Now she was faced with a new dilemma: how to choose just one superb subject out of such an embarrassing wealth of masculine riches. To hire a model, she could send an inquiry by clicking the link on his posting and shooting him an e-mail—or she could post a listing of her own. Mucho Models provided a bulletin board for artists, filmmakers, and photographers to advertise for talent.
The better thing to do, Jennifer reasoned, was not to hang herself up with indecision again by trying to select one lad from a myriad of choices, but instead to treat it as an employer seeking help or a customer seeking a contractor. The better thing might be to make her own post and see who responded. She switched from her browser to her notepad on the tablet and began to list her criteria for the kind of model she wanted to sit for her. She would begin by listing all the qualities she liked best in her favorite subjects from her Internet collection.
It was a given that he would need to have a riveting-handsome face, but she typed that in first to leave nothing to random. She decided not to specify an age for her speculative subject, as some of the men in their 30s were every bit as fetching as the lads in their 20s, if not more so. He would, of course, need to have a superbly conditioned and muscled body—not overly muscled like a weight lifter or a body builder, but just perfectly mesomorphic, with every muscle lean and toned and perfectly sculpted from head to toe. And chest hair and some hair on the legs—she definitely preferred drawing men with hairy chests and perhaps a dusting of leg hair. Ken’s chest hair, she sometimes thought during their marriage, was his best feature. From what she had sampled on Mucho Models, that would not be a problem; they had plenty of such specimens.
She went back to the website to check on whether she could specify what her model would have hanging down below the waist. The online form did not have a field in which to enter the desired size of a model’s member. Then again, from looking at the “private” sections of many of those posts, she could see that quite a few of them would give her plenty to work with in that area. Fine; this was the one thing she would leave random. The odds of getting a big one, Jennifer reasoned, were on her side.
The whole process oddly reminded Jennifer of buying a car and selecting all the options one wanted on it. She went back in her memory to the day she’d accompanied Ken to the Maserati dealership. Jennifer herself was not interested in sporty models, at least not in vehicles. Today, however, she was very much in the market for a muscle car. Perhaps not a Maserati or a Ferrari, but she would appreciate a Corvette. A lean, sinewy, hairy-chested, nicely hung Corvette.
Jennifer went through the process of opening a Mucho Models account, confirmed it when they sent back the link in an e-mail, and entered all of her criteria in the appropriate fields in the online form. She entered a price range that she was willing to pay, which was generous since her divorce had left her very well off. She wrote a personal note to her prospective subject in the allotted space, saying that she was an artist in search of an excellent male subject to pose nude for her in her studio. She hit “Enter,” and the deed was done. All that remained now was to see what her posting produced.
Then she leaned back on her pillow, with her iPad warm in her lap, and contemplated what she had just done.
She had just posted an advertisement to ask for some strange young man to come to her penthouse, take off his clothes for her, and sit in front of her while she drew him naked.
Oh my God, I’ve actually just done this! Jennifer cried in her thoughts. Oh my God, this isn’t like it was in school, where I’ll be one student in a class full of students with a naked man in front of us! It’ll be just him and me! Oh my God, I’ve actually just done this! Maybe I can undo it! Of course I can undo it; I’ll just go back into the website and cancel the account; no harm done…
But the moment she reopened the browser on the iPad and brought Mucho Models back up, the sudden panic of thinking about what she had done subsided like a wave receding back into the ocean, like a summer storm squall abruptly parting and yielding to sunshine and blue sky again. Her more rational mind, much to her surprise, overtook her fear. She was only reacting to this being something new and different, something she had never tried before, something she had never done before.
Jennifer realized what being an adult, 45 years old, divorced, and living in a penthouse could do to someone. It could make a creative woman feel more conservative, less inclined to take a risk or a chance, than she used to be. Jennifer had never been a very conservative person. Marrying an upper-level executive in a stock brokerage, living a privileged and enviable life with him, and losing him to his pursuit of younger women, had left her with a conservative streak that she did not recognize in herself. How did this happen to her? She was an artist. How had she become this play-it-safe socialite? Was this really her? Was she really this person?
Well, she thought, if she had somehow become this person she didn’t recognize, it was best she faced it now and did something about it. The advertisement on Mucho Models would remain as it was, where it was. And she would see what it brought her.
Getting up from the bed, Jennifer walked across the bedroom suite—which was spacious enough to have its own sofa, chairs, and coffee table—to the full-length mirror beside her walk-in closet to have a look at herself. She struck the most alluring pose that she knew how and gave herself her best smile. Her silk top and capri pants still hugged the curves of her body as well as they ever did. It was just that in the two decades since she had walked down the aisle to exchange her vows with Ken Casey, the curves had grown subtly rounder. The girl who’d married Ken was still in there. Jennifer still remembered being that girl. And she remembered where that girl had expected she would be in twenty years.
This was not it.
Young Jennifer would have imagined herself living in a penthouse, yes. But she would not have expected to be living there alone, surrounded by all of the places where she had once been held and made love to by a husband who had then decided that he missed making love to a girl. What was so awful about not being a girl in her twenties anymore? Why did her husband, who she had expected to be with forever, stop wanting her once their twenties and thirties were behind them?
It made her question everything about herself. Most of all, it made her question whether any other man would ever look at her, ever want her, the way Ken once had.
No wonder she spent so much time looking at and drawing beautiful lads in their twenties. Let someone be under her gaze for a change. Let her be the one doing the looking and approving and choosing, even if it were only to select subjects for her sketchbook.
It gave her some measure of power, she thought. Perhaps not a great deal of power in the grand scheme of things, but at least it gave her the power to select something in her life that would be exactly as she wished it to be.
Jennifer was an artist, after all. Beggars may not be choosers, but artists absolutely were.
She went back to lie down on the bed for a while and take a nap. That was another thing about being an artist: Jennifer’s sleep patterns were not exactly the same as those of non-creative people. Most evenings, she was accustomed to taking a nap between dinner and bedtime. So Jennifer went back and put herself down to rest. While lying there, she looked over at her iPad on the nightstand. Perhaps she should check her Mucho Model messages. Perhaps in the few minutes since she’d placed her listing, someone had already responded. Perhaps her future model had already made contact.
No, Jennifer decided. It was too soon. Young men have busy, active lives, after all; it would take them a while to log on to Mucho Model and find her listing. She would give them time. She switched on the lamp on the nightstand and set it for a dim, soft light, and with the sun setting outside her bedroom window, she drifted off into her nap, looking forward to what might be awaiting her by the time she woke up.
_______________
When she awoke, it was a half an hour later and fully nighttime outside. The air in the penthouse felt cooler, and the lamplight ma
de a golden cast in the room. When Jennifer’s thoughts fell back into place from sleeping to waking, she remembered Mucho Model. She sat up on the bed, propped herself against the pillows again, and picked up her iPad for a look at what, if anything, she’d gotten during her nap.
To her delight, several responses to her query for models had already appeared. She grinned like a schoolgirl, anxious to see who from among that multitude of choice maleness had answered her.
At first glance, Jennifer drew in a long gasp of astonishment. When she’d first decided to look at Mucho Models, she was skeptical of what she would find. She remembered, from when she was in school, the kind of models who came to pose for her life drawing classes. The women were nothing like the kinds of women that one saw in lingerie advertisements, and the men were certainly nothing like the kinds of men that one saw as romantic leads on television and in the movies—or the ones that Jennifer had been looking up online and drawing since her marriage ended.
Oh, to be sure, they were fine human beings, terribly nice people. But they simply did not have that look. They were an array of perfectly common, mediocre—and often less than mediocre—faces and bodies. Some of them were aging, and some of them were just plain…plain. Some were scrawny, and some were flabby and saggy and, frankly, fat. She even remembered some that were a bit homely. It made Jennifer feel like a snob to remember them that way, but the flat fact was that they were purely academic specimens, none of them representing any kind of ideal. They were nothing like the men who filled the virtual pages of Mucho Model.
And now, here were some of them, responding to her advertisement, interested in working as her model. Her personal model. She grinned like a Cheshire cat at the sight of them.
As gorgeous as they were, not all of them were exactly what she had specified, and she was honestly tempted to broaden her qualifications for some of them; they were that perfect. One of them was smooth all over, no body hair, but with a thick crown of dark hair over a face that could make one want to look at nothing else for days and a body of the most perfectly cut and shaped lean muscle that anyone could ever want. Another smooth one had a cloud of dark hair that came down to his shoulders. He was as exquisitely muscled as the last one, with the most sweetly handsome face and a wreath of short-cropped beard hugging his upper lip and jawline. An elaborate tattoo decorated his left pec. He was wonderful. Another was blond and had a physique that reminded her of Michelangelo’s David. Another was a dancer as well as a model. This one was the perfect boy. He had the body of a man who’d just come into perfectly shaped young adulthood, every muscle immaculately honed; and Jennifer couldn’t believe some of the positions into which he was able to get that beautifully buffed and flexible figure.
But his face was absolutely that of a young boy looking for fun and needing to be loved. He melted her heart. By contrast to the perfect boy, a couple of the others were perfect men. One had short dark hair and a tall frame adorned with the tightest, most cut muscles Jennifer had ever seen, including pecs that could have been cut from granite.
He had the look of a man who could go from the rugged outdoors to a tuxedo with the most casual ease, a lady’s perfect arm candy. The other perfect man had dark, wavy hair, a short-cropped beard, a body of sculpted muscle to make man or woman alike melt into weeping, and a trail of hair from the cleft of his pecs that looked like slabs of iron to the Promised Land behind the zipper of his jeans. He had a riveting face and piercing eyes and overall was a figure with a message—the message being Lie down, put your legs in the air, and give it up. He was awesome.
But the one to which Jennifer kept coming back was a 25-year-old named Wesley Horne.
Wesley was nothing short of amazing. He was another dark one, his hair a sea of deep brown waves. His face was in its own way the handsomest one of all. To Jennifer, his features seemed to tell a story, or at least hint at one, of places that he had seen, far away. He reminded her of the old song about the “very strange, enchanted boy.”
But there was nothing boyish about the body under that face. The muscles sang of youth and energy, but also of the concentration and dedication to perfection with which he had built them. Jennifer could hardly believe that anything as perfect as Wesley was actually a real, living thing. He was his own work of art made flesh.
And he was also exactly what she had asked for. Shading his fantastic pecs, his unbelievable abs, his steely forearms, and the mighty pillars of his thighs and lower legs was hair: not too thick, but just enough to accent every contour and plane of every muscle. He was an absolute wonder.
And he only got better when Jennifer read his description of himself:
Hi. My name is Wesley. I’m an assistant manager at Diamond Gym, where I help members with their workouts. I work as a model on the side. I majored in Phys Ed in college. I’ve worked for magazines, ad campaigns, and private artists. My goal is to one day be a certified Personal Trainer. My body is my best advertisement. I have no problem posing nude the way you want; I worked hard for this body, and I’m proud of it. I know I can be a good model for you. E-mail me and let’s set up a first session. I’ll do the first one for free; that’s how sure I am you’ll want me to come back. Thanks.
Jennifer kept Wesley’s gallery of sample photos on her screen and settled back against her pillows, looking at them over and over again. She really did not need to look any further. She had, without question, found her model.
Tearing herself away from his pictures long enough to bring up the e-mail box on her screen, she wrote him a note and told him she would very much like to meet him and have him sit for her in her studio. She told him she was very impressed with his pictures and looked forward to drawing him, and that she would like to set up their appointment for as soon as his schedule would allow. She read over her text to make sure that she’d gotten it exactly right. Then she hit SEND.
That did it, then. She had committed to meeting her model. Perhaps he would even answer her response that very night.
Yes, hiring a model was exactly the right thing to do. Her old professors who had trotted out such common, mediocre subjects for her classes were more right than they knew. There really was nothing like drawing from life.
CHAPTER TWO
When Wesley Horne appeared at her door, Jennifer was thrilled to find he was even more magnificent in person than in his pictures online—which she had copied onto her iPad to practice drawing him after they had exchanged greetings and set up their first free appointment. That was how excited she was about him.
She opened the door, and there he was, clad in a white tank top, beige-grey khakis, and tall leather boxing shoes. Over his shoulder was slung a leather bag into which he would pack his clothes while posing, with some bottled water for hydration during breaks. With his smile to complete the picture, he radiated such hotness that Jennifer wanted to fan herself like a demure Southern belle.
“Jennifer?” he said, holding out his hand.
“Wesley!” she called with a grin, shaking his head and taking in the smooth firmness of the skin that wrapped up all those wonderful muscles. “Come on in, and let’s talk before we get started.”
She let him into the living room and continued to rake her eyes up and down his figure. She shut the door and got a look at him from behind, taking note of the firm packing of the buns under those khakis. Checking him out, Jennifer wondered why she’d never bothered to get herself a model until now.
Then she remembered: to begin with, she was married, and Ken probably would not have appreciated naked young hunks sitting for her right here where they lived. Then, she was divorced and depressed and hardly wanted to see anyone in any state of dress or undress, regardless of his superb maleness. No, her time spent drawing men that she found on the Internet was a necessary transition from marriage to the magnificence now standing before her.
“So, have a seat, Wesley,” she said, gesturing to the sofa and letting him settle down on one end and rest his bag on the floor while she sat down on
the other end. “I’ve been looking forward to hearing more about you.”
“There’s not that much to tell, really. I’m just a guy who’s into fitness,” he replied. “Well, my own fitness and helping others get fit. I think if you’re in good shape physically, you’re in good shape for life, you know?”
“That’s a good attitude. And I see it’s really paid off for you,” she said admiringly. “I like it that you know where you want to go in your career. The whole thing about being a personal trainer sounds fascinating. And very lucrative, I’ll bet. There are a lot of people out there who want to get into shape and have a lot of money to spend on it.”
“Mmm, yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Trouble is, people spend all their money on fitness equipment that just ends up sitting around unused and on memberships to gyms where they end up not going. Having a trainer, it’s a different kind of motivation, you know?”
“I guess it would be,” she said. “Unless they stop making appointments with you, I mean. Then you become the thing that just ends up sitting around or the place where they stop going.” She paused and considered. “I’m sorry; that must sound so negative. You don’t need negativity in your kind of work.”
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