Art Something
8
First Painting
HOLIDAYS AREN’T THE GREATEST time for advancing relationships. Fay had the entire week off, but Annette and I had three days of school. We only got Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after off. And there were other people to deal with. Family responsibilities, meals, and guests.
Annette and her family were invited to Thanksgiving Dinner with us, along with my grandparents and her grandparents. My grandmother looked long and hard at Fay, Lady, and me. She even went so far as to push her prescription sunglasses up on her forehead and squint at the three of us. She dropped the glasses back on her nose and turned to my mother.
“How do you stand it?” she asked. I glanced at Fay and she looked frightened. Mom kept her face turned away from us. It was like Gram knew Fay and I had been sleeping together every night since she got home. We always started in our own rooms, but in the middle of the night, Fay would slide her almost naked body into bed next to mine. We’d sleep. It’s not like there was no arousal. I had Fay’s bare breasts in my hands or against my naked chest all night and we awoke kissing. We were both aroused and panting in the mornings, but we agreed to withhold from any wet reality unless Lady was with us.
“I got used to it with just the two of them. Then with the other two. As long as I don’t look straight at them, I don’t go blind,” Mom whispered.
“Here. Try these,” Gram said. She rummaged in her purse and pulled out another pair of sunglasses. She’d always worn dark glasses, as far back as I could remember. Mom put the offered glasses on and turned to look at us.
“They help. What’s different about these?” she asked.
“I got polarizing lenses. I didn’t think they’d work, but they help. My new prescription glasses have them, too. They’re still bright.”
“I can still see the colors a little. That’s what I hate about colored glasses.”
“They’re muted, but still identifiable.”
No one else seemed to pay a bit of attention to my mother and grandmother and their dark glasses. I wished I could see what they saw.
“One of you should bring your young lady to visit,” Gram said to Fay and me. We were sitting on either side of Lady. “I’m not sure I could take all three of you.”
“Arthur will bring Annette for a visit while I’m in school, Gramma,” Fay said. “That will make it easier.”
I was amazed that no one else at the table seemed interested in our conversation, but that might have been because Dad was explaining some complicated Old English traditions that closely paralleled Thanksgiving, but went back into pre-Saxon days. He called it ‘Second Harvest.’
“Gramma knows, Pen,” Fay said to me as we cuddled in bed together. “Just like Mom does. And if Mom knows, Dad knows. We just all pretend that everything is normal.”
“It is normal, Fay,” I whispered as I kissed her ear. “It’s the only way I’ve ever known. That makes it normal for me. I love you and I will never give you up.”
“And I will never give you up, sweetheart. But I love Lady. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Just like I love her.”
“Then you won’t hesitate when the time is right, will you?”
“The time?”
“To make love to our lover.” I looked at Fay as I stroked her breasts. Just a few months ago, we would never have touched each other so intimately for all that we had slept together periodically through the years.
“But…”
“No buts. Well, you can keep petting my butt if you want. Pen, Lady is our lover. There will be a time—maybe our first time—when she and I make love and you won’t be there. There will be a time when you and I make love and she is not with us,” Fay said. We would make love. She’d never said that before. I knew we both believed it, but to hear her say it hardened me against her. “Yes, my darling brother. We will make love. You will have a whole new definition of a wet reality when that day comes.” She giggled and just for a moment she reached between us and stroked the length of my shaft.
“I don’t know what to say. I love you. But there is something deep inside me that wants more. More than just lying beside you and kissing and touching,” I said. “Desire? Is that what it is?”
“I hope so, because deep inside is exactly where I want you to be. I just want us to build everything up that will support making that a forever thing. That’s why it’s important to grow with Lady. Annette doesn’t get to be with us all the time. She doesn’t get to sleep with us. You… We both need to do everything in our power to make her one with the two of us. To do that, she needs to be one with you.”
My painting had changed. I was no longer slopping poster paint on paper. There was a canvas board on my easel and I’d been working with acrylics. I was beginning to understand what Ms. Clayborn said about the poster paints being my sketchbook. I was feeling the paint move into the fibers of the canvas as something deeper and truer than the Bristol board I usually painted on.
And it took longer. I had been working on this painting since the morning Annette surprised us in bed. As I looked at Fay, still lying partially uncovered in my bed, I could study her features in repose. The little bow of her lips, slightly parted as she slept. Her face relaxed. Her brow smooth. Her eyes squinting and flickering open as she awoke to see me. Her smile.
I was no longer hesitant when I saw her awaken. I set my brushes aside and slid into bed with her. She rubbed her face against my chest and shoulder and made little mewling sounds as she kissed my skin.
I could put this on canvas. I just needed Annette to wake up like this a few mornings.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Annette said as we sat together in the family room. She’d come over on Friday afternoon and we’d fixed popcorn and soft drinks so we could watch a movie.
“I thought you had to stay home until your grandparents left,” I said.
“I thought so, too. I was even being nice about it. I mean, I like my grandparents. My grandma is always surprising me with something. And that’s what she did this afternoon. She was teaching me to crochet. Well, the only thing I can do is a long string and I like them because when you use all the yarn, you can just pull on the end and it all unravels. But Grandma took my hook out of my hand and said, ‘Why don’t you go spend the night with your lovers, honey.’ Just like that!”
“Your grandma thinks we’re lovers?” Fay asked.
“I almost fainted. She does a kind of exasperated sigh and then says, ‘You don’t have to be able to see auras to tell you three are in love.’ I just kissed her on the cheek and grabbed my toothbrush.”
“You won’t need anything else,” I grinned. I kissed her and she moaned.
“How did she know about auras?” Fay asked. She kissed Lady before she could answer. I didn’t think we were ever going to get an answer to that question. Finally, they came up for air and started giggling.
“Don’t ask me questions if you don’t want answers,” Lady laughed. “Oh, boy! Did you know our grandparents went to school together? They’ve known each other for fifty or sixty years or something. Grandma says she’s always known about your family’s ability to see auras. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but from what I understand, there was some question about which grandpa would end up with which grandma when they were in school.”
“Wow!” That was about all the conversation I was good for. Lady kissed Fay again, but she was sitting in my lap and almost before they were finished, Fay turned to kiss me.
Eventually, we got around to watching the movie. I remembered the movie we went to last spring when I had a hand on one girl’s breast and the other held in Annette’s hand. The two breasts I had in my hands and the two girls were a lot nicer than the armor-plated tit I’d touched in the theater. We were even sociable at dinner with Mom and Dad and pretended not to be in too much of a hurry to go to bed Friday night. We didn’t even pretend we weren’t all sleeping together.
So, there I was, adjusting the flesh tone on the canvas, touching the highlight at the tip of her nipple while I imagined touching it with my tongue, but mostly, just looking at my two sleeping lovers, entwined with each other in my bed.
We’d spent the night with Annette between us. There had been some wetness, for sure. And some fingers involved. I’d never touched a girl’s pussy before. Well, I still hadn’t, technically, but there had been only one thin layer of cotton between my fingers and Annette’s soft heat. And an equally thin layer between my fingers and Fay’s wetness. And between my cock and their stroking hands. I’d changed underwear when I got up to paint. It was still sticky.
“Pen, Fay has to go back to campus. Come hold our lover with me,” Lady said. I needed no further encouragement. I lay down next to Fay and wrapped both girls in my arms.
We hadn’t spent the whole weekend in bed. We went out Christmas shopping Saturday, then had dinner at a nice but inexpensive chain. We walked around the mall looking at the displays of fancy gingerbread houses. Nearly every store had sponsored some business or group to display a house in their front window. We’d held each other’s hands, shifting periodically so a different person was in the middle. We even stood in line for forty-five minutes to have our picture taken with Santa Claus. The old guy had looked at me and said, “You don’t need anything else for Christmas.”
“I will miss you, but it’s only three weeks until I’m home for winter break,” Fay said. Lady kissed her long and hard.
“Fay, my love, I want to be explicit about this,” Lady said. “If it is okay with Pen, may I make love to him before you get back?”
“Pen, is it okay with you if Lady makes love with you while I’m gone?” Fay giggled. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Um… Yes.”
“Then yes, Lady, my love. Make love to our lover while I’m away at college.” Fay kissed Lady and then turned to kiss me as well. “I love you both to the ends of the world and back. And when I get home, if things work out okay, I’m going to make love to each of you.”
When I was little, it always seemed like months separated Thanksgiving and Christmas. The day would never get here. This year it seemed that school days lasted forever and weekends flew by. I started doing something I’d been forbidden for the past several years. I took drawing supplies to class with me. My head was filled with a vision of what school looked like.
You might think that all my art was of Fay and Lady naked. I loved painting them, but that was a small percentage of what filled my head. I had no way to empty all the visions but to put them on paper. School scenes were common in my art, as were scenes of home, the city, and our neighborhood. What made it different was that nothing was quite real. Words. That doesn’t make sense. Why can’t I make words mean what I want them to?
Take the clock in Mr. Kowalski’s history class. It’s just an ordinary clock. Analog, not a digital readout of the hour. It was big and round and located right where his head kept passing in front of it. If he paused, it looked like a bite had been taken out of the clock. In my sketch, the clock dominated the front of the classroom, overlapping the whiteboard that our teacher drew timelines on as he explained the events of the Revolutionary War. The numbers on the clock went backwards. There were teeth marks where a bite had been taken out of it, clipping the point off the big hand.
“Arthur? Arthur!” I looked up. Mr. Kowalski was standing over me at my desk.
“Sir?”
“Pack your bag. There’s no sense in you being in class if you can’t pay attention.” I hadn’t been sent out of a classroom in over a year. It was embarrassing. Mr. Kowalski scribbled a note and handed it to me. “Two hours detention. See Ms. Clayborn. Clear your head before you come to class tomorrow or report directly to her. Your choice.”
Two hours! History was my last class of the day and Lady would be waiting for me. Two hours that we could have been together doing… something. I trudged into Ms. Clayborn’s classroom and handed her the note from Mr. Kowalski. She read it and motioned me to an easel.
“Let’s see it,” she said.
“It?”
“What you were drawing in Dave’s class.”
“Oh.” I dug out my sketchbook and pencils. She looked at the drawing.
“I thought we had an agreement that you wouldn’t draw in other people’s classes,” she said. She looked at the drawing and nodded.
“I just… There’s so much in my head… I can’t…” I stumbled trying to explain. Damn words!
“And Morgan isn’t here to help you,” Ms. Clayborn sighed.
“Annette helps, but…”
“Mmm. I see.” She put a Bristol board pad on the easel but pulled it off again as she looked at my sketch. “No. There will be no flinging poster paint at a sheet of paper and calling it art.” She put a twenty-inch wide canvas board on the easel. “Develop it. Use your soft graphite and sketch lightly. Prepare it for acrylics.”
“I only have two hours.”
“Your detention is for a week.”
“A week?!” Two hours after school for an entire week! All because I couldn’t pay attention in class.
“Three hours. Dave doesn’t want you back in his classroom until you’ve cleared your head. So, an hour of his class time and two hours after school.” I looked at her with my mouth hanging open. She handed my sketch back to me and took my chin in her hand to make sure I was looking straight at her. “This is it, Arthur. Is painting just what you do to keep you from going crazy? Or is it something you do to keep the world from going crazy? Whichever way you go, I won’t try to change you. But you must give it a shot. Is this a mind-purge or is it art?”
She stepped back and I was faced with the blank canvas and my sketch. I’d never considered doing anything with my life other than painting. Yes, it kept me from going crazy. Could it also keep the world from going crazy? My shot. My life.
I began developing the sketch on the canvas board.
“We need to go home now, Art,” Annette whispered in my ear as she kneaded my shoulders. “It’s going to be beautiful, but we have to leave the school now.”
“I should take it with me,” I said as I dropped my pencil in the tray.
“No. You can draw or paint something else at home. This is a studio piece. You’ll come to the studio to work on it,” she said. I looked around the empty classroom. Ms. Clayborn was packing her own notes and materials in her satchel. It was nearly five.
“When did you get here?” I asked. How had I not noticed my girlfriend waiting in the room?
“Ms. Clayborn sent a note to my Advanced Calculus class and I came here as soon as it was out.”
“I’m sorry, Annette. I’ll ask Mom to pick me up the rest of the week. It’s my detention. You don’t have to serve it, too.”
“I got all my homework done. What difference does it make whether I was doing it at home or here?” she giggled. “Besides, I am your Lady. Even if you were sentenced to prison, I would serve the time with you.”
If anything, having detention at the end of the school day made me more impatient with my classes before it started. I agreed, however, to leave my sketchbook in my locker until I had to report to the studio. Annette had ‘a talk’ with Rob and he was willing to help me stay focused in the classes we shared. It helped because he was depending on me and I couldn’t let him down. In the mornings, however, I continued to develop sketches of little details in the new painting that had become clear to me overnight.
The first color went on the board Wednesday afternoon. It was frightening. I’d never developed a sketch so thoroughly. Yet I knew that everything I had drawn would be covered with paint by the end of the week. I started with the whiteboard in the background, except I didn’t like the expanse of white dominating the image.
When I was a freshman, Mrs. McKendry taught English Composition, our basic high school grammar course. I didn’t remember anything from her class. It all had to do with words. But what I did remember was that she was old fashioned. And old. She’d retired the next year. She refused to use a whiteboard. There was one in her room, of course, but she had a huge green chalkboard that she wheeled in front of the offending new technology. She used yellow and white chalks to diagram sentences and write vocabulary words. She said a student’s education was not complete unless he or she had cringed at the screech of chalk on slate.
I talked to our custodian at lunch and he remembered the chalkboard. It was stored in a room full of old desks, maps, lab equipment, and outdated textbooks. He agreed to move it to the studio classroom.
The chalkboard had never been cleaned. There were broken bits of chalk and an eraser in the tray. I used the chalk and my sketch to copy out the lessons that I’d determined to put in my painting. The dust on the chalkboard gave it texture and dimension—something the modern whiteboards lacked.
By the end of Wednesday’s detention, the bulk of the background for my painting had been laid in, carefully leaving a void where the principal subjects would take shape. I liked the dusty texture of the chalkboard and the yellow and white marks of the lesson.
When Annette took me home, we spent a delicious twenty minutes parked in the driveway making out. She had her homework done, but I still had mine to do. She was sweet and loving and understanding.
“Your detention is good for me, Pen,” she giggled. “I actually understand that last differential equation I had to work out.”
“I don’t even understand what you are talking about, my Lady. My mind has been blown by your kiss,” I said.
“Keep up the good work and that isn’t all I’ll blow,” she whispered.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
