Alisha: A dark Romance Ch. 01

My hand moved down the soft skin of her body until I felt the soft, springy curls nestling at the top of her slit. My fingers delved lower, and she gasped and shuddered when I pressed her hard button, and let my fingers curl protectively over her mons.

"Oh, God, I love it when you touch me there," she gasped and spread her legs, inviting me to plunder further. Her black curly tuft drew me down, and she shuddered as I licked along her succulent pussy lips, tasting the sweet honey of her arousal. I licked and sucked her clit, my arousal painfully pressing against the blanket covered ground.

She shuddered with a muted cry as I pushed two fingers into the hot wet warmth of her pussy. She came a few moments later as I caressed her G-spot, this time with a loud cry. Her legs tightened around my head, and I nibbled at her clit and she writhed under me.

"Oh, holy fuck, what are you doing to me, I love you so much."

I looked up at her sweat coated face as she rose to her elbows and peered down her body at me.

"I love the sweet taste of you," I told her, "But now, I just want to bury myself deep inside you."

"Please," she said, "fuck me, show me how much you love me." She held her arms out to me, inviting me to cover her body with mine.

That afternoon became a symphony of lovemaking, with both of us playing the other like fine instruments, with intermissions for food and drink. When we grew too sticky, we restored ourselves with refreshing dips in the clear cold water of the stream, washing the sweat and fluids off our glistening bodies.

We finally admitted defeat, our bodies aching in that delightful way uninhibited lovemaking produces. A last dip in the stream to freshen up, and then we lay down wrapped in each other arms. Our relationship had taken a quantum step forward.

Alisha played with the Emerald pendant lying between her breasts. "I can understand why your grandmother's fiancé gave her this as a gift of love. I love that you've given it to me for the same reason. I promise I'll wear it forever."

She pulled me close and kissed me with all the passion left in her body to seal the promise.

The in-between years:

The good years

The good years were full of love.

College was a good time for me, my father bought me a car, and I was able to carry on living at home. I loved all the different aspects of film and photography. I was quick to appropriate, our old summer house at the end of the garden, over my father wishes. (I think he had a use for it as a hiding place from my mother). With Ali's help, I convert it into a studio and a small darkroom.

Ali was even better for me. We were in love with a capital 'L' both sets of parents cautioned us to take things slowly

Ali's enjoyment of acting grew, as well, and it was after seeing a few photos of her from one of her shows that the head of the fashion department of my college asked her to be a model for the student's summer show. She wowed the audience with her performance on the catwalk, including the head of the college's drama school. At the start of the next academic year, we were both students at the same college of art and drama.

After me, Alisha's first love was drama, and for her first year, that's what she concentrated her studies on, but as a result of her interaction with the fashion students, a second interest began creeping in, that of fashion and design. I think she saw the two as complementary aspects of the other. She loved the limelight, the ability to draw an audience in, to make them believe in her character.

The same could be said of her presence on the catwalk. She quickly became the favorite model of every student on the fashion course, the one they chose to wear that special dress. You know, the one with which they close their show. Her designs were good, but she could add that something extra to the dress she was wearing that would make it stand out.

As she grew and evolved from the beautiful girl I'd first fallen in love with, into the stunningly beautiful and charismatic woman she was. I was there with my camera; I don't think there was a day that I didn't take at least one image of her, and after I'd taken them I would add notes about them in my journal.

I'd been keeping a journal since I was 12. The first was a leather-bound notebook my mother gave me for Christmas, a tradition she'd continued all along. Early entries were just dry accounts of my day, but they soon changed into ideas and observations. Little sketches dotted the pages, then a few stumbling poems made their appearance. They became the home for all my rambling outpourings. There was even the odd short story in the last couple of journals.

Life changes: at the start of my last year and Ali's second, I moved into a flat in Brighton. My grandfather died after a short illness in the spring. He was buried at our local church, and my grandmother stayed with us for a couple of months. She reluctantly decided it was time to sell the farm in France and move back to England. Although my parents offered a place in our home, she bought a small cottage in the village near us.

She also bought a house in the old town of Brighton that was converted into a pair of flats. We all thought she'd bought it as an investment, but she surprised everyone, especially me when she gave me the whole house for my 21st birthday.

The house was on one of the numerous hills over which Brighton is built. I chose to live in the top floor flat, as it came with an extra bedroom in the attic and a view across the rooftops to the sea. The balcony off the lounge gave access to the small raised garden. The house was within walking distance of the college, so long as you didn't mind all the steep streets. The lower floor flat, I furnished and rented out to fellow students.

Once I was settled into my new home, I asked Alisha two questions. The first she said yes to immediately, the second was a conditional yes. The questions? The first was to move into the flat and live with me. The second was to marry me, this one she said yes to, but not yet.

"I want to marry you," she told me as she held the antique emerald and diamond engagement ring I'd bought for her. "And we are going to, I promise you, but I want to complete my education first and find a career that I'm happy with first." She briefly touched the pendant hanging around her neck. "I already have my token of your love, and I'll never take it off. I'll wear the ring with pleasure, but I don't want you to set a date. Will you agree to let me wear the ring under those circumstances?"

I'd have much preferred a full commitment from her, but we'd been together for three years, and I'd never seen her waver in our relationship. I had been going to suggest a summer marriage after I had graduated. I'd sold a few of my photos recently, and I had the offer of a part-time position with a local photography studio as soon as I graduated. I was feeling fairly optimistic about my future.

Honestly, a couple more years seemed neither here nor there, since we would be living together, so I took the ring from her and slid it onto her finger in answer to her question.

The bad years.

The bad years started with a good year for both of us, but the genesis of the bad years was set midway through Alisha's last year at college.

I'd managed to graduate with an art degree the previous year. After a lot of consideration, I decided not to continue renting out the lower floor flat. With a bit of seed money from my parents and my grandmother, I got a local builder in to convert it into a photography studio and started my own business. I'd learned a lot, working part-time the year before, for an established photographer in Hove, a town just along the coast.

One of my first customers was Sandra, a young local wedding dress designer with a growing reputation. She wanted 'artsy' shots of some of her new styles. She had a pretty assistant who she usually used as a model, but I quickly convinced her that Alisha would be a far better choice.

We tried a shoot in her shop and then my studio, and while the dresses and the Alisha looked stunning, there was something about the resulting images that I felt was lacking something. I convinced Sandra to let me take Alisha and the dresses up to the open expanses of the South Downs, and there the model and dresses came alive.

Windswept golden grass became the perfect backdrop to Alisha in the different white dresses. In some, the train would swirl adding motion to a frozen Alisha. I'd bought a few flowers for her to hold and I took several images with her holding a variety of single blossoms. When I presented the edited images to Sandra, she was ecstatic with her praise and was happy to promote me to potential clients.

In my spare time, I played with several of the images I'd taken on the hillside. I'd bought a reasonable computer when I'd opened the studio, and tried not to cry too much at the price of a high-quality A3 color photographic printer. Mercifully, it came with a copy of Photoshop, so that was one expense I saved.

I ended up with a series of eight prints, each one processed in high contrast black and white except for the single splash of color from the different flowers Alisha held. The most striking was a pair of images where she was holding a single sunflower in a different position.

I showed them to the owner of an art gallery in the Brighton Lanes. He'd exhibited a couple of my photos the previous year, and I hoped he would be interested. David surprised me; he was keen to add them to his next show of local artists and photographers in a couple of months. He suggested I should print, frame and sign three copies of each. David was fairly sure that he would be able to sell all of them.

I delivered the prints to David in late September. The show had been pushed back until the end of November, so I put it out of my mind. Meanwhile, I was getting a steady trickle of business, enough to pay the bills with a little left over.

Alisha started her third and last year and was immediately taken under the wing of a new acting coach, an actress who'd been a stalwart of the London theatre scene for many years. Angelique had recently retired and moved to Brighton and had taken up a part-time coaching position at the college. She watched Alisha and immediately saw her potential and claimed her for her own.

Angelique was always somewhat distant from me; I think she saw me as a competitor for Alisha's attention, or more likely a distraction. She was cool towards me from the start, and for the first time, I was made to feel unwelcome at the rehearsals for the new play the drama department was preparing. Previously, I'd been there with my camera whenever I was free. Angelique was upset when Alisha complained to the head of the department after I was asked to leave.

Angelique also tried to get Ali not to model for the third year students' New Year's fashion show.

"I don't know what's up with that woman," Alisha complained. "If she weren't so talented, I'd request a different acting coach."

I looked up from my journal and asked, "She's not still going on about me being at the rehearsals is she?"

"Nope, she's finally accepted that. Now she's got a new bee in her bonnet. You know I'm only doing the history of fashion after I dropped the rest of the design course."

I nodded, not too sure where this was going. She'd done that last year as she had wanted to spend more time on the different aspects of the drama course. History of fashion was a class that crossed the divide between the two departments, and she was still taking it.

"Well, now she wants me to drop the fashion show." Alisha plucked my journal from my fingers and sat on my lap.

"But you're not showing anything."

"I know, that not it, she doesn't want me to model for the end of term fashion shows. It's not like it's a big commitment, all the designers have my measurements, so it's only a case of me turning up for the rehearsals and the three afternoons and evenings that the show runs for."

"So what's her problem?"

"She's got herself appointed as assistant director of the play, and now she wants to schedule a mandatory additional dress rehearsal on the same evening as the last of the fashion shows."

"She can't do that, isn't there some rule that different departments don't schedule things for the same time if there are students committed to both classes?"

Alisha gave me a brief smile, "That's the way it's supposed to be, but the damn woman is saying that she can get a couple of critics to come and observe the cast and then give us feedback."

"Isn't that a big thing?" I asked. "It wouldn't harm you to be there."

"It would be if they were anyone important, but it sounds like they're both minor critics we've barely heard of. She's been going on at me about wasting my time as a model all last week, and now suddenly this. I've promised the designers I'll be there, some of the dresses were designed with me in mind."

"Well she's not going to drop you from the play; that would just be stupid." I pointed out. "It would cause her far more problems than it will you."

She nodded and wriggled to make herself more comfortable on my lap. "That why I love you, you're so calm while I panic."

"I'm not so sure about the calm bit," I groaned. She was causing me a fair amount of discomfort as my body responded to her wriggling in the only honorable way it could.

Her giggle was infectious, she moved her hips and then kissed me. I groaned again, and this time she took pity on my poor abused body.

She slid off my lap and knelt between my legs. She looked up at me, "Then I suppose I better make you more comfortable." The smile she gave me caused shivers to run down my spine. She loosened my belt and undid the button and fly of my jeans. She stroked the bulge that promised and threatened so much. A quick tug on my boxers and Alisha freed my cock. Her tongue ran around the head making me whimper.

I lay back in the armchair and let Alisha do what she does best. She teased me, bringing me close but refusing to let me crest the wave. Time and time again I was so close, yet so far. My love took mercy on me, and I spurted my essence, as she swallowed every drop. I pulled her up to me, and we kissed, I could still taste myself on her tongue

She broke the kiss with a grin and murmured, "You still taste as good now as you did that first time."

"But you've got so much better at drawing it from me."

"It's only fair; you turn me inside out with your lovemaking. I love you and I always will."

I led her to the bedroom and proved how much I loved her, possessing and sharing until we both collapsed exhausted and slept for the few remaining hours of the night.

It took several days for Alisha to resolve her issues with Angelique. The simple one of the critics was resolved when they accepted an invitation to one of the scheduled rehearsals.

Angelique's insistence that Alisha should only concentrate on her acting career needed an intervention from both departments' heads. In hindsight; such a wonderful thing isn't it! I wonder how different my life might have been if Angelique had gotten her way?

David, the gallery owner, called and invited us to the first night of his show of local artists now to be held in December. "Sorry it's been put off a bit, but I do have some good news, I've shown some of your images to a few people, and they love them," he said. "I was wondering if you have any more of the same model that is of the same quality."

I smiled, just a few, I thought. "Monochrome or colored, and do they need to have a theme?"

He paused for a moment, "Not studio shots I think, and I don't it matters if they are colored or not. Six if you've got them; with the others, that'll cover a whole wall."

I told Alisha that evening and asked her to help me pick the six images. She had no hesitation in her choice.

"Those shots we took in our dell this summer," she said. "The nudes in the dappled sunlight. The ones where my back is turned to you, and I'm looking over my shoulder at you. I love the way you can only see where the sunlight falls on my skin and they are all different."

"Yeah, there was a breeze, and the branches were swaying, the light kept changing," I recalled.

A lot of the shots from that day hadn't worked, but there were about 20 that had. Several of which were spectacular. I pulled the file up on the computer. I'd been using an ultra-fine medium format color film that day, and it had required longish exposure times. Alisha had been very patient and we'd both been pleased with those that had worked. I had scanned the best onto the computer meaning to see if there was more I could do with Photoshop but hadn't got round to yet.

She peered over my shoulder and pointed at the screen. "That one, that one, those two, maybe that one." She continued and finally picked out seven that she liked, then kissed my cheek as she went off to cook supper for us.

I decided on an eighth and saved them all to a new file to work on the next day. I'd print three copies of the best six and frame and sign them.

Supper was delicious and later, so was she. Her moans died away, and her fingers relaxed their grip on my hair. I raised my head and gazed into her eyes as she stared down herself at me. I kissed her erect clit, and she shuddered again.

"Fuck Ben, I'm not sure how many times I came," she hissed as she moved down the bed to lie beside me. She licked my face, smiling as she tasted the evidence of her body's surrender to my mouth and fingers.

"I lost count at six Ali, but who's counting!"

"Idiot."

"Yeah, but I'm your idiot."

"Aren't you just." Then she sighed, "Do you think we'll be like this when we're old and wrinkly?"

"God, I hope so," I said and then paused to look at her. Her usual post gratification glowing face had a concerned expression. "Is something worrying you?"

She wriggled into a more comfortable position, her face just inches from mine. "No... Maybe," she admitted. "This thing with Angelique has got me questioning what I want out of life. I had thought I'd go on to teacher training after college and become a drama teacher. I thought I would be happy teaching as well as doing a bit of theatre and some modeling."

"And now?"

"Her insistence that I should drop the modeling has made me question everything. When she gave me the option of the play or walking the catwalk my first thought was, I want both. Now I'm not so sure, I enjoy the thrill that acting gives me, and all the backstage stuff is fascinating, but it all fades away with the adrenaline kick I get when I walk down the catwalk, I love it when you're there with your camera."

"So what do you want to do?"

"I thought that I would send out a portfolio to some of the modeling agencies after I finish college."

I had a feeling of unease deep in the pit of my stomach. I knew how hard models needed to work to get to the top of their profession. The long hours and extensive travel. What would that do to our relationship? I had the business I was building up, so that was going to restrict how much I could travel, but it was her life, and I had to let her live it.

I shrugged, "If you're sure that's what you want then I'll support you. We can go through your photos, and I'll take some more if needed."

"You will? I love you so much." She pulled me on top of her and wrapped her long legs around my thighs. "Let me show you how much I love you!" she said as she grasped my hard cock.