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!
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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."
