The Art and Science of Love
12
Spin Class
SKETCHES WERE LAID OUT in front of me all over the studio. My laptop was playing a slide show of my paintings as I sat back and just looked at what I’d been producing. I hadn’t realized what was happening to my work until the past few months when I’d done three paintings that stood out from the rest. My work, all technically good, had become… I couldn’t think of any word but ‘commercial’ to describe what I was doing.
I’m not ashamed of that. Some of the great artists over the centuries had supplemented their work with portraiture, graphics, and even decorating. Hell, Thomas Kinkade had made a career of being the ‘Painter of Light.’ His company estimated that one in every twenty American homes had a Kinkade painting or art print. My work had evolved to a point where it wasn’t really worth anything else. I painted nice, sexy portraits of nude women to give to their husbands or boyfriends. Or to hang in their apartments. I didn’t paint museum pieces. But that wasn’t how I wanted to see myself.
Not until I painted Allison.
It was a stark shift. The computer screen lit up with the portrait I’d done of Sheila. It was a technically perfect snapshot in oil of a beautiful rich lady. But that was as far as it went. If I donned the persona of an art critic, I’d have to say the artist was . . . bored. The next painting that came up on screen was the flaming hell portrait of Allison. I now called it Pain is Pleasure. It was as if two different artists had put the color on the canvas. I couldn’t say it was an exact likeness of the woman. Even if it had been, it was unlikely that more than a couple of people could have recognized her from this angle. It was a portrait of anger and abuse and violence. For all that the flames leapt around her body, it was obvious the woman was not the victim. She was the source of the fire.
The screen changed again to my painting of Kelly, now titled Out of Body. Again, not a photographic portrait. Somehow, in fact, this image was less related to the woman herself and more to the dreamlike attachment to the male beneath her. In neither of the two portraits were the faces of the women visible. In fact, I’d never seen Kelly before I painted it, even though she claimed to recognize herself as soon as she saw it. But the portrait was about release and abandon. She seemed to rise out of the dreamer in an ecstatic wisp that took on a life of her own.
The screen changed again and I was so filled with tenderness that I nearly wept. I called the painting of little Rachel at her mother’s breast, Adoration. The only thing that showed of Tina was her milk-filled boob. Only Rick’s hand on the baby’s head indicated his presence. But the look in that baby’s eye was one of absolute worship for her mother.
I had to decide if I wanted to continue down this path and how to do it. My attempt to superimpose Rita’s image in the theme of hell had backfired dramatically. It came up on screen and I shuddered, looking over at the blank canvas I’d scraped the paint off and repainted in a white base. I was still unwilling to make another attempt at painting Rita. I wondered, though, if I was going to need a spiritual experience with every model in order to paint her as freely and gain the emotional connection of these most recent three. I’d had two other clients in the same period and I did portraits they were proud of. Me, not so much. I’d had no connection with them.
That’s why all the sketches were strewn about on the floor of my studio. I was looking for a subject I could connect with. There were a couple I kept coming back to. I remembered clearly the sitting with Sheila. Yes, we had been sexually intimate, though without the final consummation of intercourse. And then there was the money left behind the screen. A tip. I’d shoved the five $100 bills in the first Salvation Army pot I’d seen. That was a year ago. When I was licking her, I imagined she was a passionate lover with her husband, and perhaps her massage therapist, personal trainer, tennis coach, and others. But when she’d been satisfied, she simply turned over and offered to let me fuck any of her holes, but to hurry up with it. It became a cold transaction and I realized it was not the artist who was uninterested, but the model. The coldness. The ice. That was what I was seeing as I looked at the sketches.
I started sketching again.
She’d taken the last two sketches I’d done with her to ‘give to her husband,’ she’d said. Did he get off on her offering herself to other men? Those were the images seared into my memory. The proffered ass. The open pussy. The frigid coldness that radiated from her, freezing anything within range. It was early in the week. When Rita stopped on Friday night, she’d have a new painting to look at. I hoped.
When I began to prepare a canvas, I turned off my phones. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
“It’s… Wow! It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time,” Rita said when she got in after her usual girls’ night out on Friday. She looked and I could see her absorbing the painting. “Who is it?”
“A client I did a portrait of about a year ago. Just about the time you and I were getting together.”
“But you didn’t fuck her. And this can’t be like the portrait you painted then.”
“How could I fuck her? Look at it.”
“She was really that cold?”
We stood and looked at the painting together a few minutes longer. I’d discovered I didn’t need to be out of control. I’d shown that first in Adoration. This confirmed it. I thought back to the day when Sheila had decided to unnecessarily pose as I painted her portrait. I’d enjoyed her intentional seduction of the artist. And I’d enjoyed eating her. She was involved when I was giving her pleasure. But when I realized what she was doing—after I’d eaten her to orgasm—I declined the offer to fuck her. I don’t just take an offered fuck to have a place to stick my dick.
The painting, on the same canvas I’d scraped of Rita’s image and prepared fresh, was of a banquet table, spread with food and wine. It was almost reminiscent of a Renaissance still life. But in the midst of the table, I’d painted a woman on her knees, back arched and head thrown back. Her hair hung off her left shoulder. Her hands were raised and clenched in orgasm as she howled out to the skies. You could see right through her in places; the reflection from her glossy surface showed a blue candle flame.
The food at the outer edges of the painting looked real enough to eat. The food closer to her was covered with frost, ice crystals glinting on wine glasses, and silver flatware. The only clue that she was not simply a perfect pristine ice sculpture in the middle of the table was her left knee, resting on a plate, cracked down the middle.
“Like ice,” I said.
Christmas was pleasant. I was once again invited to Miriam’s house for a family dinner and exchange of presents. I watched, as I’d done every place I went since my last painting, but no new scenes presented themselves to my imagination. At Rita’s suggestion, I decided not to show Adoration to her sister. We didn’t think the painting would appeal to either her or her husband.
Then Rita and I took off for a ski vacation at a Colorado resort. I made a lot of sketches, but hadn’t found an inspiration among the snow-clad peaks or bundled skiers at the resort. Which is not to say I wasn’t inspired in the bedroom. I’d fallen well and truly in love with my lovely assistant Rita. When we returned, we’d discussed the very real possibility of her moving across the driveway from her grandmother’s house to mine. I’d not lived with anyone since my ill-fated marriage back in college. Rita’s most recent experience was the sour end of her engagement to Alex.
We decided to take it slow, though more and more of Rita’s clothes were in my closet.
I had other things to worry about, as well. I’d given my entire referral list for the Morrison house to my four rookies as I took most of December off. Their pipelines were filled with enough follow-up to keep them busy for the next three months. I had nothing in my pipeline.
I put off finding a new subject to paint and spent some long hours in the office making calls to former clients and asking for referrals. I was determined to show the newbies what it takes to really succeed in the business. I hit the pavement with New Year calendars. I knocked on doors in neighborhoods where I thought there were good potential listings to be had. If it was up to my effort, I’d turn the housing market around by myself. But, of course, the market wasn’t as strong as my effort and all I could do was lay the groundwork to build my list for spring.
I heard the doorbell sound its warning but before I could move from my comfortable chair where I was reading a risqué website I’d discovered, there was a knock and then the rattle of a key in the lock.
“Doc?” Rita called. “Doc? Are you here?”
“I’m right here,” I said from the top of the stairs. I’d long since given Rita a key but she usually knocked or yelled out when she entered the house. I’m not sure if she felt she needed to warn me she was in the house so I could sneak someone else out, or if it was just her insecurity about being welcomed whenever she wanted.
She rushed up the stairs and into my arms. Her hair was straggly, as if she’d been sweating. Her normal business clothes were askew. She must have thrown them on quickly. It was unusual to see her on a Monday evening. We’d had a nice evening Sunday. It was even more unusual to see her after work in less than a professional demeanor. I wondered if she’d been in an accident or attacked.
“Are you all right? What happened?”
“Doc, how much hot water do you have?”
“It’s an on-demand water heater. It doesn’t run out,” I answered. I’d had the house re-plumbed about five years before and an on-demand system was high on my priorities. I hated to run out of hot water when I was in the shower or to not have enough hot water if I was doing dishes, laundry and a shower at once.
“Shower. Now,” she said as she dragged me by the hand to the master suite. I’d converted a five-bedroom three-bath house into a three-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath house over the years by extending the master suite into one of the bedrooms for a dressing room/closet. I’d changed the back-to-back full bathrooms into one huge en suite and one public three-quarter baths. The house was built before the age of bathrooms the size of Texas came into vogue and I’d indulged myself with a more luxurious bath than was required. The only thing my bedroom lacked was a fireplace.
Rita shed her clothes as we rushed to the bedroom. In the marble covered bathroom, she turned on the double-size shower with all hot water and then turned off the fan. She tugged my clothes off almost as fast as her own had been dropped. I caressed her bare skin and began thinking of things we could do in a hot shower. I was more than a little worried, though, about what had inspired this sudden need for a shower.
“Hot,” she said. “We need lots of steam in the room.” I adjusted the shower heads so the hot water wouldn’t fall directly on us. It was much hotter than the usually-regulated 110 degrees normally recommended. She dragged me into the shower and we sat on the low marble bench that ran the full width of the shower. It had been one of my inspirations when talking to the contractor. He’d mentioned a client who wanted a shelf built into her shower so she would have a place to put her foot up while she shaved her legs. I thought that was a brilliant idea. Plus, I could imagine all the other things one might do in the shower if there was a full width bench in the shower. Unfortunately, there had been few opportunities to explore the possibilities since the remodel was complete. I hadn’t imagined using it as a steam room.
Rita pushed me to one side of the bench, careful not to get under the direct spray of the hot water. She slid to the side opposite and leaned back against the wall to put her right foot up on the bench while her left trailed off the side. This position left her breasts and her pussy delightfully exposed to my eyes, though the steam in the room was getting thicker by the minute. I adopted the same pose opposite her.
“I have to tell you what happened,” she said, just above the sound of the running water. Her voice had turned from urgent to husky. She was still breathing heavily.
“Mondays, after work, I go to a spinning class at the club. That’s what keeps my butt in the nice shape you like so well,” she giggled. “It’s a class that has very uneven attendance. One week, every bike will have a rider and the next week, only two people show up. It’s weird. The instructor doesn’t even notice. She has her workout routine set and she follows it whether there are two or twenty. I’m not sure she even looks up to see how many people there are. She just shouts out instructions for changing gears and taking hills as she buckles into her own workout. You would think someone named Gabriella would be heavenly and ethereal or that she’d be a down-home gal you’d call Gabby. But she’s neither.”
I tried to imagine this Gabriella but I was so distracted by the visual image I saw through the steam, it was hard to concentrate. The shower—the whole bathroom—had filled with steam and Rita continued to sit opposite me with her right knee up, letting it sway back and forth a bit. This caused her pussy to gap open and closed as her knee moved. It was hypnotic.
“I went to class this evening after work. Got to the bike room and I was the only one there when Gabriella started barking out orders like the room was full. Somehow, I think she took some bizarre pleasure in making me work even harder because I was the only one there. I groaned when she announced ‘we’re going to do hills.’ I put my head down pumping away and the terrain keeps changing. She was pushing her settings out to the bike I was on and I was supposed to keep up with her. The forty minutes were hell! I’ve never worked so hard in my life and I thought I was going to collapse by the time we went into cool-down for the last ten minutes. Then she just said, ‘Good ride,’ and left.”
It didn’t sound like a good time to me. Nor did it explain why she came here to get showered and cleaned up after her workout. Rita is not that interested in being seen in public if she is not perfectly put together. But she wasn’t finished with her story. The steam in the room shifted with a bit of air current caused by the running water and I could see Rita’s right hand creep across her belly. She lightly stroked the neatly trimmed hair of her pussy, her knee continuing to rock back and forth. I felt a stiffening in my member in spite of the heat.
“By the time I’d dragged myself into the locker room, it was seven o’clock. No one else was there. I suppose the rest of the after-work crowd had already done their workouts and left. I regretted having gone to spin class and decided I’d just relax for a while. After a quick rinse in the shower, I soaked in the spa and then decided I’d take a steam before I finished off the evening with another shower.”
I understood the rush to get home after work. I’d been putting in a lot of hours at the office lately and usually came home too exhausted to do more than heat a dinner and veg out.
“It was in the steam room that things got interesting,” Rita said. “I found a spot just to the right of the door in the corner. The benches surround the room on three sides with the steam jets on the door wall. I went to the upper level of benches because I could lean against a wall and not against the board of another bench. I was sitting there, just like I am now. It was dreamy. I got to thinking about some of the things we’ve done over the past few months and it was such a comfy steamy room, I just started stroking my pussy a little bit. I remembered the first time you ate me out and I thought I’d never stop coming. And while I was remembering, my pussy was just getting so juicy.”
Damn it! There was too much steam in the room! I was hard as a rock just from imagining what happened as I listened to Rita tell her story. Here she was, just a few feet away from me and I knew what she was doing. I stroked my cock in time with her breathing, wishing I could see what was going on. Then she turned the water off. Rita and I weren’t five feet away from each other and as the water died, the steam began to slowly dissipate.
“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Every so often, the steam jets detect the temperature is too high or the moisture in the room is at max and they shut off. I was lying back against the wall with my eyes closed, just caught up in my dream and stroking my clit like I’m doing now. Are you stroking your cock, Doc? Doesn’t the steamy room just take you off to a dream world?”
I was, indeed, stroking my cock as I sat with my left foot up on the bench and, as it relaxed and slid outward, I encountered Rita’s right foot. For a moment, we sat, silently stroking ourselves with just our toes touching.
“When the steam shut off, the room gradually began to clear, just like ours is doing,” she whispered. Without the noise of the running water, her voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room. I opened my eyes and could see her through the thinning fog, her hand still buried between her thighs. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly. I could feel the pre-come leaking from my cock as I smeared it across the head and down the shaft.
“I thought I heard a noise and opened my eyes,” Rita continued. “Directly opposite me, I saw Gabriella, like a mirror image, sitting against the opposite corner with a dreamy look on her face, stroking her clit. She opened her eyes and saw me. I thought for a moment that one of us was going to bolt from the room, but neither of us moved. I could see her eyes flick down to my pussy, just as I boldly looked right at hers. Oh, God! It was beautiful. Gabriella has black hair. It’s cut short; I guess so it’s easier to put up under her helmet when she rides outside. She doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her body. Her breasts are barely bumps on her chest—two raisins on a breadboard. But she’s no little girl. Muscles ripple all down her body, right to the small patch of black hair just above her slit. She isn’t overbuilt. She has a hard flat tummy, but when you get to her slit, your eyes are drawn down to her incredible thighs and calves. I’ve seen biker’s calves that look all hard and stringy, but Gabriella’s calves are beautifully shaped. She’s thin and lean, but incredibly beautiful. She’s the kind of girl you could paint and see every muscle beneath her taut skin.
“And we just stayed there like that, looking at each other while we stroked our pussies.”
I could see Rita’s fingers strumming away at her clit and I knew I wasn’t going to last long as I stroked my cock. It was a beautiful image. She reached up and turned the water back on. The steam began to rise again.
“When the steam lowered enough, the jets kicked in again. All that time we never changed our positions. It was like I could feel her fingering her pussy just like I was doing to my own. She was getting closer and I knew we were both going to go off soon. I could feel it building in me while she was displaying herself to me and I was showing her everything I’ve got. As the steam in the room built up, I lost sight of her again.”
The steam in our shower was building up as well and I was sure Rita was timing her story to the visual effect of the water.
“The last thing I saw, Gabriella was panting and throwing her head back with her mouth open.” I could no longer see Rita but the image burned in my mind had me on a hair trigger. One more stroke…
“Ahhhh!” Rita moaned from out of the steam cloud. She was answered by my own groan of pleasure as I went off as well. I collapsed against the corner of the shower with my semen spattered all around and on me. I would be surprised if I hadn’t shot some all the way over to where Rita was sitting. I was panting and out of breath. We just let the water splash down and increase the steam.
“When I’d caught my breath, I ran out of the steam room, grabbed my clothes and bolted for my car. I didn’t bother to put on underwear. I barely got my skirt and blouse on before I was out the door and driving here.” Rita’s voice had shifted. It was no longer across from me, but over to my right. I started to move.
“You should paint now,” she whispered. I heard the door to the bathroom close. When I’d rinsed my body and turned the showers off, she was gone.
I went to the studio.
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