I felt very different in my studio the next morning.
From the very first drawing, I could do no wrong. Every mark I made was right, whether it was with a brush, a pastel stick, pencil or charcoal, each different medium seemed to want to do exactly what I asked it to. I drew quickly and fluently, and I felt that I had energy to spare. Amy could feel it, too, and my energy was charging her up. Instead of gazing at a spot on the wall, drifting with her own thoughts, she watched me like a hawk, trying to sense when I was ready to change and thinking about what sort of pose I might need next so she was ready to suggest something as soon as I grabbed another sheet of paper. It was wonderful, and quite unlike any other session I had had with any model.
When we took a break, I picked up all the drawings that I had flung onto the floor behind me in my eagerness to start the next one, pinned them up around the wall, and stepped back to have a look at them. Amy put a cup of coffee into my hand, and stood next to me, looking at our first hour's work.
"Wow", she said. "These are so much better than anything I've seen you do before."
"I know," I said. There was a tingling excitement in my gut, which I knew wasn't last night's Thai takeaway. The drawings weren't just technically more competent than usual, there was an extra spark to them. "Why do you think they're better?" I asked her.
She didn't answer straight away, but cocked her head to one side, chewing her lip while she found the right words to fit her thoughts.
"These drawings are all me."
"Brilliant. We should get you onto a TV quiz show."
"Ha-ha, very funny. You're not listening, Sam. These drawings are all ME. Amy. Not just the 'nude model of the day'. Not just a body seen objectively, with shape and form and proportions, like you would usually do only better usual. There's something else. There's a real person in these drawings. There's a connection. I think it's because in these pictures I'm looking at you looking at me."
"I think so too", I said. "It's the eye contact that makes them more personal, but there's something else coming through in these drawings, there's an erotic edge, a sexiness that I don't usually seem to capture."
"Perhaps you don't normally feel very sexy when you're drawing."
"I don't. I'm focusing on the surface, on what I'm seeing, and on my technique. Difficult though it might be to believe this, I don't hardly ever think about sex when I'm drawing, but I feel much closer to you today than before, and you are a much sexier person to me after the last few days than you were before."
"Do you want to make the rest of this session something special? Take that bloody old shirt off."
I always wear my favourite long and baggy t-shirt when I'm in the studio. It was white, once, but now it was permanently stained with ink and paint and charcoal dust. I normally wear some old loose pants as well, but today, I just had the shirt on, which covered me almost to my knees anyway.
"But I need this to wipe my hands and brushes on", I protested.
"No, you don't. You could use a rag or something. You could still use the shirt, if you like, as long as you don't wear the filthy thing. Come on, Sam, give me something sexy to look at, too."
"Let me go back 20 years and I'll get my sexy body. But in the meantime, you'll have to make do with the one I'm wearing now."
"Sam, you're a very hard man to pay a compliment to."
"Promise you won't give me a hard time if I ...you know, if I get a hard time."
"I'll be very disappointed if you don't. Get that shirt off. Now."
Amy was right, drawing her in the nude, in the nude, took our drawing session to another level of sensuality.
In her first pose, Amy was lying back away from me on two large cushions with her knees in the air. Most of her body was obscured behind her legs and feet which looked much bigger than the rest of her and took up most of the picture because they were closer to me, but I could see her face peeping out from behind them and one breast and one arm. I was very happy about the way I had captured the soft, slightly amused expression on her face. I told her it looked like a 'Mona Lisa' smile.
" I know why she was smiling at Leonardo", said Amy.
"And why was that?" I asked. The grin on her face was like the one she had when she lifted her top at me in the supermarket.
"She was thinking about changing her pose to something like this". As she said this, Amy put the soles of her feet together, parted her knees and let them slowly fall to the dais, one each side of her, opening and showing me her sweet pussy with her thighs spread as far apart as they could be. Her inner lips were quite small and not usually visible from the outside, but her pussy was now more open than I had ever seen it, like a creamy orchid with a pink centre. Inside her lips her pussy was glistening, moist, and I could see her smooth round clitoris peeping out of the little pussy folds. I was conscious of not breathing, and I could feel my heart pumping in my groin, but I tried to sound like a professional artist.
"Very nice, Amy. In fact, more than very nice. But I can't draw that."
"Why not? You wanted erotic. Isn't this erotic enough?"
"It's too erotic. You look like a porn star."
"So what? If you drew me like this, it wouldn't be pornography, it would be art. Wouldn't it?"
She had a point. Why did I feel that some types of pose were 'art poses', but others were 'pornography'? Amy had been thinking about this before she opened her legs, and she was two steps ahead of me.
"If it's OK to draw my tits, my nipples, my ass, and every other part of my body, what's wrong with my pussy? It's part of me, part of who I am. Everything else about my body is supposedly capable of being art, so why not this?"
I didn't have an easy answer to that. I had to agree that every bit of her was very beautiful, especially including her pussy.
"Sam, please draw me like this, wide open. It makes me feel very vulnerable but incredibly horny, and it will be a beautiful drawing, I just know it."
"It will be my privilege", I said, giving her a polite bow.
"And later, I'll take care of that for you", she said pointing to my cock which was fully distended and standing straight out. "But not yet, you've got work to do, and you'll get better results if you stay horny for a while longer."
"I've been horny since Saturday morning", I said.
"Me too", said Amy, "but I'm willing to suffer for the sake of art if you are."
She was right about the drawing. I pinned a full sheet of heavy and expensive handmade Arches paper to the easel and quickly blocked out the composition of the figure with a grey wash - a large brush with some very dilute Indian ink. While this was still partly damp I used a long, fine, sable brush and black ink to sketch in her body and spread legs. This boldly captured the tension in her outstretched bent legs from her knees to her groin area, and focused the viewer's eye onto the holy of holies – her pussy. Amy took a quick break to stretch her leg muscles while this brushwork dried, then I drew some more detailed sections back into the ink base with terracotta, black, and white conte sticks. Her eyes looking straight at the viewer, her hands gentle and relaxed, her feet pressed together sole to sole like two hands praying, and her pussy, glinting with promise and then curving under and disappearing into the shadow of her ass. Some scumbled blue pastel to indicate the blanket and to separate the figure from the background and it was done. It was still rough and unfinished in places, but I had the good sense to stop at that point before I overworked it and ruined it.
I asked Amy to unbend herself and come and tell me what she thought of it. I stepped back to look at it. It was a very strong piece of work, and incredibly erotic.
"Wow", said Amy, joining me behind the easel. "That's so beautiful."
"That's because it's the real you."
"You say the sweetest things sometimes, Sam." She leaned her head against my shoulder and put her arm around my waist. I lifted my arm over her head and put it around her shoulders. Neither of us took our eyes away from the Amy on the easel gazing calmly back at us from the other side of her gaping pussy.
