Masterpiece 9

I'm entering this story as part of the

Nude Day Story Contest 2024

here at Lit, and it stands on its own. But it is connected, however loosely, to several of my other stories; if you want to read more about Southside Wellness, you might want to check out stories like "Dani And The Christmas Dildo," as exciting as that sounds. This is also linked to "Smoke And Roses."

Please read all the Nude Day contest entries and vote up your favorites!

* * *

I stood there under the pulsing gush of the shitty municipal showerhead, the stream of water feeling no more useful than a garden hose aimed at my neck, thinking dully about a history book from when I was a kid. They'd talked about Roman baths, and I remembered being amazed at the idea that men and women would bathe together; I'd read the book at that impressionable age where that kind of thing is gross, rather than kinky.

There'd been an illustration in there of a man in a steam room or a hot tub or something, dumping oil on himself and then scraping away the dirt with some kind of bronze thingie, like a blunt knife. I remembered how vividly my mind had gone to the idea of a shining sliver of metal sliding over naked flesh, rimmed with oily dirt in a thick film, now slipping off the skin and down into those fabled Roman sewers..

The notion had amazed me. It had been my first real notion of older people, like the Romans, being actual humans, with enough time and energy to think about how to make tools for scraping off dirt.

I thought of that now, wishing for one of the bronze thingies as the water gushed, looking through the waterfall off my hair as little bits of blue paint curled down off me on their trip down to the drain. Most of them never made it there; they lay scattered around like autumn leaves, the hastily washed-off shells we'd been caked in for the first installation at 9:00. It was ten now, and I was due back out at... 11:30? They wanted us standing around in full view when the donors came into the Pavilion for lunch.

Which gave me, what, about ten more minutes to shed one coat of paint and be ready for the second?

They had me doing all three installations this year, which had impressed my friend Dani. "Shit, babe," she'd whistled when I'd arrived, "that's as many as anyone's doing. You're going to have to hustle."

"Yeah." The year before, they'd only had me in one tableau, wearing vivid green bodypaint sponged on by some sort of apprentice tattoo artist. This year, though, I'd buffed up my portfolio. Now all the artists wanted a piece of me. And why not? I was hot, vibrant in the healthy bloom of 24, just then applying for grad programs in between answering phones at the law firm. I looked good. And I wasn't inhibited enough to mind people looking at me in the nude. And I was patient enough to stand still for half an hour without scratching my itches.

That's an important trait in a bodypaint model.

I clawed at a stubborn lump of blue up by my shoulder, vaguely aware that the woman under the next shower nozzle was having trouble getting some glitter out of her hair. The concrete beneath our feet really did look weird, like a bunch of psychedelic snakes had been shedding their skins there: paint in every possible color carpeted the little shower area, our scrubbed bodies adding to the colorful tide with every passing moment. I was hazily aware that the nozzle on my other side had a man underneath it, one of the two guys who'd volunteered to stand wearing nothing but paint: he was now hunched over, looking like he was trying to free some metallic purple from behind his scrotum.

Which was even less sexy than it sounds.

But that's what modeling is: comfort with exposure. Ease with nudity. A craving, even, for showing off: all the best models genuinely enjoyed being looked at, studied, photographed. Remembered. I'd never been anything but the most amateur of models, but even I knew the heady glory of striding out into the flashbulbs, showing off.

I sighed and dug my thumb into a patch of blue at my hip, feeling it peel away, grateful I wouldn't need to rub any harder. The artists sometimes gave you a hard time if you showed up in the tent with a bruise.

"Let's go, guys!" That was Dani, chirping from behind us where the curtain hid us from the rest of the beach. "Time's a-wasting. Three more models still need to shower, and two of you are in the lunch installation. Come on!"

Ah, Dani. My old friend Dani. She'd grown up in my neighborhood before she'd gone off to become a high-powered sculptor. Now she made money doing real art all over the country, making her rent by working as a massage tech at Southside Wellness.

Well. Maybe more than just a

massage technician,

if you believed the rumors. And Dani's past had given me no reason not to believe them.

But today she was creative director of Harborside Bodyscapes, a performance art installation the city was putting on as part of Bayshore July Days. Not that the city wasn't careful to keep the Bodyscapes safely behind a tent; wouldn't do for the families and the rubes to see a bunch of bodies standing around wearing nothing but paint.

As if some of the bikinis out by the water were any less revealing, really.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. "Come on, Belly-belle. Get that blue shit off your pussy and get out here. Your artist is asking for you." Dani was in understandable haste, but I didn't like her using my old nickname.

"Chill, bitch." I shook water out of my long hair. "If you'd sprung for better showers, we could clean this off better."

She glanced sideways to where the guy with the metallic-purple balls was scurrying out. "If that guy could wash his ass, you can wash yours." She leaned into the mist and smacked mine. "Come on." Another model was already stepping in, her feet kicking the flower-petal shreds of paint out of the puddles by the drain, her nails already scratching a large rainbow butterfly off her chest. "Seriously. Your artist wants you, and I don't want to piss him off. He's really good."

"Yeah?" I could barely hear Dani over the splattery noise of the showers, with her standing back out of the spray. "Then why don't

you

strip off and become his sculpture?"

She smiled, a deep and secret smirk, her eyes drifting cutely off to the side. "Maybe he's already seen what I have to offer, bitch. Perhaps he thinks you're better for his muse." She sniffed. "Whatever. Come on. You're clean enough. Scoot."

I grumbled, but she was right: I wasn't likely to get a lot pinker than I already was, and if there were any little chips still sticking to me, the painter could scrape them off. I thought again, fleetingly, of those Romans in their baths. "Okay." I'd brought my own bathrobe; the previous year's Bodyscapes had taught me that prancing around the Pavilion in nothing but a towel was a little more risque than I felt like being. Somehow, wearing a towel in public over my skin had felt much more of a violation last year than wearing nothing but paint. It really was bizarre, I'd noticed then, how smearing a coat of pigment on your naked body really didn't feel like nudity. Even though, in a way, it was.

There'd been excitement, standing there in my one and only installation last year: I'd loved being eyed, examined, judged. I'd felt detached, almost like I was flying above myself, watching my body as I'd posed. And I'd had that same sense this morning, during the first installation. The blue one. I had no idea what the next pose had in store for me, but Dani had told me this guy was the best bodypaint artist in the state.

I'd figured she'd just told me that to get me to commit to showing up, but she didn't know I'd have gladly done it for free. For the thrill.

I sashed the bathrobe, my comfortable green terrycloth one, and took a moment to adjust my boobs before I ducked underneath the plastic side of the tent. The contrast was jarring, an abrupt step from the curled paint on the floor of the showers, used every other day for washing beach sand off the public, into the lush airy light of the Pavilion. The people who worked for and supported Southside Wellness were going to be schmoozing here all weekend, with or without bodypaint models, around a series of tastefully assembled tables holding dainty snacks catered by Cheeks and Company. Behind a coffee bar in the corner stood Gretchen from Harborside Book and Tea, handing out free lattes with the help of a coolly efficient barista I thought I might have asked out, once upon a time.

A low bubbling mutter of conversation fell briefly as I stepped through the Pavilion, then rose once more behind me: Southside Wellness liked having the models walk straight through the VIP area. They thought it gave their investors a sense of conspiracy, a behind-the-scenes feel, as if they were already a part of the Southside empire... even before they'd started writing the checks.

I was sure it didn't hurt that Southside's

massage technicians

were all present, bright-eyed and ripe, their lips curved with the promise of what the VIPs could buy with a quick drive to the Wellness Center down the road, and maybe a few extra dollars' tip for the masseuses. It occurred to me, as I smiled my way out the other side of the long tent, that some of the investors probably thought us models worked at the Wellness Center too.

They had no idea that I'd probably handled some of their legal documents.

The organizers had given each artist a pop-up in the sand, a little clustered village of paint and skin over by the old bandshell. There were maybe ten of them this year, and they came in all sorts: some of them were clean and organized and beautiful, others looked as though they'd just been fished out of the sea.

But all the artists there tended to work quickly and quietly, intent on the creation of their art and not on the bodies they were painting. That's what had brought me back to the festival for a second time: what little modeling I'd done, mostly in college, had featured a lot of guys who, whether working with a brush or a camera or a charcoal pencil, had that greedy heavy-lidded look when they studied your body, that look that said they secretly wanted to bone you.

I had no idea where Dani had found her bodypainters here, but she'd evidently screened them for skeeviness. Because at Harborside Bodyscapes, it was all business. That morning I'd been painted by a serious older guy with a long beard, his eyes intense on his sketchpad even as he'd smeared thick blue paint across my nipple; he hadn't even looked. I'd been impressed. For this lunch installation, Dani had set me up with whoever was in Tent #4, and I ducked gratefully into there out of the sun.

What little space there was, I was pleased to see, had a meticulous sense of organization about it: card table in the corner, mats on the sand, a big fishing tackle box deployed full of paints and mixing cups and swabs and tissues and all the other assorted tools of the trade. I smiled at the man I found in there. "Hi. I'm Isabelle Spencer? I'm your model."

"Great." His replying smile was a little distant, as though he was just putting it out there because he knew he was expected to. He ran a hand through the sweaty curls up by his forehead, his eyes roving quickly across my face. "You can ditch your robe over on the hanger, and we can get started." He had a lazy voice, a voice that belonged to that place: the voice of a surfer, or a beachcomber, carefree and a little hip. "I'm Adam."

"Nice to meet you." I shrugged out of the robe and stood there naked in front of him, feeling that same curious sense of freedom I'd always felt whenever I'd stripped for an artist, and I was pleased when he didn't immediately examine my boobs. "What are we doing?"

"Airbrush." He was ignoring me now, fiddling with a small compressor, and I took the chance to check him out a little. The Venn diagram of

people who are ruggedly attractive

and

people who Dani knows well

probably has a wide and numerous intersection: the Dani I'd known had never, ever had difficulty finding and bedding the type of men who you'd expect to find in tents, on mountaintops, gazing steely-eyed toward the dawn with their shirts off and their pants slung low, revealing a hint of buttcrack and a mouth-watering wisp of hair stretching down from their belly buttons.

Adam would have definitely been one of those kind of guys.

Running a tongue over my dry lips, I spoke to his back. "I've never done anything with an airbrush before."

"The effects I can get are really amazing, and the application is faster. But the paint's wetter, so I have to be careful about moisture levels."

I arched an eyebrow as he finished up with the compressor. "Like... sweat?"

"Well, that too. But I was talking about thinning the paint, and about condensation from the compressed air." He stood now, turning to face me with his hands on his hips, his eyes for the first time scanning my body. "Do me a favor? Raise your arms and then turn around?" I felt his eyes on my spine, my butt, my legs. It didn't turn me on, not really, but it was definitely more than a little exciting. The thrill was less sexual, really, than it was about the excitement of daring to do something most people wouldn't do. I always assumed I'd get the same high if I did something like bungee-jump. "Great. This will work well. You, uh, missed a spot?" He pointed at my right side, where the ribcage curved in: a patch of thick blue paint shone there. "I can scrape it off for you, if you don't mind."

"No, that's fine. Go ahead." I took a deep breath then, because this was the moment when I knew I'd stop feeling like a woman and start feeling like an object. I welcomed it; it was the part of posing that I'd always enjoyed, like I was slipping on a new costume. An anonymous one. "I'm in your hands, Adam." Already I was starting to detach myself. I was here, today, to serve this man's art, and it was a commitment I took seriously. "Just let me know how to stand."

"Okay." His hand steadied me at the top of my hip, the other one bringing a baby wipe over to where the paint still clung to my skin. "There we go." He stood close, but not as close as I knew he'd be once he began to paint me. "Gotta clean the slate before we fill it up, right?"

"Sorry." I spoke past an unexpected burr in my throat. "Dani was moving us out of the shower, like, super-fast."

"Yeah. Your hair's still damp." His hand drifted off my hip and up to my hair, sorting it. "I'm not into hairstyles at events like this. A lot of artists are, but I don't worry about it. I think maybe a braid would be good, if you can make that happen?"

"Absolutely." Sometimes, the artists needed to fit elaborate headdresses, or they demanded piles of curled hair coiled around some artistic theme of theirs. Adam, apparently, was not one of those. I raised my arms, plaiting my hair behind me by feel, and cleared my throat again. "What did you have in mind for me?"

"It's a beach event, so... ocean." He came around my front as my fingers worked at my hair, showing me a notepad crowded with sketches. "Mostly fish, but the majority of what I'll be doing is going to involve getting the background right. Painting you like an underwater scene. Greens, turquioses."

"More blue," I scowled, but he just chuckled.

"The airbrush is a lot thinner than a sponge or a brush. It'll wash right off, but that's why I'm hoping you don't sweat too much."

"Not a problem." The VIP Pavilion had like five fans going, and it wasn't really all that hot a day once you got under some shade. Adam's little tent was just pleasantly warm, the sun beating down through the roof in a hazy diffused light that seemed to surround me. I felt like I was bathing in it. He had a very comfortable manner, the right kind of tone for a bodypainter. Not that it hurt that he was good-looking, either. "I'm ready when you are," I announced, my hair safely out of the way.

"Great." He was mixing some paint at his little table. "You've never worked with an airbrush before, but there's not much to tell. It can tickle a little."

"But so can a brush."

"Yeah. And then it feels slightly cool going on, from the air. The compressor. But it shouldn't bother you." I watched curiously as he took up a shiny, complicated tool that looked a little like a tattoo gun. A small cup attached to the top, with dull greenish paint showing through. "What I'm going to do is make it all ocean-y from the knees up, then coral at your feet and, like, a beach motif up above. I'll be using your normal skin tones for those parts, so it should make a nice transition."

"Whatever you want, Adam." I smiled. "It's all about the art."

"I'm glad you agree." He smiled back, pulling a cheap plastic beach chair across the matted floor and sitting down behind me. Once again, I felt his light fingers touch my hip. "Dani does this event in conjunction with National Nude Day, but I always feel like that sells you ladies short."

"Oh my god, yes!" I clapped my hands. "Thank you! I agree. Because it's not about the nudity. And we're not even nude!"

"It's about the art," he nodded.

"So much." I knew I was grinning like a fool.

He smiled up at me. "Here we go. Just stay still. Make sure your feet are shoulder-width apart." I looked down and checked, seeing his fingers on my skin, steadying me, and then the airbrush hissed and I yelped.

"Oh my god!"

"Told you it would feel cool. You okay?"

"I'm sorry. It just felt different than I was expecting." The paint struck my skin like tiny, insistent needles, a sudden wash of cold dryness that immediately gave way to a sensation like I was wrapped in plastic, only less restrictive. It was just a slight tightness on my flesh. "It feels fine," I added quickly.

"Unexpected?"

"Yes. Totally." I calmed myself, feeling the methodical kiss of the paint up my leg, starting just below my knee. "Actually, it feels nice. I thought it would be all wet." He was silent, focusing on my legs. The hiss of the airbrush, the hum of the compressor, the spiky excitement of the paint on my skin, all of it electrified me. I'd already been eager to be this guy's art installation; now, I'd have

paid

to do it. "I hope I can show off your design well," I ventured, hoping I didn't sound like a fangirl. "Like, do justice to it?"

"You're fine." He paused. "You look wonderful. You've got nothing to worry about." The paint slapped onto my flesh, straight across from one thigh to the next, then up to where my ass began. "You doing okay?"

"Actually, I'm doing amazing." Too late, it occurred to me it might sound a little bit gushy, sort of breathless, but it was the truth. It shocked me, how much I already craved the cool feathers of air on my legs. "I apologize in advance if I get a little shaky!"

He paused, the brush still steady on my skin. "From the cold? Or nervousness?"

"From... like... I don't know." I felt a little trembly. "It just feels good. Like, interesting and refreshing at the same time? A little exciting, honestly." I giggled, feeling the chilled pressure on my butt. "Like a snowman is blowing on me." His laugh was gentle, easy, the whisper of the airbrush curving around my hip and then smoothly down the outside of my leg. "I like that."

"Just try to relax," he murmured, after a second or two. The airbrush hissed over my skin, and I closed my eyes as an unexpected wave of pleasure trembled through me as a flashing wave of warmth. He chuckled. "You're getting goosebumps."

My throat felt dry. "Does that often happen?" I managed, squeezing the words out like I was trying to milk the last of a tube of toothpaste.

He waited a moment or two before answering, the snowman's breath kissing my hips as he worked his way around my body. "Sometimes." I kept my head still but dropped my eyes down, watching him stare at my skin with the intensity of a man who wants to make sure everything looks perfect. "Your coloring is great for this design."