Odalisque
Nineteen
I HAD TO LEAVE FOR CLASS, but I left Lissa in the process of booking her reservation. I told her to get the next available flight and let me know the details. I felt the phone vibrate while I was in Anatomy class, but I disciplined myself not to look until class was dismissed.
“Redeye Friday night. Want another night with you and the boys before I go. Don’t tell Melody.”
Bree was catching up to me when I put my phone away.
“Can we study as a group Sunday afternoon?” she asked. “It would be good to review everything before the final on Monday.”
“Yeah,” I said, a bit distracted. “I won’t be doing anything.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh. Uh… Lissa is going to fly out to be with Melody,” I said. “Looks like I’ll be alone the next couple of weeks.”
“I doubt that,” she said. “And I’m glad Lissa is going to be with Mel. I’d go myself if it weren’t for finals. And why a couple of weeks? Why don’t you fly out after your final Tuesday?”
“It’s complicated. There’s still another week at PCAD before semester ends. There’s the tournament on the tenth. I promised I’d be here for the Saturday night shift the next weekend. Plus, the boys don’t get out until the end of next week and I’m taking them with me.”
“All right. Well, you’ve still got Kate. And me,” she said. “Not that I’ll sleep with you, but I’ll be around. You’ve got friends.”
“You’re right, Bree,” I said hugging her. “I do have friends.”
Before I went to my Sports Conditioning session with Coach Fredericks, I made a couple more calls. Kate, of course, had already heard from Lissa and was on her way to a ten o’clock class, so I had to be quick. She agreed to meet me after 2D in the afternoon to go to the Studio. Clarice was intrigued. I wanted her to see the piece before it was crated for storage. Then I called Doc Henredon. He’d given me some solid advice about this piece and I wanted to make sure he thought it was decent enough to be stored away or if I should just paint over it. He agreed to join us and seemed excited to see our studio.
I attended the rest of the classes at SCU and then headed over to PCAD for Doc’s 2D class.
“There are only two more classes this term,” Doc said, “and then we have the final. I don’t think any of you will have difficulty with that one. I do promise you a good class, though. For these last two classes, however, I want you to look beyond the translation of three dimensions into two. There are many more dimensions. If we were studying aeronautics, for example, we might work with the dimensions of pitch, roll, and yaw—all valid dimensional criteria. What are some others?”
People in class were slow to answer, but eventually someone said “time” and another brought up “velocity.”
“Okay,” Doc continued. “It’s not important to know every dimension in this class. What I want to know is how you would translate that into a two-dimensional representation. Ideas, please.”
It was the first time that we’d really had a discussion about one of the aspects we were learning that went beyond fifteen minutes. After we’d discussed, Doc told us to put the puzzle on paper and come up with a concept sketch of a tesseract.
“What’s that?” one of my classmates asked.
“The fourth dimensional analog of a cube,” I responded automatically. Everyone looked at me. “Uh… I don’t know what it looks like,” I said. “Madeleine l’Engle talks about it in her book A Wrinkle in Time. I read all her books when I was in sixth grade.” In fact, I was anxious to read it to the boys when they were a little older.
“O-kay,” my classmate said.
“That’s all the information you need,” Doc said. “A fourth dimensional cube. How do you represent the concept in just two dimensions?”
We started sketching.
Before the class ended, Doc looked at my sketch and started laughing. I was pleased that he got the joke. Why would the two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube look any different than the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional cube?
After class, Kate and I hung back to meet with Doc Henredon and go to the studio. Clarice was waiting for us when we got there and I made the introductions. Doc looked around the studio and admired the lighting I put in. I had a dozen full-spectrum LED lamps that lit the space brightly, but indirectly. The studio didn’t really have any windows for natural light, so this was the best I could do. Doc was impressed, but suggested that I might want to change the wall color to Munsell gray so that I didn’t get as much reflected distortions. I put that on the list to talk to Melody about. I could see the benefit, even though it might make the studio look a little drab.
“Well, what have you to show us, Mr. Ames?” Clarice asked, getting right to the point.
“It would be best if you start over there,” I said, pointing to a spot about twelve feet from my easel. “You can move forward as you want.”
They moved to the spot and I undraped the easel. My three companions were silent as they looked at the piece. None of them moved for at least a couple of minutes. Doc was intent as he looked at it. Clarice pulled back and shook her head. I thought for a minute she wouldn’t look any closer, but when Doc moved forward, she followed, just off his right shoulder. Kate hung back and I could see moisture in her eyes. She was biting her lip.
Kate had seen some of my sketches for anatomy. Everyone had. She’d been there when I showed the original sketch to Doc and listened to what he said about how it could affect my career. She hadn’t seen the picture of Ralph’s face, though.
Doc was whispering to Clarice as he pointed out one or two things to her. Kate shifted her attention to me and we met half-way.
“Are you okay?” I asked. She nodded.
“I’m jealous.” That surprised me. “You’ve gone to another place with your painting, Tony. You’re not even in the same world. If you exhibit that, no one will see anything else in the show.”
“I have to agree with Kate,” Clarice said. “Unless you can provide me with a dozen of this type of painting—and I don’t mean necessarily the subject matter—then I don’t think it should be in your show.”
I sighed. I’d already decided that it was headed for the vault.
“Tony, no one here is going to criticize this work. Some artists stake their entire reputations on being over the edge. It can be done. Subject matter, style, color, level of abstraction. They’re all things you can build on,” Doc said. “You’ve got incredible talent here. I don’t think you should box yourself in with a style that is so dominant that you are forced to paint that forever.”
“I planned to put this in the vault like Clarice suggested,” I said. “The thing is, I feel like I’m being so pretentious by locking up some of my work for fifty years from now.”
They actually laughed at me.
“Pretense would only come into play if you were locking up your childhood refrigerator drawings,” Doc said. “Even though I’m sure they were great. But every artist has things that are too good to share. Take this piece and savor it. When all your work has caught up with it, bring it out. People will be amazed that you were painting at this level all along and were just getting them educated.”
“But also, don’t discount your other works,” Clarice added. “No matter what you read in fantasy stories, I couldn’t start selling your work at $50,000 each at your first exhibition, which is what I’d price this at. Our two to five thousand range is where we should stay. That’s why we’re only looking at twelve pieces from each of you. Your first showing is where people will get their bargain Tony Ames and Katarina Mirela pieces. They will brag to their grandchildren about how they got one of your first pieces at a fraction of what they would cost after you were known. That’s okay. It’s where you build your future.”
“Kate, is your artwork here, too?” Doc asked.
“Some of it. My finished pieces are all here, but there are only six of them so far,” Kate answered. “There are four more that are nearly finished in the art lab at school. I need to keep them there for my final.”
“Let’s see what the two of you will be exhibiting,” Doc said.
Kate and I started pulling our canvases off the shelves. Rhapsody Suite was still on display at the school. I showed the painting of Allison, my Three Graces painting of Lissa, Melody, and Beth, the zoo painting, the painting of Kate with her mother and sister dancing in the firelight. I had one painting of the Singhs, even though both their portrait and Sharon’s had been delivered. They were still slated for the exhibition. The other painting of the Singhs was the one I did based on the sketch of them in the booth across from Clarice and me as Indira breast-fed Mirium. There was the painting I’d done of Tent City from the roof of the athletic pavilion and one painting that I didn’t take the drape off.
They looked at my six and Kate’s six. Doc and Clarice had a big discussion about the relative merits of displaying them as an integrated whole or in two sections as if it were two different exhibitions. Kate’s style and subject matter was very different than mine but, in my eye, better than anything I’d painted. Doc pointed at the draped canvas.
“And that one?” he asked simply.
“Uh… no one’s seen that one except Clarice. I haven’t decided whether to show it or not.” I looked nervously at Kate and pulled the drape off the painting of Lissa as I imagined she would look in fifty years. Kate looked at it and then just took my arm and hugged it with her head on my shoulder.
“It’s up to you, Tony,” Clarice said. “You could always put it in the vault and see how accurate you were in fifty years.”
“You should explore this style more,” Doc said. “I like your interpretation of things overlaid on what exists. This is a precursor of your new painting. You can see one leading to the next.”
“Where are the matching portraits of Lissa where just her eyes are shifted up?” Clarice asked.
“Oh. Those are at home. I hung them in the living room for the time being. I’ll bring them in for the show, though.”
“I need to organize getting the catalog created and printed,” Clarice said. “I’ll want to bring a photographer over. Can we work here, Tony?”
“Sure. What will he need?”
“She will bring her own backdrop and lights. She’ll display each painting individually on an easel. We don’t need every painting that will be on display, but getting out a pre-announcement will be a good idea. Can we do it two weeks from today?”
“Yes. That’s right before we leave for Boston for the holiday.”
Lissa announced to the team that she had to make an emergency trip. Bree would take care of logistics and I would be coach for the tournament next weekend. It was a one-day tournament. Unfortunately, we’d be missing Tonya. She was playing in a women’s basketball tournament and had already quit practicing with us for the winter. We decided to enter one men’s single, one men’s double, and one women’s single competitor. I still couldn’t convince Bree to compete.
When Lissa and I got home, I had to put the finishing touches on my paper for Critical Reading and get it emailed in. Hard copy was due in class tomorrow morning. Jack brought the boys to us. Lissa was only going to be in town one more night and wanted to be with her sons. I went downstairs to work on my paper in the quiet as she read stories and spent quality time with Damon and Drew. They were late getting to bed, but that just meant that I got my work done and was lying in bed when Lissa slipped between the sheets.
Even with three girlfriends, I don’t just start humping the moment I get into bed. And with just this one, who was leaving the next night, all I wanted was to hold as much of her luscious body in contact with mine as I could. I hugged her, buried my face in her neck, smelled her fresh clean hair, kissed from her earlobe to the hollow of her neck and back up the other side, and placed my lips against hers as softly as I could and still tell we were touching.
She looked into my eyes and sighed.
“I love you, Tony. I’m not abandoning you to be with Melody. I just know… I mean I feel… she just needs me right now.”
“My love, I think you’ve absorbed some of Kate’s sensitivity gene. Melody is in a terribly stressful situation. Even though she finished two of her classes, she’s taking three incompletes that need to be finished when she gets back. That’s going to weigh on her. Her father just died and her mother is depending on her. There are boxes to sort and decades of family collection to deal with, not to mention the fact that the reading of the will isn’t until next week. Our precious lover needs us with her. I can’t go. You have to. I will miss you for two weeks and then be there with you. You will take care of our precious wife.”
“Oh Tony, I love you, I love you. Don’t you feel her pain?”
“I do. I feel it every minute I’m conscious. I heard it in her voice when we talked to her tonight. I wanted to blurt out that we were coming—or at least that you were—but I know we agreed to surprise her. I just want my wives to be together and happy.”
“Thank you, darling.” We lay there in silence a while, just running hands up and down our backs, feeling the closeness and feeling our love. I would be able to survive a couple of weeks. I had a lot of pressure with finals next week and the tournament the following Saturday. My team would meet to study together on Sunday for the Anatomy final and I planned a study session with Rio on Monday. In fact, I intended to cut practice Monday and just focus on our Critical Reading final prep. I thought about holding Lissa and how we’d made love just Monday.
“Did you mean it?” I asked quietly.
“Mean what, darling?”
“Mean that you wanted to have my baby?”
We lay there in silence a little longer.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, I want to have a baby with you and Melody. I want to hold her to my breast and have you cuddled next to me in the bed and say ‘we’re your mommies and this is your daddy, little girl.’ And then hold all of our family in my arms.”
“Pretty sure we’ll have a girl, huh?” I laughed.
“Well, they say the daddy decides,” Lissa said. “So, I guess whatever, it’s your fault. What do you want?”
“I want a little girl. We have two wonderful sons,” I said. They were asleep down the hall.
“We do.”
“I hope it’s okay if we wait a little bit, though. I thought about it a lot last night. I’m ready, but my life isn’t. And I’m not talking about when I get established and become successful. I just want to have a baby when I’m not spending fourteen hours a day in class or training, and the other ten studying. I want to be there with her when she needs to be held and bring her to her mommies when she can only be comforted by one of them. I want to hold her hand when she takes her first steps and wash the mashed carrots out of our hair together,” I said. “Lissa, I want to wait until I’m out of this school thing and can focus on being a father and a husband.”
“You are so wonderful. I won’t be thirty for another three years. And even if we miss that, there will still be plenty of time.” She paused. “We could… practice… I mean, if you want.”
“Don’t we do that every time we make love?” I asked.
“Well, that certainly puts the daddy part into the mommy part, but it’s not the way we’d make love if we were going to have a baby,” Lissa said. She was grinning with the left corner of her lower lip caught between her teeth. I knew she had something in mind.
“What would we do?” I asked innocently.
“Well, after I went off birth control, we’d wait until the middle of my cycle with neither of us coming during that time.”
“Sounds like a racquetball competition,” I laughed. “When is the middle of your cycle?”
“Right now.”
“Oh. So, we could practice tonight? What comes next?”
“Well, first, you’d hold me and find some way to show me how much you love me,” she said. I was already holding her and I began to pepper her face with little kisses. Finally, our lips came together. It was electric. The charge went from the back of my head down my spine. After a moment’s eternity, our lips tightened on each other, opened, and accepted our offered tongues. Lissa continued.
“They say babies should be conceived in love and at the height of passion,” she whispered. “You’d probably spend some time making sure I was receptive and pleasured and ready to receive your seed.”
Damn! I was hard as a rock, but she made me harder. I started working my way down her body, paying special attention to spots I knew were sensitive—not just her nipples, where Melody loved to suck, but the hollow of her neck, her navel, the hollow caused by her hipbone, the back of her knees. I sucked on her toes and worked my way back up the inside of her thighs to the concave place at the top of the inside of the thigh, just above and below the inguinal ligament.
Yeah, I learned the name of the groin ligament in my anatomy class.
Lissa pushed toward me, making certain that I knew she wanted my face in direct contact with more intimate parts. She was so smooth. I wondered absently if she’d just been waxed. She’d been talking about having a laser treatment and having the hair removed permanently. There wasn’t a trace of stubble or hair anywhere between her legs or over her mons pubis. Her outer lips were puffy and swollen, pulling outward and letting the inner labia flower. I could see her clit pushing outward and the flood of juices, so prolific that they dripped down her crack toward the bed. They had already created a damp spot.
I finally identified her scent as I bent my head toward her. We were having an Indian dish a few nights ago and Lissa asked me to cook some saffron rice. The tiny amount of saffron turned the rice yellow, but the heavenly scent that permeated the kitchen as the rice cooked came from the cardamom seeds. I’d often said Lissa smelled spicy. At last, I knew the savory spice. Cardamom.
I reached out to taste her treasures and she shuddered in pleasure. After just a few flicks of my tongue, Lissa moaned, stiffened, and a new flood of liquid issued from her pussy. I thought perhaps she was ready.
“What comes next, love?” I asked softly.
“Put a pillow under my butt to raise it up,” she said, handing me one of our pillows. With the way she was leaking, I was hoping that it was my pillow she’d handed me and that I would sleep with my head buried in her scent for the next two weeks. She raised her hips and I slid the pillow underneath, elevating them off the bed. “Now come here and make love to me, father of my next child,” she said.
That was all the invitation I needed and even though I paused on my journey northward to pay homage to the most perfect breasts I’ve ever seen, I was soon back to where I could kiss her. She grasped my cock and guided it to her, begging me with her eyes to dip into her core. I came forward slowly, relishing the touch as each vein in my cock slid forward. When I was fully inside her, she tilted her pelvis a bit more and I felt the tip of my cock touch the solid ring inside her.
“When you make me pregnant, I want your cock touching my cervix,” she whispered. “I know Melody is not as deep as I am, but in this position, you can sink all the way to my womb. If you bang into my cervix, it will hurt, because there are nerves there. But that also means that I’ll feel each spurt of your semen as you pump up into me. I’ll suck your sperm through that barrier to where my waiting egg will receive the best and strongest of your sperm as the father of our daughter.”
We weren’t going to do a lot of pumping in and out, I could tell. In fact, with me buried deeper in Lissa than I’d ever been before, I felt my balls begin to boil. Lissa began to breathe more deeply, almost gasping for breath. Each intake of air, forced her cervix down against the tip of my penis—it’s most sensitive part.
“Oh, darling!” she cried out as she pushed toward me again. Unable to hold back any longer, I felt my semen splash against her cervix. I could almost see in my mind the sperm being drawn through the membrane and into her womb. I held my breath as my sperm shot forth, thinking as I did that I could easily pass out in this position.
I collapsed onto Lissa, holding her to me as tightly as I could and still allow us to breath.
“Stay, my lover, stay,” she said. “Don’t back away from me now. This is the way we will create a new life, combining our essence. I love you! Our daughter will love you, too.”
No matter what Lissa said, I wasn’t about to move. I held myself as deeply inside as I could. I began to soften, but Lissa milked my cock with her pussy muscles, begging me to stay inside her. In a few minutes, I was nearly erect again and blocking the escape of my swimmers from her pussy. Within half an hour another flood bathed her womb. Had she not been protected, there is no doubt in my mind we would have become parents that night.
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