Venus of Rimmel

*** Author's note ***

This is my first story published on Literotica and my first short story. I apologize for any grammar or syntax error that the story may contain, as English is not my native language. Any comments or advice are welcome.

The title of the story is inspired by Francesco De Gregori's song "Rimmel".

*** Enjoy the reading ***

It happens at a photography show. I'm just strolling by, squished between the crowd. A wrinkled hand touches my shoulder. He is a strange little man, smaller than me, with shambling and elongated arms always circling around him. His hair, grey as smog, are scarce over his head and grow in bushes and branches on his sides. He looks more or less like an old and dusty broom. His little bleary eyes move around like flies, never resting on a single object too much. Even his mouth keeps a constant motion, curling and pouting after each phrase.

- Excuse me,- he utters,- is that you? The model in the photo?-

I look at what he's pointing at. The photograph hanged on the wall depicts a woman in black and white, almost fully naked, except for a pair of hard leather brogue shoes at her feet. She is crouched, her body pressed against the photo frame, as if she was holed up inside a wooden box. Her eyes are staring in the camera, while her arms are crossed over her chest, covering herself from the gazes coming from beyond the paper. One leg lay crushed under her body, the other is bent in front of her to obscure her inner parts. Her eyes are covered in a thick layer of mascara, to emphasize her outward gaze.

The little card at the right side of the photo reads: "Venus of Rimmel - Stefania Pozzetto, 2020".

- No, it's not me- I answer with a feeble voice.

The man looks at me, then at the photo, then at me, looking for any element that would link the woman in the photo to my person without doubts. He seems to find it because he repeats: - Come on. The model... she must be you. Who else can be?-

I cannot answer this question in all honesty. It could be anyone else in that position. I cross my arms, maybe imitating the position in the photo. Am I trying to help this man finding more elements to strengthen his belief? Our brief exchange reminds me of a dialogue from an old movie, but I can't remember which one.

My thoughts wander to the moment the photo was taken: I remember the discomfort of the hard leather biting my naked butt. They were old brogue shoes, found by Stefania in a thrift shop some years before, and she told me they were handmade by a master from Parma. She loved to use them for her photo shoot, saying that she liked the contrast between the sternness of the shoes and the smoothness of my skin. They were rough and uncomfortable to wear, as she forced me to put them on without socks, to exacerbate the contradiction between leather and skin, rigor and laxity. They would always leave a painful mark on my heels, a sanguine soreness that would last for days.

I had a very difficult time to nail that position, as if I was shut inside a box, filling up all the space between the frame of the photo. Stefania circled around me for an hour, naked behind her camera, telling me to lower my head even more, to bend my leg to the limit. "Imagine as if the walls were closing in on you", she said, and I tried to express the honest feeling of being compressed. After that, when she was finally satisfied with the results, I remember the taste of her lips and the strong scent of her pussy, as we are stretched all over her old couch. I was still wearing those old, uncomfortable shoes.

I hear the man talking in my hear, his breath against the skin of my neck, smelly and smoky.

- I can see why you think that, - I say. I turn around, looking for Stefania in the crowd, but I can't find her. The man is still behind me, he moves his hand on my hip now. He seems comfortable while touching women in public.

- Say, what are you doing after this?- he asks excitedly, a glint in his eyes telling me what he's looking for.

- Nothing peculiar,- is all I can say.

He grabs my hand and holds it between our faces, then he moves through the crowd like a fish, and I follow him outside.

We stroll through the colonnades infested by young people chattering and bickering. Everyone seems intent and concentrated on something. They smoke, they drink, they laugh and shout. It's mid-April, and the city is cram full of students and workers. They populate bars, pubs, and restaurants, they sit all over the pavement, they walk with confidence between the cars and the lights. There are no lonely people that night, but as I think that I immediately feel a cold knot forming in my stomach.

The man lights me a cigarette, then he does the same for himself. He talks energetically, but I lose much of what he's saying throughout the chaos. He stops and pulls me inside a restaurant which I don't know the name of. The interior is packed with people eating and talking noisily, and the tables are so crammed that it becomes difficult to walk through. We sit on a table on the side, and he orders some pasta, while the only thing I can ask for is a glass of red wine. I drink silently, watching him blabbering while stuffing a forkful after another in his big mouth, on the other side of the small wooden table.

I cannot concentrate on what he's saying as I am intent in observing the waiters passing by, coming into the dining room with their arms full of plates, and returning to the kitchen without nothing, as if they had lost everything in their journey. They swarm around the tables like flies, navigating the labyrinth of shoes, chairs and bawling children with ease. "I could never be a waitress", I think, "I would hate to separate myself from all that good food."

He notices my eyes wandering, maybe suspecting that I'm ogling the waiters. The thing is, he rises up from his chair, his face a full tomato of emotions, and insists on paying. I leave him rummaging through his wallet as I finish my glass of wine. Then, we're thrown again amongst the people of the night. We are pushed and pulled, compressed, and relaxed as we traverse the colonnades. My ass is touched once, twice, thrice, but I can't say anything, as when I turn around, the culprit has already disappeared amid all the others. "I have no one else to blame but the entire city", I think with a smile. The man seems more concerned than me. He's continuously touching the pouch where his wallet and his keys reside, turning left and right to catch an ill-intentioned hand and looking to everyone as if the theft had already been committed. He moves like a marathon runner, and his stride is energetic and bold.

The moment after that, he's rummaging through his keys to find the one that would open the massive wooden door of the palace. In the small brass plate, I read names of all the people we are probably going to disturb that night. Just on the left of the door, on the wall, there is a black graffiti that reads: "I asked love to love, and he never answered me".

Finally, the doors open, revealing a narrow entrance shrouded in darkness. He pulls me in, guiding me through the shadows, up a flight of uneven stairs, to a modest door at the second floor. There he stops, fumbling again through the keys until he finds the right one with a sigh of relief. He opens the door and invites me in with a large, theatrical gesture of his arm.

The second I enter his apartment; a sharp smell assaults my nose. I recognise it as his smell, a concentrate of nicotine both sugary and bitter that sticks to every object like a stamp. The apartment is small and narrow. The meagre entrance, where he raucously abandons his coat, leads to a cramped living room. Two dusty armchairs sit in front of an old cathodic television. Against the opposing wall, a great library looms all over the space, filled with books to the brim, so much as it cannot contain them all. Some books spilled out in protest, pouring on the floor in an anarchic display of independence. The only window of the room is serrated, covered with heavy curtains. On the floor, a thick parquet made of dingy and chipped pieces of wood has clearly been there for too long. A door on the right opens on a dim corridor. "A home for prisoners", is my thought, "where even the air is not free to circulate."

We stand in the centre of the living room, and he looks at me sideways, as to weigh me. - Something to drink?- he asks without conviction. I shook my head as I move close to him. He pulls me in for a kiss, awkwardly pushing himself up towards my face, and his stinking breath invades my nostrils. I reciprocate, pushing the body against him and sensing the roughness of his lips against mine, as my skin is pierced by the sparse beard.

He gets to unpack me like a gift, and he starts by lowering my skirt and unbuttoning my blouse. I'm proud of not having worn any underwear that night, as I can gloat from the surprise flooding his face, followed by a knowing smirk as all his suspicions are confirmed at the same time. I am all naked now but for a pair of black tights, mounted by a garter belt of the same colours, and my black shoes, like those in the photo but not quite uncomfortable. In his rush to undress me, he unties a suspender, that is left hanging against my thigh. He kisses me profusely, while his hands are searching all over my body to find the best points to squish, to pull, to wring out. I let him, moaning softly into his ear every time he begins to pull too hard. He plunges his face between my small breasts, squeezing them out and torturing my nipples to harden them. A hand descends over my belly, reaching between my legs, and forces an enquiring finger through the lips of my pussy.

When the assault is over, he retires, leaving me to recover my breath at the centre of the room. I watch him light himself a cigarette and crushing on the old armchair with a huff of dust. His eyes wander all over my naked body, and I do nothing to stop them. He offers me a cigarette and I take it, as I sit on his lap, feeling his stiff cock pushing through his pants. I kneel and start to unfasten his leather belt with slow, deliberate movements.

I unveil his swollen cock, red as a ripe tomato, and I take it into my mouth with a moan. A powerful smell flood my mouth and nostrils, primitive and intense like a well-aged cigar. I take my time to appreciate his presence in my mouth before I start sucking him with confidence. I pause just to take a puff from the cigarette, exhaling the smoke through my nostrils while I fix my gaze onto him, then I plunge my head back on his cock. I am very conscious of being naked on the cold floor, in that room foreign and unknown, and, as always, it excites me, sending heated vibes from my stomach all over the body. My skin is traversed by small waves of goosebumps, like wind through a grass field.

He abruptly stops me, and I separate myself from his cock, a trickle of drool wetting my chin. But it's too late, and with a groan the man comes, spraying his sperm on the armchair and on my lap. The hot liquid on the cold skin makes me shudder. He lies there, seemingly exhausted, a look of shame on his face.

As I rise up, I cannot stop to look at him. He is abandoned on the armchair, limp and pallid, the pants still lowered. His energy before convinced me that he was younger, but now I realize he's much older than he looks. He keeps his eyes shut and his mouth folded downward in a disdainful look, as he seems incapable of moving of a single centimetre. With a slow gesture, I try to wipe his cum from my legs, but I see that some drops have landed on the thin fabric of my stockings, so I desist. Finally, I manage to divert my eyes from him. Leaving him in his pitiful state, I go looking for a kitchen, as I am thirsty.

The kitchen is cramped at the end of a dark corridor, narrow like the rest of the apartment, practically a thin space between the counters and the fridge. In the sink the chaos reigns, plates and cutlery piled up over pots and pans and glasses, and from the mound comes a distinct rancid smell. It looks like nothing colourful has ever came out of that kitchen. I lean on the counter to open the fridge, enjoying being naked in that foreign environment. Inside, lighten up by an ailing light bulb, vegetables and packed meat and moldy cheese and milk, everything seems to belong to a different geological era. The cold emanating from the fridge gives off an aura of desolation and loneliness, like everything else in that apartment.

As I lean into the fridge, reaching for a bottle of wine forgotten on the bottom, I feel the sudden urge to get inside it with my entire body. I estimate that I would be able to fit inside the fridge if I push my head on the side. "Yes, I want to climb inside this desolate fridge and to close the door behind me, with my stocking and my shoes on and my suspender untied and the stains of cum", I catch myself thinking, "There is nothing in the world I want to do more". The yearning that closed space exerts on me is so strong that I begin to make space by throwing out all the inedible stuff when I hear the steps from the living room.

- What are you doing?- ask the man with a flat tone. In the dim light of the kitchen, he looks like he just got ten or twenty years older than before.

- I was thirsty,- I explain. That spectral mockery of a man brings me back to reality, and I am able to fight the urge. I confront him, naked in his house. His eyes are still wandering all over my body, but without the intense lust of the moment before. I feel like I am a dream, materializing in front of him, to which he doesn't know how to react if not rationally.

- You better leave,- he says finally, and I nod in agreement. My steps to the living room and my gesture to pick up my clothes from the pavement are sluggish and reluctant. "I would love to stay in this cramped apartment for a long time," I ponder. As I put my clothes back on, I feel his heavy gaze on my back.

When I leave the apartment, I don't look at him and I don't say another word to him. I feel like I'm leaving a piece of my life behind me, and surprisingly I realize I already forgot his face. I'm not able to look over my shoulders, as my life exists only in front of me, in the night crowded with people that want to touch me, kiss me, and devour me. I close the heavy wooden door behind me and, as I begin to walk through the colonnade, I feel like I'm levitating over the rest of the world.