Two years and more passed. They were busy years and productive ones, and a lot happened while they passed.

Right at this moment, Kyle thought he needed a few moments on his own for reflecting on what had taken place. The group in his back yard made it feel a little crowded; they were mostly his friends and co-workers, although this evening a few special guests were there too. When he got the chance he walked away from them a little and just took in the sight.

He and Chelsea hadn’t intended on buying a place as soon as they had, but it had seemed to be the right move at the time, and so far it was working out for them. First, Chastity White Swimwear had about crowded them out of their apartment. It hadn’t been bad at first, but the large-carriage printer Kyle had turned up at a used equipment house took up a lot of space. After he also then managed to find a used computer-guided fabric cutter at a bargain price, the space had simply been too small, especially when Chelsea realized that the swimwear business was too much to handle by herself and employees would be needed. They’d finally had to bite the bullet and rent a small loft workspace downtown, and it wasn’t long before equipment, workers, and inventory crowded them out the door of that space, too. They’d found a somewhat larger space in what had once been a plastics plant out by Valley Airpark, and it looked like they’d be there for a while before they outgrew that, too.

By that time they’d concluded that the apartment was just too small for them, and they needed space to expand. They hadn’t been in any huge hurry, especially since they didn’t have a lot of money to work with at the time, but when they saw this place, they knew they’d found what they wanted.

It wasn’t a new house by any means; newer houses in developments around the area tended to be clustered together on top of each other so closely that they might as well have been living in apartments. That didn’t suit them; both he and Chelsea thought they needed a little separation from their neighbors, for a touch of privacy as much as anything else. Eventually, looking around allowed them to turn up this older ranch house that had been there long enough to have a few decent trees in the developed and well-established yard. The house had needed quite a bit of work, and in fact still needed some, but they were pecking away at it a little at a time.

The leaves in the trees in the grove were starting to turn color, hinting that another winter wasn’t far away; the sun wasn’t high above the ridge to the west. The golden hour here was often short and tricky. When the light was right it could really be awesome, but it really wasn’t on his mind tonight. It was really more on his friends, the people who had helped them out as Chastity White Swimwear expanded, and the people who had wished them well.

Sometimes the people had been a little unexpected. Josie was a good example.

Back when Chelsea realized she was getting a little too busy to handle the actual swimwear sewing by herself with all the other things she had to do for both the swimwear company and the Chastity White website, they’d been talking it over at Sotelo’s Hacienda one evening. Serafina overheard Chelsea mention that she’d like to find someone who was really good at sewing who could help her out for a few hours a week. “I’ll bet my cousin Josie could help you out,” she said. “She’s really good with a sewing machine, and she’s real tired of working at Walmart and not being able to get on full time.”

Although Serafina had mentioned Josie off and on for months now, he’d never met her. At that point Chelsea was ready to try just about anyone and asked Serafina to send her over to the apartment so she could see for herself.

Josie proved to be more than a real help, she proved to be a magician as well. It only took her a few minutes to show that she was better than Chelsea at the sewing and cutting – this was before the computerized fabric cutter – but her skills went on from there, some of which she hadn’t even known she had.

At that point, Josie had no better computer skills than the average high school graduate, but she soon learned the basics of the pattern-making program. With Chelsea’s help she started to learn the much more complicated process of making the basic patterns from a design, sometimes not much more than a pencil sketch or a few bits of fabric pinned here and there on the mannequin. She soon outdistanced Chelsea in that area. After the first few weeks there were only a few swimsuits that went out the door that didn’t have some of her touch somewhere in them.

Kyle had known right from the first time Serafina had mentioned her that Josie was quite serious about her Catholicism. That didn’t keep her from having a gut understanding of what Chastity White Swimwear was all about and what they were trying to accomplish – even though she was still unmarried, and didn’t mind saying that she was still a virgin and wanted to keep it that way until she had a husband. She also seemed to have a gut feeling for where the limit was in swimwear, what was too far and what was not far enough.

It wasn’t until after they’d known her a while that Kyle and Chelsea realized that Josie was saying a little prayer in Spanish over each and every swimsuit she shipped out of Chastity White. When Chelsea asked her about it one day, Josie explained that she was praying that the woman who wore that swimsuit would get what she wanted – to feel happy about herself, to find a man, or to keep a man, as the case might be. That sounded like a pretty good prayer to Chelsea, and Kyle agreed when he heard about it.

Though Josie was nicely pretty in the face, she was more than a little on the well-fed side, but once she understood the concept of the custom swimwear for hard-to-fit people, she agreed to model some of the more conservative pieces for the Chastity White sales website. The swimsuits she wore looked really good on her, and the other way around. To the best of Kyle and Chelsea’s knowledge she never wore swimwear for any other reason.

These days Josie did relatively little sewing; she was too good at tickling the computer to get it to spit out what they needed it to do, and her skills were increasing. She was the highest-paid worker at Chastity White Swimwear, and she thought it was a huge improvement indeed over working part-time at Walmart.

There were some full-time and part-time seamstresses who did most of the sewing, but Josie kept a close eye on quality control and wasn’t in the least bit hesitant to set straight someone who was doing substandard work. Kyle was aware that there were automated sewing machines out there, but they seemed optimized for big runs of the same kind of material. Computer-driven sewing still seemed like it was a long way away for Chastity White products, but he kept an eye on what was available, because it seemed as if there was always something new coming onto the market.

Echo was another person who played a big part in Chastity White Swimwear. She was still working at Mercer-Howe and, though she had recently gotten a big promotion, she did a lot of the bookkeeping for Chastity White Swimwear in her spare time.

The really big thing that Echo contributed was her body. Learning how to fit her had been a huge lesson for Chelsea, and later for Josie. Her admittedly disproportionate body shape taught them how to push the limits of the design software, and how to make the most out of what they had to work with.

Back in the days when Denise was trying to pass along what she knew about the pattern-making software, they’d made not one, but several one-piece swimsuits for Echo. It would be unfair to call any of them failures, but in everybody’s mind they had been less than total successes, too. However, they persisted and soon started to get it right. In time, they made some spectacular pieces for her. One of the early successes was an under-wired suit that also was cunningly a corset that could be laced up tightly, making Echo seem even more voluptuous than she already was, and once they had that knowledge they branched out into wilder combinations.

The end result – although it took a while – was the “Echo” line of Chastity White Swimwear’s custom-made “Swimwear That Fits YOU” styles. Echo, of course, was the primary model for that line; and the line had the motto, “If we can fit Echo, we can fit YOU.” It almost was no lie; only when a woman was excessively obese did they run into any real problems these days.

Chastity White Swimwear even had a collection of some of her best photos on their website, and web counters showed that the photos were frequently downloaded. Needless to say, Echo was delighted, and Corey had come right out and said that he was proud to know so many people agreed that his fiancée was so sexy.

Way back before Kyle met Chelsea, Chastity White had a fan known only by the e-mail handle, DW3487. No one knew what that meant, and Kyle had speculated that it might even be the license plate number of a favorite car. He – they thought DW3487 was a male, although there was never any hint or proof of it – clearly had some good ideas about swimwear design. About once a month, sometimes not that often, Chastity would get an e-mail from him with a scan of a rather detailed drawing of a possible swimsuit design. They were all relatively modest and easily fit the idea of what Chelsea was trying to accomplish with Chastity, so working from the drawings she made some of them, and even attributed the design to DW3487 on the website.

Chastity was still getting them about as often as ever, and she still used some of the designs. But with DW3487’s permission, they also used them for Chastity White Swimwear designs, and some of them had proved quite popular. They all felt they owed a great deal to DW3487, whoever he (or she?) was.

As a result of everything, Chastity White Swimwear was growing about as quickly as their most optimistic projections. As Kyle had expected right from the beginning, marketing was the biggest stumbling block, how to make their little specialty niche stand out from the rest of the market. In fact, it was still the biggest problem, and they kept coming up with new ideas to promote sales. Some had worked, and others had not.

The first actual sales of Chastity White Swimwear had been a few of the “one size fits all” monokinis that Chelsea had made in the workroom in their old apartment; she’d made a small run of them just to test the market. Sales had been mostly publicized through the Chastity White website at first and had not been large, but they proved that a market was there and they could reach it at least a little bit on the strength of Chastity’s name. The sales, however, had been through an early version of the Chastity White Swimwear website.

They still carried a line of the “one size fits all” monokinis, though the style, colors, and designs changed somewhat from year to year, and they continued to be big sellers. A stock was always kept on hand to keep from interfering with production of the swimwear-on-demand swimsuits – the term was only used inside the company, and not anywhere the public could see or hear it. Those were the most profitable sellers and the concept kept inventory from getting out of hand.

Right from the beginning it had been decided that the Chastity White website and the swimwear company had to be separate from each other, and even now were separate corporations for tax purposes. Up until that had been set up, Chelsea had just operated under her own name, and it had carried a tax penalty with it.

The Chastity White website was still plugging along, and had grown as well, partly through its connection with the swimwear company. They’d considered going to three updates a week to help clean out the huge backlog of photos of Chastity they had on hand, but in the end decided on just staying with two so they could be sure of having new photos on hand. Kyle and Chelsea still did a lot of Chastity White photo shoots, at least partly because those were one of their favorite things to do together. Sometimes their lives got a little busy and hectic, but doing those photos was always a nice break for them, a chance to remind themselves of who they were.

The Chastity White photo concept had changed a little over time. These days Chastity rarely had her hair up in what had once been her trademark “naughty librarian” bun, a pencil in her hair, and wearing glasses. They still did it some, but now they were shooting more for a “girl next door” image, not that it was very different. They were also slowly getting away from the theme of always having a road in the picture, although that was still in the majority of the updates. They were still a little judicious in taking a lot of shots around Fort Collins, but they were perfectly capable of flying someplace for a long weekend, renting a car, and taking photos in a wide range of recognizable backgrounds all over the country.

It seemed clear to both Kyle and Chelsea that sooner or later they were going to have to dial down the Chastity White website, but while it was still popular they figured they might as well ride the wave for a while longer. It was still a big piece of Chelsea’s income, but the swimwear company had long surpassed it in total profit.

Kyle’s own photo sales had been going well, too. His impressionistic workups were still mostly a hobby, although he was seeing more sales than he’d ever had before he’d started his own website. There were still only a limited number of prints available, in numbered sets; he’d swallowed some of his compunctions about digital art having to be unique. Still, when he had time to do it, he enjoyed it, and kept him continually looking for new ideas, and new techniques to learn.

Summing it all up, Kyle thought, things had gone a lot better than he could have expected when he’d first driven into Fort Collins just about dead sure that he would never see Chelsea again. There had been some rough times shortly after that, but it had all worked out for both of them.

Now, they were taking the next step.

Kyle decided he’d been lost in his memories long enough so turned and walked back to the people standing in his back yard. He had friends and guests he really ought to be interacting with. And he had family.

His mother was standing there beaming; one of her dreams had been realized, and another one was still off in the perhaps not far distant future. His father was standing next to her, and he looked happy as well. “I’m glad you had us out here for this, Kyle,” he said. “I never quite realized what a businesswoman Chelsea was until we were shown through her office and plant. That’s quite a business she built. There’s a lot more to her than I ever thought.”

“I always knew it,” Kyle said, refraining from adding an “I told you so.” His father had had to learn it the hard way, but at least he’d learned it and all the old animosities seemed to be gone.

Chelsea’s parents hadn’t taken the truth quite as well, and they hadn’t been given the full range of knowledge about Chastity White; they knew about the swimwear company, and could see that she was doing quite well in a business they weren’t quite sure they approved of. The hatchet seemed to be buried there, as well, though perhaps not very deeply. It remained to be seen what would happen in the future, but at least an attempt had been made to patch things over for the sake of this day.

Kyle stood chatting with his friends and guests for a while before Gwen’s fiancé Reverend Lewis spoke up. “If everyone is ready we ought to get started,” he said.

Kyle had been a little surprised that Gwen had taken up with the voluble, friendly man. She was still pretty quiet, although not quite as bad when he was around. But then, he liked to talk, and she liked to listen, and that seemed to go a long way for them. Kyle didn’t know Reverend Lewis well, but had the feeling that something was going on beneath the surface between him and Gwen, but he had no idea of what it could be. It really wasn’t any of his business, anyway; he was just glad that it had worked out for them, and especially for her.

“I suppose,” Kyle grinned. “We might as well get this over with.”

“Hey, Kyle,” Corey piped up. “Are you real sure you want to do this?”

“I wanted to do it a long time ago, and so did Chelsea, but we figured we ought to wait until things slowed down for us a bit. We finally realized that things aren’t going to slow down much anytime soon, so we might as well get it over with. We knew we wanted to do it before the weather got very cold, so here we are.”

“If the two of you would take your places,” Reverend Lewis said, trying to move things along.

Kyle and Corey walked over and stood in front of the reverend, while off to the side Jill began to play a violin. They turned to see Echo walking slowly toward them, wearing a spectacular dress that Denise had made. When she reached them and stood off to one side, Greg joined in on his guitar, and Kyle turned to look at Chelsea.

Following tradition, Kyle hadn’t actually seen what she wore, but he’d heard enough about it. Josie had been the one to make it, and most of the ideas had been hers, too. It was clearly in the Chastity White tradition, but bright white with lace and fake pearls worked into the bodice. It was strapless, but tastefully so; it had boy-leg shorts and even a modesty panel in the best Esther Williams tradition. The only hint of a skirt was a long length of gauzy train tied around her waist. Kyle thought she looked stunning, even with a traditional veil.

It wasn’t long before she was standing beside him, a big smile on her face. Though they’d lived together for a long time, this was still something special to them.

“Dearly beloved …” Reverend Lewis began the traditional ceremony. Kyle only half heard him, thinking about all they had gone through to get to this point, and all they would have a chance to go through in the future. They got down to the “I dos,” and the kissing, and then the deed was done. There was still a dinner to be served; it was a little non-traditional, since Bruce was presiding at the grill, but steaks seemed appropriate anyhow. There were cakes to be cut, and toasts to be made; the festivities lasted until well after dark.

Finally everyone was gone, and in the morning, they would be too. There was a small motor home parked by the house, and crammed into it along with everything else was a small but adequate darkroom; a view camera and the supporting equipment were in there, too. Long ago, they’d promised each other to make a trip like that, doing photography the old and traditional way, although there probably would be some Chastity White shots taken, too – there were a number of swimsuits packed away in the motor home, and they didn’t take up much space.

“Are you still happy about it, honey?” Kyle asked his wife.

“When I stop and think about it, I get a little dazed sometimes. I never thought this would happen when I was back in Wychbold and decided to go out and get a few selfies rather than just lying around my apartment.”

“I never would have dreamed of it when I decided to get on my bike and go riding the back roads looking for photos. I found something so much better than that. It might have been a little bit the hard way, but it was more than worth it.”

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