Chapter 12

There was quite a crowd. When you have a few influential clients and they let their friends know and their friends catch a scent of expensive champagne ... well, people just sort of show up. There were only half a dozen galleries in the city big enough to host this showing. When I first walked into this one the day of our installation, I could smell the scent of fresh paint and old wood. I kicked off my shoes just so I could walk around on the marble floors of the renovated warehouse in my bare feet. Every step held a memory.

I was opening with fifteen paintings if you counted the fact that my painting of the three sisters was a triptych with a large center panel and two narrow side panels. For now the three pieces were listed as a unit, but it was completely possible that sometime in the future they would be split up. Three of the paintings were marked "Sold" before the show opened. Two were not for sale at any price, and one was designated to be a gift.

What amazed me was that bids were coming in on the five of the six remaining works. No one was bidding on the triptych yet. And the bids were enough to satisfy my living requirements for the next year. Ardith Longfellow had started things off. I'd done the commissioned work for the museum benefactors room. According to their specifications, it was 30 inches wide and 40 inches tall. But "Hecate Rising" was a work double that size in each direction. Ardith fell in love with it the moment she saw it and was having a room redecorated to house the work. She consented to leave it in my possession until after the showing, but had written a $30,000 check on the spot. When Allison got the word that I had painted her, she came pounding on my door demanding to see what I'd done.

When she saw "Pain is Pleasure," she stood transfixed for nearly ten minutes. She didn't move a muscle. I finally moved to stand beside her and could see tears streaming down her face. She didn't move. She didn't make a sound. But the tears flowed as though they would never stop. I reached out to dry her cheeks and finally she turned to me.

"You must hate me for what I did to you that night."

"If it weren't for that night, I would never have found the freedom to paint what I have," I answered. "I suppose that if pain is pleasure, then hate might also be love." She melted into my arms and raised her face to me. Her kiss was intense and passionate, but tender. She poured her heart into it as I had poured my soul into the painting.

"You never came back to teach me what making love was like," she said.

"We can remedy that," Rita said from behind us. She had just walked in with a tray of tea. Allison blushed crimson. "Really," Rita continued. "There might even be another painting in it." Before that week was through, either Rita or I or both of us had made love with Allison in every room of her house. We stood beside her as she laid logs in her outdoor fire pit and then as the flames burned, placed her cum-stained throw rug on it to be consumed. She insisted that I take $30,000 for the painting, even though it was half the size of "Hecate Rising." After the show it would hang above her fireplace.

I got a call three weeks before the showing from Harold Monroe, Sheila's husband. He offered me $30,000 for "Cold Fusion" sight unseen. He said it was to be a surprise gift for her 35^th birthday, although she had told him exactly what he was to give her. When I pressed about the showing in September, he chuckled and said that it was fortunate that it was on her birthday and that perhaps I would see the ice princess melt if I was lucky.

The bids that were coming in at the party were all in excess of the pre-showing purchases.

"You should be very proud," Mai Lin Tang said as she came up beside me and slipped an arm through mine. Her black hair hung straight below her shoulders like strands of silk. She guided me to the center of the gallery where the triptych hung suspended and lit magnificently. There were a dozen hands in the painting. They seemed to become flesh as they moved out of the marble goddesses that surrounded a supine shadow of a man. "I put it as near the scene of the crime as I could," she whispered.

I jerked toward her. Her tiny Chinese features were reflected in the face of one of the goddesses in the painting. I smiled. I hadn't met Mai Lin until this week when I was there for the installation. In all the fervor of getting the artwork hung and lit, it hadn't dawned on me that the middle-aged, bespectacled Asian woman with her hair in a tight bun and traditional silk pajamas was a participant in "Stone Orgy." She was not as young as the image in the painting, but I didn't paint her. I painted her spirit.

"You were there," I whispered.

"Oh yes. When Rita showed me your art and explained how she had been conducting experiments, I was a willing co-conspirator. Come, I have something to show you." I followed Mai Lin to her office, leaving the bustle of the opening behind us. She stopped one of her associates and gave her instructions to tell people that the artist had to take a break from the crowd for a few minutes, but would be back in a quarter of an hour.

"Even Rita doesn't know that I have this," she said. "But I thought you deserved to look back on what occurred that Sunday morning with a little perspective." She turned her computer screen toward me and launched a video playback. I was embarrassed when I saw myself, naked, embracing stone statues at the beginning. But she ran forward to the point where I explored the three sisters. I'd never seen such an erotic performance in my life. Performance was the only word I could put to it as I saw Rita, Mai Lin, and a third woman I'd never met before become living statues, dancing around me, shedding clothes and inhibitions as they maneuvered me from one to the next. In minutes while watching this, I found myself stimulated to a powerful erection.

"That looks painful," Mai Lin said softly. I tore my eyes away from the screen to her, only to discover her long jacket unbuttoned and her silk pants removed. She reached to unfasten my fly and release my straining cock. "Now, watch and remember," she said as she straddled my lap and let my prick slide between her slick nether lips. I raised a hand to stroke her breasts as my eyes returned to the screen. The sensations were multiplied as I watched our quartet on screen and felt her tight pussy clamp down around me. "This is my favorite part," she said as the scene changed to show me lying back on the marble bench with my head in the lap of a sculpture. In the video, Mai Lin—completely nude now—rose from behind me and flung a leg over me. She was so short that her crotch barely cleared my torso with her feet planted on the floor on either side of me. Rita slipped up behind her and guided my cock into her folds as the third, still-unnamed woman fed me her breast to suckle. Once she was firmly planted on my pole, Mai Lin leaned back into Rita's arms and passionately kissed her as they stroked each other's backs and breasts. I could see on the screen the undulation of Mai Lin's stomach around my cock just as I could feel it in her office. I heard a growing moan emanate from the woman—in stereo as I could hear it on the video as well. It built and I knew that I would release at the climax, just as she did.

The clip came to an end and Mai Lin collapsed against my chest, exhausted from her orgasm, just as I was panting from mine. Her internal muscles continued to clench and spasm around my cock for another minute. At last, she moved back, releasing my prick from her folds to drop wetly against my stomach. She gently leaned forward and sucked me into her mouth, cleaning our spend from my cock and balls.

"I promised you would be back on the floor in fifteen minutes," she said as she pulled her panties and pajama bottoms on. "That leaves us time for just this." She leaned forward and planted a long sensuous kiss on my lips, never even touching me with her tongue. When she pulled back, I was nearly hard again. "Now put that away and save it for Rita later," she said.

A new crowd of people had infiltrated the gallery in the time I had been absent. Rita and Kelly moved up on either side of me as I emerged ahead of Mai Lin and grasping my arms in a hug leaned in to kiss my cheeks.

"So there you are," Rita said. "Did Mai Lin have her way with you?" I smiled and was sure I was blushing. "She's been talking about what she was going to do for the past three months. I'm surprised she waited so long!" We walked into the room and I began circulating among the guests, accepting another glass of champagne from a server and the compliments that were paid to me as I met a councilman and the chairman of the arts commission. As we circulated, I saw a small crowd gathered around the painting of "Cold Fusion." I inhaled deeply and went to face the music. As I suspected, Sheila and Harold Monroe were at the center of the small group. Much to my amazement, Sheila was describing exactly how her sitting with me had gone.

"I was exactly as cold as the painting shows," she described. "After I'd cum, I told him to hurry up and fuck me, I had to go pick up the children. I couldn't believe he declined."

"I wouldn't have," said a man nearby. "I'd say that ass was worth a frost-bit dick." The crowd laughed. I could tell these had to be the Monroe's inner circle, but I was still surprised that Sheila would talk so frankly about the encounter in the presence of her husband. It was, in fact, Harold who noticed my approach first.

"Ah, here's the artist now," Harold said. "I, for one, have always doubted that presented with this lovely ass he turned away. I think Sheila was so overwhelmed by his prowess that she's embarrassed to talk about it." I didn't know what to think about the man's brashness. He was, as I suspected, a good bit older than Sheila. It must be difficult for a man in his 60s to have children in elementary school, but he seemed proud of his wife's sexuality.