Chapter 2

Hannah did call me, about two minutes after I got home. She knew how long it would take me, apparently. I’d had ten minutes to think about things, which is to say I’d had ten minutes for my mind to run rampant as I drove down quiet streets. It was good they were quiet. I really had no business driving at that point in time. You know how sometimes you drive from point A to point B and when you get there you don’t remember anything about the trip? It was like that.

“You don’t have to pose for her, Bob,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“She shouldn’t have asked you.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Of course she’s right. You are the only man she could have asked.”

“I guess,” I said again.

“But it was ridiculous of her to do that.”

For some reason what I thought of at that moment in time was that Hannah thought I’d be a poor model. And since all a model has to do is sit there, that meant she thought the end product would be ugly. A desire to believe otherwise and defend myself caused me to speak before I thought things through completely. That was the real problem in this situation. I hadn’t had time to process the whole idea or think about it in any kind of dispassionate manner.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not that ugly.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said, her voice level.

I did? Who says I did? Well ... Hannah, for one. That was ... something. Not weird, exactly. But not expected, either. Of course we’d never sat around and had a discussion about either one of us in terms of how we looked aesthetically. Who does that?

“I guess I don’t know what you mean, then,” I said. I was tired and it was hard to think.

“I meant that of course you’d be uncomfortable being naked in front of Harper,” said Harper’s mother.

“I guess,” I said, going back to what was apparently my standard response that evening.

“You guess? Don’t you know?”

“I don’t think I know anything,” I said. “I think she just caught me by surprise.”

“Gee, you think that might not surprise somebody?”

“Did it surprise you?”

“That’s different. I’m her mother. She sees me naked all the time.”

Talk about offering a jug of water to a man dying of thirst. My fantasies being the man, of course, and her comment being the water.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t feel like we’ve finished discussing this, though.”

“Fine. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Okay. Good. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, Bob. You’re not obligated. You mean too much to us for something like this to poke a stick in your spokes.”

I blinked. I hadn’t heard that phrase in years and years and years.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just need sleep.”

“Okay. ‘Night.”

I hung up and headed for bed. About eight hours of unconsciousness right now sounded pretty good.

Turns out sleep probably wasn’t what I needed. That’s because I don’t think there was all that much of it that was actually unconscious.

I’m referring to dreams, of course, which don’t feel unconscious at all. I read somewhere that the average dream only takes a few seconds to play out in the sleeper’s mind. A dream that “lasts” for several hours in the dreamer’s mind might take only the time required to blink one’s eyes a few times. That would suggest that our brains can “think” at speeds suitable for space travel, while we’re not cluttering them up with conscious thoughts.

I had several dreams that night and, while they might only have taken a total of ten or fifteen seconds of my sleep time, when I woke up I felt like I’d pulled another all-nighter cramming for final exams in college. Let’s just say I didn’t feel rested.

One of those dreams was about me answering the phone and Hannah saying, “She shouldn’t have asked you.” Then, magically, I was transported to her living room and we were sitting on the couch. Hannah stood up suddenly and said, “Does my butt look fat? I think this outfit makes my butt look fat.” And I answered, “No, I don’t think so. Actually, your ass is perfectly symmetrical when compared to your waist and luscious titties.” For some reason calling them “luscious titties” didn’t faze either of us and felt completely appropriate in this dream.

Then I stood up and said, “But I have a question for you. Does my cock bulge out too much in these shorts?” For some reason I was wearing silk boxers in this dream, and nothing else. She looked at me critically and said, “Well those shorts certainly show it off.” To which I answered, “Well I don’t want to advertise or anything.” Hannah walked around me once, looking me up and down and said, “No, she’ll love it. Just make sure you don’t take them off. Nobody gets to see that big boy except me!”

In another dream I was standing in a big, airy room with my back to Harper. I was naked and she kept saying, “Turn around, Bob. I can’t draw you that way!” But I couldn’t turn around because I was masturbating, trying to get my erection to be soft.

Then there was one in which I was standing in that same bright room and Harper turned the easel around to show me what she’d finished. “What do you think?” she asked. The picture showed me standing regally with my hands on my hips. She’d drawn me with a heavily muscled torso and legs. I was gorgeous. Except that my penis looked like a peanut lying on a ball of cat fur.

There was one more that I remembered vaguely. It involved Harper being the naked one, while I was fully clothed. I was lying down on a couch with my leg raised in much the same pose as I’d imagined Hannah in - the porn pose - and Harper was frowning, saying, “It isn’t supposed to be this way!”

I’m sure a psychologist or shrink would have a field day explaining these dreams, but all they did was make me frustrated. Obviously this whole pose-for-Harper-naked thing was bothering me. The problem was that I didn’t have a clear understanding of why it bothered me. I mean obviously nothing would happen, except she’d draw me. I had fantasies about women all the time, so that wasn’t a big deal. I hadn’t had one of those fantasies about Harper. I’d looked her over and appreciated her budding womanhood, but all that resulted in was thinking about what a heartbreaker she was turning out to be. By that I mean there would be one winner and a whole bunch of guys with broken hearts, once she was claimed. As for Hannah, I’d had a few errant X-rated fantasies about her when Denny was still alive, but not since he’d died. I started to have one, once, but in that fantasy she was crying and that pretty well put the kibosh on that.

Of course there had been that erection, the night before, when the whole subject came up. And my mind hadn’t been disciplined enough to manage things, but I blamed that on the unexpectedness of the whole thing. That’s the thing about X-rated fantasies. They can happen at dream speeds, before your conscious mind can do anything about them.

As I think back on it now, I think the whole situation changed on me without warning. I had, for various reasons, put Hannah and her daughter in a box marked “No trespassing”. Then Harper popped out of that box like a demented clown, pulling her mother with her, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about them in ways that, before this, had been off limits.

The problem is, you can’t put the djinn back in the bottle once he’s been released. I know the story says you can, but it’s more complicated than that. In my case once I started thinking about Harper and Hannah and me and nakedness ... I couldn’t banish those thoughts from my mind completely. Either asleep or awake.

And the next time I went over there, it got even worse.

It took me almost a week to get up the courage to go back and see them. That was a long time, relatively speaking, at least based on my past behavior. But it wasn’t unheard of for me to get busy and “neglect” them for a while. Hannah left me alone, probably to let me work things out in my mind. She knew me well enough to know how my mind worked. And there really was no big rush. Harper still had plenty of time to turn in a portfolio. She was only a junior, for pity’s sake.

Neither of them acted any different, in fact, when I tapped on the door and then walked in, as I usually did.

“It’s just me,” I called out.

“Doing laundry,” I heard Hannah’s faint voice come back.

I was almost bowled over as Harper fairly tackled me. That wasn’t unusual, either.

“Come with me!” she said, excitedly. “I just have to show you what I did!”

She pulled me upstairs to her “studio”, which is what she’d started calling the guest bedroom. There were two easels set up. One of them had a partially finished oil painting of a landscape on it. The other was covered by a drape. I was used to the clutter of art stuff in the room. All I did was sleep there, occasionally, and didn’t spend a lot of time in that room.

“Stand over there,” she said, pointing to a spot about seven or eight feet from the draped easel. I did and, with a “Ta da!” she dragged the sheet off of the portrait she’d drawn of her mother.

Harper might have all the time in the world to finish her figure studies, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t eager to get them done. That was obvious, because this one was almost finished.

That it was Hannah was not in doubt. It looked almost like a black and white photograph, so detailed was it, except it was too soft to have been taken by a camera, at least without a special effect filter. I stepped closer but there were two of me when that happened. One of them was the art critic, examining what turned out to be a combination of chalk and pencil that had been masterfully applied to thick, pebbled paper to create shadows in patterns that produced the illusion of Hannah’s form. Up close you could see the strokes and places where chalk or graphite had been lifted slowly from the paper such that it got lighter and lighter until, at one point, one bump on the pebbled surface of the paper was stained and at the next bump wasn’t.

I stepped back again, which was required by the “other” me. That wasn’t the art critic at all. That was the horndog male who wanted to gaze lustfully on the stunning rendering of a gorgeous woman who didn’t have a single stitch of clothing on her voluptuous body.

As I said, the woman on the paper was obviously Hannah. Her facial features were unmistakable, and yet there were subtle differences that made her look like, perhaps, Hannah’s sister. I later found out Hannah had insisted on that. This drawing was only supposed to be used for Harper’s portfolio, but it if ever found its way into the public eye, she didn’t want people recognizing the model. And to her, the finished product didn’t look like “her”. I think this is the same phenomenon that happens when one hears one’s recorded voice. It doesn’t sound like “you” when you hear it, not to you. It actually sounds exactly like you to everybody else, but not to you. So what looked exactly like Hannah Hooker to me looked like someone different to her.

I mention their last name here, because the piece was signed in the lower right hand corner. A stylized “Hooker” was done calligraphy style. I’d seen that on other finished pieces and I knew she only signed the things she was proud of.

The irony was that, in this context, it looked (to me) more like the title of the piece, instead of the artist’s signature.

That’s because the pose Hannah had put her mother in was reclining, with a bolster under her armpit. Her head was supported by her hand, which was in turn supported by her elbow on the bed. Her upper knee was bent just enough to bring that heel to the calf of her lower leg, which created a bit of shadow just below what were obvious wisps of pubic hair. That she’d been lying on the bed in the room was obvious, because Harper had included two pictures hanging on the wall above the bed in the drawing. Hannah’s breasts had been rendered full and heavy, with large erect nipples on them. The look on the model’s face was straight out of the Playboy playbook, communicating that this woman had no problem offering herself to the observer.

In other words, she looked like a high-priced call girl who was reclining, resting, as she watched her man get dressed to leave her. Her face communicated unhappiness that he was leaving, but a relaxed joy at what he had just given her.

To put it crassly, she looked very well-fucked.

I realized I was standing there with my mouth hanging open, quite possibly drooling, again. My penis announced it was in dire need of sexual attention, having attained a state of erection that was almost painful.

“Well?” Harper’s voice held hope. Before I could answer Hannah chose that time to come into the room.

“Harper! You weren’t supposed to show him that!” She stopped as if frozen by Professor Ice’s freeze ray. All that came out of her immobile body then was a soft, “Shit.”

“Don’t be that way, Mom,” said Harper. “You know people are going to see this.”

“Yes, but not Bob,” said Hannah, unfreezing.

“It’s not a photograph, Mother,” said Harper, pragmatically.

“It’s close,” I sighed. I blinked. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“Great,” muttered Hannah. “I told you not to show it to him, Harper!”

“I just thought if he saw how beautifully yours came out, he might decide to pose for me himself,” complained Harper.

My mind went into overdrive. My eyes were still staring at Hannah’s portrait, but in my brain her form was replaced by my body, in the same pose as hers had been. The fact that she had actually been on the bed I slept in when I stayed over, and that she’d obviously been lying there naked - I didn’t believe for a second that what Harper had drawn had been from her imagination - didn’t help any. And, since Harper’s figure studies obviously meant nothing could be covered, that meant my rampant boner was on clear display.