Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain ©2018 Elder Road Books, Serialized edition ISBN 978-1-939275-83-7
Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain
36
Back to Class
EVA LITERALLY BOUNCED in her seat all the way back home. As soon as she was in the car and it was warm, she shed her jacket and sweatshirt. Her bouncing in just the bikini top was distracting from my driving.
“I can’t believe you got me ten hours of flying time for my ‘performance’ that weekend! I love you!”
“You’ll have to work nearly thirty to earn them,” I laughed.
“Do you know what that works out to as an hourly wage? More than you make at the grocery story, for sure! Jett, I just can’t believe you did this for me! I really… Can we make love, Jett? Please?”
MARY LOOKED UP at us when we walked through the kitchen door. She smiled when I winked at her. Eva was stripping just inside the door. Not down to her bikini, but all the way.
“We’re going to make love!” she shouted. “We’re going to do it!” She ran for the bedroom.
“Must have gone well,” Mary laughed.
“I might have to clean the car seats.”
“Haven’t had to do that since our first date, have you?”
I walked over and pulled Mary into my arms for a long kiss.
“And always willing for a repeat performance,” I said.
“Go satisfy the substrate,” she laughed. “We can go out Sunday if you want.”
“It’s a date.”
“WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE, my model?” I whispered when I shed my clothes and approached the bed where Eva was stretched out. Over the holiday, she’d cut her hair into a little pixie bob. It was a good style for her oval face and generally thin features. Lying on her back, her boobs flattened slightly but the nips were still perky and sat proudly on top of hand-sized mounds. I’d chuckled a little when she was posing at the airport. She never quite popped out of Sarah Lynn’s bikini top but it was just big enough that we all caught glimpses of her nipples in certain poses. That was probably what convinced the two older men to give her so many flying hours in exchange for the performance. Dirty old men.
Eva had shaved completely before I did the Athena painting and maintained a bare pussy. It was glistening with her moisture as I sat beside her on the bed.
“I would like to please you,” she whispered back.
“Do you doubt that you are pleasing to me?”
“You… um… since I got back and you kissed me… until today you didn’t touch me at all. I thought… I was afraid you were disappointed… didn’t want me.”
“Eva, I’m not all that experienced with this stuff. You look around and see my five roommates and Mary and you think I must be some kind of sex powerhouse or something. I’ve only been sexually active for about eight months. There’s a lot I don’t know about how to please a woman. Especially a woman like you. You gave me the opportunity to explore something new in my own life, too. I’ve always just taken things as they came. You even asked Sarah Lynn’s permission before you asked to have a painting date. I’m just not very dominant.”
While I talked, I touched her cheek and drew my fingers across her lips. She kissed them and I continued down her chin. I didn’t grab at her boobs but trailed my fingers down between them and continued toward her heat, pausing a moment to trace her navel. The whole time, I was looking her in the eye and ignoring what my fingers were doing. Her breathing sped up the lower I stroked.
“But you gave me an opportunity. I’m exploring what it means to be an artist with a human canvas. You asked to please me? You do, my substrate. You are a blank canvas and I will paint a masterpiece on you.”
I finally slipped my finger between the lips of her pussy and stroked from her opening up to circle her clit. I believe she levitated off the bed. When I rolled over on her and pushed my cock into her pussy for the first time, we both flew toward the sky.
THE GIRLS DUG INTO managing my art subjects for this semester. Having successfully negotiated Eva’s and my engagement at the airport, Char was the one who took the lead, inviting the three bimbos over for dinner Saturday night. That is how I ended up ‘demonstrating’ my art technique on the naked bodies of Barb, Terri, and Syl while we were all stoned out of our minds.
We didn’t do a huge production, I just painted on their tits and tummies.
There is a phenomenon called the freshman fifteen. It is the inevitable packing on of fifteen extra pounds during freshman year. For some people, it is followed by the sophomore fifteen, the junior fifteen, and the senior fifteen. I guess that’s why so many people go back to their ten-year high school class reunions unrecognizable to their classmates. We’d all succumbed to some extent, though our meal planning and cooking schedule meant that we had a better chance of not packing on too many pounds. I’d put on five. Jas, Char, and Sarah Lynn had put on a few, but not nearly fifteen. Ariel burned off calories having sex so fast that her Asian figure was still slight. And Kelly… Damn! Kelly was sexier every day. She worked out at the university fitness center after class each day and her tight, toned body was no heavier but slightly shapelier than it had been the first day she sent me a naked selfie when we were fifteen.
All that to say that the three bimbos—I really need to stop calling them that or I’ll slip up when we’re working—the blondes from two doors down had definitely packed on some weight. A steady diet of alcohol and snack food will do that to you. I don’t think any of their household cooked meals, so they ate at the student union or McDonald’s. They weren’t fat, but their curves had definitely become rounder and softer since we first met in September. I liked it. They were almost Rubenesque.
“This is fun, but if I don’t get fucked soon, I’ll die,” Syl said
“We don’t loan Jett out,” Sarah Lynn jumped in. “He has seven of us to satisfy as it is. I thought you were playing with the guys next door.”
“Yeah. But they aren’t here. Why didn’t you invite them to the party?” Terri asked.
“We can do that when we do the painting, if you want,” I said. “We didn’t want you to be uncomfortable when we were introducing what we wanted to do.”
“Hell, give me another Fireball and you can paint Reggie’s cock in my twat,” Barb said. “You’re only young once and I plan to get as much dick as I can. Sure you don’t want a little of this, Jett?” She spread her legs in front of me and pulled her labia open.
If a girl is shaved and plans to entice a guy into her pussy, I think she should have shaved recently. Barb looked like a guy with a two-day beard and I imagined her pussy would feel like sandpaper against my cock. I declined.
“We’ll negotiate something with Reggie and the guys. Remember, we film everything in order to get the short videos you saw earlier. If we film you fucking, we’ll release it on a porn site,” Kelly said. “And we’ll be moderating the amount of weed and alcohol during the session. With a project this big, it will probably take six hours to get you all painted adequately for the scene.”
“So, aside from the weed and a good fuck, what do we get out of it?”
“We’re putting together a YouTube channel for Jett’s artwork,” Sarah Lynn said. “We’ll be able to record hits for individual videos and pay according to popularity. That video won’t include any graphic sex, but it will include you being painted like the videos we showed you earlier. You’ll get a bitcoin payment for each hit.”
“Porn is a different thing entirely. If we reach an agreement to do some serious sex, we’ll either pay you a percentage or a flat fee. A percentage split among half a dozen actors might not be much,” Kelly said.
“Have you done that before?” Syl asked. Kelly looked over at Jas. She sighed.
“I did one. It’s the only one we’ve released,” Jas said. “I’ve made seven hundred dollars from my cut.”
“Shit! I could use seven hundred!” Terri said. “Can we see your film?” Jas nodded and Kelly queued up her Egyptian goddess vid. We all watched but the three blondes were glued to the screen. Seeing Jas in her paint and her expressions of ecstasy was something I’d never get tired of watching. She was just so beautiful it made me want to bundle her off to bed again. When the video ended, the girls turned back to Kelly and me. They had tears in their eyes.
“I think I’m drunk. I’m getting all emotional,” Syl said. “That was just so beautiful.”
“Can you make us look like that?” Barb sniffed. “I want to look like that.”
“Our technique and editing has gotten better since we did that one,” Kelly said. “The acting is what you’ll bring to the set. And the boys.”
The girls left and I watched as they turned left instead of right and went up the steps to the guys next door.
I’D ALWAYS BEEN FIRST out of the house on Monday mornings because I started work at six. It was almost a luxurious feeling to sleep later and not have to be to class until eight. Two extra hours to sleep in the arms of my lovers. Everyone was pretty exhausted after our Saturday encounter with the blondes. I could only imagine what the actual painting would be like once the guys got involved. We’d have to do the whole painting in a canvas-covered living room in order to have six in the painting. There would be a lot of digital backgrounding and post-production work. I’d have all I could handle just painting their bodies as nymphs and satyrs.
I walked into my Protein Identification, Fabrication, and Utilization class as the first class of spring semester. I wasn’t sure what this was going to include since the first term that I took in the summer really focused on being able to identify primal cuts and figure out how to cut them into marketable cuts. Grandpa had handled the instruction on that course for me in the store. The setup in our new class was a stainless steel kitchen. There were eight of us in the class and we were each assigned a work station.
“If you came here to learn to cook, you’re in the wrong class,” Mr. George, the instructor, said. “The college has cooking classes. Go enroll in those. Oh, we will cook things, but this class is focused on the commercial preparation of meats for use in the home. In other words, how do you advise a customer on the cut of meat and preparation when they are shopping in your store? We will also look at the various ways you can prepare cuts so all a customer needs to do is take it home and heat it to the right temperature. We specialize in the boyfriend’s seduction of his girlfriend, the working woman’s satisfaction of her man, the single mom’s providing for her children, and the old-man-living-alone-in-a-trailer-park’s fantasy of being rich and loved. We’ll learn what makes a pot roast pre-seasoned with seven cents worth of spices sell for a dollar a pound more than an unseasoned roast. You will learn marinating, rubbing, pounding, cubing, kebobbing, stuffing, wrapping, and seasoning. You will learn proper cooking temperatures, recommended grades for each use, and combination of vegetables with various proteins. Now, let’s get started.”
I glanced around at the other seven in the class. We were evenly divided between men and women but I thought I was probably the youngest in the class. I recognized two who were in my slaughtering class, but I wasn’t on the standard two-semester-and-out program, so I seldom overlapped with the same people. As hard as this class looked to be, it still sounded interesting. I was looking forward to applying principles from this to the cooking we did at home.
MERCK WAS HIS USUAL high and entertaining self as he started the term with a slide-show of Michelangelo that was focused mostly on the ‘pristine’ chapel, as he called it.
“If in your ventures, you decide to visit and study the art of the Vatican, plan on spending at least a month. Half of that time will be spent waiting in the incredible lines to see the chapel. And do not assume you will be able to take good photographs as the light varies by time of day and weather conditions, you will be constantly jostled by sightseers like yourself who want a selfie with ‘The Creation of Adam’, and a priest will intone, ‘Please be silent,’ every five minutes. For that matter, security people will shout ‘No photo!’ at you if they so much as see you with a cell phone in your hands. Photography is prohibited, though you might sneak the occasional shot. If you bring binoculars, you might be able to focus on one or two of the paintings on the ceiling. Binoculars, I say, because the ceiling is seventy feet above you and you will get no closer.” Merck was having a good time showing the slides.
“It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling and another six to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall. We are told he was under duress when he painted the ceiling, being called off the sculpture of the tomb of Pope Julius the Second, for which he had previously been commissioned. Jealousy among artists and architects resulted in Michelangelo being set up to fail at a medium he’d never used before. Nonetheless, he made his own suggestions and modified the original scope of work to include the entire chapel rather than just twelve panels of the apostles. And what he placed there! For example, contrary to contemporary Christian and Catholic moralities, a majority of the four hundred or so figures in the chapel are naked and Michelangelo has no difficulty painting both male and female genitalia. In the central scene, The Creation of Adam, we see that only God is clothed—presumably in glory. But what is this? Who is this naked nymph with God’s protective arm around her? No one knows? Is it Eve? Mary? Sophia the goddess of wisdom? A female angel? God’s mistress? Well, it is too far up in the heavens to be easily defaced as were many frescoes close enough to the floor for later censors to paint in clothes or paint out unholy details.”
It was a fun lecture and I wondered what else was hidden in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. In our brief tour, we found that Michelangelo had changed the design of the original commission and instead of the twelve triangular panels being portraits of the twelve apostles, they were portraits of the twelve prophets who prophesied the coming of Christ. Seven of those appear in the Old Testament. The other five were the classic female sibyls referenced back in Virgil’s Æneid.
“I’d still like to attend one of your painting performances,” Merck said to me as I was headed out of the lecture hall. “I know you compress hours of work into the short videos you produce. I’d like once to get the whole experience.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “I think one of the pieces this term will include both male and female models, so there might not be as much embarrassment about having a man who isn’t engaged in the process watching them.” Dirty old man.
“I HAVE COMBINED my two Drawing I classes into this single Drawing II class. I am assuming that the weak have been eaten by predators and we needn’t wait for them. I am also assuming that you are sufficiently toughened that I can chew on you without further losses. This term, we will be focused on composition, illusional space, perspective, proportion, and form.” Blankety continued to lecture for the rest of the first hour of our two-and-a-half-hour class. Then he unveiled a doll house and told us to work on the technical rendering of perspective. He wanted us to plot the vanishing points, horizon line, and angles of each element. We were to leave all our working lines on the page. We were not to do any shading or detail work. That, he said, would come later.
“JETT, YOU KNOW Andi Michaels, right?” Mary asked as a girl followed us out of Blankety’s classroom.
“I’m sorry we haven’t really talked,” I said. “We’re always so crushed after this class that we don’t seem to be in a very social mood. It’s nice to officially meet you, Andi.”
“Yeah. It’s great being known as the cartoon girl,” she snorted. Just before our mid-term, Blankety had pointed out all our faults, suggesting that Andi’s drawings were all cartoons. She’d nearly run out of the class. As far as I could tell, she was nice and certainly nice-looking if a little plain. “You guys are so lucky to have each other,” she continued. “Mary’s the only person in class I knew at all and that’s only because we had the same Western Culture class.”
“We didn’t know each other at all until we sat down in class,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t reached out to more people.”
“Um… Mary showed me a video of the project you did using her as a model. It was really cool. She mentioned that you might need more models this semester. I’d… uh… it’s not like I’m all wild about getting naked and having my body painted, but I guess I’d be interested enough to talk about it if you want.”
“What time’s your ILS course tomorrow?” I knew Mary was enrolled in the Western Culture: Science, Technology, Philosophy course. I just assumed Andi was, too.
“We get out the same time you do,” Mary said. “Two o’clock.”
“That’s a relief. Why don’t you come over for dinner and meet the gang?” I said. Andi smiled. Hmm. I could work with that.
I GOT HOME Monday night to realize that we hadn’t redone our cooking schedule to accommodate our new class schedules. I used to get off work at two and be responsible for Monday night dinner. Getting home at six with no food ready and none scheduled threw everyone off-kilter. I quickly looked in the fridge to see what we had available and what was quick. I had a flank steak in the freezer that I planned to use for teriyaki sometime. I grabbed it and immersed the plastic package in warm water.
“Mary, could you do me a favor and run down to the convenience store?” I asked. “I had no idea that I’d be on dinner duty tonight. We really screwed this up.”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Tortillas, shredded cheese, and salsa.”
“Back in a jiff,” she said, taking the twenty-dollar bill and my car keys.
I grabbed an onion and some peppers and set to work slicing them up into strips. Our first class this morning had itemized a long list of prepared foods that were common in grocery stores. Fajita kits were one of them. I didn’t have a kit, and I didn’t have time to marinate the steak, but I had cayenne pepper and hot sauce. While the peppers and onions caramelized in the skillet, I sliced up the partially frozen meat into two-inch strips. I sprinkled them lightly with cayenne and seasoned salt. As soon as the vegetables were suitably soft, I tossed the meat in the skillet to brown. By then, Mary was back with two dozen tortillas, cheese, salsa, and she’d added sour cream and guacamole.
It was only a little past six-thirty when we sat down to eat and discuss our schedules so we could determine a new cooking rotation. I hadn’t seen Eva yet this week and she wasn’t with us tonight, so she didn’t get put on the schedule. Mary was listed for Tuesday nights and had contributed to the monthly food budget.
“I switched my meal plan at the U to the lightest they have,” she said. “It’s enough to give me breakfast and lunch. I’m over here almost every evening, even if I don’t spend the night. So I’m contributing the balance of what my food budget would be.”
There was some discussion about whether that was too much, but we also saw this as Mary making a commitment to our family.
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