Ignore the Warning Label

Author's Note:

This is NOT the kind of Part 7 that is designed to stand alone. You will be very lost without having read the first six parts.

This is also the final chapter of the series. Fair warning, it is a long one.

Please remember that this story is set in 2018, which was the present back when I started writing it.

As always, many thanks to EGRI, Echo, and everybody else who has been supportive.

General updates about what I'm working on can be found on my author profile.

Ignore the Warning Label

Part 7

I love Office Space. I thought it was hilarious when I first saw the movie in high school, but I didn't fully appreciate it until I joined the working world. My daily frustrations include different buzz words -- sprint planning meetings and JIRA tickets rather than memos and TPS reports -- but it still totally resonates with me.

There's one line from the movie that perfectly describes what the days after moving in with Malcolm were like. It's the scene where the initially overstressed main character comes into work completely relaxed, and describes his amazing weekend on the couch. "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I ever thought it could be."

That's pretty much what happened that first week. Nothing. We brought a load of clothes over from my place, made plans to rent a U-Haul at some point in the future for the rest of my crap, sat around on the couch, went to and from work and school, and just generally did nothing while in each other's presence. It was absolutely amazing!

The whole time, it just felt completely natural. Like, having all the time in the world to be together freed us to waste some of it lazing around.

Looking back, something shifted in our friendship after we started having sex. Every time we were together after that, it felt like there was a pressure. Some kind of subconscious need to squeeze the most we could out of every minute. It led us to pack our weekend dates full of activities, without leaving much decompression time to sit back and chill like we'd done so often during our lives before.

Which isn't to say it was a bad thing. We had a ton of fantastic dates! Still, it was kind of exhausting, and the week of nothing was a relief for both of us from a pressure we hadn't even realized we'd been feeling.

At least, that's the way I tried to describe it to Nicole when she wanted to hear about all the fun and exciting adventures I'd had since leaving her behind in Jersey City to go and become a Brooklynite. I don't know, I thought it was kind of romantic, bonding with Malcolm in a returning-to-our-roots sort of way. Somehow, that didn't resonate with her.

"What do you mean

nothing was everything you ever thought it could be

!?" None of Nicole's incredulity was lost over video chat.

"It's a thing from a movie—"

"You mean you went all the way to fucking Brooklyn, the most happening place for hundreds of miles in any direction, just to sit on the couch and vegetate?"

"It's not like that at all!" I protested. "Don't tell me you've never wanted some low-key downtime with Sam."

"Of course! It's great, especially after getting back to the campsite after a hike, or after getting laid, or after getting home from a show or something." Nicole gestured pointedly each time she said 'after'. "Seeing a theme here?"

"Oh, come on. You've come to my place plenty of times just to drink and chill."

"That's different!"

"How?"

"Adding beer makes it a party." Nicole said, so matter-of-factly I had to laugh. There was a moment of silence, Nicole's eyes darting around the camera in a way that had to mean she was doing something on her computer.

'Anybody else and it could be innocent... but this is Nicole, the crazy lady who invited herself to my house a mere few days after Malcolm introduced us.'

"What are you plotting?" I asked.

"Don't ask as if you don't know," she said with a sassy grin. "Sam and I will be over there in a few hours. Have you ever been to Insa?"

That's pretty much what conversations with Nicole were like -- like she was sprinting ahead and everybody else needed to catch up. She hadn't explicitly asked, but we both knew it would be perfectly fine for me to turn her down. Still, I didn't want too. She was right, it had been a while, and it was probably time to do something more social than going through the motions at work. "No, I've never heard of it. Is that a restaurant or something?" At that moment, Sam wandered into frame in the background. She smiled in the camera's direction and waved. "Wait, does Sam even know you've just invited both of yourselves over?"

"She probably expected it when I told her we were talking," Nicole said, then called over her shoulder. "Hey! You're taking a break from wedding planning tonight." Sam responded with some colorful words about being the only one putting any work into planning their wedding, to which Nicole rolled her eyes and pointed out that was because Sam didn't trust her with any of the details.

Malcolm wasn't surprised in the slightest to learn we'd been conscripted into dinner plans. He just smiled and reflected that at least Nicole had given us a few hours warning instead of just banging down our door. I still wasn't quite used to the language shift, and hearing him call it '

our'

door gave me a little surge of happiness.

In truth, saying we'd done completely nothing was a bit of an exaggeration. Quietly, stealthily, we'd been feeling each other out. We'd never been quite the Oscar-and-Felix

Odd Couple

style extreme polar opposites, but it's pretty inescapable that my love of chaos and his general organization would collide. So far, we'd headed off the problem. We'd decided that the dining room table would be my empire, to do with whatever I wanted, and we'd eat our meals from the kitchen-side bar area instead. I thought it was working out well so far. It was hard, but I'd really made an effort to keep the rest of our shared spaces the way Malcolm liked them. Little things, like keeping the bedroom floor clear of the dirty laundry than I was used to dumping on it when I lived alone, made Malcolm smile whenever he caught me putting things in the hamper.

We'd also had completely plain, non-kinky vanilla sex for the first time. I'm not sure if that's a BDSM couple milestone, but it felt significant. Like, validating that we could put the cuffs and gag away for a little bit and just enjoy some classic cowgirl fucking.

Of course, two nights later, we'd swung completely the other direction and added some new trophies to my collection of pictures of the marks Malcolm has given me. They were pretty impressive, though I say so myself, bold red streaks across my thighs that were still a little tender to the touch. They would probably have healed already, but I kept touching them, enjoying the way the sensation flared up and reminded me of Malcolm giving them to me.

"Insa, you said the name was?" Malcolm said from behind his laptop screen.

"Yeah. Seeing anything good?"

"Yeah, Korean barbeque with good ratings... Not the closest choice in the world, though. We'll probably have to take an Uber." He paused, clicking around for a few seconds, then looked up at me at the same time as my phone vibrated with a new text alert. "It says here they've got karaoke. You don't think..." he trailed off, reading the text I held up for him.

Nicole: Btw were getting a crew together and doing karaoke afterwards

Nicole: I was going to keep it as a surprise, but Sam made me warn you

"You know what, that's on me," Malcolm said with a laugh. "It was wrong of me to doubt Nicole and her complete lack of restraint.

----------

"So, I'm gonna start off today with a little bit of phthalo blue. We'll use the ol' two-inch brush. Grab a touch of the midnight black also -- phthalo blue and midnight black, just gonna mix them together on the brush. And let's go up here, and just using our little crisscross strokes, let's just drop in a happy little sky."

Vivian focused intently on the screen, where Bob Ross was calling shades of blue sky into being, then rushed to figure out which of the handles in front of her was for the two-inch brush. It should have been easy, that was the biggest one in the set, but they were all jumbled together in her cup. By the time she'd found it and produced the proper mix of colors, Bob had already moved past the sky and was on the bottom of the canvas creating water. His trademark calm, mesmerizing speech contrasted sharply with the speed he painted at; his almost lazy appearing brush strokes deceptively masking how deliberate and practiced they were.

David helpfully paused the video.

"Thanks," Vivian said, still trying to catch up mirroring Bob's crisscross brush stroke pattern in the sky.

"No problem," he said from somewhere behind her, then paused to consider her progress. "You've still got a lot of paint on the brush, try putting a bit more of it up towards the top." As she worked her way down, the layer of white she'd put on the canvas started mixing with the blue, creating lighter and lighter shades. The way it faded going downwards, it really did create a bit of depth to the sky, like it was stretching off into the distance.

"Try to flow with it," David added encouragingly, setting the remote by her side, "it doesn't matter if it turns out good or bad, just try to remember what strokes with the brushes made what effects."

"Right."

According to David, art was far more about being able to see something than it was about mechanical skill with a brush. Unless you could really see it, no amount of skill would help transferring the image to paint, or charcoal, or whatever medium. The mechanical skill was important, but it wasn't what would hold her back.

Apparently, it was kind of like speaking. Nobody ever thought about the mechanics of opening their mouths and moving their tongues to create each individual sound for each word they spoke. They imagined a sentence, then they said it. Musicians did something similar when they progressed to mastery of their instruments. Guitar players stopped thinking of how to arrange their hands to produce notes, and simply imagined the melodies they wanted to play. Without having something to say or a song to play, the mechanics of how to make sounds were useless.

Vivian had thought she could see just fine, but it turned out there was a world of difference between looking at something and actually seeing it, and she had a lot to learn. According to David, it was very hard to teach, but it would come with experience. On the other hand, the ins and outs of paints and brushes were a lot easier to teach, so that's what he'd been doing with her. He'd taken her through a variety sampler of different styles, so she could get experience with each and figure out which she wanted to delve into more. Bob Ross's trademark wet-on-wet style was the most recent.

"I thought we were both going to do this together?" Vivian said, her voice raising at the end to form a question. David had set up a second canvas for himself right next to Vivian's, but he'd shifted off to the side a bit at the last second before starting the episode of

The Joy Of Painting

.

"We were, but then I had a better idea." David grinned at her around the edge of his setup before ducking back behind it. From her angle, she couldn't see what he was working on. Whatever it was, it seemed to involve replacing the canvas with a sheet of paper and setting to it with a variety of pencils.

She resumed the video and set back to learning. Following Bob Ross's lead, she was astonished by how well basic strokes and colors turned into recognizable, and often detailed looking shapes. Going feather-light on the painting knife spreading titanium-white down the slope of the mountain she'd painted created a snow-like layer with a lot of holes in it. Up close, it didn't look like anything, but from a step back, it looked like an incredibly detailed mountainside covered in snow with sections of rock poking through.

Throughout the process, Bob's reassuringly calm voice kept up a steady monolog of encouragement, with a lot of deep philosophical stuff laced in. He framed new elements in an odd way, saying things like: "Decide where your mountain lives in your world." "You need the dark in order to show light." And "In your own world, you can create any illusion that you want. I think that's what attracted me to painting, I can create any kind of world that I wanted. Nobody is unhappy, it's a pleasant place. Everything is nice here."

It almost felt like Bob Ross snuck those bits in, and they gave Vivian something to think about during her frequent pauses to catch up. He framed the entire process of painting like the artist was a god creating an entire world on the canvas, and everything that happened there was within their control. Maybe David felt that same sense of power and control when he was being creative?

When the episode ended, Vivian's painting didn't look half bad. It was very different than what Bob's guide painting looked like, all the proportions were different and Vivian had messed up mixing some of the colors, but what she'd made legitimately looked like a landscape!

Proudly, she spun to show what she'd done to David, but he stopped her with a quick word. "Hold still! No, go back the way you were facing."

She did, wondering what was going on and trying to remember just how she'd been sitting before. Had it been her left or right leg she'd had bent under herself? Probably right?

It took her a full minute of listening to his pencils scratching away beside her to realize that he was drawing her. Instantly, her cheeks flushed red, and she nearly hid her face in her hands. If anybody had asked, Vivian would probably have put herself right at the top of a list of the world's least likely people to ever get into modeling. It was right at the intersection of two improbabilities -- somebody, for some reason, wanting her to model for them, and her being brave enough to do it.

Anybody else, even one of her former masters, and embarrassment probably would have gotten the best of her. But it was different with David. She'd seen him draw lots of other people before, and that made this feel like it wasn't such a big deal. Still, the command to keep still proved to be difficult. As soon as he said it, her nose started to itch, and she had to fight down the urge to fidget.

"Could you shift your hair a bit? Back around your ear?" David asked, and Vivian hurriedly complied, trying to straighten her hair with her fingers as she did and wishing she'd done a more thorough job combing it that morning. "Hmm," David quietly mused. "Not quite."

He stepped out from behind his paper and started adjusting Vivian, softly but firmly guiding her body with his hands into the position he wanted. Turns out it had been her other leg. "Most people straighten themselves up when they're taking pictures," he said as he gave her a little bit of slouch. "You were more natural. Like this." David moved back and forth, positioning her arms and clothes, stepping back and looking from different angles, then trying something different. "Now, your hair. Maybe we take some liberties there..." He trailed off, his hands now running through Vivian's hair. Deliberately, he gathered some of it between his fingers, and Vivian felt the tugging and positioning that went along with getting a braid.

"You really do dabble in everything," she said, impressed to discover hair styling was another of his skills, then added, "would you like it if I wore it like that more?"

"It's nice when you give yourself a braid, but keep it for special occasions."

"Like getting a portrait done?"

"Exactly." He worked quickly, gathering and winding her hair into shape and letting it fall over her shoulder.

The whole time David's hands were on her, Vivian was struck by how confident he felt. He'd manipulated her body with the same sense of rightness and ownership she'd come to expect from dominants. It was the first time she'd felt that from him, and it filled her with hopeful warmth. Maybe it was because he was in his comfort zone setting up someone to draw?

Surprisingly, Vivian found herself starting to like the feeling of being the model. Maybe it was a form of confirmation bias brought on from the change she sensed in David, but it was starting to make her feel submissive. Keeping still for him in the pose he'd picked felt a little bit like being tied up, except that she needed to focus on holding still and being obedient for him, which pushed her submissive button even more. She sat just like she had been, facing her painting but no longer seeing it at all. Knowing his eyes were on her made her imagine she could feel them like a physical presence, focusing and sending little ghostly flickers across her skin.

"You don't have to hold yourself rigid like a statue," David said, helpfully. "You can play with your phone or something, just try to keep that same general pose."

"Oh. Okay."

That kind of broke the bondage analogy a bit, but it still left Vivian feeling charged inside. She brought her phone out, but kept getting distracted from texting with Nicole about plans for dinner. Kinky daydreams floated across her mind's eye of how her position could be changed to make David's picture more exciting. Daydreams that mostly involved more rope restraints and less clothes, which both surprised and excited her. With just a bit of assertiveness, David had transformed her from a shy girl with an instinct for keeping her skin covered to actively imaging nude modeling for him. It made her smile and blush slightly, tingles teasing across her skin in the intimate places she wished were uncovered right now.

It went on for a while, David's pencils scratching away and Vivian struggling to stop herself from squirming into her chair to scratch the itch growing inside her. Occasionally, he'd give her a new instruction, or get up to shift one of the lights around them, which only intensified her fantasies and built her arousal. Without Nicole's texting banter about forcing Devyn out of the house to distract her, Vivian would have been a complete wet mess by the time David finished.

"Would you like to see it?" David finally asked, putting a hand on her shoulder and making Vivian jump slightly.

"Of course!"

David's portrait of her was not what Vivian had expected at all. It was beautiful, showing her form far more prettily than she thought of herself, and amazingly detailed for how quickly he'd done it. There were none of the smudges and eraser marks that had plagued her own pencil drawing lessons, and his shading made the black and white seem completely lifelike.

It was her, right down to the slightly embarrassed look she'd had when she realized what he was doing, yet somehow still capturing in her smile how she'd ended up enjoying it. This was how he saw her, as very pretty young woman who appeared friendly and bright. He had seen her completely, and captured her perfectly on paper.

"I did your face last," David said. "I wasn't quite sure what to do with it because your expression kept shifting. You were really focusing while you were painting, but then you got this cute embarrassed happy look. But then you kept snickering at your phone. What was that all about, by the way?"

"Nicole -- you don't know her yet, but she's another friend -- she was gossiping about Devyn and Malcolm and inviting us to go out with all of them tonight."

"Oh, cool. That sounds like fun. Where are we going?"

"Brooklyn. Apparently, we're doing dinner, and we have to think of a few songs to sing for karaoke."

David laughed at the way Vivian's voice gushed with excitement. "I'm guessing you're not like most people. Most people hear that and panic about having to think of just one song they can perform well enough for a crowd, but I'm guessing you have the opposite problem."