White Li(n)es

June 22, 2020. Two days later.

Salome is dressed in a skimpy red dress that screams sex to me.

She flicks her paintbrush across the canvas, working with a palette of earth tones in gouache today. I struggle to keep my eyes off her figure and on the canvas, where she’s painting her own rendition of a Tanguy, a dismal landscape of malformed dreams frozen solid in a hellish chill.

The supermodel has a surprisingly keen eye for color and composition, but it’s her body that’s been occupying my mind at night. I see her supple body when I close my eyes, the sensual arches of her hips and her back a constant distraction even as I’ve tried to work out how to get a message out to Erin. Salome looks back at me, giving me her trademark sunny smile, tossing her brunette tresses over her shoulder.

“How does this look? Creepy enough?” she asks, placing a finger by her lips.

“Not bad,” I say, taking in the dark grey background, the detached torsos dotting the horizon, something between a length of a string and a bottle dominating the foreground. “But something’s missing. Can you feel it? The painting is still flat. It needs more.”

“Oh,” Salome says, frowning a bit. She turns back to the painting and looks at it for a couple seconds. “Oh yes. Hm…” She picks up her brush, about to put it to the canvas again, and then she places it back down. “What do you think I should do?”

If I knew the answer to that, I would be an artist for real. As it is, I have to fake something convincing enough, much like I have been doing for all these past lessons. There are now almost a dozen paintings displayed in the Barrel Room, and there’s quite a variation in quality. I’ve been telling her that it’s part of the artist’s journey, that not every step can be a step forwards. But I worry that she won’t believe me forever.

“You need to give it some more character, make it provocative,” I say, touching her hip.

My fingers linger there for a second longer than strictly appropriate, drifting downwards over her ass, before she picks up her brush again, looking a bit distracted.

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” she says.

She looks around the garden we’re in, seemingly trying to find inspiration. I look at the way her bust rises and falls with her breath.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” Salome says. “Should I tell you what I’m going to do, or…”

“Surprise me,” I say, palming her ass this time.

My hand is gone a second later, and she leaves no comment, only getting that same distracted look once more. She begins putting more paint to the canvas, while I begin to stroll around the garden, letting her work in peace.

“Okay,” she calls out a few minutes later, grabbing my attention from the rose bush that Imelda just trimmed yesterday. “What do you think?”

I take a look at what she’s come up with. She’s added a somber mass of almost-solid black clouds in the air, an amorphous figure that pulls on the strings connected to all the figures in the painting. It’s like a dark god, a puppet master, and I smile.

“I couldn’t have done it better myself,” I say, nodding appreciatively and then putting a friendly hand on her shoulder. She smiles back at me, looking very proud of herself. “Now, one last thing that we should work on. The background is still looking a bit plain. It’s just one flat color right now, you see?”

“How should I fix it?” Salome asks, and then she shakes her head. “No, no, I should know how to fix this myself…”

“Actually, I can give you a hand with this,” I say, squeezing her shoulder.

“Oh?” she says, sounding faintly surprised.

I sidle up behind her, my chest lightly pressed against her back, and I encircle my right hand around hers, the two of us holding the paintbrush together.

“Oh,” she breathes, and though I can’t see her face, I know she’s got that distracted look on her face.

I dip the brush in the white paint and gently bring it up to the canvas, slowly beginning to trace out a series of whorls and lines on the background.

“See how the lighter color brings greater depth to the background,” I breathe in her ear, as my left arm wraps around her waist, bringing her ass up against my crotch.

“Yes,” she breathes tightly, “I see.”

“See how it makes the painting more dynamic, how it shifts the entire tone,” I say, shifting my hips into hers, pressing my hardening cock against her ass.

“I like it,” she says, sounding nervous, “I like what you’re doing.”

“I’m teaching you so that we can explore more interesting things together,” I whisper into her ear, continuing to trace lines into the painting.

I’m not sure she’s even looking at the painting anymore. Her head is tilted upwards, her neck exposed to me, and I leave a trail of my hot breath across her neck, causing her to suddenly gasp, her chest jutting up, her ass into my cock, just the fabric of her dress and my pants separating us.

“But we have to explore carefully,” I say, gradually drawing my hips back from her as I finish off the final line.

My grip on her hand loosens, and I see Salome breathing a touch more rapidly than usual, as she turns to look back at me.

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes.”

“The painting looks better now?” I ask.

She glances at it, sees how the smoky white lines add more character to the painting, and she nods.

“This might be the best one we’ve done,” she says.

“Not we. You.”

She gives me that bright smile again.

“Let’s put this one up on your website,” I say. “I think it’s a good one to showcase.”

“You think I’m ready to show my art to the public?” she asks, wide-eyed.

Maybe. I don’t know. But there’s more at stake here than just Salome’s art.

“Yes,” I say, touching her shoulder again. “You’re ready.”

Salome jumps into my arms, hugging me, beaming a bright smile.

I slowly fold my arms around her, staring at the painting through the nook of her shoulder. In that painting, amongst those white lines, is my message to Erin. I hope it’s she, and only she, that will be able to figure it out.