THE PORTRAIT
This is a work of erotic fiction. It involves themes of voyeurism and husband/wife infidelity. There are scenes of rough sex. If this offends you, don't bother reading it. Please vote and I appreciate comments.
This is a reworking of an earlier story I posted.
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"Anything," Leanne answered with a wry grin, her green eyes widening with mischief.
"Anything at all?"
"What aren't you understanding here," she laughed, tossing her head back in mock exasperation.
"And you don't get to say no?"
"I always get to say no," she winked, leaning forward to playfully nip at my neck. "But for today I'll briefly-very briefly-forgo that right."
The oak logs were still popping and hissing in the fireplace, the darkened room alive with fiery flickers. I leaned back on the sofa, running my wineglass under my nose, but did not sip at it. Leanne lolled her head back, her dark brown hair cascading around her shoulders. Thirty-seven years old and still girlish in so many ways, this beautiful wife of mine.
"Well?"
"I'm thinking, I'm thinking," I chuckled softly, watching her-gauging her. It was nearly midnight, the kids put to bed, the battered ruins of my birthday cake-black chocolate with toasted coconut-tucked neatly away in the refrigerator.
"You know you're on the clock, mister," she whispered, drawing her knees against her slim, angular torso. "I hear twelve chimes and the offer is officially rescinded."
"You'll do anything I want?"
"You only hit forty once," she said flirtatiously, the yellowish orange flames doing a fiery dance across her lovely face.
The card was one of those funny Hallmark ones, Leanne's offer-an "extra-special" gift-written across the blank facing in her graceful, curving script: Your darkest wish, your most hidden desire, all for the asking.
"I want..."
"What?"
I laughed nervously. Sixteen years of marriage and she literally had me squirming in my seat. And I knew that she was enjoying the hell out of it.
"I want..."
"Yes."
"I want a painting of you."
"...A painting?"
"I want you to pose for a painting."
"...You're serious?" I knew I'd thrown her-she'd obviously expected something a bit more risque', something with at least a whiff of perversity about it.
"A real painting, a real artist doing it," I blurted ahead.
"A painting?" she repeated incredulously, starting to shake her head, totally surprised by my request.
"I want you to pose naked."
"What?" she stammered, cocking her head as if she hadn't heard what she'd in fact heard.
"I want you to be nude."
"No way," she stammered, bounding up off the sofa, her expression one of genuine mortification.
"You said anything."
"No way, no way, no way."
"Just think about it."
"I'm not letting somebody paint me without my clothes on. Are you crazy."
"It'd be a professional. We'd get somebody really good."
"An' what, hang it out on the living room wall?"
I burst out laughing then, her panicked response bordering on the comical. I reached up and took her hand, gently pulling her back down on the couch with me.
"It'd be our secret," I said soothingly. "Just for me. I'd put it in the office upstairs."
"Yeah, where the kids can see it any time they waltz in."
"We'd get one of those cabinets with doors on the wall. A lock on it an' all. Nobody would get to see it but me."
"You're serious about this? You've actually thought all this through."
"I want a picture of you-a painting of you in the nude. I want it down by the falls, with you out by the water and rocks an' all."
"Outside?"
"Look, if you don't wanna do it, fine. No problem. You asked me what I wanted more than anything, an' this is it. This would be the best gift I ever got."
"You wouldn't care that some...some guy gets to look at me with no clothes on?"
"Could be some gal, you never know."
"You know what I mean," she answered sharply. "I'm being serious here."
"It'll be an artist. It'll be somebody with a good reputation."
"And it won't bother you?" she said, boring in on me with an accusatory stare.
"I don't know, Lea," I shrugged. "Maybe it will. I'm just telling you that this is what I want. It isn't something I just cooked up in that couple hours since I got your card. I've thought about this for a long time, I just couldn't think of a way to ask if you'd do it."
"And I gave you the perfect way," she sighed, sagging her shoulder into my chest.
"Yeah, you did," I spoke at her ear. "You think about it, okay. If the answer is no, then that's that. I don't want you doing something you wouldn't be comfortable with."
My wife sighed again, nestling her head under my chin, her fingers tracing circles over my thigh. I rubbed the back of her neck, feeling some of the tension melt away. I thought how much I loved her-how in a way I'd loved her from that first moment I laid eyes on her eighteen years before, when she'd driven my younger sister, Katie, home from Villanova.
I closed my eyes and had a perfect recall of her on that bitingly cold day right before Thanksgiving, the little Ford Escort she had, their dirty clothes and junk piled up to roof. She was wrestling a box out of the hatch when I came out to help them-her hair knotted back in a ponytail, a shapeless down jacket swallowing her up. She'd looked up at me and smiled, that was all it took. She owned me from that second on. Inside of two months we were dating, the four-hour commute between Villanova and Pitt seeming like nothing-then the engagement, then the wedding, then the kids. Like so many dominos toppling into place, all ending up with this terrific life we'd carved out for ourselves.
"It isn't a big thing if you say no," I murmured softly, stroking her silky hair. "Its nothing that important."
"No, a deal's a deal," I heard her say back after a minute or so. "So I guess you can start looking for a painter-somebody who'll hopefully make me look halfway good."
"He can't miss there," I whispered back, my heart skipping with delight, hearing the antique grandfather clock down the hallway as it started to chime its way towards midnight-a sonorous cadence of doom echoing through the walls of our picture-perfect home.
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"I work exclusively in egg tempera," Kyle Donner explained as he took a seat across from us. "Egg white and pigment, no oils. No acrylics. I guess Andrew Wyeth and Hurd would be the best known of the people who worked in it." He sipped from the plain china mug gripped in both hands-he'd laced his coffee with a generous shot of Bookers Rye, planting the bottle at the center of his bare kitchen table, not bothering to even make an offer of it to either of us. "Tempera takes time, it can't be rushed. I've worked up my own palette, and I tell you that no one out there today can touch what I'm doing."
"That's why we're here," I answered, glancing quickly over at Leanne.
"I do only a couple portraits a year," he answered with a bored nod, again bringing the cup to his lips for a fast swig. "It's strictly dollars-and-cents work to me, a way to keep up the cash flow between my shows. It'll take at least a week and a half on average to complete, that of course though depends upon weather, seeing as how you want it done outside."
He reached down and moved through the snapshots of the waterfall, bending close to re-examine one of them.
"It looks like a pretty spot. How's the light?"
"Good I guess."
"Okay, then on to the particulars. I work on canvas. I do only about four or five hours a day, beyond that things tend to go downhill. I always work alone-just the subject and myself. I'm not there for entertainment. I don't put on a show. I don't want friends or neighbors dropping in to observe the so-called creative process, sit there watching me like some damned gorilla in the zoo. Anybody shows up, I close the paint case. Understood?"
"No one'll bother you," I assured him-hell, I was probably going to have my hands full just getting the "subject" there on a daily basis.
"Good," he answered curtly. He pushed his half-rimmed reading glasses down his nose and stared right at my Lea. "Mind standing up, Mrs. Ellison?"
I turned and watched Leanne hesitantly get to her feet, averting her eyes from his. She was dressed simply, jeans and a white blouse.
"Turn," he ordered, his index finger circling in command. His tone was officious, bordering on the arrogant.