Author's Note: Here is a little treat for all my regular readers -- a brand new one-off short story! A woman receives an unusual request from an old friend for her husband to take part in an unusual art project. All characters are over 18, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is coincidental and entirely unintentional.
Enjoy!
An Artistic Endeavour
I looked upon my husband, Sean, as he sat naked on the simple wooden chair. He had a look of nervous apprehension on his face that was tempered by a glint of excitement in his eyes. My friend, Charity, or Chaz to those of us that form her circle of friends, stood towering above him with a small plastic pot in her hand.
"Right then, you ready?" she asked him. "Because once I start I'm not going to stop until you give me what I need."
"I'm ready," Sean replied, his voice sounding strained slightly by the lump in his throat, and he sat up straight.
She stepped forward, bent down slightly, and then reached down between his legs. She took his penis in her right hand and started to stroke it. Sean moaned appreciatively as he felt my friend's hand caressing his most intimate area.
I guess I ought to explain what's going on here, about how we came to be here with me looking on while my friend touches my husband in places that normally only I ought to have access to. Well, it all started one week earlier...
* * * * * *
My name is Jill Markham, I'm an art teacher from a small seaside town on the south coast of England where I live with my husband Sean. He works for an insurance company in Brighton, but has a sideline as a landscape photographer. We both met whilst at teacher training college way back in the early 1990's and have been together ever since, although by his own admission he never really was cut out for teaching and his career took a different path to mine. We have no children, but then we've never really wanted any, much to the disappointment of my Jewish parents. We've always been as open and honest with each other about our various fantasies and fetishes in the bedroom - neither of us are into anything particularly kinky, but we both believe that communication is vital in a successful relationship, and if either one of us wishes to dress up in some kind of costume, or indulge in a little light bondage or other gentle kind of sex play, we always indulge each other. Within reason of course.
I guess you could say our relationship is the envy of many of our friends, pretty much all of whom have had children and seen a decline in their sex lives.
Anyway, it was a phone call one afternoon between lessons that kicked this whole thing off. I was just on my way to the staff room for a quick cup of coffee when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I looked on the screen and noticed it was my old friend Chaz Davies.
"Hi, Chaz, haven't heard from you in a while! How are you?" I said as soon as I pressed the accept button.
"I'm good, Jill, thanks for asking," Chaz replied. "Very good, in fact. Actually, I tell a lie, I'm not very good - I'm feeling wonderfully, fantastically good!"
"Oh yeah, and why might that be?" I asked, wondering what had got my friend so jazzed.
"You know the Tillerson Gallery?" she asked me.
"Yeah, I know it," I replied casually.
Of course I knew the Tillerson Gallery - everyone who's anyone in the art world knows the Tillerson. It is, after all, the premier art gallery that specialises in contemporary modern art in London's Covent Garden.
"I just received a letter this morning - they want to put on a retrospective exhibition of my work! How cool is that?" Chaz squealed joyfully down the line.
"Wow, Chaz, that's wonderful!" I said, genuinely overjoyed for her.
She'd worked very hard to become the success she is today. Back when we were students at art college she was always the ambitious one, the one who was determined to make it as 'the next big thing' in the world of contemporary art. It had taken her the best part of ten years, but after much toil, and several setbacks along the way, she won a prestigious award for one of her paintings and hasn't looked back since. That was twenty years ago now, and in that time she has seen her work exhibited across the globe, and finally has the recognition that she deserves for her work, even though it is rather explicit at times.
"I know! Isn't it exciting?" Chaz enthused.
"Very!" I confirmed. "You totally deserve it, Chaz, after all your hard work over the years! So, am I invited to the opening night then?"
"Of course you will, darling!" my friend answered flamboyantly, in a tone of voice that implied that me asking such a question of her was a ridiculous thing to do. "In fact, I'm hoping not just to invite you as a friend, but also as a contributor."
"A contributor? How?" I asked, somewhat puzzled.
"Well, not
you
personally as a contributor," Chaz clarified. "But rather that husband of yours. If he's, ahem, up for it, that is."
"I'm afraid I'm not with you," I said, still not sure what it is she meant.
"Do you remember the painting that won me the Palmer Prize all those years ago?" she asked me.
I cast my mind back two decades, recalling the newspaper article I'd read about that year's recipient of the Palmer Prize for Contemporary Modern Painting. It was the painting that put my friend Chaz into the limelight of the modern art world and was the springboard to her current success. The painting was called 'Girl Meets Boy', a rather innocuous title, but the painting itself was anything but. It was a nude, you see, and a somewhat explicit one at that. It was a self portrait, that showed Chaz, who was always known as something of an exhibitionist on campus, completely naked and sitting with her legs wide apart with, let's just say,
everything
on show.
The painting's rather odd title doesn't become obvious until one studies the label on the wall that describes it. After all, the 'Girl' in the title is obvious - it's Chaz of course - but the 'Boy' in the painting is rather more subtle and esoteric. I remember the very first time I saw it, in a small gallery in Brighton, and being shocked when I read that label. It was the very last part that was the shocking bit, when it mentions the medium used to create it. It read: 'oil, and human semen, on canvas'.
So the 'Boy' part of 'Girl Meets Boy' isn't in the image of the painting, he's in the paint itself! Of course, that evening when I first saw the painting I had to ask her about it. At the time she was working on it she was going out with a man named Ewan, they've split up years ago now, but at the time it looked as though they might actually tie the knot. In the end, he ended up being thrown out after she found him in bed with a young woman she'd hired as a nude model. Anyway, I digress - Chaz explained to me that she would get Ewan to masturbate into a little plastic cup, and she'd then mixed his semen into her oil paint.
"You don't mean? Surely you don't want Sean to..." I said, but struggled to finish my sentence.
"The gallery have asked me to produce a new version of 'Girl Meets Boy' to sort of 'bookend' the exhibition, going from the painting that really kicked off my career right up to the present day," Chaz explained. "So of course that means I'm going to have to get hold of some semen from somewhere. I'm not in a relationship and I can't just ask a total stranger to give me some of his cum."
"So you want me to ask Sean if he wants to give you some of his," I said, preempting her inevitable request.
"Please? At least tell me you'll ask him," Chaz pleaded down the line. "Look, I know it'd be a really personal thing, for you as well as him, but I don't know where else to turn - I've only got a couple of months to prepare for the exhibition and I'm all out of alternatives. Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?"
Why was she asking me? I know for a fact that Sean isn't the only man she could ask to do such a thing for her. And besides, they've only met each other a couple of times at parties. I remember her telling me once about this man she'd befriended who was a writer of some kind, and wondered why she couldn't have asked him to do it instead. I recalled the time she'd told me about him.
"I have a 'fuck buddy'"
she'd told me cheekily during one of our long phone conversations a few years earlier.
"It's a sort of mutually beneficial arrangement - if I need sex he'll come running to me at my beck and call, and if he needs sex, he'll still come running to me!"
Surely he'd be willing to take part in this new work of hers? I thought, so of course I asked her about him.
"What about that so-called 'fuck buddy' of yours? Why can't he do it?"
"What? Andre?" Chaz responded. "In an ideal world I would have, but he's on a book signing tour in Canada and the states for the next six weeks. Bless him, I know he'd do anything for me, but his publisher has other ideas."
"Not exactly 'at your beck and call' then, is he?" I responded.
