At the Brink

by Anna del Mar

  Josh made me explain every step. He asked lots of questions. The sound of my voice narrating the process centered me in the work. I may have been naked, smeared in paint and aroused beyond reason, but I was also smack in the center of my creative zone.

  When I was done, a lush calla lily blossomed on my breast in perspective, as if seen from above. My nipple anchored the composition and served as the textured spadix in the flower’s center. A true work of art it’d never be, but I was satisfied with the overall effect.

  “You feel beautiful when I kiss you,” Josh said. It was a statement, not a question. “You come into your own. You feel like yourself—no,” he corrected himself, “the only time you feel like your true self is when you’re with me.”

  I’d chosen to paint my favorite flower. To me, the calla stood for beauty, for the pleasure that his lips grew in me and the way my body flourished under his touch. And yet none of what Josh said felt false to my soul. Was I that transparent? Had my subconscious just texted me via Josh?

  “Callas are not true lilies,” I mumbled, still reeling. “They belong to a different species.”

  “So do you.”

  His smile curled my toes. His words took me aback. I might have floundered, but he steered me back on firm ground.

  “Left breast,” he said. “Show me how you feel when I rake my teeth over your nipples.”

  I trembled at the mere memory. I’d need to go to the dark side of the palette for that. I started with a base of black paint, which I worked over my breast with a clean sponge. It dried quickly, just as the manufacturer promised. I dipped a wide grass comb brush on a newly poured well of metallic silver and twirled it around my areola. The brush’s stiff boar’s hair tortured my nipple, reminding my body of last night’s harsher pleasures. I winced, but I managed to achieve the textured swirl effect I wanted.

  I freehanded a storm of clouds, using a flat, wide brush and fast, sweeping strokes in blue hues and Payne gray. I highlighted the clouds with alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, and a mixture of reds that helped define the menacing sky. To complete the effect, I painted bolts of white and silver lightning, streaking out from my silver nipple.

  “That’s it,” Josh said. “That’s how it feels when you suck my cock.”

  “Have I told you?” I teased, holding the brush between two fingers and drawing on the tip as if it were a cigarette. “I love a good storm.”

  The lightning flashed in his eyes and echoed through my body. He clutched the base of his cock with a firm grip, pumping it slowly. I didn’t have a cock to hold, so I clung to the brush instead.

  “Your pussy,” he said. “I want to know how it feels when I fuck you. Sit down on the chair. Let’s see if you learned from last night. You know what I want you to do.”

  Oh, God. Between last night’s pursuits and my present excitement, I was a mess. I patted myself dry with a clean rag before I sat down and spread my knees apart. By then, my creative juices were also flowing and I had an idea of what I wanted to paint. I sponged the area over my pussy with a mix of browns. I had to admit, I loved the buildup of paint over my pubic bristle. It gave my composition texture, sort of like a collage.

  I was careful to keep the paint to my external surfaces, but when the browns dried, I pressed two fingers at the top of my labia. My clit popped out, fat, plump and as thoroughly sensitized from last night as my nipples. I selected an arched filbert brush to apply a bright gold. The brush rustled on me like a kitten’s tongue, rough and insistent and capable of bringing me to climax all on its own. I blew on my clit to help the paint dry.

  Josh rubbed his cock with harsher strokes. “You’re killing me here.”

  I grinned at him. “Turnabout is fair play.”

  I stuck to the browns and slid a round brush over my legs, scrolling long tendrils that draped over my inner thighs. Then I freehanded two long lines that grew out of my pubis, ran all the way to my throat and bent under my chin. Josh frowned, playing a guessing game, I supposed. I smiled inside. He’d have to wait for the big reveal.

  I filled in the two long lines with a combination of dark tones that recreated the tall straight trunk of the spruce bisecting my body. Then I went for effect. I painted the branches angled down, as if the tree had been forced to grow in a narrow well, crammed into a constricted space. Finally, I used a fan brush to add some foliage, not the bluish green needles typical of the species, but rather a variation. The needles on my spruce were a rich cobalt blue, the color of my fantasies.

  “Jesus, Lily,” Josh rasped. “That’s fucking phenomenal.”

  “Thank you.” I inclined my head. “Perhaps you’d be so kind as to inform the critics?”

  “Do you know what I want to do to you right now?” he said, pumping his cock.

  “I’m not a mind reader,” I said, “but I do have an idea.”

  He’d lay me face down on a canvas and stretch me out on the table. Then he’d climb behind me and, while fucking me brainless, he’d use his weight to press me down like a stamp on the canvas, immortalizing my portrait for him. Then he’d lacquer me, inside and out, with his come’s sultry varnish.

  “Get to it, Lily,” he said, fist squeezing and stroking. “I want to see you reclining on the chair. Perch your heels at either side of the desk.”

  “Um...” I hesitated. How to tell him? “I’m not exactly tidy after last night.”

  “Even better.”

  I squirmed under his scrutiny. I wanted to please him, but...

  “We’ll do it together,” he decided.

  I couldn’t refuse an offer like that. No amount of reluctance was going to stop me now. I needed to complete my work of art for him, to satisfy his need for wicked and lewd in a masterpiece of carnal realism. In exchange, I got to witness Josh’s grand finale, the unabridged performance, the act I seldom got to see.

  I leaned back, tilted my hips and braced my heels on the desk, facing the screen. I dropped my head back and, after closing my eyes, ran the bristled brush over my clit while fondling myself, trying to replicate Josh’s intimate touch on my flesh.

  “Looks good, sweet,” he whispered hoarsely. “You really know how to turn me on. Just watching you makes me real hard. Sink a finger in, come on. Imagine it’s me, touching you there. Imagine your finger is my dick, pumping into you.”

  I caught a glimpse of my reflection on the screen, a woman divided, one breast light and blooming, the other dark and storming, and my pussy, centered around the seed of my clit, bursting with scrolled roots and the cobalt spruce rising from my depths to my throat. Because sex was a messy activity, a concrete, biological function and not some ethereal creation, it was inevitable that reality trumped poetry. When my finger sank in, Josh’s seed trickled out and so did my juices.

  I glanced up at him, mystified, mortified; but what happened next pretty much wiped all thought from my brain. Josh’s perfect features crumpled. The white tips of his teeth dug into his lip. With a brutal grip, his fist gave a final pump. He groaned and a spurt of translucent come arched in the air. It fell on his desk, streaking the glass’s polished perfection.

  The wild look in Josh’s eyes. The slack lips, the kissable mouth I wanted to maul right this moment. The way his usually steady hands shook and his breath came in deep, sharp rasps. The untidy mess on his lap and the smears on his desk. It was the perfect performance. His creation for me complete, I pumped my finger and cried out as I finished my masterpiece for him.

  Chapter Thirty

  Josh

  After my confrontation with Chamberlain last night, the call from Paolo DaSilva was a pleasant surprise. He wanted to meet with me, but not at the office and not in a public place. I called Lily and startled her from her bath, which she proclaimed as the biggest mess ever. I got hard all over again just remembering. No question about it, the thrill I’d gotten from
watching her had been well worth the trouble.

  By the time I got to the house, Mr. DaSilva had been there for a good forty-five minutes. I knew because Lily had texted me when he arrived. Traffic had been a mess, and not even Amman could find a fast way over. I’d had the longest day of the year. My head hurt and my knee was tight and off balance, probably because I’d rushed in the morning. I had a feeling that DaSilva just wanted to check me out some more. At least I had gotten his attention.

  I took off my coat and went directly to the library, but no one was there. I frowned and went downstairs to the bar in the billiard’s room, but no one was there either.

  “Lily?” The name echoed through the seemingly empty house.

  “We’re back here.” I heard her giggling. “In the kitchen.”

  In the kitchen?

  The scene that greeted me was unfamiliar and striking at the same time. Wearing a three piece Italian suit, Paolo DaSilva sat on a stool eating a sandwich at my kitchen counter, sipping not on fine cognac, but on a can of Diet Coke.

  Lily was at the stove, cooking something and making a mess in the process. The butter lay half-melted on the tray, breadcrumbs sprinkled the counter and tomato peels piled in the sink. Her hair was up in a wraparound pony tail and she wore a jewel toned green cardigan and a pair of skinny jeans that cradled her delectable ass to perfection, both purchases I’d made for her.

  “Hello.” She planted a quick kiss on the foolish grin that hijacked my lips.

  She looked as if she belonged in my house, as if she’d been hanging out in my kitchen all her life and I came home to her smile every day.

  “Turns out Mr. DaSilva missed lunch today,” she explained. “I made him a Lily sandwich. Would you like one?”

  I stared at DaSilva, who waved at me as he chomped down on his sandwich.

  “Delicious,” he mumbled with a mouthful.

  “Going once,” Lily said, “going twice...”

  “Sold.” I tried to figure out what Lily had done with the real Paolo DaSilva. Maybe she’d put him in the closet, with her shoes, which she wasn’t wearing. Instead, she twirled about the kitchen in her socks like a goddamn ballerina.

  “Nice house, nice lunch, nice girl.” DaSilva broke off strings of melted cheese with greasy fingers. “I like Phoenix Prime too.”

  “So are you interested?” I took off my suit jacket and folded up my shirt sleeves.

  “Maybe.” He chewed briskly. “Although perhaps not in the way you might expect.”

  “How’s that?” I rinsed the sink and wiped the butter and the breadcrumbs off the counter.

  “I have a family that enjoys living well.”

  “I can understand that.” I took the stool next to my guest.

  “It’s such a shame,” he said in his elegantly accented English. “The more we have, the more we want. It’s the human condition, I suppose. I thought I’d be different, coming up from poverty as I did. But you see, Mr. Lane—Josh. Can I call you Josh?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m no different,” he said. “I want all the money for the present and all the glory for the future.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “I want to spend my money now but I also want to be remembered after I go.”

  Lily placed a plate with the grilled sandwich in front of me and silently urged me to eat. “I’ll leave you two to talk.” She parked a glass of milk next to my plate. “It was very nice to meet you, Mr. DaSilva.”

  “It was my pleasure.” The man stood up and kissed Lily’s hand as if he were indeed Rhett Butler incarnate. “Thank you for the food and the company, and remember, if things don’t work out with Josh here, Brazil is a beautiful country.”

  She smiled. “I’ll remember.”

  DaSilva’s eyes were glued to Lily’s ass as she left the kitchen.

  “Hey.” I tapped on the kitchen counter. “Eyes on me. With all due respect, it’ll be a real shame if I had to beat your Brazilian ass because you were checking out my girl.”

  I’d expected DaSilva to be offended, to grab his coat and storm out, incensed. Instead he threw his head back and laughed.

  “You’re funny, Josh. You’re fresh,” he said. “You track that girl like a jaguar on the prowl. I saw you knock out Chamberlain at the party last night. I like a man who minds his woman. He’s likely to mind his business as well.”

  It was all a little surreal, Paolo DaSilva and me, sitting in my kitchen, munching on grilled cheese sandwiches, having this very particular exchange.

  “I’ll tell you why I came.” He gulped down a last bite and licked his fingers. “I made my fortune from scratch. I paid a price for it, and so did the rainforest. I never cared much what happened to that mosquito-infested jungle. Until I got old and the orchids began to disappear.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said. “Orchids?”

  “Yes, orchids, exotic orchids so fine and rare that the world will never see them again,” he said. “I collect orchids, you see, but many of them are now in danger of extinction.”

  I thought he was going senile on me. “What do the orchids have to do with the deal I proposed to you?”

  “Think, son,” DaSilva said. “Where do the orchids live?”

  “In the jungle?”

  “And what’s my business’s greatest asset?”

  “Ethanol?”

  “Which comes from?”

  “Sugar cane?”

  “Which in turned is planted in?”

  “Land that used to be jungle where the orchids used to live.”

  DaSilva smiled. “Ernest Chamberlain’s brain cut off at the word orchid.”

  “So you’re looking for a deal that preserves the rainforest and keeps your business viable?”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “But you weren’t able to do that while you made your billions.”

  “No.”

  “What makes you think Phoenix Prime can do what you couldn’t and still manage to benefit its investors?”

  “I don’t think that Phoenix Prime or any other company could be trusted to find a solution,” DaSilva said. “But I think that you, Josh Lane, you could.”

  * * *

  “Where are you going?” Lily said when I entered the bedroom with a bag in tow.

  “We are taking a little trip,” I said.

  “Are we going to the cove?” She followed me into the walk-in closet.

  I recognized the excitement on her face. I hated to disappoint her, but I had no choice. “Not the cove,” I said. “We’re driving to New Hampshire.”

  “I went there once,” she said. “It was a school trip. Are we going to the mountains?”

  “You could say that.” I selected a few things from the shelves.

  “I can pack for myself, you know.”

  “Then hurry up and do so.” I handed her the bag. “We leave in ten minutes.”

  “How many days?”

  “Just a couple.” I watched her pack. She’d been great with DaSilva. She had good instincts and she’d been a huge asset today.

  “Will I need more than some sweaters and a jacket?” she asked, folding a T-shirt.

  “Well, you’ll need to wear shoes for sure.” I handed her the pair of riding style boots that I’d purchased to go with her skinny jeans. “You’ll also need a dress.”

  “Why?” She froze. “Don’t tell me. Another party?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  She handed me the bag and pouted. “You pack.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Lily

  I was mad about having to go to another one of Josh’s stuffy parties and, even though he looked tired, I wasn’t above giving him attitude.


  “Why do I have to go?” I said as I followed him down the stairs to the garage. “You hate those stupid parties too. I know you do.”

  “But I go.” He unlocked the garage door while lugging our bags. “And I don’t whine about it.”

  I was about to complain some more when my eyes fell on the gleaming gray beauty parked next to the sedan. My old Kia had been repossessed eons ago, but I wasn’t beyond admiring a nice ride, especially one as striking as this one.

  “Wow.” I gawked. “What kind of car is this?”

  “It’s an Audi R8 GT Spyder,” he said with a note of pride in his voice. “V10 engine, 87000 RPM, zero to sixty in three point eight seconds.”

  “Do I even want to know how much this cost?”

  “I doubt it.” He fit our bags in the trunk and opened the door for me. “It was custom built for me.”

  I sat down carefully. The car still smelled new. There was a lot of technology all around me, carbon fiber everywhere, fine Napa leather and contrast stitching on the seat, which molded to my body as soon as Josh buckled my seatbelt.

  Josh walked around and got in, tucked his gun in the door’s side pocket and strapped into his seat. The ride was sweet. The car negotiated the city streets then bolted down Highway 16, rumbling beneath my seat. I felt like a jewel tucked in a precious box, only in this case, the box greatly exceeded the value of the jewel.

  “I wonder,” I said, as Josh sped down the highway. “What’s the attraction of owning a car that costs more than a very, very, very nice house?”

  “Beauty, sport, speed, thrill.”

  “Appearances?”

  “Affirmative.” Josh stepped on the accelerator. “Appearances go a long way with the ultra-rich.”

  I squealed as he launched us down the speedway.

  His phone rang. He picked it up. His face split into a smile.

  “Hi sweetie,” he said. “How are you?” There was a long pause and then he laughed. “I’m so glad you liked it, Monique. Yes, yes, of course. Absolutely. Yes. Love you too. Bye.”