Part 2
"So how was your day?" Darla asks Vincent.
Standing in his apartment's galley kitchen stirring the chili, Vincent is in a celebratory mood. On Wednesday he received an email that led to a phone call. A dude who says he's a fan of his artwork and has purchased over a dozen of his prints for sale is married to the vice president of a small publishing company. The dude convinced his wife that her company should release some of Vincent's work in book format. While Vincent waited for the fan to patch his wife in on the call he'd looked up the publisher. The company is legit. Small--not Random House or Harper Collins--but legit. The wife asked Vincent if he had an agent. He didn't. Well, he didn't when he'd talked to the dude and his wife two days ago, on Wednesday morning. By noon that day he'd selected two prospects, one in nearby Silver Spring, and the other in New York. After a couple hours' research on how to, he wrote up a query letter and attached it to an email that included five samples of his work, and explained in the email body that he already had an interested publisher. Since a publisher already wanted to work with him, he figured an agent might be interested. Why turn down 15 percent of a deal that's already done, and you don't have to work to sell it? He's not crazy about giving up 15 percent of whatever a publisher might pay him to an agent, but he figures he needs someone experienced to help to negotiate a deal. All in all, his day has gone well, but he decides to wait until Darla gets home to give her the news. Right now is about her driving without her clothes on but being careful to not kill herself in this storm.
"Can't complain," Vincent says. "Just about work and making this chili."
"I can't wait to taste it...oh, and your chili, too," Darla says.
Darla is almost always in the mood for sex. Okay, actually, since they've been doing their thing together he can't remember when she hasn't been in the mood. She is a sexual being, for sure. It's crazy to think that if some theories are correct, at thirty-six years old Darla is just entering her sexual prime. Considering the things she's told him about her sexuality and her past experiences, if she hasn't peaked yet, she's going to be a beast when she does.
"Then you need to hurry up and get here," he says. "Just be careful out there. Where are you now?"
"Almost at I-95," she says.
Once Darla reaches the point where the 495 Beltway combines with Interstate 95 she'll almost be home.
"As much as I hate to say this, you should get dressed," Vincent says.
"Okay. When traffic stops again I'll send you the last pictures."
"Cool." In the three months since they became intimate Vincent's collection of sexy pictures and videos of Darla has grown into the hundreds. He takes pictures of her because besides being a man who appreciates the beauty of a woman as any man would, he is also an artist. He has always believed that the human female body is the greatest of Nature's works of art. Every time Darla undresses is like viewing an artistic masterpiece in a new way. Yes, she is naked in the flesh right in front of him and he appreciates that, but each moment, each movement by her, is a beautiful new creation, and he desires to capture and freeze in time as many incidences as he can.
It helps that besides having a voracious sexual appetite, Darla is an exhibitionist, at least online. Vincent was surprised at first when she told him--and then showed him--the usually nude selfies she'd taken and posted on a certain adult website. Over the years she has developed a fan club of site visitors who drool over her images. Their comments range from admiration to blatant begging for a chance to get their hands on her. Darla told him that over the past decade she has met four dudes in person through that site. She said each hookup was preceded by weeks if not months of texts, emails, and phone calls. She says that with each, sex was agreed upon before the dude traveled to see her or she traveled to meet him.
She relayed this information after they transitioned from being neighbors who had only said hello to each other in passing, to splitting a pizza or other meal while watching television together in the evenings, to knowing they were going to become intimate. They'd had
the discussion:
Birth control (Darla was on the Depo-Provera shot); STD testing (he'd gotten one after he and his ex-wife Tessa separated, but he and Darla got new tests and shared the results); the discussion about sexual preferences, fantasies, and things that were off-limits (Other than scat and blood they might try almost anything two people could do together), and told each other about their most recent sexual experience, and with whom.
His last experience had been with his ex-wife Tessa, who rather than mail him the divorce paperwork, after he gave her the address of his new apartment, had shown up at his door one evening with the documents in hand. While she was here she'd asked him for a tour of his new place, and then asked him if she could use the bathroom while he sat at his dining room table reviewing the divorce paperwork. When she came out of the bathroom and returned to his dining room she was naked. Tessa is a beautiful woman, pretty in the face and with a tight golden-brown body she works on like she plans to try out for the Olympic track team. He hadn't gotten laid in months, since he'd moved out of their house, so she had his attention. But he had also wondered about her motives.
Tessa is what Vincent calls an at home nudist. From the first time they were sexually intimate, she had requested that like her, he sleep naked. She thought it made no sense to wear any type of clothing when you were going to sleep in your own bed. What she had asked, were people dressing for when they were just going to sleep? But for Tessa nudity wasn't just for sleeping and sex. When she was home, when it was just her, and after they were married just them in the house, she wore nothing. As soon as she got home from work her clothes came off. It wasn't a sexual thing; it was just who she was. Of course, her being naked could often lead to sex. She is a beautiful woman. But on that evening in his apartment, when they were separated on their way to divorce, she had surprised him by coming out of his bathroom naked.
Because their divorce was considered no-fault, they had to be separated a year before they could finalize it. They were divorcing because Tessa couldn't wrap her head around him quitting his job as Director of Security for a retail store chain to fulfill his passion to be a full-time artist. He'd told her that if his profits selling prints of his artwork exceeded his nine-to-five salary for six consecutive months, he would pursue his passion full-time. He waited until he'd beaten his day job salary for nine straight months before telling Tessa it was time for him to change careers. Rather than being supportive, he found out she had less faith in him being successful as an artist than she had in an employer who could lay him off or fire him at any time. She said she wanted a divorce.
