She was in other paintings, with other people, all sublimely attractive. In all of them she was completely naked, and though not all of her paintings revealed her pubic area, all revealed her breasts. In fact all the models were naked, all were in many paintings, all were of course beautiful, all were of course—
“Perfect,” Daniel smiled. Amelia gasped slightly as Daniel’s voice caught her off guard—she had been staring at one of the paintings that featured Veronica and Daniel himself, nude, sleek and muscular, inside each other. The look on Veronica’s face seemed to cry out in ecstasy itself from the canvas, reaching out to her, pulling her in.
How did he manage to paint that?
Next time you ask, Janice, I’ll come…I’ll come…
“Yes,” she replied finally, gulping quietly and regaining her composure, “she’s absolutely beautiful, perfect. They’re all so beautiful.”
“Well, that too,” Daniel laughed mildly, revealing perfect white teeth. “My models offer me a perfection I can only hope to approach capturing on the canvas, but I was referring to you.”
“Me?”
“Of course, you,” he stated matter-of-factly. “You know, most people who actually come here claiming to be models aren’t really what I’m looking for. They’re usually good-looking, of course, but they just—forgive my use of a tired phrase—don’t have the aura. And I have to tell them that I can’t use them, though of course I pay them for their time. You, of course, have that aura.”
“An aura…” Amelia murmured, somewhat incredulously, skeptically.
Daniel smiled again, as though having some hidden suspicion confirmed.
“You do, but you don’t believe me, because you don’t believe in yourself. You are probably the most beautiful person who ever walked through that door—even more so than Veronica, or Chloe, the red-haired girl you seemed to be interested in—yet you carry yourself like you’re afraid to get hit by stray lightning. I knew it from the moment I opened the door and saw you standing there. Beautiful, but burned-out, and cynical. Tell me if I’m wrong—you were so scared you almost didn’t come in. I look at and think about all the paintings I’ve done… All the bodies, all the faces, all the human perfection that I’ve tried to put on canvas but will never do because no artist is as perfect as the human shape. And you know what? You’re probably more beautiful than any I’ve painted yet.
“I want to paint you; you’re perfect. And you’re probably thinking I’m some kind of con-artist who’s making a play to get you into bed right now, because it’s probably happened before when you’ve heard a speech like the one I’m giving you.”
“I…I…Daniel,” she stuttered, a bit overwhelmed, “I don’t think you’re trying to get me into—”
“It’s okay,” he cut her off, “maybe you don’t think that I’m actually that way, but you’re afraid that I am, aren’t you.” He said it more like a statement than a question.
Amelia stood there slightly dumbstruck.
“I knew you didn’t have any confidence from the way you spoke over the telephone,” he continued, “the way you stammer, stumble over your words even though you know exactly what you want to say, as if you’re afraid to offend someone or open yourself to the possibility that the only way you’ll get burned is if you let yourself get burned. You come off, if you’ll forgive my assumption, like a girl who makes promises to herself that she doesn’t keep. That’s why I was surprised you even showed up today. Though, I must say I’m glad that you did.”
Amelia’s knees nearly buckled beneath her as she took in Daniel’s words, though she remained standing before his youthful, exotic eyes, as if in a trance. He didn’t know her, yet he read her thoughts as if her life-script was written on her shirt. Was she that transparent? The open, near nakedness of her secret feelings frightened her. She felt warm with unplanned embarrassment—like sneezing too loudly in a library—and yet she felt a chilling rush of adrenaline course through her arms, making her shiver imperceptibly. She could almost see herself collapsing to her knees to admit to Daniel that he was right, that she didn’t have any confidence and that she had been burned too many times before and she no longer had the guts to be a model, that she was just a struggling waitress who fantasized about her English professor when she masturbated, and was a year away from graduating with a degree she had no idea how to use…that she and her former roommate had had a brief but utterly sublime affair, and had agreed to live apart so that the friendship could survive, even though she couldn’t stop thinking about fucking—and getting fucked by—her, and burned with silent jealousy whenever she saw Janice flirt with Cyril…
Anyone but him, Janice, please…
About Ian, the too-young-for-her photojournalism major whom she just couldn’t get over, who might or might not have put a compromising photograph of her on the Internet, but whom she forgave so long as he made her cum her brains out whenever he went down on her… About how even he—Daniel—had been in her dreams last night…
She wanted to tell Daniel everything, just to explode once and get rid of it all.
Instead, she smiled weakly at him, her lips trembling bravely with the effort at composure.
“But…” she finally managed, “Daniel, why would you want someone like me to model for you, if you think I don’t have confidence? Maybe I—”
“Because you have something that’s every bit as beautiful in art—beautiful vulnerability. You won’t have it long, because someday, especially after I’m finished with you, you’re not going to be a scared little mouse anymore. You’re going to realize how unbelievably gorgeous you are, how, if you were to step outside right now, traffic would actually slow down a little. I have to admit I’m a bit of a bigot—I put that ad out in Korea town assuming that a beautiful, vulnerable person without confidence would be easier to find there. I know because I was the same way. But not now.”
“H-how did you do it?” Amelia sighed, overwhelmed and scared, but fascinated and intrigued, too. She found herself unconsciously, inevitably leaning toward him so that they were barely two feet apart in the empty studio.
“I learned to speak English, and I learned to paint,” Daniel replied, putting his hands inside his jeans pockets. “Both extremely well, if I do say so myself, though a bit too formally, some say—the English, not the painting, I mean. I’m thirty-two years old and secure. I make my living doing only what I love. I’m not rich—sometimes days go by without a sale—but here I am, not leaving.”
He smiled at her, and the young Japanese artist’s attractive face seemed to radiate light and reassurance. He scratched at a speck of blue paint that had dried on his smooth cheek and waited for Amelia to speak.
“About the job…” Amelia murmured, clasping her bare arms in her hands as she felt another flush of warmth course through her body—she noticed in shame that her nipples had began to harden—”what do I have to do? I don’t know if I…”
“Come here,” Daniel said softly, almost in a whisper. He beckoned her to him with a curled finger. With his other hand he reached into his pocket.
She came to him, slightly confused but willing, the vivid paintings all around her seeming to watch her from hundreds of dreamy eyes.
“You’ve seen the paintings I do,” he said softly, almost imperceptibly, so close to her that she nearly felt his warm breath caress her earlobe. He pressed his slim artist’s hand into hers. “Here’s two hundred dollars, as I promised. I’m going to go into the back room to work on a painting I had already started before you came today. If you think I’m disgusting, that all of this is disgusting, then please, by all means, the money is yours, and I apologize for wasting your time. But if you can use me, if you think you can work with me, then please stay. Every time we work together I will pay you when you arrive.”
With that, Daniel turned around and disappeared behind an open door leading to a separate room—apparently where he did his painting—and Amelia watched him as he left, noting with detached amusement the two wooden paintbrushes that protruded from his back pocket. A ray of sunlight caught the defined muscles in his sleek, slender shoulder blades as he walked, visible through the thin material of his undershirt.
Amelia stood for a moment in the middle of the studio, surrounded by painting after painting of beautiful young bodies, alone and together, seeming to ask her what now, what now… It was all so unabashedly erotic, yet it wasn’t pornography. It was as though Daniel’s art walked the thin nether-region separating the two, sometimes dipping one toe in, sometimes pulling out, all of it depending on the person standing in front of it at any given moment. She stared at the small bundle of twenties in her trembling palm, knowing what she wanted to do, but not knowing if it was what she should do.
I don’t keep my promises, she berated herself in the silence.
She gasped for a moment as if a jolt of reality had awakened her from a mesmerizing dream, and quickly left the studio.
Only to return, after five minutes had passed, realizing for the first time that she was slave to no one.
Through an open door, reflected in the mirror above a sink she saw a newly familiar face, staring at her as the figure pressed a towel against his cheek.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” Amelia said softly, apologetically, with a faint air of breathlessness.
“I thought you left,” Daniel said softly, wiping his hands on his pants as he made his way to her, astonished. Although most of the paint had been washed away, some errant yellow and green flecks remained, contrasting to the lightness of his complexion. “I looked back, and you were gone. I thought, you know, that you decided this wasn’t for you…”
“I… I had to put money in the meter,” she replied, nearly whispering. “I’m parked a block away.”
“You could have asked me,” Daniel said with a warm smile, “I have plenty of change. He jingled his pockets as proof, and Amelia smiled, laughing in spite of herself. “And there’s parking right here behind the building.” He pointed through the back window at a small asphalt lot where a two-door Lexus was parked beneath a large maple tree.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Amelia said, coming toward him slightly faster, and he to her. “There was already a ticket on my—”
She flung her arms up around the beautiful Japanese man’s neck as she kissed him ferociously, feeling her aching, hard nipples press excruciatingly against his taut chest.
Daniel responded enthusiastically, wrapping his powerful arms around Amelia’s lower back as their mouths engulfed each other. Daniel’s tongue swirled inside Amelia’s mouth with expert precision as she closed her large eyes blissfully, running her hands inside Daniel’s shirt to feel the otherworldly smoothness of his back, the rippled hardness of his slender abdomen, the softness of his long black hair as errant locks brushed against her cheek. He caressed her trembling shoulders, his hands gradually traveling down her body so that his long fingers gripped her beneath her arms while his thumbs massaged the sides of her breasts through her thin shirt. She moaned into his mouth as they kissed, then gasped as she reacted to his delicate touch. She had to release his lips from hers to exhale in pleasure as his hands eventually found their way to the waist of her low rise jeans.
Inserting his fingers into the tight denim as if reaching into her back pockets, Daniel reached the waistband of Amelia’s thong and pulled gently up and down on it, moving his skillful mouth from her lips to her vulnerable earlobes and neck as he did so.
Amelia groaned softly from deep within her chest as the overwhelming intensity of the sensations coursed through her body. She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes in strain as she felt the tight, constricting thong slide back and forth between her legs, grinding excruciatingly against her aching pussy and quivering ass hole.
“Oh, mmm…” she moaned senselessly as her underwear slid against her throbbing clitoris, “oh, my God…”
The unbearable heat between her legs as they remained encased in her tight jeans had the strange yet staggeringly pleasurable claustrophobic effect of pushing Daniel’s long fingers deeper and harder into her gushing pussy. She could stand it no longer and begged him to fuck her, desperately reaching for the zipper of her jeans, impatient to spread her legs open wide and thrust Daniel’s cock in. But he made her wait, increasing her unbearable eagerness.
Daniel grasped the back of the tiny thong in the fingers of his right hand, pulling it up and down methodically and kissing her shoulders, while the deft fingers of his left moved up Amelia’s sleeveless shirt and onto her by now rock-hard nipples. She wavered off balance on her heels as she rode his fingers, nearly collapsing from the pleasure, the lightheadedness of all her senses crashing from every direction in her body into her throbbing pussy.
“Oh yes, mmm…” she sighed breathlessly, gasping as she felt Daniel’s fingers reach deeper into her jeans. Suddenly he reached all the way beneath her crotch so that he stroked her pussy from behind.
“Oh, fuck!” she cried, squeezing his shoulders tightly, her fingers digging in with such force that he grunted. She squeezed her eyes shut as the sensation crashed into her, panting breathlessly.
Caught utterly unused to such sensations, she moaned helplessly, squeezing her thighs together around Daniel’s hand and increasing the intensity of the stimulus, throwing her head back and exposing her neck to further attentions from Daniel’s soft lips and powerful tongue. Her wetness engulfed his fingers, and she felt herself only seconds away from cumming if he continued…