Chapter 14: Vacations

“THIS NAME SOUNDS FAMILIAR,” I said. “Have we shot her before?”

“She was the first client I was here for,” Cassie said. “Just a portrait. Some kind of political campaign. She lost, though, and now she’s coming back for an Attic Allure special.”

“Oh, yes. If I remember, you explained to her that my photography was not pornographic,” I laughed.

“I thought sure you were going to fire me.”

“Not on your life. I love having you as part of our crew. By the way, even though we don’t need anyone now, keep an eye out for another assistant for this summer. I’ll probably look around campus, too.”

Our client arrived promptly and I greeted her.

“Miss Harmon, welcome back to Attic Allure,” I said, taking her hand. She had a suitcase and a bag which Cassie and Leora took from her and carried behind the privacy screen.

“Please, call me Leva.”

“Leva, come in and tell me what you are interested in for a new photograph,” I said. We sat at the table facing the gallery wall.

“I want to show feminism as feminine. I believe we are being slandered in the press and popular media as somehow less than women because we believe in women’s rights. It takes all kinds of women to truly be equal, just like all kinds of men are equal. I am working on a committee to draft a constitutional amendment that will guarantee women’s rights.”

“I see. That seems like a good idea to me. Logically, it seems pretty stupid that such an amendment is even needed, but I suppose the patriarchal system of the founding fathers—indicated by the term fathers—made women into second class citizens. How will we go about helping the cause?”

“I’m a woman.”

I had to agree with that. Perhaps she wasn’t the most glamorous woman I’d ever met, but my male-centric mind leapt immediately to the fact that she was definitely a woman.

“I’m not a beauty queen, but I’m not particularly disgusting to look at. I want to present an image of womanly presence and femininity that will show that feminists are not simply bull dykes out to cut the balls off all men,” Leva said.

“That is an uncomfortable image. I have, however, met a dominant lesbian feminist who came off as very feminine as well,” I said.

“Really?”

“That photo,” I said pointing to Adele’s picture.

“Oh my! She is very attractive. Can you do that for me?” Leva asked.

“What are your limitations?”

“Not pornographic,” she said immediately. Then she turned to Cassie. “I remember the lesson you taught the last time I was here. You’re a great feminist. I have set my own definition of pornography that I can live with. I recognize the artistry involved in your photography, Nate. I am not afraid to be seen naked, though I’m not the picture of beautiful sensuality of, say, that one of the woman dressed as a jester. She would be a great advertisement for the diversity of character involved in the feminist movement.”

“She considers herself a feminist and hopes to make a future as a comedienne,” I said.

“So, nudity does not bother me,” Leva continued “What I will object to as pornographic would be anything that actually focuses on the breasts or genitalia. I recognize that in your work, you may capture these in a photo. As long as they are not the focus and intent of the photo, I’m fine with that.”

“Okay. What did you bring for us to work with?” I asked.

“I have a miniskirt and crop top,” she said. “I’m almost too old to wear them, but I like them. I like what you’ve done with drapery in the picture of the woman over there.” She pointed at the picture of Charity taken a year previously.

“Okay. Let’s start with your miniskirt and crop top and do a few studies to see what we can come up with. You can change behind the privacy screen if you’d like.”

“I assume that you will see me in all stages of dress and undress, so I won’t be shocked if you need to come behind the screen at some time or another.”

“That does happen. At the moment, though, Cassie, Leora, and I need to get some props and set pieces ready, so you are safe from prying eyes.”

She grinned at me and headed behind the privacy screen. I turned to my assistants who were ready to launch a search for whatever I needed.

“You have an idea, don’t you?” Leora said. “I could almost see it taking shape in your mind.”

“Yes. We’ll obviously need fabric for draping the model eventually. I’m thinking very lightweight. Something that we can make float in the air. The problem with drapery art is that it either involves a bed or it seems to come out of nowhere and have no reason for being in the photo or painting. We need something that will give meaning to the drapery.”

“Besides seeing the naked woman,” Cassie nodded. “How about a symbol of femininity for her to hold.”

“Good. Let’s see what you can find. What else is a symbol of the feminine? How about the moon? Let’s see what we can get to represent the moon. Anything else?”

“We’ll keep an eye out and see what we can find. This is like a treasure hunt,” Leora said. The two women headed into the props closet to see what could be located.

Leva emerged from behind the privacy screen in a nice miniskirt and her crop top and high heel shoes. I looked at her critically as she stood in front of the white backdrop.

“Let’s lose the high heels,” I said.

“What? I thought you’d like high heels with this.”

“That’s not the point, though, is it?” I said. “I love the look of your legs in high heels and a miniskirt. It’s very sexy. But that’s what we don’t want to emphasize. Not disproportionately. We don’t want your image to be one of sexual come-on. That’s part of the stereotype that men have of women already.”

“Wow! You understand,” she said, removing the heels.

“Hold it!” I said as she turned to toss the heels behind the screen. “I mean, hold the heels in your hand. I just saw something. It’s the natural woman who can be just as appealing enjoying herself as displaying herself for men. It’s that sense of joy that you get from removing the heels. Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s the same kind of feeling I get when I take off my bra at night. It’s freedom!”

“We’ll get to that part of freedom in a bit.”

We started working together to show a lovely woman simply enjoying being a woman for herself and not for the sake of pleasing someone else.

In the second roll of film, I got her out of the bra under her crop top. I helped her out of it, and she pulled her arms inside the shirt so I could pull the bra off. I might have brushed against her boobs a little. She wasn’t heavily built and I had the impression that her breasts were not suffering from aging, no matter what she felt about being thirty.

I handed her the bra and she held it as we did several poses that made it obvious that she’d just taken it off and was happy about it. The last one was an iconic photo of her tossing it in a trashcan.

“Can we lose the top and skirt now?” I asked softly.

“Could you just pull it off over my head?” she responded.

I did pull the top off and massaged her shoulders for a moment, then unzipped the skirt and pulled it down off her hips. She stepped out of it and turned toward me.

“I could ... um ... just discard the panties, too,” she whispered.

“I don’t have a reason to keep you in them unless you feel better that way. You know. Doing it in stages.”

She shook her head. “No. Might as well do it all at once.” But she didn’t move to remove them.

I chuckled to myself. I remembered Christine talking about a book Miss Ludwig had for curious young women which was about how to go about getting a man to seduce you when you’d already decided to give in. I slid my hands into the waistband of her panties and stroked down her butt as I pushed the panties down and off her feet.

She had a nicely trimmed bush. It wasn’t shaved, but it wasn’t wild, either.

“I hope you’re having fun,” I whispered.

“It seems like it could be a lot of fun.”

Still, it surprised her when I went about fluffing up her pubic hair and lightly stroking across her nipples to bring them to full erection. She didn’t object at all.

“Fabric,” I said. Leora placed a long bit of sheer blue fabric in my hand. I tossed it up in the air and it fell around her shoulders and draped forward. I pulled some up over her head, leaving her face mostly uncovered and her shoulder-length light brown hair tangled in it. “Almost. Black backdrop.”

The girls hustled to change backdrops as I moved lights, focusing them on the fabric and filling from the sides. That would be a good start. We took a roll of pictures just like that with her turning and twisting in different directions.

“Okay, what do we have for a moon and a scepter?” I asked.

“Cool technique,” Cassie said. She turned on a spotlight that showed through a die-cut of a crescent moon onto the backdrop.

“Good, but we’ll need the red backdrop instead of black. We need some tonality to the sky.”

“Red?” Leva asked. “A blood moon?”

“You forget the photos are in black and white,” I laughed. “It is simply a dark shade of gray that will pick up the moon nicely. What about her scepter?”

“Here we go,” Leora answered. She handed me a cross with a loop on the top.

“What is this?”

“An ankh. If I remember my mythology correctly, it’s the symbol of an Egyptian moon goddess,” Leva said.

“What on earth are we doing with something like that back there?” I asked.

“Darned if I know, but it looked like props from some German play called Zauberflöte.”

“Oh, that’s an opera by Mozart. That makes sense,” Leva said taking the ankh and holding it up. I liked it.

“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” I took a picture and adjusted the lights to isolate her with just the moon showing in the back. “We need some movement in the fabric. It looks dead. Um ... Cassie, ladder. Just over here where you won’t interfere with the moonlight. Get a broom handle.”

When we were set again, Cassie was on the ladder with Leora holding it steady. She had the fabric suspended from the broom handle and was waving it around over Leva as Leva posed with the ankh held high in her hand. We tried several different poses and different ways of moving the fabric.

“Hold it!” I said. Leva froze, looking up at Cassie. Cassie continued to move the fabric. It was a case of getting the timing right with the fabric and the light perfect. And there it was. I took the picture. “That’s it!”

Cassie came down and gathered up the fabric. I gave the ankh to Leora and led Leva behind the privacy screen as the girls shut down the lighting and cleared the stage.

“You were wonderful!” I said as I hugged Leva. She hugged back rather ferociously.

“Even when you weren’t touching me, I could feel you,” she whispered. “I could feel how to move and where you wanted me. I could feel when my nipples hardened because you wanted them to. God! I’m so turned on I could burst.”

She pressed her lips against mine and her tongue insisted I respond. While I’d made sure we were intimately connected as we worked for over two hours, I hadn’t focused on her breasts or her pussy. Now I changed my approach and stroked and squeezed her nipples, trailing my hand down between her legs, which she spread as she leaned back in my arm and continued to kiss me.

It was only a few minutes before I felt an explosion of breath in my mouth and all her weight relax into my arm. I slowly withdrew my fingers from her pussy and sat with her cradled in my arms.

“It’s over, goddess,” I said. “You can come back to the real world now. You have shown you are a magnificent goddess and I have worshipped you as a goddess should be worshipped. Come back now to the mundane.”

She opened her eyes and looked into mine.

“Wow!” she breathed.

It had been a month since I’d been back in Tenbrook and I needed to go home for the weekend. I missed Ronda, Anna, and Patricia. And Toni. In two weeks, Ronda would come to Chicago for her spring break, but I needed Anna and Patricia now.

I left after my last class Friday evening and was in Rockford by seven to pick up Anna and burgers for dinner. It was only the twenty-first of February, so all the parks were technically off-season. We’d found out, though, that as long as we didn’t need anything more than the pit toilets, we could overnight in some of them. I had a thermos jug of water, so we could brush our teeth and get a drink if needed. We’d worry about washing when we got back to Tenbrook.

“I’m so glad you came to get me!” Anna said. “There’s just so much going on. Classes are much more intense this semester than they were last semester.”

“I’m feeling the same way. Like the fall semester was just a warm-up and now they’re going to really get serious,” I said as we tumbled into the back of the bus.

“It’s cold out. I’m glad we have a lot of blankets back here.”

“You know they say the best way to stay warm is to take all your clothes off so your body heat mingles together,” I said.

“Do they really say that?”

“I’ve heard it. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s worth a try.”

“Okay,” Anna said. Whether it was true or not, we managed to stay warm pretty well.

I was a little surprised Saturday, when Patricia greeted Anna with a kiss. On the lips! Anna hugged her and then immediately went to pick up Toni so Patricia could hug and kiss me. I just needed to hold Patricia for a while and remind both of us that I wasn’t abandoning her.

Anna took Toni to her house and visited with her parents while I took Patricia to the studio. We went up to the fourth floor, where we still had a bed. Patricia was much livelier and more romantic than she’d been in December.

“Little Precious is sleeping through the night, at last!” she exclaimed. “I’m getting five or six continuous hours of sleep a night. I feel like a new woman.”

“I liked the woman you used to be pretty well, but I’m always willing to sleep with a new woman,” I teased.

“You wouldn’t believe it!” she growled, pushing me back and straddling me. “You’ve only ever made love to me when I was pregnant or sleep deprived. Don’t you remember the girl who pranced up to you in the studio up here and showed you her tits? I think she said something about hoping you looked at a picture of them while you got yourself off and that she was going to be thinking about the pole in your pants while she rubbed the button. Well, guess what. Now you can look at the real thing. You can touch them and suck on them. And instead of masturbating, you can shove that pole that was in your pants right up my nineteen-year-old pussy and fuck the real thing.”

Wow! Patricia was a real tiger. She slammed herself down on my cock and then bit my nipple! When I thought I was exhausted, she managed to get me up again and get another come out of me. She was right. I’d never experienced Patricia like this. Like I imagined she’d been with Tony.

And then when we headed to my house to meet Anna and the family for dinner, I got another surprise. My room had a crib in it and Patricia and Toni planned to spend the night with me.

Mom saw us glancing around at each other nervously at the dinner table and finally put both hands on the table and pushed back.

“Yes,” she said. “You may spend the night together.” Kat clapped a hand over her mouth and her eyes popped wide open. “And I’m not going to be a hypocrite about it. Anna, if you want to stay with them, you can.”

We all had our mouths wide open at that.

“Um ... Thank you, Mom,” I said. She turned on Kat.

“Do not let this give you any ideas,” she said. “Nate is nineteen. You are thirteen. Talk to me about it in six years.”

Kat left the table and ran upstairs. I was going to try to do some repair work with her. I thought she must be really upset. First, though, we helped clear the table and do the dishes. Patricia fed Toni and by seven-thirty, the baby was drifting off to sleep. We all trooped upstairs to put her to bed and found the portable crib had been rolled into Kat’s room. Kat had moved her horse over to make room and was sitting on it. She held out her arms and Patricia handed Toni to her.

“I figured it wasn’t fair for you to have four in your room and me to be alone in mine,” Kat said. “This will even it out a little. I’ll check her diaper before I go to sleep and I know where her food is downstairs in the morning.”

“Kat, you’re a sweetheart,” I said.

“You’ve all done a lot for me and I love you all. Now go watch a movie or play a game or go to bed or something,” she said. We all hugged her and kissed the baby, then went downstairs.

I told Mom what had happened and she smiled. She didn’t say anything, just nodded.

For the three of us, though, it was time to do some serious planning for our spring break. This would be my last trip home for five weeks. And, as we figured it out, it seemed senseless for me to drive all the way back to Tenbrook, just to turn around and drive all the way to Detroit. It was decided that Patricia would catch the bus east on that Friday. Anna would board in Rockford. The two would get to Chicago and over to the studio to wait for me to get to them. Then we’d head east for our trip to Canada.

We slept well together, Patricia and Anna both cuddled close to me. After church in the morning and lunch with the family, I took Anna back to Rockford and I got back to Chicago feeling much lighter.

Supposedly it was almost spring, but Chicago still looked pretty bleak outside. The temperatures were going from zero to forty and back to zero in a day. There was mud everywhere and the studio was showing the dirt. On the first of March, we held spring cleaning day. Cassie, Theresa, Leora, and Beth all joined me to scrub the studio and get everything as clean as possible.

It didn’t take long for the girls to be naked and I was talked out of everything but my briefs. I was afraid that if I stripped any further than that, I’d soon find myself buried to the balls in one of my sexy assistants. They took every opportunity to rub up against me and have me pet them. In spite of all that, we got a lot of work done and the studio was sparkling clean by the time we finished.

The girls were all still naked and pushed me back on the sofa to mob me. Oh, poor me. Eight luscious tits to suck. Four wet pussies to play in. Not fucking in the studio was a narrowly preserved rule. Four girls had powerful orgasms and my cock was in the back of Theresa’s throat when I erupted.

We finally got dressed and the girls all left except Beth. She held my hand and whispered a few suggestions of what we might do after dinner as we walked downstairs. Her roommate was gone for the weekend and we’d be undisturbed in her room all night and most of the day Sunday.

Even though the housing was pretty independent in our building, the population density and roommates made it difficult to mess around in our rooms. Most of the time, when Beth and I decided we needed a night of focused loving on each other, we went up to her house and spent the weekend in her bedroom.

Ronda was coming to spend her spring break in a week and she’d already booked a hotel room for the time she was in Chicago. It was pretty much around the corner at the Blackstone, so I wouldn’t have too much trouble making it to classes while she was here.

“Nate, can I see you a minute,” Levi asked as we touched the mezzanine where the offices were. It was a funny kind of half-floor between the store and the studio space. Of course, I would always make time to talk to Levi, even when Beth and I were in a hurry to get food and go fuck.

“What is it, Levi?” I asked.

“We have an event coming up,” he said. “Your patrons want to watch you work again.”

“Oh. I guess I can’t really complain about that. Are they providing the model again?” I asked.

“Yes. She’s a professional model and performer, though she hasn’t done much still photography work. Her name is Rose Thorne. Of course, it’s a stage name, but I’ve taken care of verifying identity.”

“Thanks. When are we supposed to do this? It’s kind of a busy time at school right now.”

“That’s why I’m giving you plenty of notice. It won’t be for six weeks yet. That will get us through your guest next week, Beth’s spring break a week after that, and your spring break the next week. And Easter. So, plan for a hard weekend when you are back in town on April 12 and 13.”