Other Colors -- Ch. 15 (part 1) - Sex Stories

Other Colors -- Ch. 15 (part 1)

... invective, and turned away. The girl’s tears were a contagion. 'But break, my heart…’ I shook my head, clearing the mist from my eyes. And then I saw it. There at the base of an ivy-laced garden wall stood a chest of drawers, a brass stool, and a giant H-frame easel of white oak. My studio. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was perfect. Too perfect—so much so that it was a little bit humiliating. Monet had his flower garden at Giverny, and Cezanne his quaint atelier in Aix-de-Provence. But I'd done nothing to deserve such a heart-splittingly pretty place to paint. I stepped l closer, half-entranced. He'd tied a blue bow around the mast, and left another envelope—sealed, like the first one, with red wax—perched and awaiting me atop the canvas tray. I sank onto the stool, and tore it open. ‘Your spindle, your wheel, and some straw, Penny. Spin me some gold.’ I smirked, though my hand was shaking a little. I glanced nervously around the unreal garden. My own private Eden, encased in glass . Pantoufle de verre. Der gläserne Sarg. The authors of those early fairytales; I suppose they too had a penchant for putting girls in glass. Inside the drawers I found fresh paints and fresh brushes, as well as pastels, oils, vine charcoal, leaves of thick paper, and rolls of rough canvas. I sighed. He’d left me everything I could possibly need; everything I could want for that matter, or even imagine. And he'd deprived me of all my precious excuses. I had nowhere to be. I wanted for nothing. He ...

... was coercing me into the very thing I'd been desiring and dreaming of for years—to draw and paint all day. Without deterrent. Without distraction. And now, watching as that dream condensed into a reality right in front of me, I felt at once elated, and somewhere hovering near the edge of a nervous breakdown. The pressure I’d expected. Its intensity I had not. I steadied my breath. There was but one thing to be done about it. I removed a red, a blue, and a green pastel from the upper drawer, and I started spinning. I’m not sure how long I went without stopping, but several hours must have slipped by at least. The moment my pastel met the page, my mind dissociated itself from the passage of time, and a sense of space dilated to become my only means of orientation. I traced out some anastomotic ivy tendrils, and the dangling, velvety bells of a foxglove flower. I even channeled my inner-O’keeffe for a while, shading in the flesh-red petals of an iris. Painting the roses red… I smirked. Stieglitz would've made a fine Mad Hatter. I could have kept at it until well after dusk. I could have gone on by candlelight, filling leaf after leaf of paper until I’d rubbed my pastels into oblivion. I could have. But my coffee consumption that morning was a bit too intemperate. I needed to pee. Badly. And by and by the urge was only magnified by the incessant trickling of Niobe's tears, softly filling up the fountain. I abandoned the glasshouse, cursing myself for not having asked Jules about ...