Fifteen

I WOKE UP before dawn. I mean, I really woke up. I felt like I wouldn’t need sleep again for a year. I was so jazzed I grabbed my stuff and was out the door within five minutes of waking up. Just before I left, I stopped and grabbed the sketchbook with my original sketches in it. I stopped at the all-night Starbuck’s a block from campus and the only person in it was a sleepy-looking barista who did her best to smile at me when I came in. I got a shot in the dark—a dark roast coffee with a shot of espresso—and a bagel sandwich and headed back out the door. I noticed the barista had pulled two shots and dumped them both in. I’d leave a bigger tip next time I was in.

There’s a big church a few blocks away from campus and in the half-light of dawn I made my way there. I don’t know what kind of church it is, but it’s big and has lots of stained glass windows. Maybe it’s Catholic or Lutheran. The Baptist churches back home didn’t have stained glass. The doors were unlocked, but I didn’t see anybody around when I went in. I found a seat in the middle of the sanctuary and looked up at a wall of stained glass behind the pulpit. It was about three stories high and had a religious scene portrayed in it. The transfiguration, I think, but it didn’t really make a difference.

What I cared about was that it was a clear day out and it was nearly sunrise. I could already see color beginning to spread through the nave. I put my headset on and started my music playing. The subtly muted strains of Orff’s Carmina Burana started, hauntingly distant, but growing closer. By the first timpani, the sun had broken the horizon and the entire nave was a riot of color. Energy from the music was being pumped into me. The espresso wasn’t hurting either. I swallowed the last of my bagel and drank off the remaining coffee. I stood in the center aisle and waited. In just a few moments the light from that big stained glass window touched me.

Hac in hora sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!

I turned and ran out the doors of the church with my bag and tossed the garbage into a receptacle near the sidewalk. By the time I reached the hall and my painting, my heart was pumping a mile a minute. I didn’t even stop to greet Doc. I just started pulling together the paints that I was going to need. Half a dozen buckets of acrylic paint were open on the scaffolding and a dozen small jars of pigment were nearby when I started mixing the colors I wanted on my palette.

Her forehead is impossibly high and so smooth it looks like polished stone. It’s covered by locks of fine golden hair that sweep across from a boyish part in a hairstyle that reminds me of Peter Pan. I remember the first time I kissed her right at the place where that part begins and found the skin that looked so opalescent was soft and warm. It was incredible. I stayed there with my lips gently touching that spot for what seemed like hours while I held her to me. Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was playing as I mimicked the texture of her skin with the softness of my brush strokes.

I couldn’t see her left ear in this position, hidden behind her aristocratic cheekbone. The right ear was slightly different than the left. There was an extra fold of skin leading to her inner ear. I’d played with that fold with my tongue teasing her until she scrunched her shoulder up, almost touching the ear, and I couldn’t get to it any longer. Then I lay my head on her shoulder and lightly blew up into her ear. The ferocity of the kiss she turned and planted on me made me forget everything else in the world. There was nothing but her lips touching mine.

Those lips might seem a little pale compared to the garish colors girls around school wear for lipstick. I’m sure she was wearing a little makeup when she posed for the class, but when Melody and I did our sketches in her basement she put no makeup on at all. You could almost see the nerve endings lying so close to the surface that a single touch of the lips caused her to tremble. Her lips were parted, not in a toothy grin, but sensuously soft as if to welcome a lover’s kiss. I remember placing my lips there and tilting my head slightly to the left as our noses grazed against each other. I lived that kiss again and again.

Her nose couldn’t be straighter or more perfect if a Greek sculptor had cut it out of stone. When she was aroused, you could see her nostrils flare slightly. I closed my eyes once and traced the length of her nose up to the slight impress between her eyes, then let my fingers trail across her almost nonexistent eyebrows. It was her eyebrows that convinced me she was naturally blonde. The pale gold wisps were only visible if soft light caught them and cast a shadow against her brow. Nose and brows together brought all the focus on her face to her incredible eyes.

Her eyes. I saw immediately what I’d unconsciously been trying to do with the drapes. I was picking up her eye color in the velvet drapery. But I’d been missing my light source. I could always get lost in Lissa’s eyes. She has incredible intensity. The black streaks in her pupils deepen what would otherwise be a pale blue. When I look into her eyes, I see into myself. She shows me what I could be. Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela was playing as I lost myself in those eyes again. The tiny black streaks pointing toward her pupil. The fleck of golden candle light reflected in her eye as she looked at me—loved me.

Lissa’s shoulders were elegant and powerful at the same time. I’d watched her in matches with other players at the club and you can’t put that much English on a ball unless you have both power and control. To see her muscles move in her shoulders and upper arms is like watching a dance with an entire ensemble supporting the prima ballerina. But to see those muscles up close...

While we made love I lay on my back and she supported herself on her arms. The drive of her hot, wet pussy was not a hip thrust movement. Her entire body undulated and I saw from only inches away how her shoulders, biceps and pecs worked together as she used her arms to force her way back onto my cock. When she drew forward until only the glans was in her, her breasts raked across my chest like hot coals. Those muscles shifted beneath her skin, drawing it taut across her collar bone and pulling the concave between her neck and shoulder even deeper. I caressed the joint with my lips and felt her push back against me again.

Beethoven’s Symphony #3, Eroica found my face between the lush, perfect mounds of her breasts. I haven’t been up close to that many breasts. I have looked at a lot of pictures—for research. One thing that I’ve noticed is that a woman’s breasts are almost never identical. A nipple or areola is a slightly different size, or just off center. One breast is firmer than the other and doesn’t flatten as much when she lies down. But that is not how it is with Lissa. You could hold a mirror perpendicular to her sternum and not have a more perfect match in the reflection than in her other breast. When, in my naiveté, I asked her if she’d had implants she started laughing.

“You have no boundaries, do you?” she howled. Then she explained that when she was modeling she was almost completely flat-chested, but that during pregnancy her breasts had filled out and never shrank. Gravity had simply had much less time to work on her than on other women her age who matured earlier. But when I touched them with my fingers, or the tip of my tongue, I thought of them as being holy. They were too perfect for anyone but a goddess.

All I could think about was how Melody and I had advanced on Lissa standing in front of the sleigh bed that was my setting where we first made love. Together we worshipped all of Lissa. We kissed together; we petted Lissa’s arms and back; we suckled at her breasts. Melody guided my cock when I entered her as she lay back on the bed. Melody peppered Lissa’s stomach and mine with little kisses, working her way up first to my lips and then to Lissa’s. We made love to her as one person, always seeming to know what the other’s hand or mouth was about to do, as if it were simply an extension of our own.