Kyle still wasn’t sure the whole thing wasn’t a dream when he woke up the next morning with Chelsea in his arms. She was really there, and this was really happening! If there was any doubt, they made up for what they had missed the previous evening before they got out of bed.

Once they were finally up and took a shower together, they got dressed for the day. Since his shorts were still wet from the hot tub last night, Kyle settled for the jeans he’d worn on the flight from Denver. Chelsea pulled on a red swimsuit, and not one of her more conservative ones; it was cut up almost to her waist on her hips, and the neckline went down to her navel. “That looks like it might be a little on the hot side for going to breakfast,” he commented. “Besides, it might be a little cool outside.”

“It’ll warm up. I can tell you it’s going to be another steam bath out there today,” she smirked. “Oh, I’ll wear shorts and a T-shirt to breakfast, but I’ll wear just the suit in the truck for a while. That’ll make it easier to stop and get photos. I think getting some Chastity White photos will be the best therapy I can come up with to wash Arlington out of my system.”

“I think you’re right,” he smiled. “I was going to suggest it, but you’re way ahead of me on that one.”

Sure enough, he hardly had the rig on the road and in motion before she’d pulled off the shorts and T-shirt. As much as he was used to seeing Chelsea in one of her swimsuits, he could hardly take his eyes off of her, and that made it a little tough to drive, not that he minded a great deal.

Somewhere around an hour out, Chelsea broke into their discussion of current events. “The state line is coming up,” she said. “Let’s stop and do a Chastity White shoot with the North Carolina state line sign in the background.”

“We can do that, but I thought one of your rules was to never give a hint of where a photo was taken.”

“This is different. I was trying to not give a hint of where I lived. Since we’re traveling, it doesn’t matter.”

The state line came up in a couple of miles. Kyle pulled the rig to a stop alongside the highway just short of it, and both of them hopped out for the photo. They didn’t want to stop for too long, but Chelsea proved that she hadn’t forgotten how to pose for a Chastity White photo, the first one taken in around eight months. Still, they were out there for a few minutes, and they got several horn blasts from passing semi drivers while they were doing the setup.

“That was fun,” Chelsea giggled when they got back in the truck. “I sure hope some truck driver is a fan and is yapping on his CB about how he just saw a Chastity White photo shoot.”

Somewhere in that few minutes, a piece of the puzzle Kyle had been struggling with for a day and a half dropped into place. He thought about it for a moment as they got back up to speed, then said, “I don’t know exactly how to say what I’m thinking, Chelsea, but it seems to me that you’re going to have to accept that you’re also Chastity White, and not just hide it.”

“Kyle, what do you mean by that?” she replied. She was hunting around in her bag for another swimsuit to change into so she’d be ready for the next photo opportunity.

“Like I said, I don’t know how to say this, but this whole hassle at Arlington with Pettis wouldn’t have happened if it had been common knowledge that you do the website, right?”

“No, because I wouldn’t have had the job in the first place.”

“Well, true, but maybe not, too. Suppose for a minute that Arlington was a little more liberal community and you’d had the website right on your résumé when they’d hired you, OK? Pettis wouldn’t have had anything to blackmail you with.”

“Yeah,” she replied thoughtfully. “I’ll have to give you that one.”

“I have to tell you that things are going to be different in Fort Collins,” he said. “It is a lot more open and not as narrow-minded, at least partly because the college is there. And you’re not going to be able to hide the fact that you’re also Chastity White there. I mean, most of my friends have already seen your website, since I’ve shown it to them. I told you about that. Also, Pettis knows your real name, though he doesn’t know where you’ll be living. He can spread your real name around.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” she sighed. “That’s going to make things a little harder all right.”

“Maybe, and maybe not. Now, I’m not saying that you have to take out an ad in the newspaper or put your real name and address on the website, but a lot of people will know about it. You’re going to have to accept that fact and live with it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “I guess I’m going to have to accept it, and maybe that means I’ll probably never be a librarian again. Whether it means anything or not, I’m going to have the website hanging over my head when I go looking for work. Maybe I could work in a university library or something, but it’s pretty well going to destroy my chances of working in a small-town library like Arlington.”

“So what?” he pointed out. “If you were to get another job like that, you’d have to put up with all the backstabbing and petty jealousies that you get in a small town all over again. They would be worse if people knew you were also Chastity White. Do you really want to put up with that?”

“No,” she shook her head. “Once was enough. I guess limiting my job options is a price I’m going to have to pay for having the website, even though it really is pretty clean.”

“Actually, I think you do a pretty good job of keeping it clean. Oh, it’s suggestive, no doubt about it. That’s the point, after all. Oh, there’s a lot of skin, and maybe the hint of a nipple at times, but anyone can find a lot worse stuff on the web with no effort at all.”

“Yeah, that is kind of the hell of it, isn’t it? There are a lot of people, especially around library boards, who would have difficulty understanding that.”

They rode on for a while, each of them lost in their thoughts. At one point Chelsea asked him to check in the rear view mirror to see if anyone was coming up behind them. When he said they were clear, she slipped out of the red swimsuit and pulled on a complicated black and white one that had a diamond-shaped panel over her navel and an extra strip around her waist. In a way it looked pretty hot, but Kyle had seen any number of bikinis that revealed a lot more. Somehow, that seemed to be the whole point of their discussion – people would have to stop and think a bit to understand that the website wasn’t a porn site, but relatively clean and wholesome.

On thinking about it, Kyle realized that his father had never come to that conclusion, or at least recognized it; that was the root of the problem he’d had with his father over Chelsea in the first place.

The website seemed to be the key to the problem. If Chelsea quit doing it, would it change anything? Probably not, he realized after only a moment. The photos were out there, whether it was active or not, and they would be there for a long time, maybe forever; it was something else that had to be accepted. What was done had been done, and it was irrevocable. Once again, it was something that had to be accepted.

But there was a germ of an idea there, too. “Chelsea,” he asked after several miles, “how are you doing with the website?”

“Pretty well,” she said. “I’m not getting rich at it, but it’s paying my student loans with a little left over. Like I told you the other night, it’s not enough to live on and pay them, though.”

“Could the income be increased? I mean, by advertising or promotion or something?”

“Probably,” she said. “I really haven’t done any of that. I mean, I regularly get several thousand hits from each upload, and a small percentage of them get converted into sales. Either people have stumbled onto the website or heard about it from friends or something, so I suppose I could increase the number of hits if I worked at it a little. What are you thinking, Kyle?”

“I’m not sure. What would happen if you tried to promote it more?”

“The number of hits would probably go up,” she said after thinking about it for a moment. “Just guessing, I would think that the percentage of conversions to sales would drop, but the actual number of sales would increase. But advertising is expensive, and I can’t tell you if it would be worth the cost. I’ve thought about it in the past and came to the conclusion that what I have now is working, so there was no need to risk pushing it.”

“But you don’t know, right?”

“I wouldn’t know without giving it a try, and it’s never seemed like it would be worth it.”

“Maybe this is the time to find out,” he said after a moment. “Look, now that you’re out of Arlington and will be living with me, you don’t have to cover your living expenses, right?”

“I feel like I ought to contribute something. You’re putting out a lot to have me live with you.”

“But what if I want to?” he grinned. “Having you with me is worth a lot to me. I’ve learned it the hard way the last few months. I’m not hurting for money, Chelsea. I’m not rich by any means, but I was doing better than breaking even back in Wychbold and I’m doing lots better now, so money to live on, even with you there, is not an issue. So what would you say to the idea of taking the money you’re making on the website right now, drop your student loan payments to a minimum, and plow the money back into promoting the site?”

“I don’t know how it would work out, Kyle. It seems like an awful risk.”

“Since I’m paying the living expenses, it’s not much of a risk,” he pointed out. “I’m saying to not go looking for a job, at least not a full-time one, and put your effort into developing the site and trying to increase its income.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m serious. I’m trying to think of ways to take what we might see as a liability and turn it into an asset, it seems like the obvious thing to do. It could mean that you might not ever be a librarian again, at least a full-time one, but since you’ve had your butt burned pretty badly at it already it might be something you don’t want to do again, anyway. And with more money from the website you might not have to.”

“You might have something there. I have to admit that Arlington has soured me a lot on being a librarian, especially in a small town.”

“I might be wrong, but I think it’s worth a look. If I’m wrong, you’ll still have a roof over your head and food on the table. “

“As well as someone to love me,” she smiled. “Kyle, that’s worth a lot, and it shows the faith you have in me.”

“I love you, Chelsea. I want to see you happy, because that makes me happy, and I know the website and swimsuits make you happy. We might as well treat them as a strength, not a weakness.”

She was quiet for a few moments, obviously thinking about it. “You’re right, of course,” she said finally. “You’re looking at the bigger picture, and I haven’t been.”

“Not wanting to sound critical, but I’m coming at it from a different viewpoint. You’ve been treating it as a hobby that brings in some income. I’m a businessman at the bottom line. That’s what I studied in college, so I’m looking at it as a business. That means the perspective is going to be different. That means I’m trying to think about how we can grow the business, and perhaps cut costs along the way.”

“All right,” she said. “I’m not saying I’ll do it, but it sure needs to be talked over, and at least we’ve got several days to do it. You’ve already said you think the website needs more promotion, and you’re probably right. Advertising is expensive, but maybe we can get into it a little and see what the response is. I’m not sure what to do or how I’d do it, though.”

“One of the advantages of being a librarian is that you ought to know how to do research. Marketing is not exactly my field but I have a couple of ideas that ought to be looked into on the Internet. I can’t do it while I’m driving, and really would rather not try it on a tablet.”

“It’s something we both need to research,” she said. “Kyle, would you stop for a minute? I think I need to get a note pad out of the stuff back in the back.”

“There’s an interchange coming up. I’ll pull off so we don’t have to stop on the highway.”

The stop was brief, although it took some digging to find the box that Chelsea knew held a notebook. It was getting hotter already, and Kyle was happy he was going to be in the cab of the truck most of the day. The southern heat and humidity was almost too much for him, and watching Chelsea root around in the back of the truck in her swimsuit didn’t make him feel any cooler, either. It was odd, he thought – he’d seen Chelsea nude many times now, most recently when she was changing swimsuits a little earlier, but somehow he thought she looked sexier in a swimsuit than she did in the nude. Somehow that seemed like a point to bear in mind.

After a few minutes they were on the road again, talking about ways to promote the website; Chelsea made several notes as they rode along before the discussion ran dry because of the difficulty of getting deeply into the Internet while on the road. “Let’s dig into some other areas,” he suggested. “One question that comes to mind is what would happen if you were to increase the posting rate to two or maybe even three times a week.”

“Good question,” she replied. “Just off the top of my head, the sales from each upload might drop, but the total sales might increase. God knows we could do it. I’ve probably got a couple years’ worth of pictures I could use, and now that we’re back together I can see we’re going to have more, rather than less. I don’t know how to find out other than to give it a try.”

“You have e-mail addresses from some of your fans, don’t you? Maybe the thing to do is to set up a survey and see what the response is.”

“I could do that easily, but I’m also pretty sure that the e-mail addresses for my fans and the people who buy photos are not exactly the same thing.”

“Probably not, but it might give you some idea of the response. It’s one of those ideas that need to be investigated. Make a note.”

“I already did. Maybe I could put the question up on the website, too.”

They kicked that one around for several miles before they finally felt they’d talked about what they could. It felt to Kyle that this was a productive discussion that offered plenty of possibilities. If even some of them worked out, the website income ought to increase substantially and make it worth the effort.

After a few miles of thinking rather than talking, Chelsea asked, “Do you have any other ideas of how we can get more income out of the site?”

“How about secondary sales?” he replied. It was an angle he hadn’t given much thought to. “I mean, like calendars or something. We’ve got enough shots between you and me that we could make up a pretty good calendar without using images that have already been on the site.”

“That might be a possibility,” she agreed. “I don’t know what the printing costs would be, but I’ll bet they would be substantial. I don’t think we’d want to order a bunch of calendars and not sell very many of them.”

“True, but I know there are print-on-demand places that have a very quick turnaround, so maybe we wouldn’t have to order very many for a trial. It’s worth looking into.”

They talked about that one for a while, until finally an idea came over him. “You know, we’re missing the point on secondary sales. What’s the obvious thing to sell on a swimsuit site? Swimsuits! How about a line of Chastity White swimsuits?”

“It seems like the obvious thing, but that seems like a real quick way to get into an inventory problem. I mean, we’d have to have several different styles and in different sizes. That would be a hell of an expense to set it up, and if they didn’t sell, we’d really take a hit.”

“Yeah, that could be a problem,” he agreed. “But it’s not an unsolvable one, especially if we’re just trying to see how it would all work out. You’re right, sizes are an issue, but the swimsuit you had on yesterday when I came to pick you up, has to be pretty close to one-size-fits-all, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah. A tie-on like that has a lot of range. We might want to have two sizes so we could accommodate really big or really small girls, but we wouldn’t need a whole snootful. If we’re only talking a few dozen suits, I could make them myself. Suits like that aren’t real complicated. Well, they can be if you get into crocheting or something like that, but we wouldn’t have to do that, at least not at the beginning.”

“I’ll bet a swimsuit like that can’t cost very much to make.”

“Not for the material, although there’s more to it than meets the eye. Depending on the design, you could sometimes get several of those swimsuits out of a yard of material. I usually buy odd lot ends and have material left over. It takes time to do the sewing, though, and that has to be considered a cost by itself.”

“Say you were working right along on a production basis, could you throw that one you had on yesterday together in an hour?”

“Oh, yes. Maybe not the first one, but by the third I ought to be doing it easily.”

“OK, let’s say ten bucks worth of labor, and maybe a couple bucks for material. That’s twelve bucks. What’s the profit if you sell it at $39.95? Or maybe even more.”

“It wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of swimsuits for that to add up,” she nodded. “We might get to the point where it would be worthwhile to hire someone to do the sewing while I concentrated on other things.”

“If we hit that point, we’re getting near where economy of scale starts to kick in. I don’t know the details, but there are places where they set up whole stacks of material, maybe in different colors and patterns, and cut them all in one pass from a computer-guided cutting machine. That could save a lot of time. As far as that goes, I know a lot of swimsuits are actually made in Mexico or China or somewhere. I think we’d have to get pretty big before that economy of scale would be worthwhile, but it’s something to think about.”

“It’s hard to believe we could get that big, at least soon.”

“Yeah, it is,” he conceded. “But it’s a direction that we might find ourselves going in with this. Look, it’s something I haven’t really investigated, but to the extent that I’ve looked at swimsuit sites, they tend to run to pretty damn expensive for what they are, don’t they?”

“Yes, that $39.95 you mentioned for that swimsuit you were talking about probably is a bit on the low side, but when you buy at end-of-season sales like I often do, the price can really drop down to near the actual production cost of the swimsuit.”

“Then somebody along the way is making a fistful of money, aren’t they? Granted, the production run is probably a little on the low side since everyone wants to have something unique, but that actually gives us a little bit of an advantage, doesn’t it? If we’re willing to settle for a lower profit margin, at least in the beginning, we could be competitive on price, couldn’t we?”

“You could be right. And yes, we’d want to switch the designs around frequently if the market is there, but that can be done. I’m just not sure how a Chastity White line of swimsuits is going to work out selling through the site. Let’s face it, a lot of my fans are men, easily the vast majority.”

“But you’re saying you have some female fans, then.”

“Yes, some. I’d guess I ought to be able to sell at least a few suits through the site, though.”

“Maybe what we ought to do is set up a separate business and advertise through a little different channel,” he mused. “Chastity White might just eventually be one of several lines. I mean, after a swimsuit in the Chastity White line has had its run, we change the color, change the style a little, wait a while and put it back for sale as an, oh, ‘Alluring’ line, or something.”

“Again, you could be right, but I’d think that one-size-fits-all tie-ons would run aground sooner or later. We’d have to branch out into things that aren’t exactly one size, and there’s the inventory problem again.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he agreed, and sat there thinking about it for a moment before saying, “Not wanting to change the subject on you, but it looks like there might be a neat spot for a photo shoot not far ahead.”

“I see what you’re saying,” she grinned. “Let’s do it.”

Once again he stopped the truck and got out to do photos. They had done it a lot by then, although mostly the previous summer, but it didn’t take them long. Of course they got several appreciative air horn blasts from truckers as they passed by. “That’s really fun,” she laughed as she climbed back in the truck. “I was thinking, though. Let’s try getting off and doing one on an overpass sometime, just to keep to the roadside theme.”

“Might work,” he said absently. There was an idea kicking around in his mind that hadn’t quite gelled.

They were up the road a bit and Chelsea was changing swimsuits again when his idea fell into place. He kept his eye on the road, with only an occasional glance at her – it was fun to watch her changing swimsuits in the cab of the truck, after all – and turned the idea over in his mind. It felt pretty good.

“OK, how about this?” he said once she’d completed changing swimsuits again. This was a dark green one with a high leg cut, and with a high neckline that zipped up the front – not that she had it zipped up very far. “You know I mentioned print-on-demand back when we were talking about calendars. How about swimsuits-on-demand?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Back a few months ago I was talking with a girl at the office, Denise. You’ll probably meet her soon enough. She’s another sewing freak, like you. She was telling me that there’s software out there that you put a design and a size into, and it will print out a pattern to fit the size. It has to be pretty good since she uses something like that to make stuff for Echo, who is pretty hard to fit with her big boobs.”

“I’ve heard of that kind of thing, but I’ve never used it. I have a few patterns I work from, and some of them are nothing more than clothes that I know fit me and I’ve cut up to use as a pattern. You saw the mannequin I use that’s exactly my size. I often just cut and fit, since I’m using the swimsuit for photos, not to actually swim in. I know the software is pretty expensive, at least the good stuff.”

“You can think of it as expensive, or you can think of it as a good investment if we get to the point where we’re making anything more than simple tie-on one-pieces.”

“You might have something, Kyle. I’d have to learn how to use it, though.”

“So what? You’d have the time to do it. It’s not something that would have to come overnight. But do you know what? I don’t know anything about the software, but I’ll bet if it can output to a printer to make a pattern, it ought to be able to output directly to a fabric cutter.”

“It seems logical to me, but I don’t know if there even is such a thing, especially to do it for a single piece of fabric.”

“There just about has to be something like that. I don’t know anything about it, but I’m in purchasing, after all, so I have access to all sorts of oddball stuff like that, so I know how to find out. And I’ll bet that if there isn’t a machine like that, someone ought to know how to develop it from the idea. But there has to be a market for something like that, so I’ll bet if someone hasn’t satisfied the demand already there has to be someone who would be eager to fill it.”

“It would probably be pretty expensive,” she said after thinking about it for a moment, “but Kyle, do you know what? Even if we’re only talking about making patterns instead of actually cutting the fabric, it’s only a short step from swimsuit-on-demand to custom fit. In fact, it’s pretty close to the same thing.”

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