by Violet Blue
“I’m the viewer,” he says. “Look at my face. Think, ‘I am beautiful. I am me….’ No, not like that, Camille. Don’t look seductive. This isn’t porn. Give me a level gaze. Open to me… That’s it! Good girl. Now hold it.”
I watch him, at his easel at the foot of the bed, watching me. This isn’t porn. This is the body spread open and translated. The luminous essence of flesh, my flesh, in thick, slippery paint. I try to picture him watching me on the video. His face contorted in le petit mort. His spunk spewing from the tip of his cock.
During the break, he switches canvasses, cleans and recharges his palette.
Casually: “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not right now.”
“Fuck-buddy?”
“No. I wish.” I roll my eyes: a joke. He doesn’t smile.
“Too bad. It would be easier. For the next group of paintings—” he trails off, selecting his brushes. The silence vibrates: I hardly dare breathe. Then his eyes lift and take mine, bore into me. “Would you be averse to posing with a naked man?”
What? Oh, god. I don’t know. I stammer. “I don’t—think so—who?”
“A friend of mine, another artist.”
I gulp. “You want me to fuck him.”
He shrugs. “Not necessarily. It’s just that it could happen in the poses I want. I’ll pay you well.”
“I can do that.” He shows me the second canvas, tall and narrow, almost finished: me kneeling, from behind. All soft sweep of thighs and intricate cunt-spread curving and shifting into shadow. Lines and planes rise and converge at the still point, just above center. Where my fingers fan open like a sunburst around the middle one, which is buried deep.
Something, some ground inside me, caves in and liquefies. How does he find in an image so outwardly gross a delicacy and fineness so sharp it slices your heart to shreds?
I take up the position on the bed.
He invites me to meet him and Peter for lunch. Café Malu, no less. He introduces me as Camille. Peter is cute and talkative, and wears a wedding ring. For some reason, that reassures me.
When we are back in the studio, it’s pen and watercolors, and Peter’s good humor is taking a beating. The minute I undressed, he horned up, and he’s been stiff ever since. Well, he would be, with the positions Rodin’s put us through. But so far the contact has been all external.
Now he wants us doggy-style. For real. He wants a close-up of the entry: how the cock pries the lips open, how the lips wrap around it. The way he talks about it makes me seep. We’ve all agreed that Peter won’t actually fuck me but simply hold his cock at the required depth.
“Need lube?”
“No. Thanks.”
Peter kneels close behind, opens my cunt with his fingers, and guides himself gingerly in. Halfway, and Rodin says, “Stop. There. Hold it.”
I fight the urge to push myself back, to take him all inside.
Long minutes pass. The pen races, the brush swipes. Page after page. Peter’s sweat drops onto my back. His cock is throbbing and I can’t help clenching and I know that must drive him mad but I can’t stop. We’re both trembling, straining to hold back the jungle rhythm in the pulse.
He starts to pant. “Jesus. I’m gonna come.”
“Pull out,” says Rodin. He passes me a cloth to dry my streaming thighs. “Don’t dry your cunt,” he says.
Peter fetches three beers from the fridge. “Fuck. I almost blew then, man. I’m gonna get you back for this.” He’s done this before, I can tell.
After the break, Rodin wants one last position: on a wooden chair, me splayed on Peter’s lap with my back to him and his cock securely rooted. He holds my arms, steadies me sweetly, his chest hair soft on my shoulder blades. Rodin kneels right in front of me with his sketchbook. He barks out commands and the pencil flies. No time to think. Just respond.
“Pete, pull her nipples. Perfect…. Pinch her clit…. Grab her hips…. Dig your fingers into her thighs. Higher… Camille, where he enters, touch his shaft. No, a circle with your thumb and forefinger. Good…. Cup his balls… Now play with your clit. That’s it. Good girl.”
My nipples ache and all I can see is the bulge in his jeans. By the time we finish, my juices drip drip drip off Pete’s balls. A little puddle on the seat.
Leaving, I stop at the door and turn. “Can I ask you a question?”
He’s cleaning up. He raises an eyebrow. “Sure. Shoot.”
“It’s probably a stupid question. I just wonder—why do you make me pose live like that? You have a camera. Why can’t you just take photos?”
He nods. “It’s not a stupid question, Camille. It should be asked more often, in fact. The answer is simple. The camera sees only with one eye. It has no depth perception and it distorts the image very subtly. With two eyes, I have depth perception. I can see what’s beneath and behind the surface. I see the whole image, as the camera cannot see it. I bring out the invisible.”
As he explains this, something predatory and angular rises inside me, a sharp and bladelike craving. I want to push myself into him.
“And what is invisible?” I ask.
He hesitates. Warily? He wonders where I’m going with this. “Heat. I paint heat.”
“Heat? Whose heat?” I press on recklessly, feeling lucky. I want to make him say it. Say, your heat. I paint your heat. Say it, you fucker.
Even across the room, his eyes pin me down. “Mine,” he says. “I paint my heat.”
For the next several weeks, he paints nonstop, always a couple of canvases going at the same time with several more roughed in. Some days he calls me in to pose, but often he just wants me to be there while he works. Calls me his muse. Right. I feel more like an ornamental house-pet, lounging around on the bed, reading, listening to music, even napping, and always naked. It feels normal. He talks rarely while he paints, but when I make coffee, he takes a break and chats.
One day, he shows me some of the finished work: props the canvases up along the wall.
It’s always a shock to see myself painted like this—in feverish color, with frenetic brushstrokes, everything vibrating and glowing together. The throb in my cunt radiates from the paint. His work is electric. It looks like fucking feels.
Looking at the paintings, he says, “What do you see?”
I stammer. “Me, but not me. Me, in your eyes.” I’m breaking a sweat with the effort.
He says, “Exactly. You in my eyes. How I see you.” Now he’s looking at me. I can smell him, his sweat, his coffee breath. Did my nostrils flare? No doubt he can smell more than coffee off me.
“Camille, look at me.” His face is lined, his eyes magnetic. He’s probably my father’s age. “I never thought anyone would do what you’ve done for me. You took on my challenge. And you’ve performed just as I’d hoped.” He pauses. “But—”
Always a but, yeah. “I want to push you further.”
“How much further?”
“Until you beg me to stop. Until you hit the wall.”
I shrug. “What do you have in mind?”
The way his eyes drill into me, I feel my nipples prickle up. “A game. Play a game with me. A game of bondage and domination. Could you do that?” He gives a casual smile, but an undercurrent of tension hums in the air between us.
He wants this. Desperately.
Damn. Damn him. “Sure. I can do that.”
When I arrive for the next session, he’s laid out some nasty-looking equipment on the bench. I can barely look at it for fear of caving in: handcuffs, a collar, a red ball gag? A blindfold.
A purple butt plug. Something that looks like a small riding crop.
Nipple clamps? Jesus. What have I got myself into?
The video camera is pointing at the bed.
He smiles. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You should be. It’s going to hurt. It has to. But I promise I won’t cut you or make any permanent marks on your body. And we’ll do this only once. I’
ll cam it all. And of course I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Okay.” So he’s going to pay to tie me up and whip me in front of a camera. Have I now definitively crossed the line from model to whore? Or is this all still for art? I’m not sure anymore. He beeps the camera on.
He buckles the collar around my neck and the cuffs around my wrists. I lift each foot to the bed for him to buckle cuffs around my ankles.
“Kneel on the bed. Facing me, so your hands hang by your ankles.”
When he clips the wrist cuffs to the ankle cuffs and I try to move but can’t without spreading my knees, I have a revelation: restrained, in this position, my body is automatically designated a sexual object. My raison d’être is crystal clear.
With just a few buckles and clips, he’s made me into a fuck toy.
“Now listen. This is important. You won’t be able to talk with the gag. We need a safe signal. If you want me to stop, for any reason, stretch out your fingers. Like this. Okay? Good. Now open your mouth.”
The ball, though soft, feels huge on my tongue. By the time he buckles it securely in place, my jaw joint is already sore with the strain.
The blindfold is next. Everything goes black and I’m operating by touch and sound. He is quiet for a few seconds. I strain to hear his breathing. Then—“Now I want you to turn over with your face and shoulders on the bed.” I obey. Upended. His favorite position for me, but he doesn’t say that.
“Are you ready to be spanked?”
I nod, my cheek flattened against the sheet.
Without another word of warning, he hits me with his bare hand, and just after the force of his blow sends fire streaking through my arse and the gag stifles my scream, I wonder if he wonders: how fast will I hit my wall?
I chomp down on the gag. Just watch me, Rodin.
It begins with his hands: slow swipes. Forehand, backhand. With each fiery stroke, I drive my fingernails into my palms and clench the gag in my teeth. Between each pass, he strokes my hips gently, almost lovingly, feathering my skin with his fingertips until I relax with relief, when the next blow knocks me sideways.
I lose count.
“Are you okay, Camille? You’re glowing now.”
I nod. My face feels flushed and my arse is blazing. His fingers coax sensation back, cool on my cheeks and down over my thighs. Then they creep between my legs and begin to rummage insistently among my petals. He grunts approvingly. I’m oozy and engorged. All that extra blood flow. Everything he’s done to me, over so many weeks, all coming to fruition now. I try, but fail, not to rock in response.
He steps away, returns. Something hisses and swoops in the air behind me, makes me startle. The crop. He chuckles. “I want some nice red stripes on this rosiness.”
And just like that, he strikes me. Swoop. Swoop. Each stroke forces a mangled moan from my lungs. My fists clench and unclench at my ankles as I consider signalling for safety. Again I lose count. But just before I hit the wall, he stops.
I’m struggling to breathe because my nose is so stuffed up. The blindfold feels wet on my cheeks. What is that sound, that muffled sobbing?
Me.
He rolls me onto my back and caresses me, his voice low and soothing, until my breathing steadies and strengthens. “Darling, don’t cry. My god, you’re beautiful like this. You’ll see. I’ll show you how lovely you are.”
He presses his mouth to my forehead, my cheeks, my breasts. His chest hair brushes me, his cock slides hard and satiny against my thigh. I realize: he’s naked. Since when? Since the blindfold? My nipples prick up between his fingers.
“Have you ever had them clamped?”
Before I can shake my head, something bites into the tender, tumescent flesh. One. Two. The pressure is savage and I scream but the sound is strangled. The twin throb of my pinched nipples ignites a relentless pulse down through my clit that makes me buck and grind helplessly. I’m desperate. My body is pleading for release. Begging him.
“Good girl.” His voice is tense.
A swipe of thumb between my pussy lips spreads my syrup down and behind. Is that his finger, opening my back hole? Oh sweet fuck. Yes. One. Two. Probing, stretching. I melt down onto him, whimpering. Oh dear god, dear Jesus.
“The butt plug,” he murmurs just before he nudges it in. It’s solid and it feels huge. My sphincter hugs it so tight I almost explode. But not yet, not until he rolls onto me and and shunts into me rough and deep. When his cock stuffs me full and everything goes numb, I realize I’m dying because I just can’t breathe anymore. I hit the wall.
At that instant: the gag is yanked out, the blindfold off. He releases the clamps and fire surges through my nipples and my clit. I’m flung screaming and singing and soaring headfirst through cascades of fireworks into the endless night sky.
I don’t know how long I lay there in his arms: until my sobbing and trembling finally petered out and I lay still, shell-shocked. Until evening purpled the studio and hunger won out over exhaustion.
At Malu, my ass throbbed on the chair. I could feel each welt where he’d beaten me.
Where he’d beaten me. Not a sign of the sadist now, in this attractive, middle-aged man of the world sitting across the candle flame from me, stirring his coffee and considering me carefully. Just hours before, this man had cleaved me to my core, ripped apart everything that I thought was me, and put me back together.
“What made it so intense?” I finally asked him. “Was it the blindfold? The gag?”
He lifted an eyebrow and shrugged. “Possibly. Sensory deprivation. When you can’t see, your other senses go on high alert. Everything intensifies. When you can’t vocalize, everything is bottled up inside. The release was powerful, no?”
Powerful? It was nuclear. I never came so hard.
“Stay the night,” he says.
He plays the video and when it is over, he says, “Did you see the beauty in that? How you exploded under me. I want to capture that in paint.”
I answer the tense note in his voice with my thigh over his. He fucks me warmly and companionably this time, but sleep is fitful until the gray half-light when he drags me from my dreams to prop me on all fours and slam into me from behind, our bodies clapclapclapping an accelerated applause.
Then a sound sleep, then startling awake at ten-thirty-five with a mid-morning sun baking the bed. Untangling from him and the sheets, fumbling for clothes: “I’ve got a class at eleven!”
“Easy, darling. I’ll give you a lift.” Over a cup of his strong coffee, he passes me a thick envelope. Hundreds. A thousand.
“What’s this?”
He smiled. “Payment for your services.”
“Services? I didn’t do anything. All we did yesterday was fuck.”
He keeps smiling until it dawns on me.
“If I take this from you, I’m a whore.” I put it on the table.
“No. If you take this from me, you’re my whore. A whore in the service of art.”
He raises a finger to silence my protest. “Camille, listen. Nothing has changed. I pay you to do what I want. What I want changes from day to day. You know that. I’ve had you masturbate for me. Fake-fuck Peter. In different positions. You’ve fucked me. Tomorrow I may want you to fuck two men while I watch. But this I can promise you: I will always push you to your limits and I will always want to paint you there.”
He offers the envelope again. “You can stop anytime you want. It’s all up to you. How far can you go?”
How far? I see the walls stacked three deep with canvases of me, me as sexual energy made flesh, all dark raw wild beauty. Who knew such an erotic creature existed inside me? He draws it out and breathes life into a part of me I never knew existed. Where can he take me? What can he unearth inside me? He’s given me a taste.
A taste for more.
I take the envelope with a grin. “Just watch me, Rodin.”
READING TO HORST
Sydney Beier
It was finally cooler that day. The last
week held record temperatures for all of Europe and the German city I lived in hadn’t been spared. I woke at dawn every morning, already panting, my skin glistening with sticky sweat. The sun rose in the back of my apartment, blazing through the red window curtains and turning the entire bedroom pink.
I walked into town for the first time since I could remember, happy to do some shopping I’d neglected. The stuffy, crowded shops had been so intolerable, I chose to do without my necessities.
My first stop was at a perfume store. I automatically reached for my favorite, Cristalle, which my husband had been buying me for years. A pretty woman in the aisle bumped into me reaching for classic, sophisticated Chanel No. 5. When she had moved on, I grabbed the next one on the shelf. I opened it on my way out of the store and applied some to my wrists, behind my knees, and not caring if anyone was looking, between my cleavage.
I walked up Lothringerstrasse, the bag swinging at my side.
In the middle of the city, just beyond the marketplace crowded with tourists admiring the Dom and Rathaus, was a small park shaded by deciduous trees and a block of apartment buildings. I took a seat on a concrete platform and leaned against a tall, stone monument to Kaiser Karl. Leaves above filtered the sunlight into shadows that danced on my skin and the ground below. The air had thinned in this shaded area and I breathed easier than I had in a long time. I watched a Turkish and an African woman entertaining their children in a nearby sandbox.
I also had a view of the Altenheim on the edge of the park. Nurses in white behind a desk busily checked in visitors and family members. The windows of the home were open and I could hear an old woman inside hollering dementedly, what sounded to me like: “Fräulein! Fräulein!”
Her voice dropped from a floor high in the building and mingled with the squeals of the children playing in the park. The little black boy and Turkish girl feverishly arranged sand with a bucket and shovel. They didn’t look over at me, but for some reason, I wanted them to. I wanted to see their big eyes and tiny teeth flash at me and to hold the little boy with my hand on his belly like his mother.