Although neither of them was a artist, and although they didn't actually meet there, their relationship began at the opening of a group show. They didn't met, but he certainly noticed her and, when they discussed it afterwards, she claimed she'd also noticed him. The galley was perfect; a small door off a back alley full of graffiti and restaurant exhaust pipes, a tiny stairs and then a huge white room; immense with giant industrial lights hanging from a distant ceiling and beautiful young people scattered in groups across a pristine floor of polished larch. There was champagne and tiny sandwiches and men in amazing suits and delicate women with tiny frocks and jackets that shouldn't of worked but looked great.
He tried, as usual to be modern and polite, to avoid leering, avoid staring at the beautiful women, but he couldn't help drinking in stolen glances of fabric following the curve of a back or belly, of an exposed thigh or an elegant neck. It was that sort of crowd, irresistible to the roving eye. When he saw her, though, it was her face he noticed first. She had an interesting face, noble and cute at the same time, intense and calm, fresh but lived in; Asian, refined, with high check bones and a wide mouth. She was with a small group, all about his age, late thirties; all laughing and relaxed, like old friends. She was wearing a long dress, silk and patterned and a wool cardigan and as she turned to say something to her friend he saw how perfect her body was, almost boyish, but ineluctably feminine. Desire, a deep want, swept though him unexpectedly and left in its wake, in his imagination, a brief but vivid picture of a naked belly, hips prominent like check bones and cunt lips dark with blood.
He walked around, looking at the art, saying hello people he knew and all the time he was aware of her, aware of where she was in the room, aware, he felt, of how her dress felt against her skin. The art was good, it was a group show by younger artists, early twenties and he often found younger artist disappointing, disappointing because they were rarely as sexy as you'd expect; you'd expect their art to be all about sex because you'd expect, or at least hope, their lives would be all about sex: young artist, cool, free, in and out of beds, discovering sex like a new thing, like a personal thing, learning it meant to fuck, to be naked with someone new, to explore a new body, to abandon yourself to sex, to your feelings. Instead, young artist seemed preoccupied with identity, a worthy topic but he'd prefer something beautiful and, even better, something that turned him on.
And here it was, there was one amazing almost impossible piece, a giant collection, maybe a hundred individual works, all showing the same few scenes in different media, framed pages from a magazine, paintings, photographs, tiny dioramas, screen prints, photocopies, close ups. None of it, though, was quite what it seemed, when examined more closely a screen print turned out to be a painting, a photocopy turned out to be a photograph and a photograph turned out to be a drawing. There were other tricks too, scenes that at first glance looked to identical would be different, so different sometimes that it was impossible to understand how they had at first looked the same, but somehow they had.
You wanted to look carefully to see all the tricks, to marvel at the skill of it. The thing with it though was that the pictures were pornographic, like images from a porn shoot. In one a naked man was lying on a bed while woman wanked his cock, in another he was going down on her, in a third she was riding him. To understand the art you had to stare at a cunt leaking juice, or cock with a jewel-like drop of precum. The precum was the clue to another trick, the sex was real, the two of them were really enjoying it, in the riding images the woman's cheeks were red with excitement, her buttock muscles straining to contain an approaching orgasm, the man's teeth were clenched as he tried to not to cum until she was ready. The porn was less really porn because the sex was real.
He stared at it for a while, for as long as seemed to be polite and it left him a turned him on; he could feel his cock half erect and full against his thigh and knew the people around him were turn on too, unconsciously all the people looking at it shifted around, separated, kept slightly apart from the people they were just a minute ago chatting too. He felt like he'd like to be alone and, more delicious still, knew the bright young things around him felt the same.
She got to the art work just after he left; he kept an eye on her as he drank wine and chatted near by to a woman he knew and once dated, he kept glancing over his ex's bare shoulder, risking rudeness because he couldn't stop himself. He saw the small step back she made when she realized what she was looking at and after that he couldn't but stare. He was glad he did because he could see her getting excited: as she stood and studied, he saw her drop one hand to her hip and then he saw an almost invisible movement, an unbearably sexy movement as she shifted her hips and clenched her ass, squeezing against her cunt. It was unbearable, he excused himself from his already pissed off ex, he wanted to think about what he'd seen and more than that he needed to wank. Looking around for the toilet, he caught the eye of some twenty something semi-hunkster and there must of been something in his face because suddenly it was on, the two of them heading to the toilet together.
In the toilet they were all over each other straight way, kissing savagely, he could feel the other man's hard cock in his trousers, pressing against his own. He reached down and pressed his hand against it, feeling it bursting against the stretched fabric. Then came the bit of these encounters he loved most, unbuttoning and unzipping, reaching in and unveiling a beautiful big cock, looking down and seeing it massive in his hand, its red head. His own cock was in the other man's hand, free from his trousers. A pause while they looked at each others hard pricks and then they were all over each other, cocks in each others hands, tongues down each others throats.
He didn't enjoy men's bodies like he enjoyed seeing women; he didn't notice men or how they dressed but he did enjoy wanking a hard cock, soft skin sliding over the hard shaft, the head damp and warm in him palm. He grabs the guy's testicles, his cock warm against the inside of his wrist; huge nuts to go with a massive penis; he slid his hand up along this length, using his other hand to hold the guys ass hard. He pushed against the cock, pushed it down, loving its heft, its strength against his hand. He could feel his own prick being masturbated and then a finger up his ass and he was cumming and the other guy was cumming, his cock jerking and there was cum everywhere and the usual pandemonium of checking jackets and trouser fronts for gobs of goo.
Two days later he saw her again on the train; she was sat in by the window reading from her laptop and taking notes in a hard back notebook. He learned later these were separate activities, she was switching between work and reading on-line erotica; at the time he assumed it was all worked but maybe it showed on her face that she was reading dirty stories, because he couldn't help watching her, secretly gazing at her face as she stared at her laptop screen and stroked her earlobe with an absent minded thumb. They got up to leave at the same stop and he was acutely aware of his cock pushing against his jeans; she didn't pay him any attention as the moved together towards the door, pushing past the people standing in the aisle. Just as the reached the door, the backs of their hands touched briefly and the surprise of it, the quickest, light touch, stayed with him all day. It was like he could still feel the contact.
Then nothing, he didn't know who she was or what she did or even whether was visiting from out of town. He had no reason to expect to ever meet her again. All he had were two encounters, two occasions he'd seen her and been near to her. He had never even spoken to her, but she quickly became the subject of his nicest day dreams. When he did meet her again it was nothing like any of his dreams, he was at a party, an hilarious party full of funny people; he was roaring drunk, full of Prosecco Bellinis and mid-flight telling a story and suddenly she was there, with the people listening and she seemed to be roaring drunk as well and she kept interjecting asides into his anecdote and he can't remember what he was saying or what she was saying, but everyone was laughing harder and harder, the drink and the company adding up to an overwhelming hilarity.
He doesn't know how it happened but next they were sitting together on a sofa chatting, kidding, like they'd were teenagers, like they'd know each other their whole lives and,at the same time, like had only just met. They were pressed together, thigh-to-thigh, shoulder touching arm, pressed together in a little bubble as the party surged around them, getting wilder and then quietening down. Later they tried to remember what they'd talked about and couldn't in any detail; they'd pointed out people they knew and told stories about them, they made lots of jokes, jokes that seemed really funny at the time, but probably weren't and, while they were doing this they drank and drank.
When they got up to leave they were almost the last and they could hardly stand, drunk like teenagers too. She said she lived nearby and, it seemed, almost at once they were stumbling along under street lights, hanging off each other, hold hands, clutching each other and then falling over, roaring like louts, banging into things and finally falling into her flat while the world was starting to spin and somehow he got to the couch and when he lay down it was like a whole 100 kilometers of atmosphere was pressing down on him and making him fall in one place. They both slept in their clothes.