The Real Thing Ch. 04

We modelled all through next day, and it was at the end of the session, as we were wearily pulling our clothes back on, that Kinlay said "Holly, come here for a second."

Holly fastened the top button of her jeans and walked over to him. He put his arm round her shoulder and took her into a corner. I tried not to make it look too much like I was watching. He had his hand on her shoulder and was leaning his head down, saying something to her, and she was looking at his shoulder and nodding tiredly, resignedly. I was sure they were making an appointment for later on. The difference now was that he wanted me to see him make it. He might even want me to watch, or something. He let go of her shoulder and patted her on the back, and she walked back over to me. I glanced at him. He was looking at me with a triumphant glint in his eye.

We sat through dinner and the whole time, as Kinlay expounded theories and told stories and joked and gossiped with his family, I was miserable that he had got such power over us. Holly and I ate our food and drank our wine and behaved like discreet little helpers, and when everyone went to bed, so did we.

I was woken up by Holly shaking me. It was still dark and I was confused.

"What's wrong," I muttered.

"You have to come," she said. "He wants you to come too."

I pulled on some clothes and we crept quietly down the stairs and out across the dark lawn to the studio. Holly opened the door a crack and we slipped inside.

It was lit with only a single bulb over the bed. Kinlay was standing by the easel in his grey t-shirt and shorts. He was smoking a large cigar. He glanced up at us. Holly led me over to him.

"Get your clothes off," he said to her. "You," he said, turning to me, "sit on that chair."

He shoved a bentwood chair into my hands and I sat on it. Holly quickly took off all her clothes and climbed onto the bed. She lay on her back, looking up at him, her body white and frail under the harsh single bulb.

Kinlay leaned over and thrust his hand roughly in between the tops of her thighs. She closed her eyes and winced. He began to massage her pussy, and she parted her legs and swivelled her pelvis forward to give him better access. He puffed on his cigar.

"Touch yourself," he ordered her. "Touch your breasts."

Holly began to cup and caress her small breasts in her hands, her eyes shut, her mouth slightly open, giving little whimpers. I watched. Kinlay glanced at me.

"You see her?" he said. "You see? That's who we are. Animals."

Holly opened her eyes for a second and looked into mine, at a moment when Kinlay happened to be not looking at her, and I could see in her eyes how humiliated she was and how much she didn't want to be doing this. And there was something animal in her look, all right. A trapped animal.

"You don't believe me?" Kinlay said to me. He puffed on his cigar. "No? Right."

He let go of Holly's pubis with a shove that made her gasp with pain.

"Strip," he ordered me. "Holly," he added over his shoulder, "get dressed."

I got off the chair and took my clothes off one by one, as Holly slowly put hers back on. I was alarmed to see that she had an uncertain, confused look. This must all be new territory to her, to find herself in my shoes. When she was dressed, I was standing there, naked, waiting for him to tell me what to do next. There was something especially humiliating in Kinlay wearing his shorts, Holly being fully clothed and me being nude.

"Come here," he said. I went over to him and he put a strong hand on my shoulder.

"Kneel," he said. "Sit on the chair," he ordered Holly.

Holly got off the bed and sat on the chair. My back was to her as I knelt obediently in front of him. I could smell the sweat and smoke and alcohol coming off him. She could see my bare shoulders and back and arse. I took a deep breath because I was pretty sure what was coming.

He reached into his shorts, pulled out his blood-engorged cock and pushed it against my lips. I opened them and let him in. I put my hands on his sagging arse, closed my eyes and began to suck him off. I'd never had a man's cock in my mouth before and I had to make up a technique that seemed to work. I tried to wrap my tongue around him and keep my teeth out of the way.

"Oh, he's good, your boyfriend," Kinlay said softly as I hauled my lips along his shaft. "Quite the little cocksucker."

The cold concrete floor of the studio was making my knees hurt. But I kept sucking on Kinlay's cock, trying to urge him to come in my mouth. He grasped my head with one hand and moved it back and forth, fucking my mouth. Once or twice I gagged as his cock touched the back of my throat. His breathing grew harsher and he muttered low curses; "Oh yeah...you fuckin bitch...that's it...take me, ya fucking girl ya..."

I pressed my lips around him and licked him as hard as I could until my tongue ached. He was getting more and more aroused and his legs were trembling. I went faster and faster and his breathing became loud moaning, then he started to gasp and he pulled my head away from him, pulling his cock out of my mouth at the same instant. I was so startled I opened my eyes.

He grabbed me under the armpits and heaved me onto the bed. I landed on my back. He scrambled onto the bed and spun me around until I was sprawled on my back, my head hanging upside-down over the side. I saw Holly watching us. She was looking directly into my eyes. Kinlay lifted my legs high and spread them, exposing my arse. I raised my head and gasped "Oh no! Please!" but I knew he was going to do it. He spat on his fingers and rubbed it around and then he leaned into me, pushing with all his force, slowly easing his cock into my arsehole. I closed my eyes and grimaced.

Normally, in stories like this, I would say something at this point about how I was burning with shame and excitement as my mentor raped me while my friend watched, et cetera, but it wasn't like that. Mostly, it hurt physically. It was only the second time anyone had ever been in my arse and it was a massive invasion of my body, a brutal presence that seemed to come with several different kinds of pain. It was also violently humiliating. Holly and I had been as intimate as this, but it had been private and about desire. Kinlay was doing this to me to make a point, and it hurt to be used. And yes, it was sexually arousing in a purely mechanical way that I had no control over. I had had the occasional fantasy about anal sex – nothing more. And I was ashamed that my body responded when Kinlay buggered me. Having Holly watching was the final insult. What kind of man was I, if being fucked up my arse could do this to me?

My cock was stiff, bouncing on my belly as Kinlay drove into my arse, and I heard him say "Look at him, Holly. Look. Your fucking boyfriend. Your poodle. What do you think of that?"

I opened my eyes again, panting, and I was looking at an upside-down Holly, sitting with her hands clenched together, her face pale, staring at me. She didn't move, although her lips were slightly parted.

Kinlay sped up his strokes and I had to close my eyes again with the pain of it. At the last minute, just as he was straining deep into my arse, he pulled out of me – making me squeal – and moved himself frantically up my body, and then he gave a harsh hiss and came in a great gush into my face. I tried to move my face but he grabbed my head and held me immobile, dripping the last beads of come into my eyes.

He sat on my chest as I whimpered, and then he said to Holly "Strip, and get up here."

I kept my eyes shut and heard Holly taking her clothes off, then the mattress bounced as she got on the bed. I could imagine her pale body crouching next to me, waiting for Kinlay to tell her what to do.

Kinlay got off me, making me gasp as his weight left my chest. The bed creaked as he got off it.

"Kiss him," he said.

I felt Holly's hands on my arms and her mouth kissing my face all over, smearing her own face with Kinlay's still-warm come. I kissed her back and cradled her head in my hands, caressing her skull and touching her short hair. The come was threading and stringing between us and some had got into my eyes – it stung. It was in our mouths and up our noses and we had to swallow some of it.

"Now fuck each other," he said.

I opened my eyes and through the blur I made out Holly looking down at me. She lay down on her back and reached up to me, her face serious and concentrated, and I lay between her thighs, then I was directing my cock against her mostly dry pussy. We needed lubrication. I unthinkingly reached up to wipe some of Kinlay's come off my face and use that, but Holly must have guessed what I was thinking, because she gave me a tiny, terrified shake of her head. Fucking stupid, of course. Holly didn't want there to be any chance of getting pregnant.

We kissed each other frantically, desperately trying to get excited enough to obey him, and when she was wet enough I managed, with some painful gasping from both of us, to get the tip of my cock inside her.

And then Holly and I were locked together on the bed, naked and fucking, for his benefit and at his command. We had thrown away any last vestiges of ourselves as being independent agents. We were his toys. Holly looked desperate and lost and I'm sure I did too. There was very little pleasure in it, only the bare physical reaction. We held onto each other and I kept my eyes shut most of the time. When I opened them, Holly was beneath me, her eyes tightly closed, her breath hissing through her clenched teeth, forcing herself to enjoy it. She opened them and looked at me for a second, and her eyes were appealing to me for something.

He walked around the bed, scrutinising us as we fucked, warning me not to pull out. We kept going, even though it was hard to keep up a hard-on when there was no privacy or dignity or tenderness in the act. Kinlay got impatient and he seemed to sense the problem.

He abruptly got onto the bed and took us each by the hair and rubbed our faces together, hard, so that we gasped in pain. The cooled strings of come on our faces were rubbed further in, and our features were squashed against each other. Somehow it seemed the last humiliation and I felt myself about to come. I knew Holly wouldn't want me to come in her but I couldn't pull out. She wrapped her bare legs around my waist and her arms around my ribs and urged me on, straining against me, as if she wanted to reassure me that she knew that I had to do it.

I forced my cock as deep into her pussy as it would go and she winced and moaned. I rubbed my pubic bone into hers and she breathed "Oh God!" and bit her lip, straining against me, burying her face in my chest. I put my hands on her bare arse and pulled her into me as I felt myself coming inside her. Kinlay was crouched next to us, watching us fiercely. I felt the muscles in her vagina tighten and she whined "Aaaahh!" into my collarbone, forcing herself down on me, and then she stopped breathing for a second – and then, at last, she came, or at any rate seemed to, letting her head fall away from me and her face go slack. We were each panting for breath and sweating. My cock was softening inside her. Her pussy was full of my come.

I was angry with Kinlay for making me do it. Holly had a dread of getting pregnant. When we had sex we would either use a condom or she would urge me to pull out at the last minute, or come in her arse. She would have liked to use the Pill, but it invariably gave her crippling migraines. I had no idea where she was in her cycle. As I pulled out of her, I looked down and saw the dark sticky blood on my cock. Normally I didn't enjoy the sight, but this time it was a blessed relief.

I rolled off her. We lay side by side on the bed, breathing heavily, staring into the darkness on the other side of the plexiglass roof. We were drained from the sex and I wanted only to go where he wouldn't be watching us.

He got off the bed and stood, looking down at us.

"Animals," he said with some satisfaction, and he walked slowly out of the studio, shutting the door behind him.

I got off Holly. Neither of us could look at each other. I found a bit of rag and wiped as much of Kinlay's come off my face as I could. Holly pulled her clothes on quickly and I did too. We headed for the door, side by side, still unable to face each other.

"Sorry," I muttered.

"It's okay," she said.

We went back to the house, climbed the stairs and fell into bed. I dreamed of being outside buildings where I could hear massacres going on inside, but I couldn't raise the alarm. In the dream, the sounds of shooting and screaming grew louder and louder.

Every morning we would go to the studio together, strip off and pose. He always arranged us in poses where we looked like we had just had sex, or were still doing so, or were just about to. He wasn't all that interested in showing our faces. He had started working at a ferocious rate, finishing a picture in as little as ten working days. We could tell that he was, as they say, experiencing Flow – he worked with a kind of ruthless cheerfulness, not talking except to give us instructions or snap at us for lacking concentration, and he didn't abandon a single picture.

It was well know that Kinlay had had affairs with his previous models. I don't think you could call what he had with Holly and me an "affair". The word suggests a kind of romantic involvement, a mutual passion, involving wine and stolen kisses and broken promises. Kinlay didn't make any promises to us. He just got us where he wanted us and used us, in every sense of the word, over and over again. And, to begin with, at any rate, we were able to think of it as an honour to be used by him.

He would want one, or the other, or both of us, every night. I would creep out of bed at a time I'd prearranged with him and go down to the kitchen and see a light on in the scullery, and I'd go in there and he'd shut the door behind me and make me strip naked – he always made sure we were naked, while he kept at least some of his clothes on – then he would shove me onto my knees and fuck my mouth. Or I would go to the studio, where he would undress me and fling me on my back, or my belly, and spread my legs and shove his cock into my anus and sodomise me until the pressure of him inside me made my own throbbing cock ejaculate. I would lie on the bed, in the wetness of my own cooling come, and snivel with the pain and the degradation of it, and he would tell me how much of an animal I was, that even a young guy like me with so many gifts and so much ahead of me was still just a shameless little fuck monster when I had a cock up my arsehole.

When he had used me for a couple of nights running he would get bored and switch to Holly, and then when he had grown tired of her he would ask one of us to bring the other that night. That was how he worked; he would always make one of us responsible for telling the other that we had to go down to him.

We had never thought of the pictures we had sent him as seductions, but it had clearly occurred to him. He seemed to be inexhaustibly fascinated with the possibilities of our bodies, the lengths we could go to. I had never put my tongue up a girl's arse until Kinlay stood over us and made me do it to Holly – I can still remember her clinging to the sheet and squirming, giving frightened little gasps.

And his style was changing. I don't know whether his style changed to fit his mood, or his mood became more callous to suit his style, but he was ceasing to be the painter we had given ourselves up to serve.

The single Portrait of H.K. had been the only painting he'd completed in his mature style; harsh and almost abstract but also tender and full of a sort of entomological compassion. He'd abandoned the second painting of Holly, and starting with the first one of Holly and me, his style was becoming more terse, more sketchy and vulgar and desperate. The bodies were simultaneously lush and distorted, the paint seeming to explode onto the canvas. The only things I can compare it to are those late Picasso cartoons of the old painter and the beautiful young model and the little jeering ape, except that he'd left the painter out and combined the figure of the model and the ape. Kinlay's paintings of Holly and me were ragingly angry about love and sexual pleasure and tenderness and youth; he painted us as two skinny naked monkeys fucking each other. He was making us act out his despairing tableaux of weary sex, of waning desire, so as to get his revenge on his own waning powers through exhausting ours. His work wasn't about the viewer anymore. It was only about him. He had finally lost interest in other people.

Except, of course, us.

It was no wonder his work was becoming so cynical about love and tenderness; with Kinlay telling us what to do all the time, circling the bed on which we coupled like lab rats, there was no room for love in what he made us do to each other. The irony, of course, was that he painted us as though what existed between Holly and myself was true love, that we were a normal boyfriend and girlfriend whose romantic naïvety he was somehow desecrating. Like he was showing us what it was all really about. I don't think he had any idea of the uneasy silence and tension that was at the heart of our relationship with each other, the way in which I sometimes still couldn't be sure whether or not she even liked me. If we had been a normal couple, I don't think we would have done what we did for him. Maybe it was that strange feeling we had for each other, that mixture of compassion with a kind of fascinated hostility, that made it possible for us to do the things to each other that he told us to do.

Or maybe some bit of him knew exactly how we felt about each other. Maybe that's what he was painting all along. Maybe he painted us as parodies of lovers because on some level he could see that what we had was a parody of love.

I don't know, really. You need to hear how it all worked out before you decide.

We were tired each morning and exhausted each evening and it took its toll. Even Hilary Kinlay, who was happy now that her husband was producing painting after painting, was moved to comment one night when we were practically falling asleep into our food.

"You work those kids very hard, Jack," she said.

"They like it really," he said, and winked at us. Holly and I managed tired smiles.

"Why don't you give them a few days off? Let them go down to the town and spend some of their money, for god's sake."

"Just need to get this series done while the humour's on me," said Kinlay breezily and changed the subject. Among his family, he was still the bluff and confident master painter; it was only when we were alone with him that we saw how desperate he'd become. He couldn't face the decay of his body and he needed us to serve him with ours, to let him convince himself that he was still potent. And while we were drained and shamed and humiliated by what he made us do, we still wanted to help him if it was in our power to do so. The work he was now doing was too extraordinary for us to walk away from.

Holly told Hilary that we were fine, thanks, that we didn't want to go to the town. The nearest town was a popular, arts-and-craftsy little tourist resort with a good bookshop and a fancy delicatessen where Anna Kinlay bought much of the food we ate. We had literally never been there since the day we arrived. We barely had the energy most days to make it there, but we genuinely didn't want to go. We didn't know what road Kinlay was taking us down, but we were determined to walk by his side for as far as we could.

The work-rate was interrupted in early October when Holly came down with an attack of thrush. Kinlay was frustrated that he couldn't have her whenever he wanted, and he took it out on me. That was when the three small solo nudes of me were done. I still don't know how I got through those four weeks. Holly would come with me to the studio and sit fully-clothed in a corner, like I used to, and watch while Kinlay wrestled with himself and with me. Sometimes, the first thing he would do at the start of a session was hold me down and deliberately fuck me, making sure Holly watched the whole thing. I would lie beneath him and moan while he worked his cock up my ass and Holly would watch me, her face a bleak mask, as he would keep fucking me and whispering to me until he forced me to come, blubbing like a kid, over the sheet. Exhilarated by his triumph, Kinlay would then come inside me. He would sometimes smear my own semen over my face. Then he would pull out of me and fling me down like a naked rag doll, then he'd start working.