Odalisque
Fifty-one
I STOOD IN FRONT of the mural wall just before five Sunday afternoon. It was still just as blank as it had been when I left a week ago. I looked at the weather app on my cell phone and saw that the temperature hadn’t reached fifty all day. The good thing was that we had over twelve hours of daylight each day now. With Daylight Saving Time, the sun didn’t set until twenty till eight, but since we were painting on the east side of the building, we lost light pretty quickly. We still had to be above fifty degrees in order to paint on the composite stucco they used on the wall. It had been over six weeks since the stucco was applied to the wall, so it was fully cured. Tomorrow morning, I was scheduled to meet with a representative of the paint company to go over mixing and using their special concrete and stucco Acrylic paint.
I walked over to the shed and identified myself to the security guard. He checked my ID and let me unlock the paint shed to look at the supplies. They’d built this little building with color neutral lighting and heat to keep the paints from getting too cold. Gallons of paint lined the walls with different base classes. The company did a spectral analysis of my painting and there were color swatches hung around the edges of the rendering. Each swatch had a color formula on the back. There was a paint tinting station like you’d see in a paint store that had all the colors on it and a shaker so we could mix up the amount we needed. One coat of paint over the whole wall would take about thirty gallons of paint, but some of the colors would be mixed in quarts. We’d estimated a total of fifty gallons being opened and mixed.
Since arriving on campus, my heart had been beating faster than on the racquetball court. The magnitude of my responsibility was overwhelming. Up until now, the wall had been a part-time endeavor while I was in school. But this quarter, it was my full-time responsibility. We’d just received $30,000 in donations and pledges. Volunteers would be working with me and the Gary Ranson Foundation was matching every hour with fifteen dollars. PCAD and SCU had fundraising activities scheduled. I’d heard there was even one of those kick-start sites set up to accept donations online. We were talking serious bucks.
And every single one of them depended on me painting this goddamned wall.
I couldn’t help myself. I sat on the floor of the shed and let the tears flow. It was so overwhelming. I was afraid I couldn’t do it.
I don’t know how long I cried but I got it out of my system. What a pussy. I needed to get myself together and go home. I needed to hold my lovers and maybe even my lovers’ lovers. The weather forecast was fair and warmer tomorrow. I needed to paint a fucking wall.
Bed was crowded. There were six girls in there and they were all pretty involved with each other. It was funny in a way. We were all there and naked, but I’d never had sex with three of the girls and didn’t really think I was going to. Oh, we’d kissed and used fingers and hands on each other, but Bree and Whitney and Wendy just weren’t on my list of lovers. As I watched them in bed, Kate, Melody, and Lissa didn’t seem to be moving or letting their partners move to anything more intimate than naked embraces, kissing, and touching.
Man! Was I jaded? Naked embraces, kissing, and touching weren’t that intimate? What was the name of that president who kept declaring that he had not had sex with that woman? I was like six or seven, I think. Was he the same one that kept saying “I am not a crook?” Somehow, I made a distinction between having a hand job and orgasm with a girl and actually penetrating either her mouth or pussy. By that standard, I’d had sex with Sonia, even though I’d never slept with her, while I’d slept with all these girls, but never had sex with three of them.
It made my head hurt.
I tried to edge into bed beside them and was allotted about three inches of mattress. This really wasn’t going to work. Kate rolled toward me and I managed to hang onto the sheets to keep from falling off.
“A little crowded, isn’t it?” she giggled.
“Yeah. I feel kind of like a third wheel. Or seventh wheel,” I said.
“Poor Tony,” Melody said. “Six naked girls and he’s not getting any.”
“We can fix that,” Lissa said. She and Whitney rolled out of bed on the other side and ran around the bed to start tickling me and kissing me. That was too much and I slid off the bed onto the floor. I was immediately on the bottom of a pile of girl flesh. God! There were twelve bare boobs all trying to get in my hands or mouth. I wasn’t even sure which pussies my fingers were playing in and couldn’t concentrate well enough to sort it out. Especially when a mouth covered my cock and took me all the way down to the root. That could only be Melody. Apparently, my fingers weren’t the only ones that were finding hot wet spots as the volume of moaning was steadily increasing around me. Part of it was mine.
I heard one girl go off pretty quickly and thought it was Whitney. It was definitely Lissa’s pussy that settled over my mouth and rode me to a fast climax. Someone was working on Melody as she was sucking me. I could feel her moans around my cock and that was getting me close quickly. As soon as Lissa was off my face, Kate and Wendy were licking me and kissing me, cleaning up all Lissa’s juices. I pulled the two girls to me tightly as I began to pump into Melody’s throat, stifling the scream she was building to.
Everybody just rolled to the floor in exhaustion. I wasn’t sure if everyone had come, but everyone seemed satisfied—for a minute.
“If you ladies are going to keep bringing your girlfriends to bed with us, we’re definitely going to need a bigger bed,” I said.
“Oh, we’re not,” Lissa said. “This is just a special occasion. We all wanted to be back together tonight.”
“We might need a traffic light, though,” Melody laughed. “That would help.”
“Well, we’ve got an extra bed downstairs,” Kate offered. “How about if a couple of us take Tony down there and you guys get the big bed tonight. We’ll bring coffee in tomorrow, okay?”
It was agreed and Kate and Wendy took me by the hand and led me out of the bedroom.
“It gets a little over the top, doesn’t it?” Kate said as the three of us snuggled. I was beside Kate opposite Wendy.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s not like I object to having naked women around, even when I’m not painting, but I like to know who I’m loving.”
“You can love me,” Kate said, pulling me in for a scorching kiss.
“I’ll go to my room,” Wendy said softly.
“Don’t go, Tiger,” Kate pled. “Please stay with us.”
“Yes, Kate,” Wendy said.
“Hey, Tiger,” I said quickly. I recognized the tone of submission. “Want to help me turn Kate to jelly?” Wendy grinned at me.
“Oh?” Kate said just before the two of us descended on her.
We rolled around, kissed, touched, and made love. As I entered Kate, I watched Wendy lovingly kiss her and caress her breasts. Kate wrapped the other girl in her arms as I plunged away bringing her closer and closer. Kate pulled away from Wendy’s kiss with a gasp.
“Oh Wendy! Oh Tony! Oh god! I love you!” I heard the telltale whine of her impending climax as Kate inhaled deeply. Wendy sucked Kate’s nipple as her fingers played with Kate’s clit. That was all it took. I started spurting as Kate went rigid. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she went limp. Her sudden drop pulled my cock from her pussy while another spurt dribbled onto her mons. Wendy and I slid to Kate’s sides, gently kissing and petting her until she began to recover.
She looked at us and smiled that radiant smile I loved so much.
“I haven’t done that in a long time,” she whispered. “Is that your come or mine dripping out of my pussy?”
“Both,” I said.
“Good. Tiger, I didn’t help you tonight. I don’t think I can move right now,” Kate said.
“’Sokay,” Wendy said.
“I think I owe you something,” I said, holding out my arms. Wendy smiled and crawled across Kate into my arms. Kate edged over a little and Wendy settled on top of me, finding the spot on my leg she seemed to like to rub against. Kate gently held my cock as I kissed Wendy. She moved slightly so my cock was trapped between our bellies. I was slippery enough from Kate’s and my juices that it felt really good to be rubbing against Wendy’s tummy. Kate had managed to get her finger positioned so that as Wendy rode my thigh, she kept bumping her clit into Kate. She raised up enough to look at both of us, her eyes watery, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she began to shake. She kissed Kate as I felt my cock begin to spew out its contents between the two of us. Wendy froze against Kate’s finger as she came.
Wendy looked longingly at Kate—lovingly. Then she turned her green and gold eyes on me and smiled.
“My hero,” she sighed.
We got comfortable and Kate handed me a tissue to wipe up the mess. The two girls pillowed their heads on my chest and I think they were still kissing when I went off to sleep.
Monday morning was a madhouse as everyone scrambled to get showered, dressed, and off to school. Bree and Whitney left in time for Bree to get to her seven-thirty class. Melody and Kate had class at nine and were getting ready. Lissa left early to get the boys and take them to school since she hadn’t seen them for a week. Wendy quietly brought two outfits on hangers to me and stood in front of me completely naked with one held in each hand. She didn’t say anything, but just looked at me questioningly.
“It’s supposed to be warmer today,” I said. “Do you think this would be good?” I took the blouse and jeans from her left hand and held it up. She nodded.
“Thank you, Tony,” she said quietly.
“Anytime, Tiger,” I answered.
By ten o’clock, I was alone. The weather app said it was nearly fifty degrees and sunny. It would be a good day.
I made myself another cup of coffee in a travel mug, grabbed my red hardhat, and went to face my wall.
If you were a linear thinker, you’d look at a wall eighty feet wide and naturally start at the top left corner. Doc taught us differently. A mural is multiple focal points that draw the eye from one to another. The logic in my head said start at the end and work toward the beginning. I mixed a few paints then thought better of it. I’d start one step from the end. I didn’t want that piece of the painting standing out by itself for the next two months. We’d come to it.
It was all I could do to keep from stepping off the back of the scaffold to look at what I was doing. I hated painting on this scaffolding. Doc said he had an idea, but I wasn’t sure what it was and hadn’t seen him yet since I got back. I plugged in my music and let the rest of the world disappear as I painted.
“Hey! Artist boy!”
The shout jarred me out of my zone and I unplugged. Who the fuck would interrupt me? I turned around, ready to lay into the intruder.
“Hey, Tony!” he shouted. I looked down at Coach Frederickson.
“Hey, coach,” I called. “What’s up?”
“You missed class. You know you’ve still got me to contend with this quarter. I came by earlier, but you’ve been in your own world forever. We’ve still got time for a run and if you are going to paint every day like you were today, you need the exercise.”
Like I was today? What the…? I looked around and realized that I was painting in shadow. I flipped on my phone and saw the time was after four. I’d been out here for six hours? No way. All of a sudden, I was hungry.
“I had no idea what time it was,” I said. “Sorry I missed class. When was it?”
“It’s officially whenever you show up. Come on and get cleaned up. We can run hard for half an hour and you’ll feel better for it,” he said. He was probably right. I still couldn’t believe I’d been out here painting for six hours. The sun was still shining, even though it was on the other side of the building from me. I hoped I hadn’t inadvertently adjusted colors as the light changed. That would suck.
I came down with my paints, went to the shed and cleaned things up. I was wearing running shoes, so as soon as my brushes were put up and the paint was sealed, I was ready to go. I walked out of the shed, tapped Coach on the shoulder, and took off.
“Tag. You’re it!” I shouted as I ran. Coach was right behind me.
I headed toward the water and used the park sign as a vault before heading west with the sun in my face. I grabbed a tree limb, swung up on the branch and reversed directions, jumping back over Coach as he grabbed for the limb. When I was crossing the parkway, I picked up a dog that was determined to chase me faster than Coach was so I took two steps up the side of an apartment building, ran along the balcony railing and jumped the gap to the window of the next building. There was a stairway on that side and I slid down the railing back to the street. The dog gave up on me and turned to Coach, but he was out of reach before the poor dog could respond. The kids’ playground was almost deserted, so I vaulted to the top of the monkey bars, ran across them and launched out to a chin-up bar on the other side. Two more turns and I saw my goal. Coach was trailing me by about thirty yards, so I reached in my pocket, tapped my key to unlock my car and jerked the door open on the passenger side. I left the door open as I settled into my seat and started the car. Coach slid in beside me.
“Where can I drop you, Coach?” I laughed.
“Nice run! When did you add the tree limb? That was seriously fun.”
“I just saw it and grabbed it. Thanks for getting me moving. I needed to get the kinks out,” I said.
“Congrats on your big win this week. It’s all Sam’s been talking about today. But we should really keep this up at least every other day. I know if the weather is decent you are going to be on that wall, but you’ve got to keep active and you still have to make your training a priority to get ready for National Singles,” he said. I drove him around to the door of the Athletic Pavilion.
“Yeah. I’m taking a couple of days off while I get this beast started. It’s a huge project,” I said.
“No kidding. How long were you out there today?”
“I figure about six hours.”
“Let’s see. I could see grid marks on the wall. It looked like you’d painted in about a dozen of them. Are they finished?”
“No. Mostly just the base coats and highlight blending. Tomorrow I’ll lay in the shadows and it will really pop.”
“So that sounds like about an hour per square foot,” Coach mused. “Baby, you’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Thirty-two hundred hours? Fuck! That’s like 130 days 24/7. I gotta speed up the process.
I got home just in time to sit down with the family for dinner. Wendy was working but we had the boys. After dinner I read with them for a while and got them ready for bed. As soon as they were down, I sat at my computer and opened a spreadsheet.
I was spending too much time doing fine detail. There were seventeen focal points and they were each around twenty square feet. That’s only a tenth of the total wall. If I figured the focal points took an hour per square foot, it would take 340 hours. If that was all I worked on and other people did all the rest of the painting, I still couldn’t finish by Memorial Day.
I was still at the computer when Wendy got home from work about a quarter till eleven. She leaned over me and kissed me on the head but didn’t say anything before she left. Five minutes later the rest of the family was surrounding me.
“What’s got you upset, lover?” Melody asked. “I’m sorry we weren’t paying more attention.”
“We all have work to do,” I said. “I’m not upset over it.”
“But you are upset about something,” Kate said. “Wendy noticed.”
“My estimates for how long it’s going to take to paint are all off. I only got about twelve square feet done today and it’s not all in,” I said.
“That’s sounds like an awful lot,” Lissa said. “You were working alone all day, too, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. But at that speed the mural will be done by Memorial Day all right—only next year. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”
“It won’t all go that slow,” Melody said. “Sandra and I can do the whole bottom tier next weekend if the weather is decent. That’s a quarter of the wall. And we’ve got volunteers to paint the textured grass areas and tent awnings. Those are all going to go really fast and they don’t require you to do anything but spot check.”
“That’s if we can paint,” I said. “Look at the five-day forecast. It’s back in the thirties for the next four days with highs ‘near fifty.’ Even without rain, that’s too cold to paint. And the damned scaffolding drives me crazy. I’ve either got shadows all over the wall in the morning or fading light in the afternoon or I’m falling off trying to step back to see the work. I’ve got to talk to Doc tomorrow.”
“We’re with you, Tony. I might not be much help, but I still trust you,” Wendy said. “I know you’ll do it.”
If anything, that made me want to cry. The whole job changed perspective. It wasn’t about the money we were raising or the work of art. It was about Wendy. It was her wall, not mine.
I’ll do it. Somehow, I’ll do it.
Doc came out to the jobsite with me at ten on Tuesday morning. The temperature had actually started above fifty, but was falling steadily and was in the forties now.
“It would have been easier to do this project in the summer,” Doc said. “Long days, warm weather, little rain. Right now, we’ve got the most unpredictable weather of the year. Like this. It’s supposed to get warmer as the day progresses, not colder.”
“Yeah. I’m not thrilled about it, but what can I do?”
“Hmm. Control the weather, maybe?” Doc said facetiously. “This looks good. Your colors seem to be holding together just fine. I don’t think you need to worry about having adjusted for different light conditions. Still, it would be better if we could even it out some.”
“It would be a lot better if I could step back and see what I’ve done,” I said. “I really hate this scaffolding.”
“Then let’s get rid of it,” Doc said. “First, though, the broad areas need to be laid in. Those aren’t areas that you will be putting a lot of detail into, but a little texture and shading. We need as many people out here this weekend as we can get to do all the field work. Once that’s all in, we’ll remove the scaffold.”
“How will I reach it to paint then?”
“We’ll use Genies.”
“Got a magic lamp?” I asked.
“Hmm. That’s another good idea. We’re going to get rain soon and we need to tent this for the weekend with enough lamp power that everyone can see easily,” Doc said. “Okay. While the weather is too cold to paint, let’s get the rest of this done.”
Doc had a class at twelve-thirty and another—mine—at two o’clock. We went to his office and he gave me a list of names and phone numbers and told me what to ask each one for.
“You know your project and its needs. You have authority to get things done. Explain to each person what you need and when. Be sure to contact the scaffold company for a change of configuration on Monday or Tuesday,” Doc said. “I have class. You can use my office.”
It was a brilliant idea and I wanted the tenting and lighting done immediately, so I called those numbers first. Man! As soon as I connected with SCU maintenance the first guy I talked to asked what he could do for me and then said, “Sure. We’ll get right out there.” When I asked them for a couple of Genies, they said it would be no problem. They used them all the time for lighting and maintenance and there was one right inside the maintenance locker in the Athletic Pavilion, but anyone who used them would have to take a four-hour certification course. I called the PCAD theater department and they were a little more skeptical until I told them what the project was.
“Oh! That!” the department head said. “Look. We’ve got a show going up this weekend. It’s the last show of the season, so once it’s down the equipment is free for the summer. Will it be too late to have it a week from Monday?”
“No. That would be great. We’ve got a couple from SCU that we can get started with.”
“Jim Mason mentioned that he’d like to get involved. He’s our head scene painter. I’ll have him get in touch with you,” he said. Wow! More painters? Hell yes.
By the time I went to class at two, I had equipment problems on the run. I was still worried about speed, but this could lengthen our working days when the weather was warm.
I’m not sure how we managed it, but Kate held my hand through most of Doc’s class. That’s not bad considering that we were drawing. Doc told us that our assignment for the class was to work around an obstacle. How appropriate was that? He had artists drawing with their easel only partially in view, set crooked, out of view of the subject. People wore eye-patches, were tied with their arms barely able to reach their pads, or—in our case—holding each other’s hand. To make it interesting, we held right hands, which mean that I had my right hand crossing my stomach to reach her right hand and we were both drawing with our left hands. Everyone in the class was surprised at how good their drawings were.
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