Chapter 22

CLARICE AND I took Sharon’s portrait to her house on Thursday.

“Oh! Look at it!” she exclaimed when we unveiled it.

We’d chosen to take the portrait into the master suite where it would be installed before showing her so she would see it in the context of her space. She’d brought Rebecca along and I kept maneuvering so that Clarice was always between her and me. I had come to like Sharon and had painted a nice portrait. But Rebecca gave me the creeps.

“I don’t know, Sharon,” Rebecca said. “That doesn’t look like you.”

“It does too! It’s like looking in a mirror.”

“It’s not meant to be a photograph,” I said. “There are bound to be some interpretations that are seen differently by different people.”

“Don’t be modest,” Sharon said. “If I’d wanted a photograph I’d have hired a photographer. This is what I wanted.”

“Well, you’ll know for sure if you come in here and find Ralph beating off in front of it. It’s certainly your tits.”

Rebecca had nothing particularly good to say about the painting and even Sharon was getting a little impatient with her. Eventually, we agreed on an installation date and once I’d seen the portrait in the space I could determine the type of frame it needed. I asked her about a framing budget and she said to just do it and she’d pay for it. Man. I’d have to be careful about that. Frames for a piece like this could cost as much as she paid me to paint it. I put the piece in the back of the car while Clarice chatted with the two women at the doorstep, and was in the car waiting by the time she finished.

“Well,” Clarice said as we drove away. “She wants you to do her portrait.”

“Who?”

“Rebecca Sanders, Sharon’s friend. She’s willing to pay a premium for a full nude.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I won’t paint her. She didn’t have a single good word to say about the painting of Sharon. She’s suggested that she wants more than paint on a canvas. I won’t do it.”

“Not for a fifty percent premium? You’d make $3,000 from one painting.”

“No.”

Clarice looked at me at a traffic light before we got onto the highway.

“Good,” she said.

“What?”

“I already told her no. You’re exercising good judgment, Tony.”

I looked at her in disbelief and couldn’t help but think how much she sounded like my dad. I smiled and then snorted before we both broke out in laughter.

“Thank you for being my agent, Clarice.”

I’m not sure if I was giving Lissa a workout Friday afternoon or if she was working me extra hard. All I know for sure was that after two hours on the court I challenged her to sprints up and down the edge of the basketball courts for another fifteen minutes. We ran them forward. We ran them backward. And we ran them left and right. When we finished, we collapsed in a pile together next to the water fountain, too tired to make it to the showers until we’d rested.

It was officially Labor Day weekend.

“You want to just go to sleep until it’s time to pick her up tomorrow, don’t you,” Lissa said.

I grunted. A weekend away with Kate. Visiting her family. What was I getting into?

“I’d go get her right now if I could,” I said. “Is that terrible of me?”

“I’d never have made it through practice if it was me going,” Lissa said. “It was hard enough to concentrate as it was. But with you pounding the ball at me, I had to focus or die.”

“God, I love you, Lissa. I’ll still cancel if you or Melody say to.”

“Not on your life, lover. You know how we feel. Although, to be honest, I might not let Melody get dressed all weekend.”

“Kinky games?”

“No. Just horny. We need to get showered so you can go home and remind your girls what we’ll be missing all weekend. I’ll bet Meddy is dripping, too.”

“We’d better hydrate,” I said.

I gave up trying to wear out my lovers sometime after midnight and dropped off to sleep while they were latched in a sixty-nine. When I woke up, they were still wrapped in each other’s arms. I went to the bathroom and started the shower. God, the water felt good! I’d really pushed in practice yesterday and could feel the stiffness in my muscles.

A gentle hand on my back let me know Melody had joined me. She steadied herself against me as she stepped into the shower and then dislodged me from my position directly under the spray. We slid past each other, embracing and stroking each other as we danced under the hot water. She kissed me and I held her in a long, leisurely embrace. She turned in my arms and pushed her ass back into my growing erection.

“One more before coffee?” she asked, bending slightly and pushing against me again.

Who am I to argue? I bent my knees and she guided me inside. I reminded myself again how lucky I am. We built toward a quick climax and both groaned out loudly when the crest washed over us. I pulled her back to me and she caught me between her legs, not letting me escape from her warmth entirely. I nuzzled my face into her neck.

“I love you,” I said softly.

We kissed and I turned to rinse and leave the shower.

Rinsing wasn’t necessary. Lissa caught me in her mouth just as I turned. She was kneeling at the edge of the shower and sucked our lover’s essence off my cock.

“Coffee?” she asked sweetly as she released me and proceeded to minister to Melody’s needs while she stayed on her knees.

I got out of the shower and toweled off, wrapping my towel around myself as I went to the kitchen to make the morning elixir. When I returned with three cups fixed just the way we like them, Melody and Lissa were sitting in bed with towels wrapped around their heads. It was so wonderful I could scarcely tear myself away. But Lissa and I had Pilates, and then I’d be going to pick up Kate for our drive south.

It was a beautiful sunny day, but the days were definitely getting shorter. Seattle is far enough north that there’s a huge difference in the hours of daylight in summer and winter. It was no longer light at six in the morning. I knew it would get dark around seven and I wanted to be sure we were at Kate’s parents’ house before then. I don’t like traveling unfamiliar mountain roads after dark.

Kate was fresh and beautiful, dressed in her usual bibs and T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was scrubbed shiny without a trace of makeup. I was caught by how young she looked.

Well, we weren’t yet 20, so I suppose we were young, but lately it seemed like I’d entered a world of adults that had me thinking much older than I am. Seeing Kate, I actually felt like the teenager that we’d still be for almost three weeks.

“Thank you for coming with me this weekend,” she said as we hit the freeway. “I couldn’t have done it otherwise.” She unclipped the straps from the bib on her overalls and let the front fall down.

“Uh ... Kate, we have a rule of no sex-play while the car is running,” I said hesitantly.