Art Critic
9
Left Out
“I’M LOOKING FORWARD to this little exhibition,” Lily Wells said. We were leading all the parents upstairs to our studio. Part of what we’d accomplished when our friends came over in the afternoon was to arrange our studio so that Mavis, Kendra, and I had artwork displayed. Annette and Susan had manuscripts sitting on opposite ends of the reading sofa. Morgan fired up her laptop with a sales graph for our work. I was happy to see that even some of Susan’s poetry had sold.
“Ah, the scene of the crime,” Richard chuckled as he glanced at the daybed.
“This is a nice room, but isn’t it a little crowded for all of you to work in?” Adam asked.
“We tend to spread out when we are all working,” said Morgan. “Annette, Susan, and sometimes Les often work on the dining table. Mavis has her own photo lab at home and when she’s here it’s usually as a model or to photograph a model. Susan is usually modeling as well. Kendra has to do a lot of her work at the university. There just isn’t room for welding and polishing bronze in here.” We all laughed at that. I could just imagine!
The only full-color piece I’d hung was the painting I’d done of Susan two years ago. I had an all-black painting of Kendra on the easel that I’d done before my color vision had begun to return. Hanging on the wall behind the daybed was the painting I’d done of Annette, Morgan, and Mavis the day of what we still referred to as ‘the silent orgy’. On Kendra’s work table stood the bronze of Mavis and me. It was polished and golden, awaiting the patina stage next. One wall held a cluster of three of Mavis’s photos, all featuring others of us in her surreal landscape settings.
“I want this,” Richard said. He hadn’t moved from in front of the painting of the three girls. “Morgan, since you are Art’s agent, please send me the pricing and terms for acquiring this painting. I want it. That Navaho rug over the fireplace is going to be replaced.” Lily joined her husband and leaned her head against his shoulder as the two continued to contemplate the painting. Mavis slipped up to me and kissed me.
“Kendra, this is beautiful,” Lee said. “Is this part of a limited edition?” Mom and Laura were standing next to him as they surveyed the bronze statue.
“Not quite,” Kendra answered. “This one is an original. It will be much different when it is finished. However, I have cast the pieces for a second piece that won’t have the same patinas and glass work. That one will be a straight bronze and I’m thinking I might use the golden tone as the patina instead of doing any other work on it. We’ve set aside rubber molds of all the pieces in case I decide to do an additional casting later. A piece like this… well, this one had to be cast in sixty-three pieces that I welded together and had to polish the seams of. Even a limited edition is pretty intense work. I may do a smaller version for that.”
“There must be an easier way!” Mom was just fascinated by the bronze.
“Oh, there is. One of the juniors at school is going on and on about 3D printing with bronze. I guess you can print with about anything that can be sprayed.” Kendra laid a hand on her bronze as she spoke, stroking it like it was a living thing. “It just doesn't seem right. Once the scan is done, they can print as many copies as they want. Mass production of bronze sculpture. Even large pieces like this or larger. I could have paid to have the clay maquette laser scanned and then printed in bronze. No plaster. No refinement. No welding. It just doesn’t seem like art then.” I nodded in agreement.
“These photos are astounding,” Adam said. “I recognize some of these places, but I’ve never seen them like this. So… intense.” He was beginning to sound a lot less intense himself. I’d only met him once before our dinner and he’d seemed really dominating. Of course, my opinion was colored by my concern for Les.
“These are inkjet renditions. I'm working on some chemical-based developing techniques for color prints, but it's going slowly. Like the bronze and 3D printing, every advance in digital imaging makes chemical-based photography less common and more expensive.” I’d heard some of this from Mavis before and realized we all had challenges in our artwork.
I glanced around the room and saw Dad settled into Annette’s usual reading position with her manuscript in his lap. I was betting we wouldn’t hear another peep from him till bedtime.
I was wrong, of course. Dad tore himself away from the manuscript to bid goodnight to our guests as the parents all left. The rest of us gathered in the kitchen for another piece of pie and ice cream before we called it a night.
“You’ve turned your darkness into art,” Mavis sighed. “My father loved the painting of the three of us. Charge him a lot for it!” We laughed.
“Your dad… is unusual,” I said.
“Because he likes black art?” Kendra asked.
“No. He likes me.” They all looked at me.
“He does, you know,” Mavis said. “He’s never liked anyone else I brought home. I was a little worried.”
“Have you brought home a lot of guys?” Susan asked.
“Um… a few. I’m not, like, pure as the driven snow,” Mavis answered. “I’ve been with guys. And girls. Sometimes at the same time. I hope that doesn’t put me on the outs with you guys. Does it, Artie?”
“No,” I said. “Why would it make a difference?”
“Some people are a little crazy about things like that, honey,” Morgan said. “It’s no problem to me. It’s part of the world we live in.”
“Me either,” Annette giggled. “We call it magic. Maybe you can teach us some things.” We all got a laugh out of that.
“Why do you suppose your father likes Arthur?” Kendra asked. “You must have brought home some really weird ones!”
“Kendra!” Annette scolded. I laughed. They’d have to be weird to make me seem normal.
“You know what I mean,” huffed Kendra. “Not that Arthur is that strange, but that Mr. Wells seems so open and tolerant of everyone.”
“Well, there is that, but it’s probably because my father is so weird.”
“I’ve never seen someone look so normal,” Les said.
“Looks are deceiving. One of the reasons I went into photography and wanted to be an artist was because I didn’t want anyone comparing me to him. I’d always come out on the short end of that. He’s so scary smart. His normal conversations are about sub-atomic physics. He wrote a two-volume book on particle detection and modeling of the universe with a foreword by Stephen Hawking. It’s beyond most grad students. But he has a bunch of coworkers that he can talk to about it who understand what he’s saying,” Mavis said. “It’s not that I’m not smart, but I’m not rocket surgery smart.” We all got a kick out of that and talked about school while we ate our pie.
“Dr. Lowenstein hit us with crippling praise yesterday,” Morgan sighed.
“Better than crippling criticism, like last time,” Annette responded.
“How can praise be bad?” Les asked.
“Well, Arthur has gone from a form of art that could be commercialized as prints and even posters,” Morgan said. “He has book covers. Now, every piece is one-off. There’s no way to reproduce them.”
“Because of the black? But there is so much depth,” Kendra said. “It’s almost like sculpture.”
“Right. Maybe we can do bronze castings of my paintings,” I laughed. “Then there are the mixed ones with black and some color like the one Mavis’s dad wants. Maybe the 3D printing you were talking about would get me back into competition with Thomas Kinkade. I just fucked myself up on this one. I’ll create art at night after I get done with my shift at McDonald’s.” Everyone stopped talking.
I didn’t really feel that bad. I guess they were just surprised that I could joke about it. After all the parents left, I’d been more relaxed. These were my friends and I could talk to them. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to say.
“Every once in a while, you stun me,” Morgan said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “I think it’s time to take you to bed. Anyone want to join us?”
“If we were all just going to cuddle up and sleep, even I’d consider it,” Les said. “But if you three are going to be shaking the bed all night, I’d be better off where I can do a little shaking, too.”
“Yeah. Let’s go do some shaking,” Kendra smiled. Everyone got up and grabbed their coats to leave. I got kisses from Susan, Kendra, and Mavis that made me ready to go to bed with all of them. Just before she left, though, Kendra added, “You know, that whole idea of doing castings might not be so farfetched. Could you do up a sample canvas that I can do experiments with? Something that has the same kind of depth and texture as your art, but not necessarily a picture of something. I might ruin the painting.”
“Sure. Kendra, I’d do anything for my friend.”
“So would I,” she said looking into my eyes.
I used acrylic for the sample that Kendra wanted. Maybe she’d get a kick out of the fact that she was in the picture. I couldn’t just put a bunch of paint on the canvas and imagine that it would be like one of my real paintings. The only reason I used acrylic instead of oil was that it dries faster and Kendra was hot to run her experiments.
“Pen, don’t you see Kendra in color?” Annette asked me while I worked. She’d caught a glimpse of the black paint I was using and did her usual cycle around the artwork, finally resting her chin on my shoulder while she looked at it.
“Um, yeah. I like what I see. She’s… soft, you know?” I said.
“Hmm.” Annette went to the canvas boards stacked against the wall and began going through them until she’d selected two. She hung them on the display hooks where we’d shown the art to our parents a few days earlier. Then she visually attacked them, pacing around the room and looking at them from different angles and distances. She was the only person I knew who looked at art this way. But she always came up with deep insights when she’d spent time examining them.
She’d chosen two of my paintings that were real favorites. One was of Kendra, working naked and bent over her clay model. It was the first day Mavis and I posed for her large bronze. Annette was behind her, rubbing her shoulders. The other painting she’d chosen was of her and Susan, caught in an embrace as they posed in front of the window. It was just before I joined them and lay Susan on the daybed with Annette. I just watched as my Lady danced around the pieces until she was satisfied.
“You open new doors to me,” she began. “When I look at your paintings, I see things I didn’t observe during the event or pose. Remember the first time you drew my right nipple? I got so turned on just by having you so intensely focused on my breast that I had to make love to you right then. It was like I could see myself through your eyes. That’s what I’m experiencing now.”
“Would you like to make love?” I asked as I kissed her softly.
“Yes, but… let me get this out first, okay?” I kissed her again and we almost lost where we were going.
“Go ahead, love. You and I have all the time in the world.”
“I’m so glad,” she sighed. “I’m in both of these pictures. And I’m not the focus of either one. I’m behind the other model. Still, you’ve painted me with all the loving attention to detail that I’ve grown to expect from your touch and your kisses—from making love with you. I look at myself in your painting and, like with the nipple painting, I can see myself through your eyes. You have such a clear image of who I am. I love it. Then look at Susan in this painting. She is ethereal. Not out of focus or anything, but it’s like she’s transparent. Translucent? There are places where I can see myself right through her. It’s almost like I gave her shape by holding her in my arms.”
“I think you do,” I said. “You have a very… special relationship with Susan. It came out that day.”
“Yeah. We’re still exploring it, but you’re right. She seems to mold to whatever I want at the moment,” Annette sighed. “It’s nice. But look at the painting of Kendra. When I look at it, I can see exactly what you mean by her being ‘soft’. She’s not at all ethereal, like Susan. She’s solid and opaque. You can’t see me through her. But I remember touching her that day. I massaged her shoulders and back. I took her to the shower and washed her hair… and everything else. Kendra is really strong. That work she does with clay has hardened her arm and shoulder muscles. Even her abs… she’s ripped. But there is a softness to her spirit. You captured that. It’s almost like…” Annette paused and I saw color rise in her cheeks.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s like your cock,” Annette whispered. “You get so hard I can feel and see the rigidity. Yet when I touch you, you are soft and silky. I can’t wait to feel you inside me.” She stroked my length and I hardened in her hand. “Please don’t ever tell Kendra I compared her to your cock,” she laughed. “But I can see her hardness in your painting, and can feel the softness. I can’t see auras like you and Morgan can, but I see your love.”
I think she had more to say, but that was as far as either of us could take it as we stumbled into the bedroom and fell on the bed. Her hand was still wrapped around my cock and mine had found the soft wetness of her pussy. I still marveled at the beautiful treasure in my arms. A lot had happened in our four years together, but when I touched her, I still felt the wonder of the first time she placed my hand on her breast and the first time she introduced me to a wet reality and the first time she guided me on a tour of her body and the…
I lost my train of thought as she rolled on top of me and slid slowly down my shaft. My Annette. My Lady. My beautiful, beautiful love. Loving her like this, I could see everything illuminated around us, but ignored it all.
Annette and I both had been focused on our projects for several days and taking a break to make love was like opening a window to fresh air in a stale room. We didn’t stop. When she was rising to her first peak, I latched onto her right nipple and she screamed as she vibrated around my cock. I wanted to feast on her body, so I rolled her off me and slid down so I could bury my face in her pussy. She was wet and fragrant and I fervently lapped her juices. She hadn’t come down from one orgasm when she soared to the heights of another.
I didn’t stop… couldn’t stop. I insinuated my fingers into her hot tunnel and found the spot that always seemed to light her up as I continued to lash her pink bud with my tongue. She did light up. The light that came from her body was like camera flashes going off in my eyes. I pushed her legs back so her bottom rolled up and I attacked the little rosebud there. Annette was delirious. I pushed a finger into her there as I returned to flick her clit and she lit up the entire room. She was panting and flinging her head from side to side, screaming unintelligible encouragement. I kissed my way up her body, paying special attention to places I knew turned her on and discovering new ones as I covered her with my body.
I didn’t need to guide my cock to her ready opening, but slid in until our pubic bones mashed together and her clit was stimulated once again. There was an uncommon wildness and abandon about Annette’s lovemaking that drove me forward. I gave her what she begged for as she slammed her hips up off the mattress. I couldn’t hold off my own impending climax and shook as I sprayed inside her. With one more gasp, Annette rocketed off to space again and we collapsed together. The room spun and glowed in the light of our coupling. The red T-shirt I’d dropped to the floor. Her blue panties lying nearby. The subtle tones of the bedspread we’d just totally trashed. The pale green walls of our bedroom. The rose flush spread across her chest. The red lips that joined mine in continued passion, even as our heartrates began to slow.
“How is your book coming?” I whispered as we drowsed together, still enjoying the afterglow half an hour later.
“According to Dad, ‘solid’,” she laughed. “If I hadn’t had four years of classes with him, I wouldn’t know that was praise.”
“I want to read it, but I have trouble reading.”
“I know, my darling. It will get better. I’m not sure I want you to read it, anyway. The horror might be too close to home,” she said. “Pen, I used the darkening vision theme. It’s not about you, but that’s the concept, and it’s truly evil.”
“Sometimes it felt evil, but most of the time it didn’t have a feeling. It was emptiness. Void. I still struggle against it.”
“That reminds me of what I was going to say when this all started,” she giggled.
“Do you think if we start over, we can end up back here like this again?”
“Oh, Pen, I love you. I will be back here like this with you anytime you want.”
“What did you plan to say when I rudely interrupted you with sex?” I laughed.
“Mind-blowing sex. Mmm. It was about seeing Kendra in color,” Annette said, rolling so she could face me. I touched her lips lightly with my own. “I’ve been worried. Morgan and I both. You’ve launched a new artform, but it was based in your darkness. We were worried that as your vision improved and you saw color, you would stop painting the black. Morgan can’t see it, but she knows the significance, just by seeing the reactions of people who do see it. But this new painting you are doing for Kendra… It’s all black. Even though you see her in color, you can still paint her in black. I think that’s important, Pen. The art that you created doesn’t depend on your inability to see color.”
Annette’s words spurred me on. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the paintings I created were evolving away from the black art my professors and others saw as a breakthrough. After the painting of Kendra was finished and handed off—much to her delight—I experimented with another painting all in black. I hadn’t painted any pictures of my lovers after the darkness until I was able to see them in color again. This was a major test.
I created a whole new scene, abandoning both the daybed and the curtains. Instead, I placed Morgan and Annette side-by-side on a narrow bench facing a mirror as they applied makeup. Their bare bottoms hung over the edge of the bench slightly and they leaned forward—away from me—to look at each other in the mirror.
We took a couple of reference photos and I began to paint. The photos wouldn’t really do me much good because they were flat with no texture, and inanimate with no glow. Maybe someday I’d be able to see them and compare them to what I painted.
The girls’ positions, facing away from me, let them talk with each other and even make small adjustments in their positions for comfort. In my mind’s eye, I could see an entire suite of paintings of the couple and wondered if I could replace the black surrounding them with some other color and still get a similar effect.
But for now, I was focused on black. I could see my lovers in perfect clarity. I painted them with the care I would take making love with them. Every gentle slope and curve of their bodies was important. I dipped my brush in black paint while I saw lush, nubile bodies lighting each other with their glow. We worked all afternoon and after they were too exhausted to continue, I worked on laying in the details of the background and the room that surrounded them. By dinnertime, I was also exhausted, but I had a new canvas.
Mom and Dad joined us after dinner to view the new painting. Dad had a typically literary interpretation right off the bat. Something about a portrait of The Vanities. Mom reached out her hand to touch it, but I managed to stop her. The paint was still wet and wouldn’t be ready for handling for at least a week. Oil had to cure. Annette proceeded to pace around the painting in her typical way, but Morgan simply turned her head into my chest and wept. Mom and Dad bid us goodnight and left the room.
I picked my sister up and carried her to the bed where Annette and I gently undressed her and cuddled. I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt. The longing in my heart ached to comfort her.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered.
“You’re always telling me I don’t have anything to be sorry for,” I admonished her. “Doesn’t that apply to you, too?”
“Oh, my Pendragon. I… I feel so left out.”
That got Annette and me both focused on her, comforting and consoling. My sister, my lover, my rock for twenty-one years on this planet. How could I tell her how much I wanted and needed her?
“Talk to us, le Fay,” Annette whispered. “Don’t hold it in. We’re here and we love you.”
“I… I have always been able… to tell how Pen was feeling… exactly what he needed. I could look at even his most primitive finger paintings and know how to comfort him or whether to laugh out loud. You’re everything to me, Arthur, and now I can’t even see what you paint. It’s a blank black canvas to me and I don’t know how to help you or how to see it. I don’t know what you felt when you painted it or what it means to you. Annette… oh, my love, Annette. I’m sorry, but I get so jealous that you can see what he’s painted and I feel blind. Just… so… left out.”
How could I ever convey to my sister/lover exactly how important she was to me? I didn’t care if she could see my stupid paintings. I depended on her to see me. To understand what I felt. Maybe that was the answer.
“Is it the picture you miss or the feeling?” I asked softly. “Fay, look at me. What do you see?”
“I see you, my brother, my lover… I see love,” she whispered.
“Come with me.” I took her hand and led her, the three of us padding naked into the studio. I stood Fay in front of the easel and put a new canvas on it. Annette wrapped an arm around her. “Now focus on me while I paint you,” I said. I started scraping black paint on the small canvas I’d set there. I used Annette and Morgan as models, just as I had when they were seated at the vanity. But this time, they were looking straight at me. “Look here,” I said, pointing to my eyes. “This is where I need you to focus.” I laid down my brush and looked into my sister’s eyes.
We stood there silently for a moment and I reached down to add a flourish to my painting.
“What do you see, my le Fay, my love. Tell me what do you see in me?” I sang the words we’d made up as children. I hadn’t used them in many years.
“I see my sweet, my baby, my love,” she began. Then she switched from the song. “I see love. Assurance. Confidence. Peace. I see a strong young lover who promises to always care for me as I care for him. I see your aura stretching out to me.”
I stepped around the easel and went to her and wrapped her up in my arms. I felt Annette move around to look at what I’d painted and grinned slightly.
“You’ve never needed the paintings, Fay. It’s me you’ve been reading, ever since we were babies. I didn’t need to paint late at night during a bad dream for you to come and comfort me. I didn’t need to put pencil to paper to love you. It’s me you’ve been looking at, my darling. Only at me.”
“I love you, Pen! I love you so much. I want to always know what you need.”
“You do, my love.” Behind us, we heard Annette snort and I grinned again.
“What are you laughing at?” Morgan demanded.
“He painted a puppy dog.”
It was a breakthrough for me to paint black where I saw color. Before, I had painted black because that was all I saw. I was a victim of the black. But now I controlled it. I mastered it and made it mine. It was liberating.
I’d painted two en plein air paintings, done in the out of doors. In one, I saw and painted the green of the trees against the black depths of the inanimate surroundings. The other was all black. Annette looked critically at each as did Kendra and Les. All were agreed that I’d kept the initial effect of the black paintings even though I saw the color now.
As I worked to perfect that technique, I began wondering if the opposite were true. Could I look at a room full of non-living things, a still life, and paint it in color even though I could only see black?
I was setting up a table with my subject on it when Mavis and Morgan entered the studio. Mavis was radiant and bubbling. Everything around her was brighter when she was present.
“Look! Look! I’ve done it!” she shouted. She held a portfolio that she put on Kendra’s worktable to open. Kendra could not do the patina and glass work on her sculpture in our studio and was tied up for long hours at school. Since we had no classes together, it felt like I hardly ever saw her.
“What have you done?” I asked. Annette came to join us at the table.
“Color photos!” she said. She opened the portfolio and laid out a series of eight-by-tens on the table.
Flat black pieces of paper.
I stepped back away as Morgan and Annette oohed over the photos. I understood a little of how Morgan felt left out. Mavis chatted happily about the difference between C41 and Cibachrome processing.
“So vibrant,” Morgan said. “It’s almost surreal!”
“It’s one of the things I’ve been trying to do digitally, but the range of ink just doesn’t give the over-saturation I’ve been looking for,” Mavis said. “Even using seven- and twelve-color printing, it reaches a point where the colors get muddy instead of more saturated. I feel like a working chemist getting the right combination of sodium carbonate and hydroquinone with the right timing and temperatures.”
“I love this one of Susan in the tree. She looks like a wood sprite. It reminds me of the paintings Arthur did of the two of us,” Annette said.
I felt a hand on my arm as I arranged a new canvas on my easel.
“Artie? Don’t you have a kiss for me?” Mavis whispered. I turned to look into her electric blue eyes and was captured there as Mavis closed the distance to my lips. I wrapped my arms around her and held her tightly as we kissed. I lost track of the time and place. Transported, as it were.
“I’m sorry I can’t see your photos,” I whispered. Around us, I could clearly see my paints, easel, palette, our clothes, and the softly pulsing carnelian at her throat. “I wish I could see flat objects in color. Of course, Morgan wishes she could see the depth and texture of my black paintings. We’re quite a pair.”
“Speaking of Morgan,” my sister said. “Morgan would like one of those yummy kisses, too.” Mavis giggled and went to my sister.
“So would Annette,” my Lady said, joining the two. It was so sexy to see the three of them exchanging kisses and little pets. I could see them brighten as they softly petted each other, illuminating more of the room as they kissed. I moved in to share in the mini orgy.
“Hey! These are beautiful!” I said as I glanced over Annette’s shoulder at the photos. They were glowing and intense in the light shed by the three girls. Illuminated. Saturated. I wanted some of those colors in my painting but had no other objects that even approached that intensity. “You light them up.”
“You light up my life,” my sister sang softly.
“Um… We need to keep kissing so Artie can see,” Mavis giggled.
The photos were interesting, but the way the three girls were shedding clothes was far more compelling. I tore my eyes from the picture and managed to get my share of kisses from each of them. We got lost in the passion and progressed easily out of the studio and into the bedroom.
We’d had some pretty intense make-out sessions, individually with Mavis and all together. There had even been some orgasms shared. But none of us had ever crossed the line to what we considered sex with Mavis. Over the years of working with different models, especially when Susan seemed to desperately want sexual release during a posing session, the three of us had a lot of opportunity to discuss what we considered ‘having sex’ with someone else to be.
Some of it was obvious when it came to me. Sticking my dick in a girl’s pussy was sex. Same with her ass. None of us were big on that activity, but we’d experimented and agreed that if my dick went into a girl, it was sex. We were a little less certain about blowjobs. Having my dick in a girl’s mouth was definitely penetration. The girls agreed that having their mouths on another girl’s pussy was also sex. Morgan and Annette had discovered intense pleasure rubbing their clits together and considered that sex, even though it wasn’t an easy or comfortable position. It was intense. That left fingers and hands to deal with. We’d all agreed, back when Susan was first posing, that we had to provide her with some relief and that fingers would be okay, even if they were inserted.
Of course, by any of our definitions, my having eaten Susan’s pussy and she giving me a blowjob counted as sex. But by her own twist, Annette considered that she had also had sex with Susan during the posing session with the two, even though she didn’t ‘get her face glazed,’ as she said. It had to do with the emotional state of the two girls. They were making love, and by any definition, if we were making love, we were having sex.
With the four of us naked on our bed, our frantic pleasuring relaxed. I knew that whether or not there was penetration or glazed faces, we had crossed that last boundary and were making love with Mavis.
In fact, I didn’t penetrate any of my lovers that afternoon, but we’d all had at least one orgasm. It was messy, but my emission wasn’t the only one soaking the bed. The post-coital bliss sent us all drifting in and out of sleep, rousing enough to kiss a partner or caress and squeeze a lover. We were sated and woke to shower and go out to dinner together.
“I’m feeling a bit left out,” my friend whispered as she held my hand. “I’ve been stuck over here in the school studio all semester. I miss being with you and having my hands in clay while you paint.”
“I miss you, too, Kendra. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come over and see your project. I don’t feel like I’ve been a very good friend for a long time. I really…” Kendra turned to me and lifted her lips to mine for a soft kiss.
“Yeah. It’s been a little empty.”
We walked on over to the ‘shop’ as it was called. Metalwork and glasswork required a whole different environment than the quiet studio work I was used to. Welding equipment, grinders, hammers, and the hiss of the furnaces as doors were opened and clanged shut. I wondered how Kendra managed to focus at all.
In her workspace, two bronze figures stood. I knew the first was uniformly a flat medium brown even though I couldn’t see the color. It was inanimate. We’d talked about the traditional patina with slight reddish overtones her professors had advised. And it was beautiful. Even in the blackness I could see the care and detail she’d captured in the figures of Mavis and me. I could paint that. Black on black.
It was harder for me to see and appreciate the details of the other bronze. The basic shape was the same as the first, but tendrils of glass connected the two people in the casting. I knew that she had varied the patina by making the two figures bright gold in color before encasing them in glass, but all the rest of the casting had the same color patina as the first one. I knew these things, but I couldn’t really see them.
Not until Kendra bent close to the second figure and I could see the way the tendrils of colored glass connected the two bright faces.
“Kendra, did I tell you what happened when Mavis brought her color photos over to the studio?” I asked.
“No, but I got a play-by-play when Morgan came over here to talk about marketing a smaller edition of this piece,” Kendra snorted. “It kind of made me feel even more left out. Are you saying you need the three of them to come over and snog next to the sculpture so you can see it?”
“I was thinking more of you and me.” There was a sudden flare of brightness from Kendra that cooled slightly while I looked at her. I wanted to see the sculpture, but I didn’t want to take my eyes off Kendra. “Um… How are things with you and Les?” I asked. I supposed I shouldn’t even consider kissing Kendra if that might mess up her relationship.
“Good. Good,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk.” She took my hand and we left the shop. When we’d rounded a corner and were out of sight, Kendra took me in her arms and kissed me—deeply and with rising passion. The black I saw all around us began to resolve into color.
“I could definitely see the statue after a kiss like that with you,” I whispered as I held her closely to me.
“That’s why I brought you out here to kiss you,” Kendra said. “I didn’t want to have a kiss that just meant you could see my sculpture. I wanted it to be between us.” I kissed her again. I was good with that. We stood in the shadows and kissed for several minutes. Some early flowers were blooming in a bed along the next building and I noticed I could see them clearly, even though they were beyond the range of what Kendra was lighting with her aura. The snow was gone and green grass was appearing everywhere.
“Lots more is lighting my world now, but little lights it as much as my friend,” I said.
“That’s sweet. Um… About Les and me. We’re together. We live together. We sleep together. We make love. I think we’re in it for a long time to come. But…” Kendra sighed. “We’re not passionate. We both recognize that. Les is… bisexual. I guess I probably am, too. I certainly didn’t have any objections to Annette washing my pussy in the shower,” she chuckled. “But I think Les actually prefers guys. He loves me, too, but he wishes I was a man. How screwed up is that. His father would completely disown him. We’ve agreed that we are going to fulfill the contract his father made until he’s twenty-five. We might stay together longer, or by that time, he might have found the perfect man. Don’t worry. He considers you ineligible.”
“Are you okay, Kendra?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I sometimes feel a little left out. Not with Les, but with you and Annette and Morgan. Even with Susan and Mavis. That first time I posed completely nude for you? We both came. We never even touched each other. That’s passion, Arthur. That’s what I feel left out of.”
“Would you like to make love?” I asked.
“God, yes,” she giggled. “With you. With all of you. You are still my best friend in the world, Arthur. I can’t help it if I get wet thinking about you.”
We walked back to the shop and approached her sculptures. I guess we were still glowing from that last kiss and the admission we wanted to make love. I could see the statue clearly and it was truly stunning. The fusion of colored glass with the bronze was amazing. It wasn’t just a new or unusual technique; it was the passion Kendra mentioned. She’d transferred her own passion into the statue. It brought tears to my eyes.
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