Chapter 2: Modeling Contracts

It took two weeks before Dee came to the studio to pose for us. I was surprised that Kendra managed to persuade her to model for all three of us. Dee was the most body-shy person in our class. The first time I’d drawn her nipple, she only pulled her shirt up high enough so I could see it without seeing anything else. She even hid her bra so I wouldn’t see that. She described it as a liberating experience, though, and the next session, she simply removed her shirt and bra and sat for over an hour as I drew. There was a downy softness to her with fine light hairs all down her torso. It made me want to reach out and pet her.

Mavis got to the house early and set up three different lights to flood the area where Dee would pose. She had a pretty hefty camera on a tripod, but we managed to accommodate all her equipment. It was kind of funny in a way. We now had five workspaces in the studio. Annette had her little sofa and reading corner. She called herself a Luddite because she wrote out all her first drafts longhand in a spiral notebook. Of course, she transferred it all to a laptop later, but she felt strongly about her first drafts. Morgan had a desk in the corner and spent nearly all her time on the computer or the phone. I felt bad about the fact that she was the only one of us that we didn’t have a class with because she was a year ahead of us. She even commented about being left out and considered taking a year break so we could be juniors together. But she couldn’t stop any more than one of us could stop painting or writing. Kendra had a worktable with a high-intensity lamp clamped to the edge. She liked working in clay and created maquettes that she then used as models in the sculpture studio at school where she created the plaster master for her casting. She talked about experimenting with porcelain, but didn’t think she’d be allowed to do that until the next year. Of course, I had my easel and paints. And now Mavis had her camera.

Dee didn’t pose completely nude. She was still a little nervous, especially with the camera added into our mix. Kendra had been the de facto organizer of models ever since she convinced Susan to pose for me last Christmas and then facilitated poses by everyone else in our Lib Arts class. But Annette slid smoothly into the coordinator role as Kendra focused on getting her clay ready. Annette gave Dee a fluffy robe and told her she could get ready in the bathroom and then just come into the studio. We wouldn’t remove the robe until we were ready to start. Dee came out dressed in just her panties and the robe.

I hadn’t seen that robe before and I loved it. It was really fluffy. I suggested that we put her on a stool and keep the robe, but have it slide down her shoulders as she held it together just below her breasts. We positioned her three-quarters back to us and got a nice expression on her face.

Mavis and I had our first mild conflict when she wanted to use a flat blue paper backdrop to isolate just Dee with no surrounding ‘distraction’ as she called all my drapes. Of course, I wanted to fill the background with falling fabric. We managed a compromise. I got one draped strip with the rest of the image against the blue screen.

“Um ... Dee? May I position your robe? We want it pulled down your shoulder and back. I’ll try not to touch you inappropriately,” I said. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I’m all yours,” she sighed. “And after what Susan told me about what you did to her last spring, I’ll be deeply disappointed if you don’t pet my breast at least once.”

“It’s really not about being sexual,” I explained rapidly. “Just posing.”

“I know. But it would still be a shame to waste the opportunity,” she whispered. “No one’s ever touched them but me.” I pulled the robe down in back and all the way to her elbow on the left sleeve. I’d intended to leave her breasts mostly covered, but what she said moved me. I didn’t get really turned on by Dee. I liked her and appreciated her body, but it wasn’t like the instant arousal I felt with Mavis. As I’d realized with Kendra months ago, caring for my models was more than just seeing that they had a break every half-hour or so.

I leaned in to Dee and very lightly kissed the startled girl as I ran my hand down her chest and over her left breast, pushing the robe down below the downy globe. While our lips touched, I circled her nipple with my fingertip to be sure it was fully erect. She whined a little as I stepped back. Her eyes tracked me as a huge smile lit her face. The flash from Mavis’s camera and lights went off as soon as I was out of the picture and we were all focused on our work.

“You should have seen her aura light up!” Morgan said. “It wasn’t ... hmm ... Well, there was an element of arousal involved, but I’ve seen more sexual arousal in people who were watching a football game. It’s not like she was suddenly getting ready to orgasm. There was just this light of joy that came from her.”

“You could see that just in her smile,” Annette said. “What a beautiful glamor shot Mavis got. The whole set, actually.”

“Did I ... um ... do wrong? Kiss her?” I said. My Lady, Fay, and I had frequently discussed the relationships that developed as I was posing a model. I was really worried when Kendra and I both orgasmed the first time she modeled nude for me. She’d modeled a couple more times since then and we didn’t see any adverse effects for either our friendship or my relationship with Lady and Fay. Perhaps we were more casual in the way we treated each other, not avoiding contact that we might have considered inappropriate before.

“I think you did just right,” Annette said. “I heard her ask you to touch her. She placed a lot of trust in you at that moment. You could have just mechanically reached out and squeezed her boob, but you made her first time being touched by a man something that she’ll remember all her life. That little kiss sealed your friendship, but it didn’t make her a lover or damage anything we have.”

“That’s what I meant about it not being arousal,” Morgan said. “She didn’t fall in love with you but she was proud of ... maybe how grown up she was.”

I was relieved. If Annette and Morgan were okay with it, I was okay.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that there would be other encounters. Not everyone wanted to pose nude. Rachel had made a very strong argument in favor of the school policy in her paper. She did pose in a little cheesecake outfit like a 1950s pinup. Her paper cited comments she’d made last school year about how seeing drawings of her classmates had affected how she thought about them, even though she had no objections to having posed topless herself.

Leonard continued to pose with Casey. They’d gone their separate ways during the summer, but once back in school they renewed their relationship. It still looked strange, considering Casey was about 98 pounds thin and Leonard was well over twice that, but they gave us one of the hottest poses of the year. Casey straddled his lap and planted a huge kiss on him that she was able to hold for thirty minutes with no difficulty. Leonard kept his briefs on, but we did a swirl of fabric around the two that occluded the small scrap that was exposed. Casey was fully naked and I think if he hadn’t had his underwear on we’d have seen considerably more than either of them wanted us to.

Jonathon came in with his own pose. I’d expected something that let him keep his pants on. He’d complained of becoming aroused when he posed shirtless for my project last year. He didn’t seem to have any embarrassment about it this time.

“I practiced this pose in the mirror,” he said. He wore a flat cowboy hat and a Mexican blanket. The blanket was tossed up across his shoulders and the angle pulled the tail over from the right just enough to cover his junk. His left side was bare from his nipple to his toes. He stuck a short stub of a thin cigar between his lips. Hell, yes. He looked like a naked Clint Eastwood from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Mavis went over to adjust the angle of his blanket a couple times, making a comment about how things were escaping. I found myself a little jealous of their flirtations and a lot hard.

“You know, eventually you are going to have to pose for me, too,” Mavis said. School was out for another two weeks after Christmas and Mavis had offered to pose for me ... just for something to do. I was really getting into having models using drapes in all kinds of classical poses like I’d done with Kendra. Of course, we were using them as inspiration and not trying to duplicate the poses. I had in mind doing a full suite of paintings of Mavis, though I hadn’t mentioned it yet.

I needed to see if I could survive one.

Kendra was out East for the holiday and for some reason, Morgan and Annette had both decided they needed to go to the mall. That was strange because one of them was always with me when I had a model in the studio.

And I was nervous. This was Mavis looking at me intently. And she was just wearing that fluffy robe we’d acquired for models.

And then she wasn’t wearing it. It fell in a casual heap at her feet. She was just standing in front of me and I was trying not to stare at her nudity but she was so ... naked. And beautiful. And I was so hard it was painful.

She stepped right up to me and kissed me on the cheek. She took my left hand in hers and placed my fingertip on her right nipple. I moaned as she used just one of her fingers to stroke up the length of my cock in my jeans. Then she stepped back.

“I just want you to know that you affect me the same way,” she smiled. “Now what position would you like me in?”

I could think of several. I shook my head to clear it and got back to thinking about the pose I wanted. I’d done rough sketches of half a dozen and showed her one I thought we’d start with. She perched up on the stool and I artfully draped the long strip of silk around her. I’d chosen a dark blue that contrasted nicely with her blonde hair and intensified the electric blue of her eyes. Eyes that held mine the entire time I posed her.

“Can you keep your eyes toward me in this pose?” I rasped as I stepped back to the easel.

“That’s easy to do,” she answered. Her lights flashed. She changed the expression on her face and they flashed again. “Remote control,” she laughed. Then I started drawing.

I’d never posed a model so that she was looking directly at the artist ... me. They always had another focus. But I couldn’t bear to have Mavis’s eyes looking anywhere else. I just had this visceral response to her that overrode all my other thinking. When I paused in my drawing to look up at the model, I wanted to look into her eyes.

Over the next week of daily visits, we did a total of eight drawings and I prepared a canvas for the first one. There didn’t seem to be any concern about whether or not one of my girlfriends was with us. Sometimes they were and sometimes they weren’t. We didn’t grope each other, but we didn’t shy away from each other either. When our hands brushed each other or I reached to tilt her head or position her arm, I felt an electrical tingle run through my body. We silently saluted our mutual attraction and then went to work.

Then we were back in class.

Les Dorn hung around all the time now. I liked him. He never said much more than I did and was often as tongue-tied when around other people. When we were alone together, we’d go for an hour without saying anything. Then, odd as it seems, one of us would say something that just cracked us both up.

“Kendra invited me to the sculpture studio to see her newest thing,” Les said. “When I got there, she and Annette were bouncing up and down as they looked at it. Then they kissed each other and I got an instant boner. God, she’s sexy.”

“Annette gets that reaction from me all the time,” I said.

“I meant Kendra.”

We looked at each other and both busted out laughing.

In April, the two of them finally got around to actually going out on a date together. Les moved in with Kendra at the end of the semester over his father’s objections. The objections didn’t seem to be overly strenuous, though. Mr. Dorn made a monthly maintenance contribution to Les to pay for housing and food as part of his college expenses.

It was cool that the five of us could go out together and no one felt left out or like they needed to include someone else. Kendra and Les were a couple just like Annette, Morgan, and me. Well, we were like a trio, but that’s what I mean.

More and more often, Mavis was with us when we went out, and occasionally, Susan.

It seemed that Zen blamed my art for the poor response to the auction of her portrait. She complained about having been taken to the cleaners and that no other model would work that cheap. Susan had told me that she needed to stop posing for me after the performance in the spring for fear she was becoming addicted to the sexual high it gave her. But when Zen forbade her from modeling, it really got her hackles up. Whenever Zen had one of her long cam sessions, Susan showed up at our studio.

Usually, she just sat with Annette while the two of them worked on their various literary projects. Susan was determined to become a poet, but she regretfully admitted that she’d probably make a living as a journalist. She had contributed a short article to the Examiner each week about the goings on at the university—especially during second semester when the BFA exhibitions got rolling. She didn’t get to review an exhibition unless the regular arts reporter didn’t go to the opening, but she did get to do an occasional interview. Aside from that, she was supplementing her income as a barista at Hallowed Grounds.

Morgan interned at a gallery again that summer between her junior and senior years and took three of my paintings with her. They didn’t sell during the summer months, but it was cool to see my paintings hanging in a gallery with real artists. And in September the first one sold. I had enough to pay models for the rest of my junior year.

That was good because it was the only income I was generating and I didn’t feel like I was contributing to the family. We were lucky that Mom and Dad were willing to support us through college and Annette’s parents were helping, too. But we didn’t want to be freeloaders. I didn’t. Annette had a part time job of just ten hours a week in the school library. That was about how much time Morgan could spend at the gallery. They’d asked her to continue working weekends after school started. Kendra had a teaching assistantship for the studio arts fundamentals class. I painted. I was getting worried about ever being a contributing member of the family.

Les surprised us by bringing three other artists to Morgan to get her to represent them. He was good at talking to the artists but not at talking to galleries. Morgan, a year ahead of us, became a sort of mentor to Les since they were in the same discipline. They even created a working relationship in which he handled getting clients to represent and did the bookkeeping. She found places to sell the clients’ work and paid Les a referral fee from her commissions.

Morgan was working on placing some of my paintings in other galleries and larger cities in the Southwest. She had a couple of positive responses and encouraged me to just keep painting. Another of her artists had a successful opening in Phoenix. Morgan was gone a couple of days to help coordinate the installation and opening.

It was Les who made a breakthrough with my Lady.

“Annette, may I read one of your stories?” Les asked at lunch when we were all sitting around comparing our fall class schedules.

My junior year fall schedule was the most varied I’d had since I started. I had an art history class that focused on landscape painting from Nazca to Heizer. How’s that for thrilling? I was having fun in a photography class with Mavis called Ethics and Image. My one studio class was almost beyond me. It was called After Drawing and focused on the connection between idea and image. It was something I felt I had a handle on before I came to college when I was painting dreamscapes out of my imagination. Now I was focused on painting much more perfect representations of real life.

“Really? Why?” Annette asked. I admitted to myself that Les was paying more attention to Annette’s creative endeavors than I had been lately.