Once I got dressed, I put on one sneaker and left the other foot wrapped and socked for the day. At the top of the stairs, I sat on my ass, let my crutches slide down the stairs and used the strength in my arms and my bum to get down the stairs without hurting my foot. I felt damned good about the process.
“Hey! I would have helped you down ma jolie.” Alec came around the kitchen bar and over to me. My mouth dropped wide open. Alec was wearing loose plaid pajama bottoms and nothing else. His chest was golden, ripped, and on full display. A veritable feast for the eyes. His hair was long, wavy and came down to his shoulders. The colors were mesmerizing hues of brown, russet and gold. He walked over to me as if in slow motion. The muscles of his abdomen bunched as he leaned down to help get me settled with my crutches. I placed a hand around his waist and felt nothing but sinewy muscle.
Sweet Mother of God I was in so much trouble.
He helped me get settled with my crutches and led me to a barstool in the kitchen. Once I was seated, he turned around, and I couldn’t contain the burst of air that left my lungs. Alec turned to the side and his eyes caught what I was staring at, positively drooling over. On the left side of his back from his shoulder blade and curling around his ribcage was a giant black tattoo. It was a swirl of words written in French.
“Your tattoo...it’s...” I stared in awe at a loss for words. “It’s…beautiful,” I finally finished. Alec went to the stove, and in a cool trick move, cracked two eggs with one hand into a frying pan. For a moment, I wondered if I could get him to teach me how to do it before our month was up.
“Merci,” he answered cracking another couple eggs into the pan. Next to the eggs he plopped several strips of bacon into another frying pan. Instantly the bacon started popping and sizzling.
“What does it say?”
He pushed a stray lock of hair behind his ear and moved about his kitchen half naked very much at ease. I watched his body move as he reached for a ceramic, multicolored mug hanging from a hook then filled it with coffee. “It’s a poem from Jacques Prévert a French writer. He wrote it in 1966.” Alec pointed to the coffee in front of him. “Cream or sugar?”
“Both please,” I responded. He finished up my cup, set it in front of me, then went back, flipped the eggs and turned the bacon.
“Do you mind me asking what the poem says?” I sipped my coffee trying to hide behind the large mug.
He licked his lips, leaned against the side of the counter and crossed his bare feet at the ankles. Jesus the man was fine. Wes was good looking but this man is no slouch. The two were polar opposites. Where Wes was light, Alec is dark and vice versa. They seemed to have the exact opposites in every aspect, right down to Alec’s dark hair, mustache and beard to Wes’s clean shaven yet sometimes scruffy chin.
“It’s most of a poem about people viewing Witold’s paintings. Roughly it translates to:
The mystery of everyday people
Painted with love in the furtive silence
And the obsessive noise of the street.
You follow their progress,
But you have only the back view of them, and like them,
You will give a back view to other visitors
Who will take your place in front of the paintings.
“It reminds me that many will look at my art, the images I capture or paint, and sometimes, part of the experience will be when another person captures that person viewing my art. It changes what they see. So now, the art is viewed in a way that the person standing in front of it, becomes part of it.”
I thought on what he said for a moment. “That’s deep.”
Alec shook his head and smiled, then slid the eggs and bacon onto plates. He set one in front of me. “Eat up, ma jolie. We have a full day in the loft ahead of us.”
“Speaking of full days, where are my clothes?” I asked around a mouth full of eggs.
He leaned over the opposite side of the island and bit into a slice of bacon. His eyebrows furrowed. “What clothes?”
“The clothes.” I flailed a hand into the air. “You know, whatever you want me to wear while I’m here. That’s supposed to be provided…” I let the rest just fall off. It made me uncomfortable talking about our contract.
Alec grinned a full cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, then set his hands wide on to the counter leaning closer to me. “Ma jolie, there aren’t clothes for you to wear because I don’t plan on having you wear anything while you’re here. You are my muse, and I want to see your body, curves and angles as much as humanly possible.”
I blinked, opened my mouth, closed it, then blinked again. He couldn’t be serious. “You want me to walk around naked? All the time?”
“Oui,” he stated plainly as if the question didn’t hold the entire weight of the world on it like it did for me.
“‘Oui?’ That’s all you got for me?” I set down my fork and it clanged loudly against the plate. “You think I’m going to walk around here,” again the arms went flying, “without so much as a stitch of clothing on?”