by Daryl Banner
“Grace. The head of the Art school,” I reply, my voice as light as whipped cream on a nipple. “Now, Irene, I gotta warn you—”
“Irma,” she corrects me dreamily, her unblinking eyes glued to me.
“Cute name.” I shoot her a wink. “Now, Irma, it’s very possible that the original model might still show up. So, you know, if he does, he needs to be sent away. Grace’s orders.”
“Sent right away,” she agrees, furrowing her brow.
She bought the whole damn thing. I’d laugh if I didn’t think it’d blow my cover. Really, just give me a chance to flash my smile and my baby blues, and I can pretty much get a woman to believe anything.
I lift my brows. “So, doll, wanna tell me which room it is?”
“14 … um, 1401,” she stammers. “Hall A, the first one.”
Of course, I already knew. “Thanks, Irma. You saved my life,” I tell her. That’s what I tell them all—you saved my life. Girls eat that shit up.
The professor waits outside the classroom, a woman who looks like she hasn’t slept in days. She seems confused when I explain the little predicament, but I have her smiling in no time. She gives me a robe and tells me where to change after giving me a surprised once-over she thinks I didn’t notice. Maybe she was expecting an older model.
Maybe I also notice how her breathing changes.
Women is a language I speak fluently.
Behind the privacy screen, I experience a sudden rush of joy. If I squint, I can swear I still see the sweaty silhouette of the dancer I pressed against that wall not two days ago. The thought makes me grin, and the next second makes my underwear drop.
Goodbye, clothes.
When I come out from behind the screen wearing just the robe, I’m faced with the backs of the artists at their easels. I lift my chin and lock my jaw. This is going to be so fucking great. I already can’t wait to see Clayton’s expression when I tell him what the fuck I did today. I’m about to be the envy of every woman and man in this room.
I strut through the sea of art students, drawing their attention one at a time as the professor announces my arrival. The lonely stool in the center of the room awaits my tight tush.
“Whenever you’re ready,” urges the professor, her voice a tad too tight in the throat.
Just when my eyes meet the front row, I see her.
And oh yes, she sees me.
Her eyes tighten with recognition, becoming a squint that nearly burns a hole through me. Boy, she’s one fierce-looking woman. Her jet black hair is swept over the side of her slender neck, and her deep black eyeliner lends the dissecting stare she’s already giving me an even more dangerous allure.
Dangerous to other men. I face her with my boldest grin, undoing the robe, then let it drop to the floor.
The room sees my cock. I observe their collective gaping.
Yeah, I’m used to that reaction.
The woman in front, however, she doesn’t seem to regard it at all, her sharp eyes penetrating me from behind her easel. She crosses her legs, unimpressed, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see a tinge of amusement in her eyes.
I’ve got her.
I take my position on the stool, doing that one-foot-on-the-ground-and-one-foot-on-the-second-rung-of-the-stool thing. I rest my hands comfortably near my hips, proudly on display, and throw my gaze to the side, as if that hot woman whose attention I totally have doesn’t mean a thing. I know how these mind games work, and she’s about to find out how expert-level I am.
The calm room becomes a chorus of pencil scratches, tiny sighs, and creaking from shifting stools.
Unable to help it, I turn my chin slightly, meeting her eyes.
She smirks, bringing the pencil to her lips and biting softly.
Fuck.
Sitting on this stool, totally naked, in front of a class full of women and men who are meticulously drawing my every outline, shadowing my every curve and cut of muscle, right down to my big dick … I find myself suddenly caught with an entirely different, unplanned concern.
I can’t let myself get hard.
Not in front of the whole classroom.
I look away from her. Then, I can’t look away, glancing back.
Her tongue teases out, touching the tip of her pencil as she quietly studies me. Already, I’m imagining what that tongue could do to me.
I’m fucking naked. I have nowhere to hide.
In seconds, I’ve been converted from the cock on the block to … the cock on a block. I’m a dude with his junk exposed to the world, and I’m slowly being worked up and turned on by that evil girl.
Is my cock stirring? Everyone’s watching.
The scraping of pencils on paper. The creaking of easels and chairs. A long breath in the back of the room. The clearing of a throat.
I swallow, bringing my eyes back to her.
She shifts in her seat, crossing her legs the other way.
Fu-u-u-u-ck. Don’t get hard. Don’t get hard. Don’t get hard.
Her eyes draw down my body, landing on my cock. The way she looks at it, I can almost feel her fingers wrapping around it.
The end of that pencil breaches her lips. I catch a flick of her evil tongue, imagining how that tiny flick would feel on the tip of my dick.
And her lips, wrapping around the end.
Her warm mouth enveloping it.
I suck in a jagged breath of air. If I control my breath, I can control my cock from getting hard. I hold my breath, blinking and fighting all the blood in my body that’s quickly rushing south.
Her lips curve into the tiniest hint of a smile.
Oh, yeah? Does my predicament amuse you?
Suddenly, I find my confidence again. The rush of heat subsides, and I look down at her legs, wrinkling my forehead ever so subtly. I consider what sort of warmth is gathering between them right now.
Haven’t I been reading the signs? She’s turned on, too.
When I look up from her sexy, squeezed-together legs, her intense eyes are on me, and they’ve changed. They’re defiant. It’s like I literally just touched her without her permission.
Now it’s my turn to wear the nearly-undetectable smirk of victory.
Her eyes narrow.
I got you.
It isn’t much longer before the professor makes an announcement, and then class is finally over. With a careless bend downward, I reclaim the robe, shrugging myself back into it and glancing at my eye-fuck-slash-mind-fuck partner, only to find her packing up her supplies.
In the noise of others chatting and gathering their things, I stroll by her easel, catching sight of her sketch.
“Hmm,” I mumble, studying it. “I think your … proportions … are a little on the small side,” I note with a leering nod at my junk.
She regards me with two dark eyes that struggle to hide their amusement. “Actually,” she says, her words seeming to lick my ears with their breathiness, “I think I got it just right.”
She smirks, amused, then zips up her supply bag. Ouch.
I chuckle, undaunted. “Maybe you need a new pair of contacts,” I tease her, crossing my arms as I peer into those rich green eyes that glow like pure emeralds in that sea of black eyeliner she wears.
“Nope,” she answers curtly, tucking her supply bag under a slender arm. “Perfect vision.” Her eyes trail down my body like a smooth set of fingers, landing at my crotch. “I just draw it how I see it.”
“I’m Brant,” I tell her. “I could … give you a closer look sometime. Maybe tonight, if you’re free.”
She lifts her eyes, those gorgeous greens flashing.
She stops my breath.
Her lips curl, amused. “I’ve seen enough.”
Then she turns, her hair flipping, and she saunters away, her ass hugged by those tight, black jeans of hers. I can’t take my eyes off of them.
With a grin, I crack my knuckles. Looks like I have my work cut out for me. Hard-to-get is a game I’m quite used to.
&n
bsp; And I’m ready to play.
Chapter 3
Nell
Animals seem to love me.
Especially the dogs.
My mom had an enormous one. He was named Dog. He was so big that he looked like a deadly wildebeest thirsty for my blood when he’d barrel down the hall, even if he was just coming to give my face an innocent lick. He terrified my friends growing up, even to the point that two of them stopped coming over for my sleepovers. I think that scary beast called Dog who I loved was an omen for who I’d become.
My art wasn’t always so dark and terrifying and provocative. In fact, until the age of fourteen, I was a downright sweetie pie.
“Nell.”
I lift my chin, stirred from my thoughts. “Say what?”
“You’re up.”
Linus, my professor, waits at the front of the room with his usual calm and expectant face—his arms crossed, his eyebrows lifted. I rise from my desk and bring my picture to the front. Unceremoniously, I slap the thing onto the easel in the front for the class to observe, then stand next to it and stare dead-eyed at the crowd of them, awaiting the obligatory ten-minute critique that each of us are expected to endure after finishing and presenting work to the class.
Linus bristles at the sight of my work. His eyebrows lift further.
Someone in the front row sighs—this bitch named Iris with pink highlights in her pixie cut bleach-blonde hair who thinks my work is all shit; she’s let me know as much since my freshman year and always seems to end up in my same classes. Everyone else is either holding back gasps or swallowing laughter—I can’t tell.
I don’t care. I don’t do my work for them.
“And … what do you call this piece?” asks Linus, his words spilling out from lips I can’t see through the mess of his big orange beard.
“Pussy,” I answer.
Two boys titter in the front near Iris. Someone else giggles, a girl in the fifth row. Some guy in the back says, “Amazing,” but I don’t bother to identify him. I’m just ready for this critique to end so I can take my work back to my desk and get started on the next one.
Linus takes a step forward, doing his usual routine to engage the class in offering their so-called constructive criticism. “Would anyone like to—?”
“It’s very …” interrupts Garnet, whose face is nearly missing behind her curtain of brown, knotted hair, “sexual …?”
“Yes, right,” agrees Linus. “It’s … well, it’s quite an interpretation of the assignment, to say the least.”
“I thought we were supposed to draw a cat,” someone mumbles.
“It is a cat,” Garnet retorts, squinting at my work, leaning so far forward that the desk creaks beneath her weight.
“A cat with big human boobies,” says a bigmouthed guy, fascinated.
“And her legs are parted,” someone else puts in, recoiling.
The comments keep coming like tennis balls, back and forth.
“She looks like the billboard graphic to some cat brothel in … in, like, some parallel world run by cats.”
“Sick.”
“Is that nail polish on her claws? I can’t tell.”
“It’s like Playboy Cat.”
“It makes me feel sad, actually,” offers a guy with three nose rings whose voice is as small as a sigh. “Cat can’t pay rent. Resorts to catcalls on the cat corner with the other cat prostitutes.”
A girl with a nasally voice speaks up from the middle of the room. “No, this is something else. Something political. Feminist? Or it’s like, scrolling through hundreds of cat pics on Facebook, and … Or maybe it’s about how everything’s commercial now. Advertising. Billboards.”
“Everything is sex, sex, sex,” someone adds, picking up on her vein in agreement.
“If we could sexualize natural disasters and monetize every tragedy that goes down in the world …”
“We do.”
Linus, through all the commentary, seems to visibly gather patience before addressing them. “What do you think about her technique?” he offers, guiding the critique with shifting eyes. “Is there, perhaps, some way she might have better conveyed her message? Is there anything you see that deters from that message?”
I love how effectively my Pussy caught him off-guard. And while the class continues to pull my work apart, arguing about what I’m trying to say or what my boob-bearing cat means, I find my mind wandering to a picture I remember presenting my sixth grade art class. I wore a bright green dress that day and I smiled proudly when the teacher praised me in front of the room for my watercolor painting of a girl hugging an enormous dog by her side. Even sitting, the big white dog still towered over the girl. It was a beautiful picture, and if the bitches on the bus hadn’t torn it apart, I might’ve framed it when I got home. When my mom asked where my project had gone, I lied and said the teacher loved it so much, she kept it and framed it in the classroom.
Here I am, standing in front of a class and totally not protecting anyone’s feelings anymore.
“My problem is, it’s too fucking obvious.”
Everyone’s heads turn at the criticism, which had come from pink-haired Iris in the front. Her arms are crossed, legs are crossed, and eyes are squinted in mild scrutiny.
“Care to expound?” offers the professor.
She starts expounding before he even finishes the question. “It’s so literal. Cat. Sex. Boobs. Great, thank you, my mind is so stimulated. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the originality? I swear I saw a meme of this very thing in my Twitter feed last night.”
“Let’s be constructive,” Linus coaches her. “How do you feel she might have better conveyed—”
“I’m not going to do the work for her,” blurts Iris, crossing her legs the other way.
I pay her words as much mind as they deserve: none.
Linus itches his beard, studying my work. “Perhaps this picture is … providing us with the problem. And maybe what it lacks is a solution.”
I can’t mask the smirk that comes over my face. “Solution?”
“Your picture …”
“Pussy,” I correct him, because he might as well say the name.
He smiles, his every word gentle and carefully chosen. “Pussy … is asking us, the viewers, a question. Yes? Perhaps what we’re lacking from your work is the answer.”
“Oh. I see.” I consider the room of agreeing faces for a moment, then turn to my professor again. “Should I provide a spoon with my picture, then?”
Linus doesn’t follow. “A spoon?”
“Yeah. So you can spoon-feed yourself my work instead of having to think on a solution or an answer on your own,” I spit back. “God forbid my art causes anyone to think for themselves. Isn’t that the point?”
Iris blows air through her lips, rolling her eyes. “I love how you pass this pretentious crap off as ‘art’,” she mutters, making air quotes with her fingers.
The class is unrested for a moment, stools shifting and a whisper of scandal bursting here and there. I toss my hair at all of it and grab my work off the easel, refusing for it to be judged any further by these elementary morons. I head for the door.
“Nell.”
I stop only because it’s Linus who says my name. I turn, allowing him my last ounce of patience.
“Sometimes we must hear the opinions of others. It’s the only way we can grow as artists, don’t you agree? It’s important to process the—”
“I’ve processed enough,” I say, cutting him off.
He lifts his brow, surprised by my lip, I assume. Then, with a tilt of his head, he asks, “Do you know when an artist dies?”
I stare at him, deadpan. “Is this some kind of knock-knock joke? How many artists does it take to screw in a light bulb? What are you getting at?”
“Do you know when an artist dies?” he repeats.
I frown, then humor him. “When?”
“When she thinks she has nothing left to learn.”
The he
ads in the class turn slowly to face me, as if they’re afraid of my reaction to his frigid last words to me. The clench I have on my artwork tightens. My eyes narrow, hating everyone in the room in an instant, and suddenly I’m in sixth grade again clutching a picture of a girl cheerily hugging an enormous white dog. I’m in sixth grade and I’m wearing that bright green dress, feeling so proud that I could burst, and can’t wait to take my pretty picture home to show my mom—a pretty picture she’d never see.
I miss that girl in the bright green dress.
I let the door shut loudly behind me as I leave. When I pass the nearest trash bin, I throw my Pussy into it, then shove out of the double doors and into the courtyard. Ten seconds and a deep breath later, I slip back into the building, return to that same trash bin, and pull my work right back out, smoothing it gently against the wall. The longer I look at it, the more I start to calm down. One deep breath in, one deep breath out, and I give my deranged, whorish cat a soft smile.
I really, really miss that girl in the bright green dress.
Back outside, there’s something about passing through the tunnel that has me thinking about that guy named Brant again. Instantly, the cloud of bitterness around me parts, disintegrating to let in the sunlight. That sunlight happens to be his cocky face, and the further the clouds fade, the more of him I see: his smooth toned pecs, his rippling abs, his taut thighs and shapely calves.
His big dick.
I find myself smiling suddenly, all the anger from my art class gone in an instant. The girl in the green dress is very much alive; I have to believe that. The guy named Brant, though I know him for precisely what he is, is also the only guy who’s dared to breach my bubble in a very long time. Everyone else is too intimidated. Everyone else prefers to stare at me from a distance and whisper to their friends. I can only imagine what they say. “She’s a witch,” I’m sure I’ve heard. “She sacrificed her own sister for some Satanic blood ritual!” I wouldn’t doubt they’ve said that, too. “She keeps one of her ex-boyfriends in a basement and cuts off a tiny piece of him every morning to put in her breakfast cereal!”