I've heard stories about news photographers who get shot because when they put the camera viewfinder to their eye, they forget that they're actually in a dangerous situation and think they're just watching something happening to someone else. It's like extreme voyeurism. I know it sounds strange, but I believe it. I believe it because it happened to me.
I'm not a photographer. I'm an artist. Well, I want to be an artist. I take my sketchbook everywhere I go and when I get "in the moment," I'm really transported away from where I'm really at to a place somewhere in my head.
So I'm sitting in the park -- you know, the one downtown where all the fountains are -- and I'm sketching the statue there in the center of the square, when I notice this -- I don't know, girl, woman, female, whatever. You couldn't NOT notice her. She was exceptionally well-built, if you gather what I mean. Very chesty. And her body was voluptuous in a very old school Italian Masters kind of way. She wasn't fat, she just had curves. Like a woman should look instead of these starving, rail-thin women who try to pass themselves off as sexy.
Her hair was a bright red, almost brassy color. Very shiny and shot through with streaks of black. She had real dark eyes, almost black, and she was wearing a variety of clothes that looked like they had come from an expensive vintage clothing store or a cheap thrift shop. You know the look I'm talking about.
Anyway, she sat down on the ground and leaned up against the statue I was sketching. She opened a book and started reading and I let my eyes kind of linger on her. Her breasts in particular.
The button-down shirt she was wearing wasn't buttoned up that much. I could see her black lacy bra very clearly. And on each breast top, she had tattoos. It wasn't a picture of anything, it was just a design mirror-imaged on each breast. I got to imagining how the tats must look on the parts of the breasts I couldn't see. So I started sketching her. Nude.
I imagined her full breasts with dark, silver-dollar aureole and a tattooed design reaching around as if to caress them. I imagined her mound shaved except for a thin landing strip of tightly trimmed pubic hair, another tattoo just below her pierced belly button. I imagined her so well, I got a hard-on under my sketch pad.
I got so involved in my drawing, I don't really know when she noticed me looking at her. I did notice when she closed the book, stood and started walking toward me. That was when I panicked.
You see, it's not unusual for people to want to see my sketches of them. Usually I comply, but this time I was rapidly trying to come up with some kind of excuse so I wouldn't have to show her. Unfortunately, my mind doesn't work that fast.
She sat next to me on the bench. Her perfume was understated but magical. My throat went dry. Her short denim skirt rode up on her thigh and I could see the garter clips holding her stocking tops. This woman knew how to dress.
"Can I see?" she asked. I had flipped the cover closed.
"Sure," I said. I opened the sketch book to a picture of the statue I had been working on before she had arrived.
"Nice," she said. "Very good. Now show me the one you drew of me."
"I...the statue... not..." My words weren't coming out too good.
She leaned over and put her lips next to my ear as one hand slid beneath the sketch book and cradled my bulge. "Pretty please?" she purred.
I flipped the pages. There she was, in all her imagined glory.
"Wow," she said. "Not bad. I thought you might be undressing me with your eyes. Guess I was right."
I'm sure my face was seven shades of red. "I'm sorry," I told her. I don't normally do that. It's just that you were...And I noticed the...And I started...imagining."
"Actually, you've got a very good imagination," she said. "But the tats don't come down quite that low around my nipples. Low pain threshold," she laughed. "See?"
She pulled her left breast from the black bra and ran her finger over the tattoo that ended right about where the bra had covered. I'd gotten the aureole right. It was large and the nipple resting in its center looked like a dark red gumdrop.