Joyce Slater: New Paintings

I nodded.

"What's the word again?"

"'Garden'," I said. "I understand."

"Good boy," she said, and leaned down and kissed my cheek. "Just one more thing we have to do."

And she moved down the bed and fiddled around with something, then she reached down and took my bare hips and lifted them. Obediently, I stuck my bum in the air, and she placed some rolled-up clothes beneath me so that when I relaxed, my bum was tilted in that position.

By now I had a very good idea of what Joyce was about to do, and I was trembling, not with fear so much as with excitement and nervousness. I was an eighteen-year-old boy, naked on the bed of a woman in her sixties, helpless to let her do what she wanted to me, about to have her show me what humiliation tasted like.

Then I felt her finger smearing cool gel between the cheeks of my bum, and I couldn't pretend any longer that I didn't know what she had in mind for me.

"Oooh," I whimpered.

"Yes," she said, "that's what we're going to do. You want it?"

"Yes."

"Say you want it. Ask me to do it. Give your consent."

"Please...please, Mrs Slater...Joyce. Please...fuck me."

"Mm-mm, Sandy, not good enough. Tell me exactly what it is that you want me to do."

"Oh, please," I moaned, as her fingertip popped some of the gel inside my taut anus, moving around in me, loosening me, "please, Joyce, fuck me up my bum."

"Good," she said, and she pulled her finger out.

And then I felt it, the thick, broad tip of whatever it was she was using on me, pushing very slowly but firmly against my resisting anus.

"Relax, Sandy," she said. "Look, bring up your right knee. That's it."

I brought my right knee as far up as I could and it helped widen my anus. The thing, whatever it was, was spreading me, filling me. It wasn't exactly painless. I clenched my teeth and gasped "Oh, god!"

"Relax," she murmured. "You're doing great. Just a little further."

"Oooooh," I moaned as it filled my arsehole, stinging...I made myself relax and yield, giving in to it with difficulty...

...And then it was narrower and the suction of my anus pulled it into me, and it was different, very different. It no longer hurt. It was deep inside me, occupying me, and it felt dark and humiliating and wonderful, and the only thing that hurt now was my boyish pride, because it felt sweet and poignant to be used like this, to be naked on a bed, blindfold and tied, and have a woman old enough to be my grandmother holding me down and buggering me.

"Ooooh!" I whimpered.

"Oh my, Sandy," she chuckled. "You're a natural."

And then Joyce started to bugger me for real, gently pushing in and out of me as I squirmed and moaned and begged her "Oh, please...", and every time she murmured "Do you want me to stop?" I would let a passionate "No! Oh god...", and luxuriate in it, my young body helpless to stop the waves of dark pleasure flowing through it, my sense of my self as a good young man pierced by the humiliating thrill of knowing that I liked to be dominated, used, made to submit to something as forbidden and as taboo as sodomy.

It was one of the things we'd joked about in school, with guys who spent a little too long naked in the shower. Watch out, the joke went, I think so-and-so wants to take you up the ass. Well, now I knew I really did like being taken up the ass. And it was not coming from another guy, or even an adventurous girl of my own age, but from a mature, intelligent, cultured woman who had seen that I was open to having my sensibilities shaken up.

"God," Joyce murmured, as I squirmed and whimpered beneath her, "you look bloody gorgeous, Sandy."

I couldn't help myself, and maybe the dildo in my arse had touched my prostate, but I felt myself beginning helplessly to cum -- and then, to my amazement, I felt Joyce do something to the plug, and it began to vibrate.

That was when I was pushed over the top. The vibrating pressure of the dildo caused wave after wave of pleasure to tear through me and I let out a muffled scream as I pushed my face into the sheet and squirmed, a dazed animal. Orgasm after orgasm went through me, and I don't know how long it took but by the end, I was limp and sweaty and sobbing quietly, gratefully.

Joyce said later that it had been about two or three minutes, but it felt like hours.

I lay face-down in a blissful, humbled stupor, the sweat cooling on my naked body, and after a little while I simply slept.

I was woken up by feeling Joyce slowly easing the dildo out of my arse. I whimpered.

"Ah," she said. "Hello, beautiful boy."

"Oh my god," I moaned, and I winced as the bulbous tip of it left my arse. There was a pause, then I felt Joyce untying my hands and when they were free, I reached behind my head and untied the blindfold.

I sat up, blinking and naked, and was startled to see that Joyce was fully dressed. I was even more startled to see that her easel and canvas were in the room.

She smiled at me, blushing slightly.

"Sorry," she said, "but you were out for three hours. I had to take the opportunity. Come and see."

I got off the bed on jelly legs and walked around to see what she had been doing.

She'd been painting me, naked and unconscious on her bed, blindfolded, my arms stretched out. The figure wasn't exactly recognisable as me, just a slender, naked male youth; the blindfold and my face-down pose saw to that. I blushed to see that the dildo between my buttocks was clearly visible. It was scaldingly erotic and also oddly moving.

"I'm not sure what to call it," she said, "but it's not too bad."

"Wow," I said, dumbstruck.

"Yeah," she said. "I mean, I know it was a bit cheeky to paint you without asking you. I'll get rid of it if you don't like it."

"No, no," I said. "You can't do that. But, um...what...would you be thinking of...showing it to people?"

"Well," she said, "I do have a show coming up..."

My mouth went dry. I knew how much Joyce had been feeling like she'd dried up as an artist, but clearly I had inspired her.

She was looking at me carefully.

"Honestly, Sandy," she said, "if you're not happy with anyone seeing this, I'll give it to you to do whatever you want with."

"I think you should show it," I said.

She smiled.

"In fact," I said, "I'll do more paintings with you, if you want. As long as I can be awake to know that you're doing them. And I would sort of prefer if I can't be recognised."

Joyce put her arms around my naked body, pulled me into her, and kissed me.

"I was hoping you'd say that," she said.

***

So that's how it started. Joyce always stayed dressed; she said that she had to keep a distance between herself and the model, no matter how intimate she'd been with the model, so that's how I came to be in her studio, lying naked on the floor, while she went behind her easel in her paint-spattered shirt and jeans, and we got to work.

Over the next two weeks, she did what must have been thirty or forty pictures of me. She was a fast worker. After she'd done many drawings, she painted me. I was generally lying on my side or on my belly, although in the one titled simply Boy 4 I lay on my back with my arms under the base of my spine and she produced an astonishingly creamy, luxurious image of my naked torso and arm and legs, my penis lying on the top of my left thigh. My face was never shown. In Boy 4, my head--apart from my chin--is cut off by the right-hand edge of the canvas. In Boy 7, one of the more dangerous and sexually explicit images, she captured me standing in the hallway of her house, my erect cock jutting out in front of me. It had an edge of sexual menace that I found startling.

In the evening of each session, we would break and I would put on a robe, and she would prepare dinner for us. Then, as the dinner cooked, I would pose for a bit longer, and then we'd stop for the evening and eat, and then talk, and then I would end up in Joyce's bed, and we'd make love. I felt that she had so much to teach me that I wanted to spend as much time as possible in bed with her, naked. As for her, she was revelling in having an eighteen-year-old boy as her sex toy.

Joyce may have been long past menopause, but she still had a very strong need for sex. She introduced me to different positions, to the idea that sex didn't necessarily have to involve penetration, and most of all to the sense that sex wasn't just about me fancying girls and shagging them; that I should take pleasure in my own body, that I too could be somebody else's object of desire, and that there was nothing odd or nasty or unusual in letting myself be the passive partner in lovemaking. I spent hours lying naked in her bed, enjoying her gaze on me, enjoying her cooing over me and kissing and licking and sipping at my nude boy's body. I also learned the pleasure of receiving oral sex, because Joyce gave superbly prolonged and teasing blowjobs that would have me whimpering and begging her to let me climax. She, in turn, also inducted me into the endlessly complex and subtle world of cunnilingus. In only a few days, I learned to worship Joyce's body with my face buried between her thighs, covering myself in her juices.

And of course, there was anal sex. That was the one thing between us that was strictly one-way; she said she'd taken more than enough of it for one life time, and I respected that, but also, I had such an appetite for receiving it that I never minded.

It wasn't always as elaborate and ritualistic as it had been the first time. More than once, in the studio, if she wasn't happy with my posing or if I felt tense, Joyce knew that the best way to make me a more pliable subject was to come over to me and push me to the floor and, without asking my consent because she knew that she had it, lube my arse and work her dildo into me while I moaned and gasped and squirmed naked beneath her. Because every time I came from her doing that, I gave up my stupid false pride and accepted who I really was. And after my orgasm, when I was pink and glowing and sated and, yes, humiliated, she always made her best pictures of me. In one of the best ones, Boy 21, I am sitting naked on the bare studio floor, hugging my knees to my chest, my face buried in them. For some reason I had been in a particularly bad mood that day and had been unable to disguise the fact that I didn't feel like posing, but Joyce had diagnosed the problem and had pushed me up against the wall and fucked my arrogance out of me. I had needed it, but it had stung, and after reassuring her that I was okay and ready to pose, I had sat on the floor while I waited for her to get ready and had been unable to stop myself from weeping a couple of self-pitying tears, hiding my face so she wouldn't see. That's what Joyce had painted, and when she was done, she was exceptionally kind, and I was grateful. We'd painted no more that day. I had got dressed and gone back to my house, and that night I had Joyce over for dinner where we made it up, and then went back to her house to make love in her bed.

***

Towards the end of the third week, Joyce started inviting me over less. She was hard at work on the pictures, finishing them, giving them this or that twist, and she said that she didn't need me to model any more, they had a life of their own now.

I was a bit disappointed, but not too much. My parents were due back in a week and in only three weeks I had gone from being a shy, unconfident virgin to feeling comfortable in my own body, in or out of my clothes, knowing that at least one woman thought me intensely desirable.

I found out that my confidence was visible when, feeling bored one afternoon, I sunbathed in the back garden in just a pair of swimming trunks, and I heard a voice.

"Hi Sandy," it said. I looked up, and Sophie White was looking over her garden fence at me. She was smiling.

I was a little embarrassed at being seen like this, but after all, Joyce had seen me in far less, and for hours at a time.

"Hi, Sophie," I said.

"Sunbathing."

"Yup."

"You look good," she said, nodding. "I didn't know you liked sunbathing."

"I don't do it very often," I said. I saw Sophie checking me out, her gaze roving over my body. My trunks were a bit on the small side and I knew they outlined the shape of my bum.

"Would you like to come over?" I said. "I've got juice."

"Sure," she said and smiled. "Gimme a second just to get changed." She disappeared.

Five minutes later she came round via the path down the side of the house, wearing a bikini, a sun hat and sunglasses, and carrying a bag. I gave her iced orange juice and we sunbathed for an hour, chatting. Okay, so it wasn't love at first sight or even instant lust, although she looked very, very good in her bikini, but it was nice to make conversation with a girl and even flirt with her, without the terrible inner feeling that I would never know what it was like to be naked with someone else.

Well, Sophie and I did become friends, and from time to time more than friends, but this story isn't about her.

Three days before my parents were due back, Joyce phoned me up.

"Darling boy," she said, "it's all ready. Sorry to have not seen you. I've been up at the gallery hanging it all. It looks wonderful. Do say you'll come to the launch. It's tonight. Can you come?"

"Um, sure," I said. "Thank you. You won't, um...introduce me as the guy in the pictures, though?"

"Of course not. I'll simply tell everyone you're my charming neighbour who's interested in art."

"Great, then. What time is it on?"

"Six o'clock. It's in the Criterion Gallery. But, darling, don't come in the front, there's always a huge crush and there'll be people trying to collect for charity and what not. There's a side entrance. I'll have someone keep an eye out for you. Come that way."

"Okay," I said, feeling flattered that I got special treatment.

That evening, I dressed in my smartest shirt and chinos, because it was a hot night, and I went to the gallery. I didn't know where it was (this was before Google, remember) so I had to buy a newspaper to find out.

I saw the entrance to the gallery and there was a sign hanging in the window. People were standing in front of it but I could see Joyce's name. I went around the side and found the door and knocked.

It was opened by a smart young woman in her twenties, who smiled at me. I smiled back, feeling once again that my confidence had been given a visible boost. She showed me into the gallery and handed me a glass of champagne.

There were a lot of people but I didn't know any of them. There were a lot of pictures, most of me. They brought back memories of the previous four weeks that made me blush. I overheard people talking about it being 'powerfully erotic' and having 'fantastic energy' and how unusual and great it was to see a young man through the gaze of a sexually satisfied older woman.

Then Joyce came over, dressed up to the nines, smiling. She had a small bearded man with her and a handsome woman in her forties.

"Darling," she said. "So glad you came! What do you think?"

"It's great," I said.

"It's terrifically indecent," she said.

"Well, it's art, though," I said.

"Exactly," said the woman. The man and the woman were looking at me.

"People will think me a dirty old woman," Joyce said, grinning cheerfully.

"I don't think so," said the man. "I think there's a lot of power and intimacy in them. It's wonderful to see a male figure looking so vulnerable."

"It's beautiful," said the woman simply. "Wonderful work, Joyce."

"Oh, Lynn," Joyce said. "You're always so lovely."

Somebody else buttonholed Joyce and took her away to be introduced to someone, and I was left standing with the man and the woman.

"Sorry," he said, "I though Joyce would introduce us. She's hopeless. I'm Alan Curzon, I'm a curator. This is Lynn Field, she's the gallery director."

"Hello," Lynn said, smiling warmly and holding out her hand. "And you are?"

"Oh, I'm Joyce's neighbour," I said. "I'm interested in art. I'm Sandy."

Lynn shook my hand warmly and she and Alan looked at each other.

"Yes," Lynn said. "Extraordinary work. Very brave."

"Very brave," Alan agreed. "For both model and artist, I think."

They looked at me. I nodded.

"Joyce tells me that this wasn't staged intimacy," Alan said, "and I can believe her. You can feel the intimacy coming off the canvas. It's remarkable to see a model make himself so...naked, physically and emotionally."

Lynn nodded, looking at me.

"Mmm," I said, not really knowing where to look. A large man came over and smiled at them both.

"Lynn," he said, "Alan. Aren't these wonderful?" He smiled at me.

"Peter," said Lynn, "this is Sandy. He's Joyce's neighbour."

"Ah," said Peter and smiled at me. We shook hands. He stared right into my eyes. "Wonderful paintings. Just wonderful. Isn't she something?"

"She is," I said.

"I don't think I've ever seen images of a male model that were so...sexual, but also...tender," he said. "It's wonderful to see a model who obviously made himself completely available to the artist, on every level. So rare."

"Peter's also a painter," said Lynn. "He specialises in the figure, too."

"Ah," I said.

"Mmmm," said Peter, smiling at me. Then, abruptly, he touched me on the shoulder.

"It was very nice to meet you, Sandy," he said. "I hope we meet again."

"Me too," I said.

"Maybe Joyce will put us in touch with each other," he said, smiled into my eyes and walked off.

"Well," I said, to Alan and Lynn, "I'd better go."

"Oh, no," Lynn said. "Stay a little longer."

So I did. I stayed for another half an hour, chatting to them, and every so often someone would come up and say how wonderful the paintings were, and I would introduce myself, and they'd talk for five minutes about the intimacy and the exposure. It was all very nice, but I was extremely glad that you couldn't see my face in any of the paintings. It felt like the room was full of people who were looking at the eighteen-year-old boy in the pictures and wishing that they'd been Joyce.

After an hour I seemed to have met everyone, and I was hungry, so I said goodbye and found Joyce and said goodbye to her too. She gave me a hug but then someone came along and distracted her and I waved to her and she twinkled at me before resuming her conversation.

I went to the exit and stepped out in the street, wondering what to do about my supper.

Then I glanced at the exhibition sign in the window, and did a double take, and felt the heat spreading over my face. I hadn't been able to see it in full before, but now there was nobody in front of it.

JOYCE SLATER

IMAGES OF SANDY

NEW PAINTINGS

I was horrified. Hadn't Joyce promised not to tell anyone it was me?

But then I remembered. She hadn't told Alan and Lynn my name. She hadn't introduced me at all.

If I hadn't told everyone in the gallery my name, nobody would have guessed that the nude boy hanging on the gallery walls -- sometimes blindfolded, sometimes not, sometimes clearly recovering from sex -- was me. I had stripped myself in front of them, as surely as if I'd actually taken off all my clothes and let Joyce bugger me in the middle of the gallery.

My mouth was dry and I was trembling. They all knew. They all knew what I looked like without my clothes.

But since there was nothing else for it, I took a moment to calm myself down, and closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

Then I opened them, and went back into the gallery.

The minute I walked in, everybody nearby turned and looked at me. I could feel my face burning.

Time to face up to it.

Peter, the artist who'd been extremely interested in me, was smiling at me. I walked up to him, on my way accepting a glass of champagne from a smiling gallery worker. Joyce saw us and came over. I looked at her, and at Peter, and at the girl who'd handed me a glass of wine, and I knew, at last, what they were seeing, when they looked at me.