My mouth watered at the memory of her taste, and I was hard. My cock strained and thumped and it hurt.
It hurt to need a woman I should never have.
Anna’s face stared out at me from the mantelpiece and today, for the very first time — the only time since I’d met her a lifetime ago — I felt the urge to turn her away.
Mark
I could feel my grip on reality slipping away, bleeding out slowly through every hour I spent in the same room as Helen Palmer. The days danced by in a blur of paint and laughter, and on the third day we started up the radio, blaring out a cacophony of chart music that roused the youngsters to new heights of productivity. The set took on life, vibrant gold temple scenes, and a dusty market, and mock drapes in purples and ocean blues, and my beautiful student came alive too, right before my eyes. Responsibility suited her, she bloomed with the thrill of command, coaxing those who looked up to her for guidance with both grace and skill.
I watched her confidence blossom. Her shoulders rose higher, her chin up, her eyes sparkling as she toiled away the hours.
And she reminded me of the love I’d lost. Helen was unlike Anna in more ways than I could ever articulate, but in others she was a perfect match. Her talent, her dedication, her drive, her intuition.
Her compassion.
The look in her eyes had softened, and I saw less of her raging teenage hormones. They’d been replaced by something much more hypnotic. Call it maturity, or call it pure old-fashioned affection, I’m not quite sure. But I loved it. I loved her for it.
I found myself pondering the world in ways that I shouldn’t. Considering the practicalities of a life with Helen at my side, in some far distant future, when she was a woman with university behind her, and I was just a man, not her teacher. But she was so young, with her whole life stretching out in front of her, and I was reaching the middle of mine. I’d be growing old as she discovered life’s endless possibilities, hooking up with men much younger than me who’d steal her heart from under me, just so long as she’d let me go.
I did everything I could to believe that was ok.
She deserved the very best, and that best could never be here, in this town, with a man like me.
She touched her hand to my back and leaned in close. “Kids are wrapping up soon, we’ll never get the final scene set finished on time.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll cover it, we’ve achieved great things here.”
“I’ll help,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
I smiled. “I think your parents might have something to say about that, Helen. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”
She pulled a face. “It’s the last day, what are they going to do?” She dug around in her pocket. “I’ll text Mum, tell her I’m going to be late.”
“And that will be enough?”
She finished thumbing in the letters and pressed send with a smirk. “It’ll have to be,” she grinned, then pressed the off button. “I’m out of signal.”
I couldn’t help but smile back.
We stood and contemplated the final canvas; nothing but a vast expanse of white space, pregnant with potential. She looked at me and I looked back, and there was such excitement in her eyes at the prospect.
“Together?” she asked. “We could work on it in tandem, see where the muse takes us.”
I pondered it. “Without planning? Just ad-lib?”
“Free.” She smiled. “We’ll be free. Let’s see what happens.”
“I like that.”
“I’ll take the right side,” she said and grabbed up a paintbrush.
The final scene was a mountain range under the stars, with the golds of the desert rich but murky in the foreground. We ignored the faint pencil lines, discarding the brainstorm from earlier in the week altogether. This would be our work, the culmination of our week in perfect brilliance, embodied in paint for the year to come. I went to the radio and switched it to CD, firing up a soundtrack that changed the mood in the hall completely. Brooding instrumentals, with a woman’s soulful wail, void of words capable of interpretation but that didn’t matter. The music was alive.
Helen’s body moved to it, her brush strokes matching both tempo and emotion. Her brush marks became ragged and raw, and so did mine, and the work consumed me, consumed both of us, until we were moving as one joined visionary. It had been a long time since I’d worked in sync with another, but Helen made it easy. I could sense her movements before she made them, feel the natural flow of her brush, of her colours, of her body. I’d paint over her strokes and she’d paint over mine, but we never clashed, not once.
The canvas was alive, the scenery blurred and fluid in its brilliance. The sky was twinkling with stars, yet it was heavy with the promise of the new dawn, and the world outside our real life windows darkened to orange and red and finally to dull twilight blue, but it made no difference, we were in that timeless space, where everything loses meaning, just she and I.