The Portrait

It happens, rarely but every so often, that a person long forgotten will walk back into the life of another and pick up just as though they had never left. This is what Ada thinks about as she walks down a sunny row of old factory apartments, recalling, as if from a previous life, childhood memories of Miles.

The last time they had spent an afternoon together he brought over a box of old photos, ones she had never seen but still remembered. There were first days of school, shared vacations, a pile of film from a now-defunct amusement park. Her favorite showed her looking over her shoulder at the camera, her bare back painted in a smudged but competent dirt-colored landscape next to a proud Miles showing off mud covered hands. They couldn't have been older than six.

"I still do that, you know," he had said with a sideways glance.

"What, roll around in the mud?"

He had laughed. "No, paint, draw. You should model for me sometime."

She had been flattered. Now she feels nervous, making her way up the steps and through the broken-latched door to his building. There's a rusty looking freight elevator but she opts for the stairs; up one floor and to the left. She knocks on his door. Miles opens it, stiff and formal despite his ill-fitting, graphite smudged clothing. The room is big but cluttered with boxes of colored chalk and oil pastels and sketchbooks, which have been pushed to the walls to make a clearing for the wooden stool next to the window. His easel is backed up to the edge of his bed, the only piece of furniture in the room not devoted to creating or displaying art.

"Alright." They look at each other, then away again in mutual embarrassment.

"Can I get you anything before we get started? Water, coffee...?"

"I'm good." She sets down her bag and steps out of her shoes.

"I'm ready whenever."

"So just...on the stool here?" The seat is laid out in the middle of the room, in the flood of afternoon sunlight streaming through the factory windows.

"Uh. Yeah. However you want to sit, just make sure it's comfortable."

She sits with her knees slightly apart, hands grasping the stool behind her back so that her chest is thrust forward. It's comfortable enough.

"Are you ready?"

She nods and he sits behind the easel and begins to draw.

She focuses on the wall behind him, on the thermostat mounted above his right shoulder. Still, she can see his face in her peripheral vision, constantly glancing upwards, flitting from her body to the sketch and back again.

They are still and silent for the better part of an hour, each do their best to pretend there is not another person in the room. Ada concentrates on the thermostat, letting her vision blur and cloud over again and again before she allows herself to blink. Miles flits back and forth, studying each shadow on her face, saying nothing.

Finally, he blinks to life as if waking from a trance.

"Do you want to take a break? I've been focusing on the face so now's a good time, before I move on."

Ada stretches and rolls her neck. Miles pulls his easel closer and edits patiently while she circles about the room.

"Is this one yours?" She points to a nude portrait of an older woman with cropped hair. Miles looks up.

"Mmhm. From a class I took last year."

"And this one too?" It's a younger man, standing confidently with his short flaccid penis resting on his thigh.

"They're all mine." He shrugs.

"They're really good. I know I said that before but...they're really good."

He looks back down at the sketch.

"They're all nudes."

Miles examines his sketch. "Your observational skills are unparalleled."

They are silent for a few minutes more as Ada flips through portraits of models with sagging breasts and protruding stomachs, shapely legs, uncircumcised members, rippling pectorals, hourglass hips with spiderwebs of stretchmarks, and shy, tense asscheeks. The whole spectrum of the human body presented skillfully without judgement or preference, only quiet appreciation.

"Should I take this off?" She tugs on the hem of her sundress. Miles looks up.

"What?"

"All your models are nude. Do you want to draw me nude?"

"I mean..." Miles blushes, looking for the first time self conscious, "well, only if you want to. I didn't want to make this whole thing more uncomfortable than it is already."

Ada smiles slightly. "I'm not uncomfortable being naked. If that's how you want me."

He blinks and smooths down his trousers. "Okay."

Though both know it doesn't matter, he looks away as she undresses with her back to the easel. Somehow the act of removing the garment is too intimate to share without the pretext of sex.

She sits, a little more shyly than before, her knees closer together, her chest less proud.

"Ready?"

He looks up, clears his throat but says nothing. Instead he picks up the pencil and continues to sketch. He imitates the curve of her bare shoulders with ease, breathing in a slow, measured pace to keep himself focused and relaxed. He starts on the clavicles, then erases several marks and starts again.

"That's not how you were sitting before."

Ada frowns, biting back a defensive response. His steady gaze has made her self conscious.

"How was I sitting before?"

"You know, sort of..." He sticks his chest out in imitation of a rooster.

"I was not."

"You were...a little, I mean. I wasn't that exaggerated."

"Show me." Her voice is weaker, softer than she anticipated. She hopes it did not betray her desire to be touched. Miles stands, stowing the graphite behind his ear, and walks over to her.

"May I?"

She nods. He lightly touches the dimple between the lower points of her shoulder blades. His hand is warm and barely grazes her skin but still she reacts as though brushed with ice. Her torso shivers and arches automatically. Goosepimples break out across her skin. Her breasts become taut and pointed. Miles clears his throat again.

"Better."

He takes his place behind the easel and turns his attention back to the drawing. Ada tries to concentrate on the thermostat but her gaze keeps slipping back to Miles. Each time his eyes flit back to her she feels a ripple of electric satisfaction, though he betrays nothing in his face that might suggest arousal.

She takes pleasure in denying herself movement. She imagines adjusting ever so slightly just to feel the friction against her thighs but rejects the temptation. Be still for him. She is still as the very air in the room as her swollen breasts and concave waist take form beneath his pencil.

His hand moves down the easel, his eyes move down her body. She imagines his glances growing longer by fractions of a second each time. When he looks down she studies his face. When he looks back their eyes meet. She drops her gaze, face burning. Stomach burning. Thighs burning.

He sets down his graphite.

"Your legs are wrong too."

She knows her knees are too close together but she does not correct her posture. She waits for him to approach her. He places his hands, warm, dry, firm but not forceful, on her knees and parts them slightly.

"Better?"

He nods. He sits.

She can smell, now, her own desperate arousal. She wonders if he has noticed. She wonders if he has even realized that there is a woman in the room at all or if he is so used to professional models that she has been reduced to the role of statue, an anemic, desireless representation of a woman. He licks his lips. She wonders if the glistening wetness between her legs is visible.

The thermostat remains in her eye but her mind wanders. She thinks of a vacation taken to the coast when she was sixteen, still young and totally inexperienced, having just recently outgrown the physical awkwardness of puberty but not yet surpassed the humiliating insecurity. She thinks of the afternoon when, not courageous enough to wear her new grown up body down to the beach, she had stayed in the apartment rented by her family, which overlooked a shared courtyard.

She had stripped in the living room to try on a new bathing suit, plain, white, one piece, which seemed to mold her body into a shape she thought of as womanly. As she slipped the straps over her shoulders she had looked up to see a sandy haired, brown skinned boy, perhaps nineteen, sitting in the courtyard, a book once held to his face now fallen between his knees. His eyes were wide, not embarrassed nor knowing, only surprised. Ada had thought to run, but instead stepped out on the balcony, thrilled by the boy's shamelessness as he stared at her with one hand clutching the lump in his shorts.

She remembers, with a rush of warmth, having pushed the straps back down over her shoulders. She had pushed the bathing suit down over her new breasts and let it fall to the floor of the balcony, exposing herself to him completely. Neither had said a word. She had watched with a studied curiosity as he stroked himself to completion. Then they had parted ways forever. Still, she had thought about the encounter often as a teenager, bringing herself to her first orgasm thinking about his eyes on her body.

She is flooded with a pleasant dizzy feeling, warm despite the cool air. Her eyes flutter closed. She thinks of each movement she longs to make and delights in forcing herself to stay exactly where she is. It occurs to her that she is sitting in full view of the window. They are on the second floor but now that the sun is setting anyone walking down the opposite side of the street could see into the apartment.

She is wondering if it is possible to climax by thought alone when he softly says her name.

"Ada. I think that's all for today. The light's not very good now."

It has grown dim in his makeshift studio. He switches on the lamp by his easel. Ada rises, begins to walk to him, then hesitates, partly unsure if she wants to see how he has rendered her on paper, partly aware of the humiliating wetness dripping down her thigh. She steps back, inadvertently catching the edge of a loose bit of chalk which breaks into splinters beneath her toe. She sucks in a loud breath and sits back down on the stool.

Miles looks up with alarm.

"It's nothing," she assures him, examining the white powder on her foot, "just a piece of chalk."

Miles says nothing. He takes a clean tissue from beside his easel and kneels in front of her. Gently, he takes her foot in his broad hands and dusts the chalk from each toe. She looks down at him, mesmerized. He lifts the tissue and wets it with his tongue, then sets to work polishing her skin clean.

When he is finished, they look at each other with the questioning eyes.

"Thank you," she says, the words melting into the air even as they leave her lips.

He bows his head and kisses her pale feet, chaste and reverent as a beggar kissing the feet of Jesus. His lips graze each toe on her left foot and come to rest on the inner arch.

He glances up at her again. They exchange a silent acknowledgment that they are past the point of no return. She parts her legs slightly.

Miles kisses her ankle, her calf, her knee, the downy softness of her thigh.

"Your smell," he inhales as if surfacing from water, "is driving me crazy."

He kisses the inner curve of her thigh, now softly, now with increasing urgency, suckling until she knows there will be a mark there the next day. He kisses her where she is already swollen and flushed with desire, licks her with great, bold strokes, penetrates her greedily with his tongue.

"God," he groans, "I tried. I couldn't stop thinking about burying my face between your thighs."

Ada blushes as he resumes, "I wanted you to. I wanted to touch myself."

"I'd like to see you touch yourself," he says quietly, "I'd like to draw you like that."

He strokes her with long fingers, drawing out her wetness mingled with his saliva, and enters her easily. His tongue draws gentle circles around the bud of her clitoris. She contracts with pleasure around his knuckles.

"Miles."

He withdraws his fingers and licks the honey from her sex. He stands. At this height, her chin meets his chest and his shaft, stiff and bulging in his pants, presses against her stomach. Ada watches him closely. His eyes are hooded with lust and the dark pupils are wet and dilated, laced with longing as he bends to kiss her.

Ada responds to his touch with her lips and her legs, wrapping the latter around him so that her cunt is against his left thigh. She writhes, inelegant and blissful, mewls deep in her throat with delight as his tongue grazes her teeth. With deft fingers, she unbuttons his trousers and caresses the organ underneath. When he pulls back her cheeks are hot and red, her mouth wet.

She blinks up at him, then down to where his member is pinned between them. She lets a strand of spittle drip off her plump bottom lip and fall on its purple head.

She clasps him gently. With one delicate thumb she coats the bulb and its sensitive underside with saliva. Miles inhales a sharp, short breath, quivering beneath her touch. He strokes her cheek, down her jaw, and pulls her closer. He kisses her forehead, her temple, the translucent pink shell of her ear.

"I want you so badly," he says, his voice hoarse and rasping.

He clasps his hands around her buttocks and lifts her from the stool. They totter backwards and fall onto the unmade bed. He sits up beneath her to remove his t-shirt. Ada tangles her fingers in his hair, holds his hot skin to her own, presses her lips to his cheekbone.

"Tell me how badly."

"Remember when we went up to the lake with my family? We must have been thirteen or fourteen."

She nods. It was one of the last times they had seen each other before losing touch.

"We picked you up at your new school. You were wearing your uniform, that little kilt. I thought it was the cutest thing I'd ever seen."

She laughs and sits up, settling her hips across his pelvis so that her clit meets the base of his bobbing member. Miles' lips are on her throat, then on her breasts.

"You wanted to fuck me when I was fourteen? Pervert."

"I was fourteen too! And I didn't want to fuck you. I wanted to kiss you."

"Liar."

She lifts her hips, running her wet slit up the length of his cock and back down. He groans and wraps his arms around her waist, holding her close as he can. She remembers now, that weekend at the lake. He had avoided her. When they made eye contact it was rare and fleeting and with a guilty look in his eye. She remembers crying when she got home, because he wouldn't hug her and she thought he no longer liked her at all.

"I wanted to kiss you too," she whispers.

He kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her. On her chin, her cheeks, her nose, her beestung lips. He tilts her on to her back and kisses her neck, her shoulder, the hollows above her collarbones. She clutches at his shoulders while little noises escape from her throat.

"Miles, please..."

She guides him into her, though he is of a considerable girth and enters her slowly and with a little pain before she relaxes. He pulls out and thrusts again, this time more fully and met with a gasp of pleasure. She wraps her legs around his waist.

They each glance up and discover the other has also been watching with perverse pleasure his dark cock disappear between her thighs. He runs his hands down her waist and on to her thighs. He pulls out and sinks in a little further. Hands trail up her thighs to the small of her back, drawing her to him as he thrusts slow and deep and intentional.

"Miles," she says again. It's all she can think to say. He looks on the verge of answering but instead he smiles that slightly crooked smile and presses his mouth against her neck. She can feel the five o'clock shadow on his cheek like sandpaper against her own. He is forceful, but not rough, so that each movement elicits a small gasping breath from her.

Ada tightens her legs around Miles' waist, forcing him to rest a moment, feeling her contract around him and her chest rising to meet his own and falling again. He withdraws, gently, falls beside her. She angles herself into the crook of his lap so he slips between her slick thighs.

Miles caresses her body, pulling her against him, lifting one thigh above his own. Her back and his chest are hot and damp and she feels his heartbeat against her shoulder as she reclines on him like a painted Venus. When he enters her to the hilt she gasps. Her fingers thread through his hair, bringing him close to the crook of her neck. His hand goes from her waist to her breast, up her neck to her jaw, turning her head to face him.

"I want to look at you."

His pace speeds to a gallop and she fights the urge to close her eyes. Her breath quickens with arousal then hitches as she melts into him. Ada grows limp and doll-like, eyes sleepy, faint with pleasure. Miles crushes his lips against hers, aggressively, and then softly as he twitches and releases into her, grunting from the back of his throat.

They say nothing. They lie there and listen to each other breathe. Ada buries her face into his chest, which heaves shallow and steady with sleep, and drifts off under the watchful eye of her own portrait.