Girlfriends Ch. 02

Cheri

I laid cuddled up against Hunter as he slept with that post-orgasmic obliviousness to the world that guys can get after fucking a woman and surrendering all their cum. My throat was sore from being roughly fucked by his hard cock, but in a good way, the taste of his sexy, salty load still in my mouth. And my large clit - or small cock, depending on your point of view - was pressed up against his naked sexy buns, stiff and ready to plunge into action if I were to listen to my endearingly dim and impulsive small head.

Being a woman and all, I rarely make decisions that way, and I felt Hunter wasn't ready for such... festivities. Eventually he'd let me do as I pleased with him -- things would go smoother once he accepts I'm always right. And once he quits worrying about all the Relationship Red Flags O' Doom he perceived popping up with dismaying regularity in the less than half day since we met. Not as fucking Zen about that as me.

I slid out of my bed, trying not to wake Hunter, put on an older set of panties and bra that I wouldn't have to worry about ruining, and laid out a bathrobe. I slipped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, turning on lights.

I iron chefed some Jollof rice, fired up the rice cooker -- 'iron chef' in this context meaning 'make one of the few dishes possible given almost no ingredients' - then headed into my painting studio.

I grabbed the biggest canvas I had left, previously painted with a black background -- most everything is better with black -- and stared at it a moment, debating whether to dial it back and cautiously use the bare minimum of my remaining acrylic paint stock to transfer my vision onto the canvas.

Nah. Fuck it. Nothing but the best for my newly acquired bae.

I poured a generous dollop of Fluorescent Magenta onto a palette, thinned it with some GAC 100 extender, and confidently started flinging paint at the canvas with a long handled thin brush. Laying down a splatter effect for the background, stirring in few drops of other fluorescents after each fling so each is unique.

***

Hunter

The burly guy pushed me to my knees, then grabbed the back of my neck. He pushed me forward toward his stiff prick... no, I said, please, don't...

Take it, bitch, he said...

I woke in an unfamiliar dimly lit room, just before his cock would have penetrated my mouth.

Where the fuck am I? Oh, yeah, Cheri's.

I got out of the unfamiliar bed, softer than mine. Cherie had put a neatly folded plush bathrobe at the foot of the bed. I couldn't tell what color it was in the faint permalight from the downtown Austin skyscrapers several miles away.

I put the bathrobe on, opened the door. The combo living room / kitchen area was dimly lit by undercabinet fluorescent lights. Light leaked around the edges of the closed doors to the painting studio. The clock on the microwave oven said 3:31 am.

Wonderful smells permeated the room, presumably from the rice cooker on the counter in the small kitchen area, which had a red "1" indicating it had been on the warming cycle for over an hour. There was a pale green sticky note next to the rice cooker, saying, "West African dish. Help yourself." A rice paddle with a few reddish grains sticking to it rested next to the cooker on a small white plate.

I opened the leftmost of the four overhead cabinets in the kitchen area, looking for a bowl. A profusion of spices -- Indian, Asian, Caribbean, etc. Pretty much the whole world represented there.

The next cabinet had one can of tomatoes, a packet of chicken bouillon cubes, and a nearly empty bottle of olive oil. Nothing else.

The fuck?

Next cabinet - four glass storage containers, two each of white and brown rice. Two glass jars -- black beans and pinto beans. Peanuts. Bowls and plates and glasses.

That's all the dry food she has? Refrigerator must be stuffed.

Nope.

A stick of butter. An onion and a red bell pepper. A jar of chopped garlic. A few ounces of sharp cheddar in a ziplock bag. A half empty bottle of red wine. The freezer had a small bag of corn and a large bag of winter mix vegetables. No meat.

Dieting? I thought. Vegetarian? Self control via a lack of food?

Then the epiphany hit. How she sat down next to me at the bar this afternoon, no drink in hand, not ordering anything. The worn out painter jeans she was wearing. The coyness about whether she was really a call girl. The bit about no clients ever having stiffed her on her amateur negotiating scheme.

Damn near broke. Possibly on the verge of eviction from the apartment. The dodgy economy drying up demand for luxury goods like her paintings. Possibly, in desperation, a first venture in a career as a high end call girl.

Naah, my aspie cortex muttered. A whole lot of dubious suppositions there. Look at a Venn diagram of all the possibilities...

You dumb fuck, the instinctual part of my brain chimed in. Quit analyzing, and FEEL what's right in front of you.

I was really hungry, not having had anything to eat since a light breakfast almost a full day ago.

I took a small bowl of her spicy rice. Found a spoon in the silverware drawer, went toward the studio doors. I could faintly hear the song "Radar Love" playing behind the doors.

Opened the door to a whirling storm of activity. Cheri, who had a faint sheen of sweat from exertion on her smooth dark skin, despite only wearing a slightly paint splattered black lace bra and panties, had two small natural sponges in her hands, each speckled with several different colors of paint. She was moving in perfect rhythm to the beat of the music, alternately dabbing and slapping the sponges against the upper left corner of the canvas on the easel, creating a semi-pointillist effect. Bits of the black base coat I'd seen earlier still peeked out on the canvas amongst the riot of colors that overlaid it, sharpening and intensifying the hues.

I had no fucking idea of what she was painting -- at first glance it appeared to be purely abstract, but something tickled at the base of my brain, telling me a pattern was emerging.

Cheri glanced over her shoulder at me. "Hey, sexy."

"It's magnificent. Don't let me interrupt your flow."

"K." She turned to a little round speaker on one of the tables. "Alexa, increase volume." The tail end of "Radar Love" ratcheted up, louder now that Cheri didn't have to worry about the sound wakening me.

Cheri grabbed several more paint jars from the half emptied rainbow on the storage bench, added them to a slew of opened paint jars on a bench to the left of the easel. Twisted off the lids, added more dabs of the newest colors to each sponge, resumed her frenetic painting pace.

I ate the heavily spiced rice, placed the empty bowl on an unused corner of the bench furthest from the canvas, and quietly stepped to the far side of the storage bench half full of unopened jars, trying not to break her concentration. I stooped and checked out the jars -- they all said "Golden Acrylics" in big print, and in smaller print to the right, "Heavy Body Acrylics / Acryliques Heavy Body". I picked up a small jar of blue paint, labeled "Primary Cyan". Carefully placed it back in place in the ragged remains of the rainbow of colors. Quite a few of the smallest 4 ounce jars had hand-written descriptions taped over the original color description, protected by clear plastic tape. I picked one up: "Turquoise + Veridian Green + Light Green (Yellow Shade)".

The air was heavy with paint fumes, which the ceiling fan was whooshing out of the opened windows. I belatedly shut the doors to the room to keep the fumes out of the rest of the house, and then peered into the mishmash of opened jars of paint.

Most of them were close to empty. Oh. Yeah. Broke.

I looked more carefully at the evolving canvas. Lots of bright colors - no grays or browns. I realized the grays and brown paint jars were sequestered on the small table, far away from the action, that held the little speaker pouring out hard driving music, like Cheri had decided to not muddle her paintings with earth tones.

I sat on a small chair behind and to the right side of Cheri, far enough away to not intrude, and watched her paint, somewhat distracted by her big sexy booty swaying to the beat. The chair was covered with a smaller version of the paint splattered canvas drop cloth protecting the entire floor of the room.

After a mesmerizing spell watching her work, I realized I was still pretty tired. So I went and picked up my empty rice bowl.

Cheri must have picked up the motion out of the corner of her eye, because she turned around and looked at me, sweaty, heavy lidded with fatigue and sleep deprivation, sexy as all fuck. "Back to sleep?"

"Nah. Gotta send some work emails."

She lifted her chin a tiny bit and pouted her lips in a Come Here and Kiss Me Already gesture.

I came over and carefully kissed her. She held her arms out to the sides, still holding sponges in her paint smeared hands, trying not to get paint on the fluffy red bathrobe she'd thoughtfully laid out for me.

"I love this painting."

She gave it a critical glance. "Wait til it's done. Still getting the image to pop."

"Great rice, by the way."

She sighed. "It's OK. Needed meat."

I padded off into the living room, sneaking one last peek at her magnificent booty before I shut the doors.

***

Cheri

I opened the doors of the studio as the first rays of sun peeked in the windows.

"Done?" Hunter asked.

"Whattaya think?"

He went inside the studio. "Holy. Fuck."

"Is that a good 'Holy fuck?' "

"Fucking is always good," he said, winking.

I rolled my eyes. "Pervert."

He rapidly blinked his eyes, trying to make me laugh. "I'M the pervert?"

Hunter walked close to the huge canvas, six feet by four feet, with two inch thick museum quality edges, barely fitting on my paint splattered high end easel, despite being oriented in landscape mode. I'd covered most of the canvas in brightly colored splatters and then sponge work, including all the edges. I'd rendered a 3D surface from the thickly layered heavy bodied paint, with metallic, fluorescent, and iridescent touches to lead one's eye around the canvas.

Hunter stared at the painting, like the embedded pattern, in what at first glance appeared to be a pure abstraction, was nibbling at his subconscious. "What's it about?"

"I don't believe in defining my paintings with the sort of pretentious word salad so many artists use. Assign your own meaning to the work."

He stepped up, inches from the canvas, mulling it over. "Can I turn it, figure out which orientation I like best?"

"Sure. Paint should be dry."

He carefully hefted it. The canvas made a squicking sound as he pulled it off the bottom lip of the easel, where the not quite dried paint had started to bond with the splatters from previous paintings.

"Well, dry except for that bit resting on the easel."

"Did I damage it?"

"Nah. I can touch it up if needed."

He turned the heavy canvas ninety degrees clockwise, from landscape mode to portrait mode, watched a series of metallic and iridescent accents glitter and gleam off the tiny peaks and valleys in the paint, on and off and on again, as the angle of reflection from the overhead lights changed. Started to put the painting back on the easel, realized it wouldn't fit in portrait mode. Leaned it against the wall. Stared at it.

His forehead scrunched in concentration, like the meaning hovered tantalizingly close, but still elusive.

He picked up the painting, rotated it another ninety degrees, back to landscape, but upside down from the original position. Back on the easel.

Glanced at me. I gave him an amused look, waiting for my relatively slow but endearing boyfriend -- or did he still think of himself as a "boyfriend"? -- to get it.

And then he got it. A view of a long haired, dark skinned woman, presumably me, laying on top of a lighter skinned guy between his spread apart thighs. The skin tones were composed entirely of colors instead of browns, a hard trick to pull off, but well worth the extra effort. Despite the facial features being blurred almost beyond recognition, the guy somehow looked startled, or worried, or ecstatic or maybe all three. Projection.

Once you saw the pattern, you couldn't unsee it.

Me fucking his ass, or preparing to do so.

"Fuuuuck."

"They certainly are."

"Is that the moment when... you know...?"

When you figured out I had a dick, I thought. Don't have to be PC in my thoughts. My eyes narrowed. "It's OK to silently think the word 'dick'. Just don't say it out loud."

"Busted. Fuck. How do you DO that?"

I ducked the question about the purported mind reading. "The meaning you think you see here can be mighty slippery. You never see a painting exactly the same way when you go back to it, because you're changing, the light is changing... it's like water in a stream."

"How much?"

"It can evolve a little, or a lot."

"I meant, I fucking love this painting. I want to buy it. How much do you want for it?"

My eyes widened for a fraction of a second, then I gave him a soft look. "I'd give it to you as a gift -- if I could."

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a price.

"Ummm... I've got paintings this size in galleries priced at fifteen. After the 50% commission -- taxes -- replacement paint and canvas -- maybe clear six."

He waited.

"If you could pay cash, the boyfriend price -- uhh -- four thousand?"

"For the sake of transparency -- part of me wants to blurt out 'hell yes', but that's just bad manners. The respectful thing is to mull it over. Agree too quickly, and you'd might feel remorse at not asking for more, instead of feeling good about closing a sale."

I stepped inches away from him, watching his eyes. Put my warm hands, still covered in dried acrylic paint, on both of his cheeks, caressing them gently.

"If it's too much, I --"

He put a finger on my lips. "Negotiating tip -- after you name a price, stop talking. Let them respond. Don't undercut your own price."

I nodded, then gave him a wicked look. Slid my lips over his finger. Sucked and licked. A faux blowjob.

You're not the only one with negotiating skills, sir.

***

Hunter

"Mmmm. Never had a woman do that to me."

She took her lips off my finger, presumably to speak. I instantly regretted the tactical error. What sort of idiot interrupts a blowjob?

"OK. How many * guys * did you let do that?" she teased, her eyes merry.

Thought about it. "Four."

"Four guys?"

"Four thousand. Cash. For the painting. But you gotta come to my house and hang it for me."

Her eyes widened. "You're the best boyfriend ever." She gave me a lingering hug and kiss. I hugged back, let her kiss me. Make her work for it.

She broke the kiss. "Kissing you ain't work, sir," she said in her laconic Texas drawl.

"How the fuck do you DO that?"

"I'm smarter than your average bear. Remember that if you're ever tempted to lie to me, even a little bit. Oh, and you gotta drive me. I don't own a car."

"Trying to save the planet?"

"I could faux virtue signal here, but no. Had to sell it a couple months ago."

I nodded. Glanced at the time on the microwave. "My bank outta be open by the time you shower, dress, and we load up my SUV."

She put my finger back between her lips, gave it a three second blowjob. "By the time WE shower, you mean."

"I think that might be pushing my dick's refractory period a bit much."

"Don't have to cum to enjoy a leisurely, steamy blowjob."

"Mmmm. I'd love to have your lips wrapped --"

"Who said YOU would be getting the blowjob?"

My eyes widened.

She grinned. "Kidding."

I relaxed again.

"Maybe."

I gave her stink eye, stuck my tongue out at her.

"See? Changed your mind already," she said merrily, her lovely wicked eyes sparkling.

I hurriedly retracted my tongue.

***

After a long soapy semi-platonic shower together, we dressed, and then I walked to retrieve my Lexus SUV from where I'd parked it yesterday, while she packed some gear to hang the painting. Driving the couple blocks back to her apartment, I mused on how surreal it felt that I'd met Cheri only about a half day ago.

And how I was planning on driving her to my house and giving her four thousand dollars. In cash.

Things... moving really fast.

An internal Red Flag O' Doom popped up.

I mentally told that idiot savant waving the flag to go sit in a corner and shut the fuck up.

Back in the apartment, I picked up the painting, while Cheri flicked off the lights then hefted a green worker's bag full of her gear. As I headed to the door, I noticed the rice cooker, still on the warming setting. I nodded at it. "Hey, could you bring that? Thought I'd make breakfast at my house, use the rice as a side."

She nodded, held the door open for me as I awkwardly maneuvered the huge painting, then went to retrieve her bag and the cooker. Locked the apartment. Rode down in the elevator with me and the Ginormous Painting O' Ass Fucking.

Outside, she eyed my black Lexus appraisingly. "Really nice SUV."

"Thanks." I tapped my key and the hatch quietly raised up.

"Is that gonna fit inside?"

"Sure. If I fold down the middle seats and angle it in."

"Really?" She looked skeptical.

"Not my first rodeo, hauling shite."

I had to adjust the front seats a bit, but soon the hatch closed silently, the glass barely clearing the top corner of the painting. "Ta-daa!"

In the Lexus, I said, "I live quite a ways south of here."

"I think I can just about manage to free up a few hours from my busy schedule," she said, deadpan, her eyes more heavy lidded than when I first met her. Tired from being up all night.

As I drove, I chatted with Cheri about painting techniques and fucking, with her at one point teasingly describing me as being "Gayer than that time when gay came to Gaytown." I got on 183, drove over the Colorado River, motored across south Austin, and took the swooping flyover toward Mopac freeway.

"Hell of a view," she said at the top of the ramp, looking at the expansive view of real estate for tens of miles around.

I shrugged, turned off at the William Cannon exit, stopped at my bank. "Back in a bit. Gotta get your cash."

"K." She turned up the radio, rocking out.

I withdrew four thousand for the painting, plus a couple hundred more for walking around money, rejoined Cheri. Drove south as the city tapered into suburbs, then into the rolling roads of the Hill Country exurbs.

"You weren't kidding about living a long ways away," Cheri said. "Thought you lived in an apartment." Her forehead creased for a moment, like she was idly speculating if she had terribly misjudged me and was being abducted by a serial killer.

"You're not an ax murderer, are you?" she said, lightheartedly.

"Nah. I prefer chain saws." Glanced at her, deadpan.

A flash appraisal from her dark eyes.

Eyes back on the twisty road going up yet another steep hill. Not a drive for lingering, loving gazes, if you liked keeping your car's sheet metal intact.

She make a sound halfway between a scoff and a chortle. "Like you would know how to run a chain saw, city boy."

I turned into the woodsy exurban housing development where I lived, taking the corner at speed. Not my first time zipping thru that turn. "This look like city to you?" I slowed down, watching for those fucking deer, or maybe a wild pig. Or pedestrians. Texas.

Interspersed among the woodlands was some pricey real estate. I kept on driving.

"Never answered my question about the alleged apartment you allegedly lived in."

"After my ex trashed the place, I changed the lock on the door. Then the arsehole apartment manager told me I had to give them keys for the new locks, one for them, one to give to my ex if she came back. Since she was still on the lease."