Roland grunted as Angela raised and lowered her broad hips one last time, causing him, while clutching and releasing his two-handed grip under her drooping breasts, to shudder, tense, release at his core and then to repeat: shudder, tense, and release. His hands went to cupping her breasts as she leaned down into him, going for the kiss on the lips, which Roland avoided at the last second by turning his face and taking the kiss on his throat. Grunting, Angela rolled off to the side of the bed, reached for her clutch purse on Roland’s nightstand, extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and lit up. She exhaled a couple of streams of smoke in dramatic pose before turning and looking down at the man in the bed beside her. She gave him the best coquettish smile a zaftig woman of forty-eight could manage. It was a pretty good smile; she still was a handsome woman, if a bit hefty and busty. Some men like a fair amount of meat on the bone, though.

“I think we need to clean up and get on the road or we’ll be late to Kenneth’s garden party,” Angela said.

“We’re already late for his party. And I’m not sure we should go at all.” Roland sat up in the bed, turned away from Angela, and rolled the spent condom off his cock, giving it a look of distaste as if it were some alien object that had nothing at all to do with him. He dropped it into the wastebasket beside his side of the bed and pushed the basket under a desk there, which was covered with textbooks and exam papers.

Roland was tall and lean to Angela’s short and not lean, and he was a fine-looking late fifties to her attempts to continue looking under forty. He was a distinguished-looking late fifties—one would almost say he looked effete. But then he was a college professor, so he was in character.

“Of course we should go,” she countered. “Why on earth not? He’s been working on something in secret. I want to know what it is.” Angela and Kenneth were both artists, teaching at the small university in an even smaller college town. Angela was senior to Kenneth—she had tenure and position; Kenneth didn’t have tenure and his position was eroding. The kicker was that Kenneth had more art talent than Angela did, and Angela knew it.

Roland felt the competition with Kenneth, but for the moment at least, Roland had Angela, which was a power chit at the university. In many ways being on the faculty of a small, family-run university, was akin to a board game of strategy.

“In view of our decision this morning not to give Kenneth tenure, I think it may be tactless to take his hospitality.” Roland said. “He’ll have to find someplace else to work now, which means some other town than here. And he’s still reeling from Marianne’s unexpected death.”

“He doesn’t know the vote went against him,” Angela responded. “He shouldn’t even know the meeting was this morning. And you say it ‘may be’ tactless. So, are you having second thoughts? You know that it was your and my votes in the tenure committee that sank him.”

“It was mostly your argumentation. He teaches fine arts; yours was the influencing voice in that realm.” Roland Smyth was chair of the art department, but his area was art history, not studio arts. He enjoyed being the chair, but only when the decisions to be made were popular and raised no dust. “No, not second thoughts, I guess,” he added. “I’m sure you spoke as you did for the good of the university.”

“Of course,” she answered, taking another puff on her cigarette. She didn’t show the man her face, though. She hadn’t given two thoughts to the university in her campaign to move Kenneth on. It was, in part, of course, his artistic talent compared with hers. That threatened her position. But it also was their cut-off affair, ended by Kenneth when Marianne had been diagnosed and given a short time to live. Kenneth had given it all to his wife then—and he hadn’t come back to Angela when Marianne had died. Three months now and he’d shown no inclination to come back to Angela. Having more talent was one thing; no longer being in Angela’s thrall was quite another.

“And of course you voted against him for the good of the university too,” she said.

It was Roland’s turn not to look at Angela. He rose from the bed, pulling the bed sheet around his waist, modest now, after having been coaxed into the act. Angela had couched it as his reward for going with her on the tenure vote. He had only succumbed for camouflage purposes. He would have voted that way in any event. Kenneth had spurned him. Roland had assumed that, after Marianne no longer was in the picture, the two of them could return to their undergraduate days’ relationship. He and Kenneth had been roommates and lovers as undergraduates. Roland had gotten Kenneth the position here with the hope of rekindling that heat. After Marianne died there was no reason why they couldn’t come back together again—discreetly, of course. But it didn’t happen, and when Roland pushed it by showing up at Kenneth’s house one night and offering himself, only to be rejected, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to happen. And it was equally obvious then that Kenneth had to go. Roland already had a young man in mind as a replacement who was quite attractive and approachable.

“Of course,” he said as he swished his tall, willowy fifty-year-old body toward the master bathroom. “Our university is coming up in the world. We can’t tolerate having second-class talent here anymore.”

Angela reddened and shot a pointed look at Roland’s disappearing back. The man had a sharp tongue and a razor-sharp mind. That hadn’t been a dig at her, had it? No, of course not.

“He’s working on something new—and entirely at home,” she said. “I want to know what it is; what it might reveal of his state of mind. He hasn’t been completely stable since Marianne died. He knows there’s a tenure meeting in train, although I doubt he knows it was today. He will suspect the ax has fallen more if we don’t show up to the garden party with jolly faces on than if we do.”

It was Roland’s turn to pause en route to the bathroom and to mentally assess what Angela had just said. Was it a warning to him? Did she know or suspect about the relationship he and Kenneth had once had? Was she going to hold it over his head until Kenneth was gone? Angela had a razor-sharp mind, a glib tongue, and a mean streak. If he’d had any second thoughts about separating Kenneth before—he still ached for the handsome man with a god-like body even after all of these years—having Angela in the departmental machinations equation decided that.

Roland wasn’t sleeping with Angela because she aroused him. It was a classical case of keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer. After Kenneth was gone, Roland could give his full attention to moving Angela on as well. It also, in Kenneth’s case, was a matter of sending your personal weaknesses and failed desires out into the distant darkness to keep your enemies in check.

“So, this is what he’s been up to,” Angela thought as she roamed around Kenneth’s art studio in what had once been a greenhouse conservatory built onto the side of the Victorian house he and Marianne had restored on a shady street in the old section of the college town. She had slipped away from his garden party shortly after she and Roland Smyth had arrived—at different times in separate cars, of course. When you were in a small college town with sharp-witted competitors, you went to great strides to keep your appetites and activities secret. It was a revelation to be uncovering one of Kenneth’s. This explained a lot.

The canvases were covered with cloths, but that didn’t prevent Angela from sweeping the cloths away and discovering what Kenneth had been painting. They were nudes and they were in sensual and revealing poses. They weren’t nudes of women as Angela would have suspected. They were nudes of a young man—just one young man. Haruki Hiroshiga—Hari for short. He was Asian—Japanese—and he was a beautiful young man in his early twenties. He was perfectly proportioned and muscular. As Angela could see now too, he was hung—or at least he’d been painted as such. She’d seen him modeling for artists before. The department used him because of his facial beauty, the exotic edge of being Asian, and the perfection of his body. But he hadn’t posed at the school in the nude, as far as she knew. From the background, she could tell that all of the paintings had been done here in Kenneth’s studio, or in a bedroom somewhere. She had no idea what Hari did for a living; she didn’t think he was a student at the university. She would have guessed a personal trainer—and now that she’d seen him fully in the raw, she ached to have him be quite personal with her.

So, this was what Kenneth had been doing since Marianne died. He hadn’t come back to Angela because he had switched teams. It was quite clear to Angela that the artist and model fucked. That was obvious to another artist from the pose, and some of these had been painted on the bed upstairs where she and Kenneth had trysted before Marianne had taken terminally ill.

There was an electric connection between the model and the artist that came through in all of these paintings, and there was a sensual openness in the stances Hari took. She didn’t know whether she should be disgusted with Kenneth for having an affair with her while he was married to Marianne, once her best friend—and to what this meant for his relationship to Marianne, the poor woman. But Angela could feel relief now that she didn’t lose him because he’d moved on to a younger woman. It had been a younger man. Marianne’s death had relieved Kenneth of far more expectations and assumptions than Angela had figured.

So, why had Kenneth lain with Angela in the first place? Had it something to do with departmental politics? She’d have to think about that. For now, though, she had learned much—enough for now. She took one last, close, assessing, and arousing look at each of the paintings, covered them again, sighed, and went back into the garden through the house. The studio also opened directly onto the garden where the others had gathered, but she didn’t want anyone to know she’d been in the studio. Kenneth had pulled the blinds on the wall of glass looking out into the garden. Quite obviously he hadn’t wanted anyone to see the covered paintings and to get curious. He wouldn’t want his friends to know he was having an affair with a far younger, Japanese man.

But in thinking Kenneth wanted to keep this a secret, Angela was wrong.

As she entered the garden from the house, she spied Roland in a discussion with Linda Stroud, and she experienced a flash of anger mixed with fright. Linda, a graduate student in the department, was the root of the department gossip grapevine. Was she tracking down the results of the tenure meeting already? Would that all blow up here in Kenneth’s garden? How could Roland let himself be cornered by her?

But then Angela had second thoughts. Roland was being brilliant, she decided. He was finding out if Linda had learned of the vote going against Kenneth yet. And, if not, he no doubt was finding out what the scandal of the day was. Cleverly milking Linda for gossip was one of the ways he kept a controlling hand on the department as its head. And Angela’s own manipulation of Linda enabled her to keep a controlling hand on Roland. She and Linda had their moments—in bed.

Angela faltered a bit as she slid in between Roland and Linda, as the two had had their heads together and stopped talking when she arrived. Had they been talking about her? Roland made an effort at least of showing they hadn’t been.

“Linda’s just been telling me the most extraordinary thing about Kenneth, Angela. Did you know he had a new protégé?”

“No, do tell,” Angela said, turning to Linda. What she wondered, though, was whether protégé was a cover word for lover. And, in fact, that was the case. She didn’t have to speculate further on Kenneth having taken a young man into his bed.

“You know that handsome young Japanese man who sometimes models for the classes?” Linda asked, leaning into Angela and looking into the glass of gin and tonic Angela had picked up from the bar cabinet before coming out into the garden.

“A Japanese fellow? Let me see. Yes, I seem to remember one. Hari Kari springs to mind as a name.”

Both Roland and Linda laughed. “Close, but Hari Kari was a spy, I think,” Linda said.

“I rather think you have in mind Mata Hari,” Roland said, his voice dubious as if he was wondering whether Linda was pulling their legs. “I think Hari Kari is some sort of suicide ritual.”

“Haruki Hiroshiga is his name,” Linda said as if there had been no confusion, “but he does go by Hari. He’s a dear.”

He’s a hunk, is what Angela thought. I’d like to see him dance a pole with or without a Speedo. But what she said was, “Yes, I think I vaguely remember him.” “Vaguely” was hardly the word, though. She indeed knew him from his use as an artists’ model by the department and she’d salivated over his beauty and magnificent body. And just now she’d seen him on multiple canvases in the altogether and, oh, my, is it hot out here in the garden? “What about him?” she said.

“Kenneth is painting a series of oils he’s modeling for and ... this is almost scandalous ... I’ve heard the young man is here so much he has his own bedroom in the house.”

“Well, it is a large house and Kenneth is all alone now,” Roland interjected, always ready to give what might be a mitigating comment but that might, upon contemplation, be taken as some profound and revealing truth.

Angela was then close to blurting out something like, “I doubt the boy needs his own bedroom when staying with Kenneth,” but she was saved by the appearance near to hand of the subjects of their gossip themselves. There Kenneth and Hari were, appearing in the garden, side by side, each looking radiant, with Kenneth moving from one small group to the next, introducing his Japanese protégé.

Or lover, Angela was thinking. Kenneth was guiding the young man from group to group with a hand on his lower back that screamed of intimacy. She wondered who dominated and from what position and if Kenneth had trouble sheathing what she’d seen he’d painted of Hari in his nude poses. Had Kenneth perhaps enhanced the young man there to flatter him? Then she was aware that Hari was looking at her and smiling—a special, sensuous sort of smile. Was the young man flirting with her? She preened and smiled back just in case he was.

Or was he looking past her—at Roland Smyth? If he was sleeping with Kenneth...

No, Angela decided, the young man was definitely making eyes at her wherever she was in the garden as the party droned on. He’d separated himself from Kenneth and was moving around on his own, speaking with the students from the department who had been invited to the affair. She found herself assessing whether he was more attentive to female students or male—they all seemed to be taken with him, as of course they would be because he was so beautiful and so self-confident. It was while she was trying to assess his interests that she realized that he often was looking at her and smiling. She found each time her eyes would slide off his as soon as she was assured of his smile and would travel down his muscular torso to his crotch. Did Kenneth enhance him in the paintings?

She found herself blushing from arousal and pulled herself away from the group and entered the house again. She went to the powder room and dashed her face with water, cooling herself—and her thoughts—down. Or at least trying to. When she left the powder room, her feet carried her back to the art studio rather than to the garden. She no longer was sure of the proportions she thought she had seen earlier. She simply had to check that out.