Familiar with Oils

The wrought iron bench was colder than her soul, despite the gorgeous sunshine and beautiful day. Jessie sat stiffly, vacant and spent, the hundreds of thoughts attacking her brain creating a hurricane. The memories that should have been so uplifting only made her heart heavier with grief. The image of the inquisitive tilt of the head or the dancing behind of her little adventurer taunted her as she sat avoiding the return to the now silent apartment.

"Keep it together, Jessie," she told herself, clenching her jaw so as to hold back the pain. Her fingers rubbed along the leather collar she had in her hand so much that they were starting to take on its color. She could feel the sun's warmth collecting in the brass tag. The collar was light in her hands, and at the same time it was more weight than she could bear. Only hours before she had unclasped it from around her best friend's neck.

This was always the midpoint of what Waddles had believed was an extraordinary journey. As a slightly aged and ridiculously indulged French Bulldog, Waddles' stocky, well-muscled form had been somewhat diminished over the years to that of a snoring marshmallow, and he considered the trek half a block from the front door of their apartment to the fountain at the park a marathon of the highest order. He did not merely walk, however; Waddles trundled, the velvet stand-up bat-ears shifting like radar dishes, his tongue flapping in time with his steps.

Among her daily obligations, there were few that ensured Jessie had a semblance of normalcy, this one was sacred, a time for bonding. Each day as she finished up work, and twice on weekends if the weather conditions held, they'd both make the long schlep past the florist to this bench by the fountain. Waddles would always throw his doughy mug into the grass, playing the part of the snob who takes one look at the local dog-racing-track heroes chasing frisbees and tennis balls and snubs them with a look of utmost disdain. He was quite content to merely be in the green space.

Today however, the steady splash of the fountain no longer appealed to her. Like a band minus its drummer, it was lacking the beat of his rumbling breaths. Jessie looked down into the patch of grass at her feet. The empty spot of grass felt horribly out of place. There'd never be a longer walk than this one she thought to herself as she sat there motionless.

When the fountain's spray hit the sunlight, it was almost always diamonds, she watched the sparkles until a tear welling-up blurred her vision in a watery splash. Jessie blinked rapidly, trapping the tears before they revealed themselves. When her vision cleared, the figure opposite on the plaza sharpened in focus. At a wood-frame easel was a man; lopsided glasses sat atop the bridge of his nose as he whirled his hand in rapid, rhythmic swipes over the canvas, his supplies nestled in the portable wooden cart beside him. When their eyes finally caught, he looked away quickly. Flinching and shuddering he turned his attention to the canvas, shoulders tensing as he again focused on the work at hand.

A hot prickling of self-awareness came over Jessie. She watched inconspicuously from the corner of her eye. His movements were swift and hurried, his eyes on her again. Her thumb catching on the cold metal of a dog collar remaining in her fist. "He's not painting me, is he?" She thought suddenly. Then a rational thought that suddenly sliced through her grief and irritation. The fountain, it was the fountain, how the sun shone on the stone or the fact of the trees in the park; it was a regular theme for a picture.

But when she dared to look again, he was returning her gaze. His head was tilted to the side, and on the trailing end of a slow dip of his brush into his paint, he was now staring straight at her bench. He wasn't just taking in the view.

Before she could work herself up to angry or even simply uncomfortable, the park's enormous clock tower chimed two. With a grating metallic cry, the fountain cast up its high-pressure jets, spouting out a thick, watery curtain. The artist had disappeared behind a cascade of spray and white noise.

She didn't want to be a spectacle, to be somebody's "Sad Girl on a Bench" study. She pushed herself up to her feet, body dull and clumsy, clutching the strap of her bag. Rather than heading towards the exits and the empty, deserted apartment that awaited her, she found herself walking towards the fountain's rim, following its circumference to see precisely what he had painted on that canvas.

As she rounded the end of the stone basin, she glimpsed his nervous frenzy of making ready. Hands trembling, he was trying to set the wooden legs of the easel without knocking over the jar of dirty rinse water in the process; then, desperately, center a canvas. Then, grabbing his brush, starting it moving in frantic circles as he worked in a trance.

The painting on the easel was beautiful. It was a sun-drenched section of the park she was familiar with, on the opposite side of the green from the pond. Two girls, side by side in the grass, tackling a golden retriever puppy were lit by a childlike, contagious, and unrestrained joy. The glow of the painting was realer than the sun above, and for one brief moment, a huge, hard knot loosened in Jessie's stomach. The utter innocence of it, that sparkle of joy, was like a drug, dulling the sharp pain of her own grief.

"You are pretty good," she said.

The man started and almost lost his brush.

"What? Sorry!... Sorry! Sorry!" He looked up, glasses clunking down his nose, his face reading a combination of terror and bewilderment.

His reaction was so truly alarmed, Jessie felt a grin of mischievous satisfaction begin to break through her sadness. "You are a very good artist. Do you do this as your profession?"

He cleared his throat. "Oh. No," he said suddenly, blushing just a bit. "I, uh. I just kind of... I've always done this. As far back as I can remember."

Jessie didn't seem to be able to stop looking at the picture of the pond. It wasn't just that it was good enough to be a photograph; it was like the window was being opened and she could see into the kids' souls. It was a photograph with an omnipotent sheen. But as she adjusted her position, her eyes caught a flash of color lodged in the niche of his wheeled cart. There, partially hidden by a blank board, was a familiar tilt of a jaw and the exact hue of her hair.

"Can I see it?" she asked, indicating the canvas in the cart.

"What? See what?" The young man's voice cracked up an octave, and his hands swept anxiously near his equipment like a bird flapping defensively over her nest.

" I saw you looking at me," she said softly but sternly while observing his reaction. "And I can see my face right there."

The man's defense was laid to waste immediately. His shoulders sank, and his face seemed to liquefy with heartfelt contrition. "Sorry. Please don't be upset," he whispered. It was barely a second before he leaned down and lifted the picture from the cart.

It wasn't a landscape. It wasn't a complete picture. It was just her. Her face, her hair, all filling a stark white space. But oh God, it was so detailed. He'd just snapped the moment her heart had broken wide open, her eyes, glassy and shiny; her mouth, clenched tight; her grief, radiating out from her like a shock wave. To lay eyes on it was like getting shot with a cannonball, immediately slamming into her midsection, robbing her of breath.

"Oh my god," she said, voice breaking. "It's so... it's so alive."

The artist wouldn't say anything. He just sat there, face impassive, eyes glued to the dirty toes of his sneakers, shoulders curled inwards as if to make himself the least amount of space he could be.

As he finally looked back at her, a sudden cold stab of feelings darted through her fog; he was so tethered to his shyness, it was almost painful. Unlike this man, her life was dealing with the carefully monitored tempers and overinflated egos of celebrities who expected the sun and moon from her. This guy was apologizing just for living.

"Hey," she whispered as she pawed into her purse. "Do you work from photos?"

She retrieved a small glossy photo, weathered by time, but still cherished, some relic from a sunny, more radiant afternoon. Waddles in the grass, his youthful glow shined through the phototaken in the grassy spot from the exact same park bench where she stood now. Waddles at his best: mouth hanging open in a lopsided idiot smile, and those bat-like ears, enormous, slouching confidently. It seemed those days were just the beginning of two partners, living out their best lives.

He held the photo with a shaking hand, pushed his thick glasses away from his face, and stared at the picture. A tiny, barely visible smile spread across the corner of his mouth as he looked up at her anxiously. "I suppose I could," he whispered. "But I don't know if that will be the same. The... The feeling may not be the same."

"I'll take you up on that," Jessie said, her brain already making this what she had been searching for. "How much for a big one, say, the size of the scenery you've got over there?" He blinked, seeming very upset by the word transaction. "I... I dunno. I don't... I don't take money or nothin'. I just... I just paint."

"Nonsense," Jessie said, feeling the familiar surge of body heat as the emotional side of her took over, completely ignoring his confusion. "Two hundred? No, let's just go with three hundred. It's a commission." She dug into her wallet, grabbed a business card, and shoved it into his palm.

"Here's my cell. Call me when it's ready. Deal?"

He looked down at the card, then back up at the picture of the smiling bulldog, and he gave a hesitant, unenthusiastic nod. It was like he'd agreed to something without knowing what the something was, but his hand firmly held Waddles to his chest nonetheless.

==================

The Saturday morning sun was peering through the windows, beaming down in a way that mocked her misery. It was a perfect day outside; however, the apartment still seemed cold, and the atmosphere was worryingly silent. She could feel the weight of her grief double when she walked around the house with no old furry buddy to create the white noise she was used to.

Jessie trudged toward the kitchen and stepped lightly over the threshold, instinctively navigating the empty space where Waddles used to plant himself in the doorframe.

In the corner of the kitchen, exactly as they had always been: his two bowls resting side by side, catching the light across the surface of the water. Still half-full, the now evaporating water leaving a flaky skin of mineral dust along the edge.

The sight hit her straight in the chest. A quiet, devastating altar left behind in an empty house for a body that had filled the room just yesterday. Those "hard emotions" she always talked about with her clients, that raking, suffocating combination of hope and denial, erupted with such force that her sinuses instantly stung with hot tears trailing her cheeks.

On autopilot, she pressed the button to start the single-cup coffee brewer, just to make noise and drown out silence with the whirring of water. As the machine sputtered into life, she knelt down to gather up the bowls. They were light, hollow, and heartbreaking. She washed them in the sink; the metallic clang of water hitting them echoed in her ears. Jessie didn't dry them, just let the excess drip off, then she opened the utility closet and tucked the bowls out of sight behind the pile of old towels. Hidden, but heavy on her mind.

Just as the aroma of coffee finally drifted in, her phone buzzed on the counter. The number was unknown.

"Hello?" asked Jessie, her voice sounding high and cradled by the silence of the morning.

"Um, hi. Ms. Blake? It's Eric," said the voice at the other end of the line, even more weak-voiced than it had been during the encounter the day before. "We talked yesterday afternoon. You remember? By the park ... at the fountain ...?"

She sat up against the still cold surface of the granite countertop. "Sure, Eric, I remember. What do you need?"

"You wanted me to call when I was finished with the painting... You know the one, the one with your dog?!"

Jessie sat back up, her hand clenching her mug of coffee. "Already? It's done already?" Her grief was pierced with a sudden flicker of skepticism. She remembered the painting of the two girls, the outline of the pond, the way the water glittered, the sensation of each speckle of grass, and the smiles printed on the girls' faces. Such depth of humanity didn't simply spring into a canvas on his whim. Even the picture of her own face, so perfect in form, seemed almost inconceivable, especially because he'd only been sitting there for twenty minutes. It was like he wasn't just painting what he saw; he was painting what his subjects felt in ways that defied explanation.

"Yeah, I think so," Eric said softly, seeming to speak as if he was staring at the canvas at that moment. "I finished it," he said again softly.

He was, without question, quite the character. Working with "quirky" actors on a daily basis, ones who wouldn't enter or leave their trailers unless they had a particular bottle of alkaline water or folks who could only communicate through metaphor, she found Eric's kind of social ineptitude was something else entirely. It wasn't a political statement or a don't-touch-me attitude; it was like he'd simply skipped the layers that most people "costumed" themselves with to get through the world.

She set her coffee mug down, the caffeine just starting to hit her system. A question was beginning to pierce through the morning fog. How in the world did he paint a masterpiece oil in less than a day? The science of it didn't seem to add up, as oil needed to tack, layers needed to dry. She grabbed her light jacket and keys, looking at herself in the mirror in the hall. Her eyes were still puffy, but the mission was giving her a reason to exist.

He said he lived by the bakery, just three blocks away, a neighborhood icon for its sourdough and its quaint alley patio and cobblestone street that wound its way behind it. A dark, lost section of the neighborhood, far from the manicured greenery of the park. As she emerged into the bright Saturday sun, it all felt fitting, a "perfect" morning for what was to come.

==================

Jessie cut through a tight brick-lined corridor wedged between two high-rise pre-war buildings. One of those secret, well-trodden cut-throughs that felt like a permanent urban mystery, hidden in plain sight like an entrance to Diagon Alley. It was illuminated by an ambiguous glow, the kind of weird, ambient light spilling off a rooftop parking garage ten stories high that didn't quite seem to know if it belonged there. The air carried a distinct city mix: the sweet, damp scent of moistened moss growing on the cobblestones layered with the warm, yeasty exhaust of the bakery. Pausing under the hesitant light, Jessie yanked the scrap of paper from her pocket to check the address.

0812 Montgomery Way.

The zero. He had been strangely precise about that leading zero, as if, without that, the number would not be correct. She followed brass digits stenciled along building and street fronts.

808, 810... until she was facing the limestone front of 812. And yet, as she approached the solid front doors, she noticed a painted wooden board attached to the brick facade near the cornerstone, a jagged arrow leading her into the darkness.

0812

She skirted the narrow walkway around the building's edge, the faint voices of the street beyond drowning to an indistinct murmur. And there, hidden between a corroded pile of trash, concrete steps dropped down the side of the building to the basement. A shiver of chill, hair-raising intuition shot up her spine. That staircase resembled something out of the opening montage of a true crime documentary.

Cut it out, Jessie. This isn't Law and Order, she berated herself, taking a deep breath. The guy's about as intimidating as a squirrel. He's no threat.

There was a battered wooden door at the foot of the stairs, and the green paint seemed fresh like someone was trying to cover the fact the apartment was actually the basement. There was a tiny four-pane window, and below it a strange small metal eagle, wings bent out over a sassy, crooked head that was only about three inches wide. Taped next to it on the wall was a wrinkled piece of notebook paper that said in a frenzied pen: 'Ring! Ring!'

She pulled on it half-heartedly, but the figure was set hard. The impulse to mend and make right asserted itself, and she grabbed the eagle and realigned the wonky bird so the metal wings were level. A metallic clang sounded from the other side of the wood. She leaned into it a little more, and it clanged again. The bell played a clear silver note through the damp stairwell.

A face suddenly popped into view through the window. Eric looked so much like a different person without all the "artist's armor" of jackets and carts he wore. He was clad in oversized grey shorts and a sun-bleached shirt that was long past when it could be 'refreshed', and his hair was a mass of unbrushed curls. It was obvious he hadn't intended to be seen by the outside world today.

The door swung open with a protest, the squeal of hinges. "Hello, ma'am," he mumbled, his voice lost in the sound of pipes humming in the walls of the building.

"Ma'am?" Jessie chuckled as fake exasperation filled the awkward silence. "I can't be more than a year or two older than you, Eric. You act like I should be sitting by the fire with a shawl on my shoulders and a knitting in my lap."

"Sorry," he muttered, chin dropping to his chest as he fixed on the concrete below with a focus so hard she felt the heat of the embarrassment radiating off him.

"Oh, shut up. I mean, seriously, Eric. How old are you?"

"Twenty-four." He smiled and shifted his weight from one foot to another.

"See?" Jessie walked into the entryway, a mischievous little grin on her face. "I'm just twenty-six. I just turned that three weeks ago. We're about the same age."

And suddenly for the first time since she had known him, he was smiling, even if it was only a little one. A little flicker of warmth that softened his thick glasses and made him seem less obscured by them. Jessie wondered if he was smirking in amusement at her sass, or if she'd just taken his mind off getting his anxiety.

The artificial lighting of the basement blanketed her when she entered, and she looked at him as if for the first time. Setting aside social anxiety and the giant glasses, Eric was, by anyone's assessment, a handsome man. His naturally symmetrical face had a rugged, earthy appeal; in fact, it reminded her of many of the top-tier actors she had worked with, though without the faux-earned authority of most of them. He didn't appear to have been a gym rat, but his anatomy oozed strength; muscular arms and thick legs that suggested he spent a lot of time on his feet.

"It's just up ahead," Eric said softly, his voice faintly echoing as he moved her further down into the room.

The apartment was a subterranean maze. A sprawling, raw industrial zone more than a living space. Brickwork and timbers supported an area more closely resembling a mine than a ceiling, pierced every few feet by a spider's web of wiring and a zig-zagging cluster of galvanized ducts. The window was high and meager, set so far back that the cluster of glass panes had violated the letter of the law for occupancy, but the lack of sunlight was at least made up for by the astonishing abundance of art. Paintings were wedged against the walls in tumbling stacks of four and five, lining the "hallway" walls in jumbles of six or more, hung at odd angles along the perimeter of a literal gallery. The haphazzard arrangement, with its jumbling energy made Jessie's mind spin. It was a sort of emotional gut-punch, living among the inexhaustible outpourings of a hundred seemingly conscious works. It was hard to keep walking when you were feeling their screams, their shouts, and their laughs and tears.

"I'll show it to you now," Eric said, before reaching an easel in the middle of the room. The image of Waddles made Jessie's breath catch. It was the same as the photo, but more. The light, rather than hit the canvas like color, seemed to radiate directly from within the mottled coat of Waddles. He had revealed in the eyes of the dog that most familiar, most unerringly faithful and open, innocent soul who had been Jessie's mainstay for years. A wave of tears wasn't what she felt; it was more like she was cocooned in the thickest comforter. His painted smiley mug could take a back seat to the feeling of security in the image.

"Eric... It's beautiful. It's more than beautiful."

"Really? I... I've never used a picture to paint from before," he said, his fingers twitching at his sides.

"Do you always use live subjects?" Jessie asked, turning to him.

He flinched away as if she'd hit him, a sharp, instant jerking back that was like a frightened rabbit darting behind a dark hole. "No, not all the time. But I do have to have something... to keep me connected to the feeling."

"What do you mean by a connection?"

Eric looked down at his shoes and curled inwards. "No. I shouldn't say anything more."

Her curiosity, honed by years of unearthing the psyches of difficult celebrities, would not let it go. "Can you show me?"

He jerked again, blinking through whatever conflict was obviously in his mind. "Oh! Oh, I don't know!"

The harder he pushed her away, the harder the mystery tugged her in. "Please, Eric? I won't criticize. I just need to know how you do it."

He raised his eyes. The wall of anxiety suddenly cracked for a fleeting moment. Just a spark of whatever it was, a soft, human intensity crossed his gaze. He paused and uttered softly: "Fine. But you gotta keep it a secret. For real."

"I can do that," she promised, her tone calming and curious.

He found himself guiding her out of the living space of the studio and through a tangle of clutter into a bedroom. Clothes, reeking of linseed oil, piled in a corner against a dusty wall. At one end of the room stood yet another easel, obscured in shadows. Eric pointed at a large canvas framed on the wall.

I did this when I heard her," he whispered. "This is what was in my mind's eye when I was hearing her hollering at the top of her lungs up above."

Jessie stared as if the wind were knocked from her lungs at a woman with her face contorted in an expression of such frightening beauty, all of it raw with pleasure, her mouth slightly agape as if she'd let out a soft moan through her heavy breath, her eyes tightly closed against the world. Her dark hair cascaded about her shoulders and over her heaving bosom, the dark, hard points of her nipples like tight, little stone buds against the darkness of the shadows. She was holding her arms at her sides, squeezing her breasts together with them, but her hands were lost in the shadows beneath the edge of the canvas, as if suggesting in the hidden darkness what her rhythmic movements were doing in the shadows below.

As with the others, the painting didn't just depict an image; it transmitted a physical sensation. Suddenly, a thrumming heat bloomed in Jessie's chest. Her breathing turned shallow as the thick, cloying rush of endorphins flooded her system. She felt the heavy, wet dampness pooling between her legs in response to the raw, unadulterated ecstasy on the wall.

"You're not going to tell her, are you?" Eric's voice tugged her back to consciousness.

Jessie could feel her face getting hot, and her skin breaking out in a shiny sheen of sweat. She looked away from the blissed-out face of the woman. "No... oh no, Eric."

"All right. Good." Eric gave a little crooked grin, apparently unaware of the way the work had just affected her. "I shouldn't have painted it. But I had to get it out of my head. The sound... It was so loud, so loud I could see it."

Taking her by the hand, he led her to the large, dim living room that served as his studio. As they walked past the easel, Jessie couldn't help but look back down to the floor to navigate the clutter of art, causing her to spot the work-in-progress of her face from the park. The contrast to the nearly pure-white background on the canvas made the intense detail of her features leap out with an almost startlingly aggressive intimacy. He had painted her in the thickest contractions of her grief, and yet something radiant shone through.

"I don't even know how to tell you how good this is, Eric," she said, her voice taking on a deep, low sincerity. She moved out of the shadows, into his field of vision. "There are no words for what your paintings do to me. They don't merely show things. They feel like things."

Eric walked away, shifting his weight, embarrassment at once re-occupying his face as he looked out of the corner of his eye at a gap in the concrete.

"I'm not joking." Jessie launched straight into her bag. Out came her wallet, crisp and business-like. "I want them both. Waddles and one of me. Four hundred?"

Eric gazed at the incomplete oil on the ground with a slight frown, behind his glasses. "It isn't finished, though. It has... nothing but your face. No body, no background... no bench." She peered at the canvas once more. Her face and vacant surrounding area somehow felt familiar. She got the sensation that her empty apartment echoed the feeling. "I think that's because that's the way it was meant to be," she murmured softly. "Nothing else mattered at that point. That was all that was left of me at that moment."

Eric glanced up at her then, a tentative smile crinkled across his face. "Maybe," he admitted quietly. "Maybe you are right."

He took the bills and clutched them in his hand. But she couldn't leave it there. Her heart still pounding from the rush of the secret she'd discovered in the bedroom, she peeled off another $400, the taut bills trembling with her desire. "And this," she said with a defiant face, "is for the picture of the woman."

Whether it was the technical mastery or the way it had ignited a new ember deep within her, she knew not why, but she couldn't leave it there.

"Oh no. I can't," Eric stuttered, his eyes widening. "I shouldn't have even shown you that." He struggled to detach his hand from hers and appeared truly horrified at the idea of letting the painting go.

"Please, Eric. That is some awesome artwork. Is it not enough money? You want more?"

"No! That's not it. I just..." He hesitated, deeply flushed.

She moved closer, so close she could smell the slightly acrid sweat off his brow. She thrust the four hundred dollars into his hand, her fingers brushing against his palm. For a moment, he tensed, his muscles knotted tight, then he slowly slumped as his gaze met hers and he relaxed into a silent capitulation.

Jessie paused with a relaxed chuckle, staring at the three large canvases. "How am I going to get all these home?" she wondered.

"I've got a canvas sling," Eric said, his voice recovering just a little of the even, artistic steadiness he was able to sustain so well. "I can lend it to you... And, uh, maybe, you can return it sometime?"

"Sure," said Jessie, with a big smile, growing a little more excited for reasons she couldn't explain, "And when I bring it back, maybe we can even go out for lunch."

==================

The hike back to the apartment felt like a weird, reverent procession. The sling was an engineering marvel, a set of leather straps and padded canvas buffers, each frame slipping into the indentations in the leather holder so that the three of them became one piece, nicely cushiony against her hip as she went.

Back in the apartment, the relative quiet didn't seem so bad. She headed for the couch and gently released the straps, dropping the canvases free. Moving them to the cushions, she stood back to see the three paintings.

Her face, frozen and lonely in a white nothing, a whisper of a ghost haunting her own life. There, so close that the light made it burn like a sun, lay the image of Waddles. And... the woman. That delicious, treacherous tingle, Jessie's trademark flash of electricity that ran right through her gut.

"Not... not right now," she said to the empty room, her voice sounding a little winded. She struggled to move around the room, retrieving a hammer and some nails from the utility closet. She treated it as a kind of ritual. The picture of Waddles was front and centre on the living room wall, positioned to be bathed in the perfect patch of afternoon light. She tacked the "Sad Jessie" piece just to its immediate left. The stark difference was a gut punch of a visual; an immediate before-and-after of a pain. The two images worked together in harmony; there was a loving grieving loop in the room that was so distinctly her own, for a moment she believed herself to be the only person in the universe to have truly experienced anything.

And then, she moved over to her third canvas. A wicked little grin lit up her face with an expression that would have frightened her famous patrons. She didn't even think about the living room for that one. She lugged it into her bedroom, where it sat dead-on-center for each sunset that graced the room.

She took a step back, her hands on her hips. The painting grabbed hold of her immediately, even more potent than it had been in the dim light of Eric's bedroom. She could practically hear the deep, throbbing frequency of the woman's moan; she could almost feel the phantom pressure of a touch that wasn't there, a pulsating intensity that had her own breath hitching. Her body had already begun to betray her, a slow, heavy wetness blooming between her thighs as she leaned her back against the bedpost, eyes fixated on the woman's look of rapture.

Just then, the mood was shattered with a text message alert.

The phone vibrated in her palm. She leapt, her chest pounding in her throat, eyes scrambling through the words. Dan Masters.

"Jessie, been thinking... Sorry about that skirmish in the office. I apologize. What were we thinking? We good? What's the deal with the HBO renewal? Do I need to go to the indies?"

"Prick," she muttered, her sexual flush now replaced with cold calculation. Of course, Dan was predictable. He was the kind of man whose level of remorse was dictated entirely by his bank balance.

The wide, flared huff she drew from her lungs was the last thing she had the willpower for, the final glance she cast at the portrait of the woman before slamming down another fully professional, beautifully crafted lie.

"Hey, no problem, Dan. We're fine. No word from HBO, but I'll let you know as soon as I hear. As far as indies, you and I know you are so much more than that. Cheers, J."

She threw the phone onto the duvet and glanced toward the painting on the wall. The world of work seemed a million miles away.

==================

Jessie entered the shower and was instantly hammered with hot water as she opened up the tap. It was usual at this hour for her to be in a designer silk number, floating through a crowd of camera flashes and overly fragrant celebutantes in a sunset sky bar on a Saturday night, but the idea of doing the "career-maker" party tonight was neither here nor there. She looked through the glass shower door; on the bathmat, the gap where Waddles had sat had turned to silence.

At 11:00 p. m., she was curled up in her robe, drained more from the heart than the body. Her cellphone was ringing, shaking on the nightstand with a text from her friend Val: "Hey girl, Chad is asking about you. He said he needs you over here, and I'm pretty sure it's not for a script consult on 'Destiny.' "

Even if Jessie had wanted to, her thumbs quickly went into autopilot: "Sorry, guys. Still a wreck after losing my boy. Need a raincheck. K?"

Seconds later, she responded: "Totally understand, Jess. :( Yeah. He was the best. Take care." She placed the phone back on its charger, the link to the world snapped at last. She remained sitting on the side of the bed, the light from her bedside lamp warming the room. The woman on the canvas seemed to be breathing, almost moving, as if alive. Her fingers found the silk sash of her robe, and she slowly uncovered herself, letting the silk fall to the floor.

She looked back at the painting, at the parted lips and pure abandonment Eric had painted on her face. Her eyes scanned the woman's ecstatic expression, and she subconsciously mimicked the expression on her own face. She tentatively dragged her finger over the peak of her own nipple and watched as it hardened instantly in the cool air. Her breath hitched in a sharp gasp at the same time as she squeezed her other nipple, hard, for grounding.

Her eyelids grew heavy, and the walls and furniture of the room were melting away. The canvas transformed into a mirror in the playroom of her mind. The touch of her unconscious hands pressed down on her body; the lingering feeling of fingers wandering further down, threading through her own moistened folds and seeking the warmth between her thighs.

In the silence of the room, the woman in the portrait seemed to be groaning in time with the increasing cadence of her heartbeat. As she ran her fingers over herself, Jessie had a very clear and sudden mental picture. Pressure was on her mound as she felt herself being parted, but not by herself. Looking down in her mind's eye, she saw dark, untidy curls of hair bobbing between her legs, where she used to be running fingers through her own dark hair, wildly massaging her clitoris in a desperate frenzy. There was the top of a man's head, complete in his every devotion to his actions, licking and sucking at the most sensitive bit between her legs.

Eric?

The full knowledge of who she was just watching, the knowing he had watched her soul through grief's lens. Her hips arched off the bed, her muscles contracted, and she clenched. Her climax was earth-shattering, rocked her, and left her shivering in the sudden stillness of the room. Electricity shot from between her legs to her brain, and she heard a moan... a scream!

Then blackness.

==================

The sun was merciless, raw orange slabs of light streaming from high windows and splashing into the bedspread. Jessie squinted as she was jolted awake, opening her eyes only to find that she was totally nude on the bed; cool air chilled her naked body as she lay outside the safety of the duvet. The events of last night seemed like no more than a glassy swell of sensation still in her thoughts, a kind of residual vibration in her body that told her she'd crossed a finish line.

Across the room she saw the picture. The woman on the wall still wore her bliss, a face of ecstasy and madly unkempt hair. Jessie couldn't help herself. She released a giggly burst, her pillow squeezed to her chest, the way a high school girl does when she's just been asked to prom by the football captain.

"Pull yourself together, Blake," she said, tempering her amused smile as she made her way out of bed. She practically skipped to the bathroom on the strange rush of energy that had overcome her. Who knew where her mind had gotten off to during last night's display, she thought with a cheeky grimace, as she grabbed for the shower handle.

The warm spray pounded into her skin, and the "blur" sprouted into fierce flashings of color. She recalled the heft of her own fingers, the tempo she had established, and then how the memory changed.

She saw her fingers were lost in her own pubic hair, while she massaged herself. But it was not her hair. It was thick, dark, and unruly.

It was Eric's hair.

"Oh my god," she gasped out, the words echoing away in the water on the wet tile. And she rested her forehead on the cool porcelain, her heart starting to pound in an entirely different tune.

It was terrifying and addictive.

She ran the lives of the most beautiful people on earth, and her subconscious had skipped right past them all, to a lonely, painfully shy artist in a basement. Had it been his work itself that had unfocused her, or had something about him sown a seed she didn't realize was in her until she saw it bloom in darkness?

As she stepped out of the shower, steam still hovered in the air, like the fog in Jessie's brain, as she stood looking at the canvas through the door to the bedroom. The woman in the picture appeared more luminous in the morning light, her ecstatic expression frozen in a taunting challenge. Jessie watched the droplets stream down her skin, her heart pounding in her chest. The intensity was so heightened now; each breeze felt like a physical contact.

A sharp, ragged exhale escaped her, and she turned away from the bedroom. The fire was still there, but the world of big-time talent manager, Jessie Blake, did not pause for personal illumination.

She pulled her phone from the charger. The screen was a war zone of alerts, six missed calls and a deluge of texts from clients who apparently forgot how to operate the simplest motor skills the second she was off the clock. Typical chaos. Contract disagreements, wardrobe breakdowns, delicate ego meltdowns. Then one name brought her to a halt, Jason Maxwell.

She hit the voicemail notification, and the voice of the world's biggest teen idol poured out, sounding small and panic-ridden. "Jessie, are you there? I'm in a holding cell, for chrissakes. Please, I need your help, damn it. Call me A S A P!"

Jessie, standing at the kitchen counter, narrowed her eyes as the plan started to form. Jason was a pain in the ass, and his mother, Joan Maxwell, was a force of nature. Joan was on three prominent museum boards and had ownership of the city's most coveted galleries. She was the 'Old Money' of the art world; she didn't buy art, she dictated art.

Usually, dealing with the Maxwells was a chore of placating Joan's icy perfectionism. But as Jessie looked toward the living room where Eric's work hung, she felt a surge of cold, calculated ambition. Eric was a genius living in a basement, hiding from a world that would eat him alive... or make him a god.

Perhaps it was time for Jessie to be the "Sweet Angel" of Mercy for Jason -- but this time, she wouldn't be taking her fee. This time, the price for his freedom would be a seat at a table for an artist who didn't know he'd been invited.

==================

The bail clerk was a woman whose face was a map of years of municipal exhaustion; she took Jessie's card and waved it with a lazy shake of annoyance. She yammered about court dates and liability and the utter catastrophe of a "failure to appear," but Jessie wasn't listening. Bail was just a way to buy a day; she had enough favors in her contact list to make a felony simply a clerical oversight by noon on Monday.

Almost carelessly, she threw Jason into the leather seat of her SUV. The boy-wonder's body looked anything but fresh-from-the-popstar-factory, his wan cheeks contrasting offensively bright pink with the discotheque cool of trendy designer clothes.

"I bailed you out, and I'll deal with your mother," Jessie said, with the murderous thrum in her voice, grabbing the steering wheel. "But if you hurl in this car, Jason, I'm going to murder you myself. I won't even call a lawyer; I'm just going to drive you out into the desert and bury you."

"Errgh..." Jason moaned, clutching his belly as if he had a coup raging inside of him.

The journey along the well-kept roads of the neighborhood was mercifully brief. Wealthy areas like this one were constructed to deter noise from entering their private corner of the city, but they could also shelter the trouble inside from the rest of the world. Jessie pressed the buzzer at the huge iron gates of the Maxwell estate.

"Hello?" The voice was like shards of dry ice. Joan Maxwell would not abide fools, and that included children she had given the gift of life to.

"Hi, Joan. I've brought our boy along," Jessie said with a warm, professional smile. "He's not feeling very well at the moment."

There was a pregnant pause, the kind of quiet that almost always signaled a tornado on its way. Then at last, "Come up to the house."

The driveway led into a sweeping view of neoclassical buildings that would make the White House look like a weekend cottage. The moment Jessie cut the engine, she walked around the car to drag Jason out. He lurched forward, a weak, pitiful stream of bile splattering his lapel. "Son of a... That was close, Maxwell!" she snapped before steering him toward a bed of trophy hydrangeas right before he surrendered the contents of his stomach.

Joan Maxwell came out on the portico, a flame of intensity and stern grace. She didn't even glance at her son as he heaved into the bed of flowers. She strode past him and took her place at Jessie's side, placing a manicured hand on Jessie's shoulder in an uncommon mark of gratitude.

"Thanks," Joan said softly. "What are we doing today? News stories? Lawsuit?"

"I think I've got this," Jessie responded.

Joan tried a faint smile that was as rare as it was thin. "As always, I trust you do. If there is anything I can do for you..."

Over her shoulder, Jessie could see her trap snapping shut. It was time. "Actually, Joan," Jessie said, fishing her cell out of her purse. "I need your sharp eye; I found some art that's a little... creative."

Joan scoffed, a quiet aristocratic laugh of doubt. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a pair of artfully distressed designer eyeglasses, looking ready for some clueless hobbyist experiment. But as Jessie brought up the images of Eric's paintings on her phone, Joan stepped a little closer.

Her thumb moved through the three images again. Jessie's tragic emptiness, the warm glow of Waddles and her on the bench, and, at the bottom, the woman in the midst of ecstasy. Joan held her finger on the last one.

"A little racy," Joan whispered through her glasses. "But look at the lines... The technique. This isn't the work of a novice. The emotional impact is overwhelming."

"On the phone like this, you can't feel them," Jessie pushed. "You've got to be in the room. They shine."

Joan rolled through the images again, then she looked at Jessie. A faint pink was back in Jessie's face, the tiniest shake to her hand. "Feel them," Joan said again. "It looks as though they've affected you quite profoundly, Jessie."

"You could say that."

Joan raised a finger. "I'll be in your office tomorrow about our little Charlie Sheen wannabe," she said, pointing, somewhat blindly, at her sickly looking son. "Just bring the pictures along. I am starting to wonder if your knack for nurturing talent applies as well to the canvas as it does to the screen."

==================

Jessie felt a kind of rush come over her, and she couldn't believe what was happening. Joan Maxwell didn't "look" at art; she curated culture itself. If she was even open to looking at the pieces, Eric was in the top five percent of his field. If she actually liked what he had to show her, he'd be flying off into the stratosphere, passing into the top one percent, where talent turns legendary.

Rather than huddle in her quiet apartment, Jessie went for a walk. She followed the same route she and Waddles had laid out for years around the neighborhood. She moved along with a cautious persistence, eyes glued to the pavement, where she could almost trace the baleful ghost outline of a sullen Frenchie sniffing at every lamp post for the morning's town gossip.

Heart pounding, she approached the park. Sitting in the sunlight by the fountain, there was Eric, just as she remembered him at the fountain's edge. Only now he was painting the fountain.

The canvas was stunning. He'd painted the fountain in its hourly climax, a wild, shimmering explosion of water. The realism of it all was so striking she could feel the cool spray on her skin. "Eric?" she whispered as she walked up to him from behind.

He turned, and for a moment he let the stern barrier of his countenance slip, to expose a small, brief smile. "Oh. Hello. Have you come to bring me my sling?"

She let out a soft laugh, feeling her chest unclench at the sound. "No, sorry. I never thought... I wasn't even trying to find you. I was just... I don't even know. Old habits, you know? This was always our place. Waddles and I."

"I guess so," he mumbled, eyes returning to the spray of blue and white across his canvas. "Do you like the paintings?"

"So very much. I love them," she said in a voice that seemed positively maternal. "Actually, Eric, I know a couple of people. Big, big people in the art world."

He tilted his head in curiosity and looked at her with blank, confused eyes. He looked at her as if she was speaking about another planet.

Jessie was amused by his naivety. "I let them see images of what you do, and one of them's interested. Actually, she seemed intrigued."

His face did not seem to become excited or greedy; it remained perfectly, absolutely horizontal. "Eric, can't you see? This woman doesn't even notice ninety-nine percent of what is brought before her. Your paintings are different."

"I don't know whether I've got time to do paintings for her too," Eric said in a straightforward, no-nonsense way, as if he were talking about the supermarket shopping list.

"Well, don't you think she should at least take a look at them? Tomorrow, I will try to show her the three paintings I have, and I will tell you how it goes. Okay?"

"Sure. That would be okay. Thank you?" His voice trailed off at the end, heavy with uncertainty.

She looked at him, and really looked at him. There was something so wonderfully tender and adorable about his unassumingness. He was the exact opposite of the sharks she spent her days appeasing.

"Next time, bring that sling and we'll do that lunch we talked about. Okay?" He looked up at her, and the fright that had characterized him appeared to have faded, and in its place settled a stoic, unwavering gaze. She saw more of him now, the sweet man behind the talent.

"Sure," she said. "Come to the office and meet me there at noon tomorrow. You still have my card, with the address on it?"

"Yeah, I got it. See you at noon."

She lingered for just a few more moments, fascinated as he slowly added the finishing touches to the massive flume on the canvas. Then she quietly slipped away, leaving him to his latest muse, and her mind raced with the possibilities of what tomorrow would bring. How it could change his life.

-----------

The quiet was cut by the digital warble of Jessie's desk phone: end of the silence. The sleek voice of her assistant: "Jessie, Mrs. Maxwell is here." Jessie exhaled and ran her hands over the tight skirt and her blouse before pushing the button to respond. "Thank you, Susan. Please, send her right in."

She moved across the room to push open the heavy glass door. Joan Maxwell cruised into the room like a cold front in a dark silver silk suit. "Joan, how are you? Nice to see you," said Jessie. "You and Jason doing okay today?"

"Much better, now that we've managed to settle his fine and seal his records for his latest nocturnal adventures," Joan interjected briskly.

Jessie returned her usual pleasant smile. "Glad I could be of assistance, and he's back to normal? Fortunately, the series has just been officially renewed, so between that and the salary increase he's going to be getting, I suspect the two of you will be smiling very soon."

"Oh, I most certainly hope so," Joan breathed as she smoothed her hands over her reflection in the glass that separated Jessie's office from the rest of the space. "If he's going to keep racking up this much legal debt, he's going to need every cent. Now, what do I owe you for getting all this done away with?"

"Not a thing today, Joan. You paid for the bond, my bail money is back in my account, and the ride home was professional courtesy."

Joan paused, drawing a new cigarette from her silver case, and sliding it between her fingers in a smooth, effortless arc. She didn't bother to light it - no smoking in the office - but instead held it out like a baton. "That's very sweet of you, Jessie. Although you really shouldn't let me walk all over you like that," she poked the cigarette toward Jessie's chest and shot her a sly smile, "because you know I will."

"I'll risk it," said Jessie with a smile, motioning to a side table with a cloth covering three standing rectangular objects beneath like a veil. "I've got the paintings we were talking about. Want to see?"

What little joking Joan was doing was gone, replaced by the look from a world-class collector so sharp it sent shivers down Jessie's spine. "It's the least I can do given the circumstances."

She took a seat on the sofa. When the cloth was removed, the atmosphere of the room changed. Joan was silent for a long time. From the picture of Jessie and Waddles, she looked at the thin, ghostly painting of Jessie again, and then at the woman in ecstasy again. She stood, getting right up close to the canvas, leaning over the table so close that Jessie was afraid she would fall over.

"So much truth in this!" Joan whispered, her voice brimming with honesty now, unmasked by bravado. "By God, how has this guy escaped my attention for so long? This is... It's mind-boggling. You have such a great eye, Jessie. They're not just sitting here. They're speaking to you. They're practically yelling at you."

Even Jessie's own heart was pounding so fast it might jump out of her chest. Jessie gazed through her office's glass wall and recognized a familiar slouching form idling around outside the near the elevators, apparently at lost at sea in this gleaming corporate world. "Want to meet him?" Jessie asked, already raising a hand in the general direction of Eric.

"Oh, would I, dah-ling! He's a breath of fresh air," Joan clapped her hands. As Eric came farther into view, it was clear he was intending, if at all possible, to sink into the carpet. Joan carried her momentum forward. "We'll have to arrange something, honey. You'll have to give me a call at the gallery, maybe. I gotta go. Board meeting at the Met."

Out of the office she came, nearly crushing Eric against the bookshelf as if he was part of the architecture.

"But, Joan," Jessie yelled out, grabbing her. "He's... He's right here."

The elevator door closed as the vortex of silk and perfume disappeared. Jessie glanced at Eric, who was staring into the space Joan had been occupying with a vaguely puzzled expression.

"Sorry about that," Jessie said as she moved towards him. "She's a little... Fast. Did you get any of that? Eric, she adored them. She was blown away."

Eric entered the room and headed toward his work. He examined the pictures as if someone else had painted them. "How do you really know?"

Jessie sidled up to him and said, "That means your life is about to get real loud now, Eric. It means you might be famous. It means you might get to sell your work for hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of just hundreds."

Eric, who didn't seem impressed much by the idea of fame, contemplated this, staring at the half-finished "Sad Jessie." "That'd be all right, I suppose," he said softly, then turned to look at her with his glasses hiding his eyes. "Want to grab that lunch?"

"Sure," said Jessie, and a little odd wave of relief washed through her. She took the canvas sling she'd set by her desk. "I brought this back for you."

He eyed the sling, then looked back at her. A shy, if a little roguish, twinkle sparked in his eyes. "Most likely you're gonna want to take it home with you." He gestured at the paintings. "Honestly, I think I only came for the lunch."

Jessie, her smile wide with a curious crookedness to it. "Well, if you change your mind, we'll just have to do lunch again when I finally get around to dropping it off."

Eric's mouth broke into a faint smile. To see her again was easily worth the dreaded prospect of a gallery opening.

They made their way to a little street-side cafe down the block, taking seats at a small wrought-iron table. As they bit into their sandwiches, Eric let out a little snort, wrinkling his nose.

"This bread is made at the bakery by my place," he said.

"How could you possibly know that?"

"I can smell it. It has a very distinct smoky smell to it. They use a wood-fired oven." he took another bite, happy as could be.

Jessie looked at him, expecting that he was trying to be clever and joking around. She brought her sandwich to her face and put her nose to it to smell it. Eric's smile returned and lit up his entire face in the endearing way he only had.

"You're joking!..." she accused, but was giggling as well.

"No, not at all. You don't smell the oak?"

Jessie smirked, suddenly mischievous and affectionate. "If you don't sell your paintings, Eric... what do you do? I think I realized I don't know what you do with your days."

"What do you mean?"

"How do you make a living? Rent, food, those canvases and oils?"

"Oh!" said Eric. "I'm a security guard. Night watch at the warehouse on Meridian. Mostly empty. Gives me a lot of time to think."

"Which is why you are always in such a sorry state when I come knocking first thing in the morning," Jessie quipped. "I've been disturbing you from your after-job nap, have I not? Sorry."

Eric didn't answer her and didn't seem to take any offense to her actions. He only took another bite of his sandwich and stared out as the city slipped past.

As they stepped outside, they kept to the sidewalk. Jessie made sure he had her cell number again, her hand remaining on his arm. "Just call me, Eric. For lunch, or... For anything."

For some reason, she felt "safe" for the first time in days. Not because of locks or alarms. Eric was unlike anyone she'd ever met before. Amongst her motley flock of peacocks and predators, he was grounded, silent, entirely authentic.

"Count on it," he said. He gave her one last, lingering look and then turned to head off down the sidewalk. Jessie remained where she was, watching him pass out of her sight in the crowd, already planning the second appointment she'd need to make to return that sling.

==================

The week was a whirlwind of damage control. For eight hours a day, she was drowning in a sea of invalidated, overbearing people and wounded pride, but her mind kept drifting elsewhere. All she could think about was the quiet of her apartment, a retreat now carrying a ritualistic significance of its own.

Before Eric entered her life, nights were pure chaos. But since, she would finish her busy day, buy a bottle of deep, rich oak-aged wine, and then lounge beneath twin canvases in her living room. The oil rendition of her Waddles exuded such an undeniable vitality that it was almost as if he was still huffing with curiosity about getting his picture taken, while the other, a study of her own grief, was stark and unfinished. Rooted her in a brutally raw honesty she'd never admit to feeling.

Then, after one or two drinks, the alcohol would start to bloom in her chest, and she would scurry off to the bedroom, where she would shed her work armor, lie in the bed, naked. She would keep staring at the woman on the wall, waiting for the theater of her mind to start. The painting seemed more a portal, and although the lust it inspired was constant, the scene of her desires changed each night. She was sometimes with Eric, their bodies entwined; other times she was solitary, enslaved by her own hand. One night, she had even looked across the distance at the woman in the frame, and they both pleasured themselves in the same slow, deliberate way, neither breaking eye contact until the violent, world-altering release slammed Jessie back to the real world.

She awoke every morning with a wet bed, having fallen into the deepest and almost drunken sleep because of the sheer intensity of her mental dreamscape.

The change was abrupt tonight. The sounds of pleasure began first, low, billowing depth at the bottom of the familiar, vibrating frequencies that sounded as if they rose from the room's walls. The bedroom dimmed, abstracted into that hazy, in-between space in which the woman from the painting sat in her chair, slowly, oh so slowly, tracing her steamy, velvety lips.

Jessie stared in amazement as her own blood surged towards her sexual center and her own hand moved to press between her thighs. The heat was immediate. But then, the scene changed.

From the shadows behind the chair, a figure stepped forward. Eric. Lean, corded muscle and nothing but those heavy, distinctive spectacles on him. Jessie caught her breath, her fingers stalling against the moisture between her legs as her eyes focused on him. Her breath hitched. He had a ridiculously huge cock, and it only seemed to grow, harden, and lengthen the longer she stared at it.

Eric moved up toward her in silence and reached down with impossibly strong hands to hoist her off the mattress. He drew her tight against his chest before setting her down on top of him. He didn't push inside her, only mounted her on top of his length like it was a vaulting horse. Her swollen folds slid over the edges of his thick, rock-hard length, and the pressure of that weight alone was enough to shock a tremor straight through her body.

As soon as she was released, he stiffened into a veritable column. Jessie twisted her body to try to find some sort of leverage, but the movement only caused the sensitive bead of her clitoris to rub against his hard velvety shaft. She bit her lip and let out a whimper as she started to buck against him, needing a release she could feel building.

But just as the surf of her desire was breaking, he picked her up again.

"No," she cried, her hand shooting out to try and grab hold of him. He pushed her back onto the bed and hovered above her. A rush of animalistic terror added to the intensity of her pending orgasm. "No... I can't... it's too big!"

Eric remained silent. He only bent close, his eyes piercing into hers with a deep, soulful stare that shut down her protest. As he pressed into her, the anticipated agony failed to arrive. There was only absolute, enveloping completeness. The ecstasy of absolute possession, and the fadling of her broken fear, resulted in an orgasm so explosive that it felt as though the world had been shattered into a billion pieces, leaving only a blissful, black velvet void.

==================

Jessie stirred awake, laying in a tide of sweat and the other wet residuals of her indulgence, unable to discern her current world from what lay in the painting. She sat up, and the atmosphere of the space was thick and heavy. She looked at the woman in the painting. Her stomach fluttered, and her mind shook loose. She felt physically and emotionally empty, a cavern needing to be filled.

She undressed the bed, her trembling fingers throwing the dampened sheets to the floor and turning on the ceiling fan to its fastest speed so she could dry the dark mark on the mattress. She'd gotten up mentally exhausted, but her body was humming with a ferocious, jagged craving. The warm water of the shower hit her skin, shocking her overstimulated nerves. She slumped against the cold tile, her breathing shaky as she wondered where the dream left off and where she began. She ached. She was tender after repeated nights of trying to fulfill her unquenchable desires, but the urge, the need, didn't care about the toll being extracted. She thought about the version of Eric from her dream. The impossibly large, fearsome size of his cock and how her fear had been the most present thing in her mind, with her true desire to be broken apart. She wanted to be ruined. She wanted to be used until there was nothing left of the composed and professional Jessie Blake.

Again she looked at the woman on the wall, so peaceful, so focused on her rapture. A pang of pure hot envy shot through Jessie. She no longer wanted to watch the art; she wanted to be it. She moved with frantic, feral energy, throwing a sweatshirt on and sweatpants on, turning her back to her underwear. She didn't look like the pretty-and-calm talent manager that she was supposed to be; she looked like a woman on the verge of falling apart, her eyes unnaturally bright, wild, and hungry. She grabbed her key and ran out the door.

She ran.

At the basement door, she knocked away at the wood with a mad beat. "Eric!"

Within a minute, a rumpled and sleepy Eric looked out the window. He opened the door. "Jessie? What's wrong?"

She took the initiative. She pushed past him into the cool, oily air of the studio. "Eric, what is it about that painting? About you? How do you do it?" She turned back towards him, voice tight with emotion. "I gotta know! I've gotta make me... like her. I gotta be her! I gotta be the woman in the painting!"

She entered the lounge, stood in front of the sofa, her body a conduit of anguish and pain. Eric was statue-still with his inane silence. His spectacles were fogged over; she wondered if he could even see.

"Eric! Stop! Don't do that thing where you withdraw into yourself. Don't shut down on me!"

In one smooth, resolute gesture, Jessie kicked off her shoes and pulled the sweatshirt over her head. Eric sucked in a breath, and his eyes blew wide as saucers at the vision of her.

"Paint me," she said, her voice lowered to a do-or-die kind of whisper. "Put me in a painting somewhere and let me be like her, calm, relaxed, and satisfied in a realm of pure bliss."

She slid out of her sweatpants and sat on the edge of the sofa, worn to a velvet sheen from decades of use, her skin glowing white and iridescent in the grey basement light. Her hand trembled as she rubbed her own thigh nervously, her gaze locked on him, terrified and hungry. She wouldn't touch herself yet -- not yet, not until he was looking through his magic painter's lens. She had to show him. She had to let him catch the flame as it took her over entirely.

Jessie sat there, her heart beating as if a trapped bird was going to take wing in her chest. "Eric, please?" she whispered, the single word vibrating with a rough, uneven quality to it.

She eased her left calf deliberately, opening her posture, pushing it flat against the front of the couch. She kept a watch on his expression, waiting for any little twitch, any indication he was still functioning. Finding nothing, she flattened her right calf to the other side, opening herself up to him. She sank back into the battered cushion, her body trembling and her sex ready and wet, exposed to the studio's dull, industrial glow.

At last, Eric looked at her. Everything stopped. She hoped he saw the intense, aching want in her eyes. His eyes began to stray, focusing beyond her eyes, down the line of her shoulders. As he shifted his gaze, she was jolted with a power surge of electricity. It felt like a sable-haired artist's brush, so light, so cool, so deft, dancing over her skin. Jessie jumped at the jolt and looked down at her collarbone, but there was no brush, no hand. Only the air and the force of his gaze.

She rested her hands on her thighs, enjoying his gaze upon her. The inexorable touch only fuelled the flames. Still Eric stood, simply enjoying her, moving his eyes, as the 'touch' moved with them. It brushed her face, then traced the line of her throat, finally landing at her chest. That is where his eyes stayed. A focused, prickling heat spread across her left nipple, like a brush laden with paint applying the last, lingering stroke to a masterpiece. Jessie's breath hitched, the sharp sound echoing in the silence as the pointy nipple tightened in response. Then he looked to the right. Causing both nipples to stand fully erect.

An involuntary moan slipped from her lips, her head tossed back into the cushions and her eyes closing. And in that moment she knew that he was already painting her, but not on the canvas of a frame. No, he was changing her, painting her on the canvas of her flesh, with nothing but the light touch of his eyes causing her spirit to ignite.

Jessie didn't even have control of her own breathing anymore. She was aware of each movement of Eric's eyes, like he was actually redefining her body with a ghostly caress more intimate than any hand she had known.

When his eyes moved below her navel, the sensation moved with them perfectly. A thousand microscopic, silk-fine hairs were sweeping her mound, making her shiver so intensely that her blood hummed in sympathy. Her sex began to ache. A heavy, burgeoning sensation, as if her lips were already thickening and engorging, swelling and parting of their own accord to display her secret heat.

And then the floodgate opened. The sudden, hot rush of slick fluid caught her so unprepared that her breath hitched in a sharp gasp. She felt the heavy warmth pooling between her thighs, gathering thick in every fold before a single, heavy drop slid slowly down from her entrance.

Eric wasn't even moving, but his intensity radiated off him like an invisible heat. He observed with the detached, ruthless attention of a master, watching her inner petals begin to engorge and redden. It felt to Jessie like the invisible caress was concentrated now entirely on her clit, swirled in a rhythmic, teasing motion that had her hips bucking up off the cushion.

She shuddered violently, toes curled in. Eric kept his eyes pinned to the glistening warmth below. He watched the fluid's surface tension stretch to its limit, clinging to her skin for one suspended breath before gravity won, sending a heavy, honey-like strand dripping down.

A long, glittering thread hung like an enormous spider-silk from the parting lips of her pussy, reaching down, down, down until it touched the floor. The tether danced in the air currents. She was no longer a woman, only a work in progress, and the pulsing, primal, raw desire she inspired was already propelling her to the very edge.

The silence in the basement was thick and heavy, punctuated only by Jessie's erratic, jagged gasps. Another heavy bead of honey-thick, iridescent fluid began a slow descent down the glowing stand, an alluring reminder that she was more physically aroused than she had ever been in her life. Jessie's expression shifted as a new, sharper hunger took root in her eyes, transforming her pleading, desperate gaze into one that was positively wolfish.

Her hand came off her thigh, her fingers curled, beckoning him to come closer. Eric staggered forward as if walking underwater, staggering, dazed, but compelled to go on. As he drew near, she was met with that fragrance of him: the heady, musky aroma of paint and salt and the zing of pheromones.

Jessie sat up, stretching the thin thread of fluid that had pooled between them across the distance to the carpet as she moved. She caught his hand and tugged on it gently, pulling him forward, between her widespread, welcoming legs. She watched him close in, her eyes drifting down, fixed instantly, hungrily on the thick, hard shape thrusting against the material of his shorts.

She moved slowly and deliberately, her hands sliding in along his hips and and finding the waistband of his shorts as she finally sunk her thumbs into the side. Eric stayed frozen, his eyes filled with a veil of anxiety so impenetrable you couldn't tell what he was thinking. She didn't need his cue. She yanked. The shorts slipped down his legs and crumpled at his ankles. He stepped out of them.

She gasped when she looked at him. He didn't measure up to the fantastic monster of her feverish fantasies, but what stood before her was nonetheless jaw-dropping. He was thick, long, and filled with a heavy, throbbing heat. The dark, smooth, hooded head began to peek out from its shroud, shining in the dim light. It was beautiful and formidable, and a fresh ache bloomed and sharpened between her thighs.

When Jessie smoothed the velvet skin down over the sleek dark head of his cock, the sight of him, so undeniably real, almost made her drool. Leaning in to anchor herself in the reality of him, she let her lips touch the hot flesh; but as she did, Eric bucked back.

That look of complete fear in his eyes was enough to make her want to cry. He could paint a person's soul on canvas, but the world at large terrified him. Jessie sat quietly and gave him a gentle, reassuring look, palms open and welcoming. It dawned on her that he might be one hundred percent unfamiliar with a woman's love, her hand, her touch; after all, he painted ecstasy from the darkness, but had he ever participated?

"It's okay," she whispered.

He advanced slowly, like a wounded dog, creeping back between her splayed legs. He was still very skittish, holding back at just the right distance that his heavy length, frustratingly, never swept up against her folds.

Jessie reached out for his glasses, and gingerly took them from his face. His eyes were deep and clever and tender, and below them his jaw was strong and masculine. Without the glass barrier, the connection between them felt dangerously fragile. Jessie put the glasses down, then leaned forward, touched her lips to his. There was resistance at first, and she could tell he was caught unaware before he slowly responded to her. When her tongue teased his lips, he responded with an impulsive and tantalising sensation that, for the next few minutes, danced in unison.

As they kissed, her body began its crazed prep work, and she reached down, took his hand, and placed it on her left breast. She wanted to move him into the driver's seat. She wanted him to stop watching and start engaging. His fingers sank into the flesh of her breast, and he pulled back, staring down with pure astonishment, looking at her skin like it was a color or texture that shouldn't possibly exist.

He traced the patterns of her skin, his strokes becoming more assured, and soon his thumb was teasing the very tip of her nipple. The effect was instantaneous. Jessie's back went rigid, a ragged gasp of sound torn from her throat as she let out a tiny flood from her pussy. The iridescent, spider-web strand broke in the impact, little droplets glittering briefly, diamonds in the dim, until they hit the floor and were gone.

She shuddered through that tiny, sharp orgasm, and a gasp left her as the pleasure rippled then subsided, to be replaced by a deeper, throbbing need that almost hurt. She looked up at him with dark, heavy-lidded eyes.

Eric was a fast learner; the hesitant kisses had disappeared, replaced by a deep, questing hunger that made Jessie dizzy. When she pulled him down, her hands dug firmly into his shoulders, and he did not resist. He looked at her heavy breasts as though it were the work of art he'd finally been granted permission to examine, his breath hot on her flesh. When he finally drew her nipple into his mouth, his tongue swirled in an imitation of the kiss she'd shown him; the reaction was violent. Jessie rose off the sofa, her back arching like a taut bowstring ready to snap. The electricity was simply too much; a second sharp, rhythmic throb of pleasure produced another hot flow of slickness that dripped onto the concrete floor in a frantic staccato.

She was breaking apart, piece by piece, but it wasn't enough.

With her fingers dug into his scalp among those dense black ringlets, she pressed his head close against her breasts. His lips had worked miracles, but the agony throbbing in her core was now a voice demanding everything. Moving her body forward, she pushed herself up against him, searching with her pelvis to gain contact, the weight of him, the release.

However, Eric, never one to miss an opportunity for detailed inspection, merely stayed on his knees, his superb, heavy cock poised only inches from her own dripping and engorged folds. Every time she thrust herself towards him, craving the hardness of his velvet cock against her softness, he pulled slightly back to deny her by mere inches.

Her desire was an ocean, and she was drowning, the nectar of her own arousal steadily escaping her canal to dot the floor as she continued to weep into the open air of the room. It was torture, the exquisite bliss of his mouth against her skin contrasted against the hollow, throbbing void of her own unsatisfied cunt.

"Please..." begged Jessie, but he hardly heard her, his own internal requests for "more" paralleled rather than complimented hers. His senses were bombarded by the onslaught of her being. His head was deep in her breasts, the taste, smell and feel of her filling his senses with the rush of her hot flesh pressing against him.

Defiantly, no longer able to withstand his horrendously close presence, her hand darted off her thigh and to the top of his head. Her hand clenched in his hair; she pressed into him as gently as she could.

Eric obeyed the order and, with the same fury he would a brushstroke, his tongue was a tempest, whooshing along the length of her sternum, circling her navel, and then plunging into the hollow of her hips. Then, for Eric, the whole world was reduced to that one-inch strip of skin, the last frontier.

He finally touched what was currently the center of her world, it was more than a sensation; it shattered her reality.

"Ahhhhg!" A scream tore from her throat, rebounding off the concrete walls when his tongue sought out the throbbing, swollen heart of her need. The force of it almost lifted her from the cushions, and a convulsion racked her body with such ferocity that it seemed to vibrate into her bones.

A great hot flood of nectar followed her, speckling the velvet of the couch and joining the pool on the floor in a wild pattern; she was overflowing, hips grinding in blind craving.

Eric didn't hesitate. He didn't back away. He waded into the maelstrom. His face, slick with her, was etched with focus as he matched the rhythmic violence of her body. He darted from the swollen nub pulsing above to the engorged satin of her labia to plunge his tongue into the warm, syrupy depths of her. To him, this was the final piece of a complex puzzle that choked on its own frantic energy..

Her hands were iron clamps on his head, holding him down, pinning his head against her so tightly he could barely inhale. Her mind had checked out, her hips riding a seemingly endless climax, a wild jolt of raw, screaming ecstasy.

The room spun in a mad kaleidoscope of blurring images and shadows. Jessie's grip loosened. Her head spun, a raging inferno of endorphins from an orgasm that had clearly erased her brain. Eric leaned back onto his heels, panting, his wet, flushed face an unmistakable homage to the contours of her sex.

A raw, primal hunger, fogged Jessie's mind. She tipped her hips forward until the tiny distance between them disappeared. She kissed his mouth, a messy, desperate mating of lips as she tasted herself on him. The flavor was intoxicating: sweet, salty, and all theirs. As she dragged her tongue across his cheeks, licking off the remains of her slick, the scent invaded her, drawing her down into a velvet darkness.

Now she was running on pure instinct, vision tunneled and dark around the edges. She could feel herself nearing the cusp, but the emptiness in the middle had grown into a void that could only be filled with his thickness.

With a burst of surprising strength, she managed to pull him forward against the cushions. As he drew closer to her, she threw her legs around him, latching her ankles over the small of his back; she was a trap of soft skin and iron will, dragging him closer and closer until finally the scorching, hard tip of his cock was touching her, high to the left of her target, but touching.

She felt the electricity shoot through her. The heat of him was a physical jolt to her sensitive skin. His blunt velvet head instead pressed against the hood of her clit, rather than the slick pathway she had opened for him. He fumbled, blindly trying to position himself, but even just the feeling of his heavy weight pulsing against her finally brought more electricity lancing straight to the center of her.

She loosened a little, allowing him to instinctively withdraw. She shifted slightly before pulling him closer to her. This time, his shaft found its mark.

She was a country full of raw nerves, and he was a lost traveler. She could feel his jittery, bird-like pulse beating against her chest, betraying the fact that he was panicked. She wanted to soften him, to make him relax, but he was stiff, muscles tight and spooled, trying to scale the soaked landscape of her.

Jessie did not give him time to fumble. She squeezed her legs together around him again. She led him, dragging the dark head of his cock over the slick wetness of her until he was aligned, poised on the edge of her entry.

The head of him pressed in but a hair's breadth, the invasion of his entry stretching her already swollen flesh. Jessie let out a jagged, ragged gasp, and she locked her ankles tighter.

He paused, breath hitching, frozen for a heartbeat as the hot slickness of her started to consume him. The expression in his eyes was not just fear now; it was a horrible, terrifying revelation of just what he was about to do.

Jessie guided him in, an agonizing millimeter at a time, amazed he was even able to fit inside. Her own breathing was becoming shallow and frantic, her body stretching to accommodate his excessive length and impossible dimensions. And then she felt the scratch of his pubic hair against her clit, the final limit.

A shiver tore through her as her body reacted to just how thick and breathtakingly hard he was inside her. Her hips began to work against his in slow, rhythmic, hypnotic circles meant to tease every inch of their joining. It was magic. Being stretched wide, so slick against his velvet-thick heat was almost perfect. A tight friction and fullness that owned her, letting her know who possessed whom, smoothed by a lubricated slip that felt like silk and honey.

Still he hesitated, still too cautious to claim her; Jessie needed the beast within him. She released the iron grip of her legs, enabling him room to pull back until almost out from her, and then, with a sharp, insistent clench of her muscles, she snapped her legs tight, drawing him all the way deep inside her again, with strength which came from her own lust; it took them both by surprise and ignited her with a renewed orgasm.

She started to play him like a magnificent instrument. She let him go, let him back away, and then pulled him in again, only more rapidly, and more insistently. The last time, she not only beckoned him, but she forced him. Eric rammed into her with a primal, unrestrained fury that stole her breath in a gasp.

That's when she felt the shift, the hesitation giving way to his burning rush of hunger she feared was hers alone. She relented, a long, painful withdrawal that left her hollow, shivering. She didn't call him back this time. She waited.

The air was thick with the scent of turpentine, and time appeared to come to a halt. A pregnant pause between them, a silent transfer of authority. Finally, the silence became too much, and Eric broke.

He didn't slide; he slammed back into her, changing the angle as he shifted his weight to get over her, pinning her into the soft, overused cushions of the sofa. It was shocking. It felt like he'd suddenly become twice as thick and impossibly longer. He drove into her hard, his heavy length driving all the way in to press at her cervix.

This was it. The scene her subconscious had been practicing in its shadowy theater of her mind. She remembered the horror in her dreamscape, the certainty that he would rip her apart, the jagged reality of it. She hadn't been fleeing that destruction, she'd been racing toward it.

His rhythm went from searching to punishing. Like mechanical desperation, power, as he pumped her with hard and long strokes. His weight was forcing his cock into her wet pussy in a way that made the blunt head feel like it was going to erupt through her belly... her very soul. She wasn't a just woman who'd wound up fucking him in the basement; she was now the painting getting reformed by a master artist.

She threw her head back, hair fanning against the cushions, letting her body become a vessel for a series of exhaustingly perfect orgasms that came, one right after another, until her breath was gone, her throat raw with an echoing scream that eventually trailed off into a panting whimpering sound.

Eric was leaning over her, sweat and the blush of sex coloring his face. He was sucking air through an open mouth, straining to breathe, as though he were somehow trying to make words for a feeling without a name.

The world dissolved into one, beating point of contact.

A deep, rhythmic pulse started in a place so deep inside her where no man had ever been before, a sacred, concealed cavity deep within the depths of her soul. Jessie took a moment to hold her breath, then she let it out a trance-like gasp, and new orgasmic force took control. It wasn't just pleasure anymore; it was a total shutdown. Her entire body convulsed with an electrical storm.

Eric felt her reaction, as if something just grabbed his hard rod with a fist and squeezed everything into oblivion. That feeling made him swell with a full load, screaming to burst into an airless wet cavity. Finally, he erupted. Her body hit another hard pulsing orgasm as if intent on milking his rod of everything it had to give.

Jessie's eyelids closed as she slipped into a state so near catatonic he could hardly tell if she was breathing. Jess's pussy was crammed so tight and filled to the point she couldn't take in another drop. Tension coiled through her, each wave of sensation sending jolts of electricity through her body. She lay motionless, overloaded by sensations, gazing blankly at the ceiling, caught somewhere between exhaustion and disbelief.

His strength faltered, and he dropped on top of her. His ragged, raspy, jerking sobs returned as he pressed himself into her body, and he lay there for a long while before the basement grew silent again, interrupted only by the frightened engine of his twitching lungs. He looked to Jessie, who lay motionless, her eyes blankly staring into a world different from ours. He feared for her until finally reassured by deep, desperate breath, like a free diver, finally breaking the surface water.

Her focus came back in slow, blurry increments. Eric let out a low moan as he rolled off of her, the friction of his retreat ending in an audible wet "pop" as her swollen tissues finally released their grip on him. Jessie felt a great, warm rush of liquid come pouring out of her, such a huge volume that a primitive instinct of primal fear flooded her mind, convinced she was hemorrhaging from him spearing her all the way into her gut. But when she managed to lift her head and look down, all she saw was white. The edge of the couch cushion and the space between her thighs were covered in the thick, pudding-like cream. It was a staggering amount, evidence of his long-dormant hunger.

The silence was thick, like a velvet curtain pulled down and draped around her head. Eric's head was still in her lap, his breathing slowly coming down from the ragged gallop to just ... hum. She looked down on him, her heart thudding a frantic tempo against her ribs. His face was a map of chaos, sorely marked with the salty-sweet aftermath of an encounter that had violated every rule of an ordered universe.

She ran her fingers through his dark, sweat-dampened curls, the sensation of his scalp beneath her touch grounding her. She felt like a hollowed-out shell, her muscles humming with a residual electricity that made even the simplest movement feel like a monumental effort. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt the phantom sensation of him still inside her, stretching her, claiming her. Staying conscious was a battle she was losing. She looked down at him; his eyes were clear of any fear or anxiety. She could see him now. He was looking up at her with a gaze so profound it made her chest ache, a wide-eyed, unquestionable expression of true, unconditional love.

She closed her eyes, safe and protected.

She awoke having dozed off, her lap empty. Eric sat up, slowly, deliberately, like he was putting himself back together into something that no longer seemed to sit right. He didn't look at her. He stood; the weight of his long pale frame faded into the darkness of the room.

Jessie remained propped on the cushions, her flesh seeming to be a part of the sofa. Her eyelids were heavy, but she observed his return. He was dressed, his oversized glasses back on his face, their glass barrier preventing his heart and the harsh world from colliding.

She observed him moving around with a practiced, almost purposeful will. He was packing canvases, a handful of oils, and a bunch of brushes onto a rolling cart. The jingling glass jars, the rattling metal palette sounded like a song of despair to the silence. He grabbed the handle of the cart and headed toward the door without so much as a backward glance.

Jessie listened. His steps thumped on the concrete. He grunted with the effort of dragging his entire life's work toward the door. It swung open, and traffic noise crept into the room for a moment, then clicked shut.

She heard him put the cart down after carrying up the steps, its wheels gritted against the rough pavement of the walkway. Rumble-clack, rumble-clack. The rhythm was even, fading backward in an ever-distant direction until it was simply an echo of a sound, swallowed up by the dull roar of the cars passing by.

Standing up was a complete disaster. As soon as her feet hit concrete, her muscles had an all-out revolution. Her legs felt like they'd been cooked al dente, and her pelvis thrummed with a deep, bone-deep ache that made every step a strategic maneuver.

She felt like she had finished an Ironman triathlon, but hadn't bothered to train, let alone stretch first. The marathon had been run entirely on her back. The finish line had been a soul-crushing collision. If she was this sore and exhausted, barely twenty minutes after the "pounding", she could only imagine what the next forty-eight hours in store for her. Likely a lesson in how to recover from an overly indulgent libido. All of her core muscles felt strained, and already the tender tissue between her legs was on fire, the telltale flicker reminding her exactly how much of himself Eric had poured into her.

She navigated the basement with rigid movements. Locating the discarded sweatpants and sweatshirt, she pulled them onto her shaking limbs. The soft cotton against her overly sensitive skin felt like harsh wool. Thank God she hadn't been wearing underwear; the very idea of fabric rubbing against her swollen pussy made her feel nauseated.

She slipped her feet into her shoes and didn't even bother to tie the laces. She checked herself out in the tiny, cracked mirror hanging by the door. Her hair was a bird's nest of static and sweat, her lips were smeared with lipstick that she didn't even remember putting on, and her eyes... Her eyes looked as if she'd seen the face of a god and lived.

She was a wreck. A gorgeous, exhausted wreck.

Jessie emerged into the fresh air of Montgomery Way, the afternoon sun direct and unrelenting on her pupils. She trudged back home with ginger, wide-legged strides, her mind's cinema playing out memories of the surge as he came inside her, his surprising "pop" at the end, and the wondrous and frightful size of him.

She was already dreaming of a bag of frozen peas and a bottle of chardonnay by the time she set her key in the door.

==================

The light an unwelcome visitor, creeping between the blinds and stabbing at Jessie's eyelids so she had no choice but to wake up. She attempted to roll onto her side, which caused a chorus of pain; her muscles didn't simply hurt, they felt as though they'd been pulled off of her bones, beaten with a hammer and reattached with rusty wire. Her center was a ball of stabbing, penetrating pain, the skin on her inner thighs red from the very friction of Eric's wild movements.

And then there was the fire down there.

The fire down there was localized, burning and pulsing so, that she could hardly breathe without another burst of discomfort erupting. Still, she sat up. Her knees were still shaky and sore. She felt gravity more intensely as she moved. She swung her legs over the side of the bed carefully, feeling her own flesh like a heavy, unwieldy object hanging from her body, wasted and exhausted.

She limped into the bathroom with the plod of an injured fighter. She started the shower, its savage roar matching her internal hurricane. She sat down on the toilet. The urine was a yellow stream of pain. It was more than a sting: It was a lace of broken glass drawn through an open wound. She seized the sink and white-knuckled the edges while her teeth clenched and she held back the scream.

"God, let me die! Just let me die!" she snarled at the medicine cabinet in a hoarse voice.

Nevertheless, when the initial shock wore off, one nagging thought persisted in her mind: "You asked for this," she thought grimly, yet a crooked smile tugged at her lips. You asked to be ripped into shreds. You asked to be the art. Here you are - after the art is finished. The commission must be paid.

She stood up slowly, her heart hammering as she looked down into the bowl. Given the sheer, gut-wrenching pain of the sensation, she half-expected to see the water stained a deep, crimson red. She felt as though she had been physically dismantled. But the water was a clear yellow, a mundane reality that mocked the drama of her nerves.

She limped into the shower, hissed as the spray hit her sensitive skin, then let out a breath as the heat sank into her tired, aching muscles. She stood under the spray for a while with her eyes shut, letting the warm steam expand her lungs. Her entire body felt bloated and tender; her sex felt overfull and throbbed with the ghost of the pressure of Eric's thick, deep release, but the warm water was a blessing. She was an absolute wreck, a beautiful yet shattered ruin, and as she began to soap the sweat and the spent pleasure from her skin, she knew with absolute clarity that she would never be the same woman who'd entered the cellar.

Steam formed a white mist that shrouded Jessie as she held herself in place, allowing the spray to work its needles on her tortured muscles. She started a slow, clinical inventory of the way her body had been destroyed, following the contours of her skin.

She saw the chafe, angry red streaks of where the friction of cotton sweatpants against raw skin had rubbed away while walking home, saw the irritations, a sensitive swollen warmth in her crotch as if it had been stretched to a new, permanent geography of itself, but the black and blues were the ones that told the truth.

She looked down and saw a large, flat purple stain emerging from her ankle. A bruise, like an enormous thumbprint from a giant. She frowned, trying to remember where she'd got it when suddenly the memory hit her with the force of a punch to the stomach. There she was, back on that velvet sofa, her knees wrapped tightly around Eric's waist, her ankles crossed with every ounce of her body's force to keep him there, and she'd left her own bruise on herself. She'd squeezed so hard, desperately trying to keep that weight from getting away that she'd bruised flesh to bone on her own foot.

Leaning her shoulder against the tiles, the steam rising around her made her head light, and with her eyes closed, she allowed her mind to fully realize the sheer size of him again. How there hadn't just been a sensation, but a feeling of being occupied in every sense of the word. A blunt, smooth stone was what the tip had felt like, an impossible, widening sensation of being spread from the inside out, until it had reached the point where Jessie wasn't there, just the feeling that he was inside her.

He'd been a monolith. A living, velvet-coated rod of steel that had taken her entirely, completely, and pressed deep into her, as though he wanted to imprint his mark on her for all eternity. Now, standing there alone in the steam, her body felt... "full," as her nerve endings still bounced with the ghost of the stretching, soul-twisting invasion. And she understood that the pain wasn't an incidental consequence, it was his pigment, his brush, and she was his canvas.

Her thoughts made her body ache for him, like an electric pulse wrapped around a brutal sting in her flesh. Jessie tiptoed around her bedroom as if she were made of glass, setting each step down softly, carefully to reduce the abrasiveness of her abused body. One more carnal assault wouldn't be feasible in her current state: She just wouldn't be able to take it, but the enticingly inescapable emotional attachment was there. She wondered to herself. If he'd really been a virgin, he wasn't just feeling "something", he was probably undergoing a total detonation of his mind and soul at this point.

She towel-dried meticulously, the thick, soft loops of fabric scraping painfully over her tender mound and thighs. She threw out her daily power suits, opting for a breezy, low-slung sundress that flowed and clung to her at the same time. No undies, even the thought of elastic discomforted her. She paused before the full-length mirror, lifting the hem just enough to see the evidence of his claim: the swollen, dark-pink architecture of her sex.

"No one will ever know," she breathed softly. An impish grin teased the corners of her mouth despite the pain. She passed the picture of Waddles and Sad Jessie, and she felt the warm tears well up inside her. She made her way to the door, feeling like she was carrying a secret fire in her chest.

The Montgomery Way she discovered felt like a different world. She reached for the brass eagle ringer, her hand grasping at empty air. It was gone. Not just removed, but as if it had never existed. Puzzled, she knocked on the door, and the sound was hollow, brittle. Large, sun-bleached flakes of paint spiraled away from the wood, dancing in the air like dead leaves before settling in the dust at her feet.

She leaned forward to look through the window, but what she saw was murky. The glass was coated with a thick, dried layer of dirt and filth, baked on by years of neglect. "Flood or something?" she muttered, the first flush of unease prickling on the back of her neck. Her hand shook as she fished out the phone, finally managing to get to his number. "The number you have dialed is not available..." The robotic voice echoed through her head and slapped her.

"Fuckin' phone company!" she yelled, heading down the sidewalk with her now familiar gingerly wide stride. She would not let herself believe it. He was at the park. He was an artist; he had maybe been hit by the morning sun and wanted to document the afterglow of the previous day on a blank canvas.

She feebly hurried the three blocks, a subtle, still cautious bounce to her gait. The happy reflection of the woman she'd been trying to come back.

She spotted a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat, standing in front of a canvas. "Eric!" she cried, her voice light with relief.

He turned. The man, who looked to be in his seventies or so, had thick glasses and a face as wrinkled as a dry leaf. He was carefully dabbing muddy green onto a canvas straining to augment some wonky ducks.

"Oh... sorry," she stammered, the joy in her step vanishing instantly, the disappointment a physical blow to her stomach.

She retraced her steps to the Eric's apartment, her heel beating a solo cadence against the sidewalk. She pounded on the door again. Her knuckles ached against the planks. Silence. No hint of turpentine, no creak of canvas, no deep and steady breath.

Having no other options, she headed to the small staircase that led up to the units above. Someone had to be able to tell her what happened to the man with the massive cart and the unbelievable, soul-crushing talent.

Jessie shoved open the heavy front door and entered, hearing the squeal of hinges as she went down a short, dark hall where the accumulated scent of time and mail and overdue rent hung heavy. Her body throbbed with every step, a sharp, rhythmic reminder of the man she was looking for. She scanned the row of tarnished mailboxes. Then her eyes landed on a door marked 101, with a small, hand-lettered sign taped beneath the number: Building Owner.

Jessie's knuckles pounded nervously on the wood of the door. Inch by inch, the door swung open, and the world spun...

"Hello? Can I help you?"

The girl in front of her was clad in a faded T-shirt and a well-worn pair of jeans, her hair tied up in a messy knot. But Jessie didn't see the denim and the cotton. Her brain made a sudden slingshot leap to the canvas in her room. She was gazing upon the girl in the picture. The woman's clothing dissolved within her mind. Jessie saw the arched back, heavy, firm breasts, and swollen, dark nipples that quivered with each frantic stroke of the woman's self-inflicted pleasure. Her fingers danced rapidly between wet folds and flicked against a swollen clitoris, her face twisted in a raw, lovely mask of primitive release.

Jessie stammered and tried to put this all together. Is this how Eric feels all the time? Jessie thought to herself, her heart beating fast.

"I-- I..." she faltered, unable to get her voice to work for her. The contrast of the plain woman at the door and the goddess of ecstasy in the painting was too great. She tried to get her throat to relax so she could enunciate; too tired to do so, she simply mumbled. "Sorry... I was looking for Eric."

The woman narrowed her eyes, her gaze sharper, more defensive. "I don't have any Eric living here."

"He lives in the basement!" Jessie's voice came in a desperate pitch. "The basement apartment. The studio below the house."

"Are you serious?" the woman retorted, the words coming out as a sharp, incredulous laugh. "There's no basement apartment, sweetheart. Just the cellar down there. There's only the boiler, along with a bunch of moldy furniture, mothballs, garbage, and anything else you'd care to store away."

"Are you sure?" Jessie's voice was barely audible now, her knees starting to shake. "I was just there. I was just... In the studio."

"Listen, lady," the woman barked. Her reserve snapped like a stick. "It's my building. I've owned it for fifteen years. I think I'd know if I had a tenant living in the basement. Try someplace else and mabe be a little more careful of how much you drink at the club."

Jessie could only nod mutely, her mind in a fog after the door shut unmercifully. She retraced her steps to the street. At the curb, she turned and looked back at the brick facade, searching for the address plate. A wave of panic washed over her. 0812, the numbers that led her to his doorstep, were no longer there. Just a smooth brick wall, scuffed and worn, with no sign of having ever had something attached to the brick.

She was all by herself on the sidewalk, her body sore from a man who, according to the world, had never even existed.

The walk back to her apartment was a blur of concrete and static. Jessie moved like she was sleepwalking through her life, her body a map of phantom sensations, the deep, internal throb of his entry and the cooling slickness of his departure. The very things that the world was trying to tell her were hallucinations. Her mind raced, grasping for a logical tether. Carbon monoxide? Amnesia? But the ache in her pelvis was too vivid, too structural, to be a trick of the mind.

Jessie reached for her keys, and they clinked in her hand as she trembled uncontrollably. I need the paintings. They're the proof. She thought. They were the tangible receipts of the man that had broken her apart.

She pushed the door, listening as it swung open into the silent living room. Her eyes found the wall where his paintings were, and her breath exploded out of her mouth in a loud, rough cry. They were there, but one had somehow evolved.

The portrait she'd called "Sad Jessie" was no longer a haunting, solitary face in a sea of pristine, vacant canvas. The emptiness had been replaced. While she'd been losing her mind on Montgomery Way, the brushstrokes had spread into a stunning scene: the park, the speckled sunlight behind the oak leaves, the timeworn bench where she'd sat alone after sending her beloved pooch to doggy heaven.

But it was the center of the frame that made her heart stutter and stop.

There, draped across the painted version of her lap, lay a blue-merle French bulldog. The detail was exquisite: the silver-grey coat, the bat-like ears velvet-soft even in oil. The dog's heavy, blocky head rested firmly on her painted thigh, his weight a visible anchor. He was looking up at her sad face with a gaze so profound it made her chest ache, a wide-eyed, unquestionable expression of true, unconditional love.