Chapter 15: Back on Canvas

By the weekend, we’d all managed to get moved in. There were still a few things at my house of mine and Sarah Lynn’s. Charmaine had less to move than the rest of us. She’d always had a limited wardrobe. Her dad had plenty of money, but he was stingy as all get-out. He didn’t figure women needed money and he’d have to pay to get her married someday, so he wasn’t about to waste it on her now.

We had several big deliveries. We chose the biggest of the bedrooms, which was about twelve-by-twelve, and bought a king-size bed for it. We took the two twin beds out to the garage and wrapped them in plastic. We’d put them back when we moved out. We kept the two twins in each of the other two rooms but put new mattresses on them and had the mattress company cart away the stinky old ones. I’ve never seen so many body fluid stains on a mattress. Guys must have been coming on them for twenty years.

The other really big delivery was a piano. Not like a baby grand or anything. It was just what they call a console, I think, but it was good quality and Ariel started playing almost immediately. Sweet!

We weren’t going to replace all the furniture in the house, no matter how disgusting most of it was. We bought slip-covers for the sofa and chairs, a couple of plastic tablecloths for the dining room, started stocking the kitchen cabinets. Charmaine kept a record of everything we bought—even down to having checked the receipts for the cleaning supplies the moms bought and the paint Dad bought.

“These are things that apply to the cost of living here that exceeds the rent. If we ever get a complaint, all we need to do is show all our receipts and threaten to charge the landlord for improvements to his property.”

She loved the numbers and had a dozen different spreadsheets that included a breakout of what each of us had contributed and our share of the balance. She even included the value of our labor at both minimum wage and average local “painter’s helper” wage, which was somewhat higher.

We all managed to go to the festival on Saturday and heard some great bands. We were beginning to feel like we were a family and had our own home.

I finally managed to get some time in my new studio. Well, that’s what we were all calling the little eight-by-eight room at the front of the house where my painting things were. At first, I was going to just spread newspaper around on the floor like I did in my bedroom at home, but Jas convinced me to get a canvas tarp to spread on the floor.

“This way, the hardwood is protected and you won’t have to worry about picking up newspapers every day. Once a week, we can take it out and shake it, or just run the little vacuum cleaner over it,” she said. After the tarp was down, we moved my equipment in on top of it and realized right away that we wouldn’t be moving everything out of the room once a week to shake the tarp. Vacuum it was.

“Do you want to sit for a painting?” I asked. “Maybe we could make love after. Or during.” I kissed her and she melted into my arms like a kitten.

“I hate to delay you but could we make love first?” she whispered. “And again after?”

“Yeah. I’d love to do a painting of you with that just-fucked look.” And that was what we did. No one else was home, so we fucked right there on the tarp-covered floor. Then I painted her with that slightly bemused expression she gets and her glassy eyes. I knew that my instructors in school were going to teach me to slow down, but the paint just flowed onto the canvas as I got lost in that smile. There was probably a lot of detail work that I’d want to get finished later, but I only took an hour and then bent Jas over the stool she’d been sitting on and slid smoothly back into her snootch. God! She even had me calling it that.

“I hope you never get tired of fucking me,” Jas said as she turned in my arms and laid another kiss on me. We’d both gotten off loudly and were thankful no one else was home.

“You sure gave a show to the street and the house next door,” Sarah Lynn said from the doorway. So much for having been alone.

“What?”

“Your windows are open. It wasn’t quite so visible from the street because of the porch, but I walked around next door and they had a clear view.”

“People saw us?” Jas squeaked.

“Just me. The house is still empty and probably will be until September,” Sarah Lynn soothed her. “It just shows that we need to get some drapes up on these windows and remember to pull them when Jett’s painting a model. Either that, or charge admission to the show. Let me see the painting.”

She didn’t wait for an answer but just walked around the easel to look at the painting. I returned to kissing and fondling Jas. Hell with the windows.

“You’re an exhibitionist,” Jas whispered.

“So are you.”

“Only online, mostly.”

We stopped our whispered conversation just short of me penetrating her wet pussy again when we heard a deep sigh from Sarah Lynn, still in front of the painting. Her eyes were closed and her head was tilted back as one hand fondled her own breast. I guessed the hand I couldn’t see behind the easel was in her pussy. I saw that same look cross her face that I’d painted on Jas and wondered if she was mimicking the painting. After a couple more squeaks and a long sigh, her eyes opened and Sarah Lynn moved around the easel to approach Jas. The kiss they shared told me all I needed to know about why our little group worked.

“I hope it was as good for you as it was for me,” Sarah Lynn said. “I’ve never felt so ... satisfied after getting myself off. It’s just ... You looked ... Satisfied is the only word I can think of.” She turned enough to kiss me deeply. “Thank you for making love to us. We love you.”

As bizarre as the interaction between Jas and Sarah Lynn had been, it felt good to be putting paint on a canvas where it belonged instead of on the walls. The girls went upstairs to take a shower together and left me naked in the little studio. I looked around for my briefs and finally found them next to the paint cabinet. I pulled them on and smeared a bit of paint from my palette on them. Kelly would be disappointed if she found I’d been painting and didn’t save the underwear for her. Her new room with its camera and computer and toys had one sloping ceiling with my painted underwear tacked to it.

I was still trying to figure out what to do with my walls. Bare white wasn’t really my taste. I didn’t want to tack up a bunch of posters or nails for hanging pictures, though. The ceiling was higher than the room was square. Old houses, I guess. There was molding about a foot below the ceiling and the windows met it. That gave me an idea. I’d make a few hangers that I could hook on the picture rail and hang paintings from to dry. With that decision made, I kept applying paint to the canvas, filling in little details in the initial painting. Each time my brush touched the canvas it revealed more depth and meaning.

The summer got boring real fast. We were all working more or less full-time jobs. I had the most regular hours at the market where I worked from six in the morning until two in the afternoon. Grandpa was ‘promising’ that I would be at a level of being able to work alone soon, but I still needed to finish my certification as a meat cutter. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do that.

I was fortunate to live in an area where there was a meat-cutting certificate program. That was what it was called informally. Formally, it was the Sustainable Farm to Table: Modern Meat Production. It had 26 credit hours and I was going to try to complete it in summer and evenings. Fortunately, the lab portion of the Protein Identification, Fabrication, and Utilization course was what I was learning at the market. Grandpa said he thought he could make a case for having me get the Retail Butcher Shop Operation and Sales credit from the market, too. It was still going to take me a year and a half to complete the other courses and over four thousand dollars in extra tuition. Grandpa was a devoted mentor, though, and the market was picking up all the extra tuition.

Sarah Lynn worked at the grocery store, too, but checkers got shuffled around a lot. She never knew from week to week what hours she would work and whether she would have a full forty, twenty, or fifty. While normally rare, overtime was more common in the summer as all the checkers with kids needed extra time off and it was a popular time for vacations. When a bunch of college students came in wanting jobs in the fall, it was more common for the store to hire people for ten to twenty hours a week and Sarah Lynn could expect a reduction in hours as more people were available.