The Girl in the Painting

by Monroe, Max

  “Actually, it’s my painting.”

  She sticks out her tongue and starts to make a beeline for the kitchen, and I’m on my feet in a matter of seconds. Indy squeals when she sees I’m right on her tail, and it doesn’t take long before I reach her and wrap my arms around her waist to stop her momentum.

  “Let me go!” She giggles and holds the painting out of my reach.

  “Give me the painting, Indy.”

  “No!”

  “Give it to me.” I gently dig my fingers into her sides, and her giggles come rapid-fire.

  Fuck, she’s adorable.

  “No way!” She giggles some more and starts to lose her grip on the canvas. I capitalize on her fading hold and steal it from her fingers.

  “Aha!” I cheer, but I have to stop my victory chant when I realize Indy is barreling directly toward me. Apparently, this battle isn’t over yet…

  “Give that back!” She jumps onto my body and wraps her arms and legs around me like a monkey.

  “No way.” I hold the painting high above my head and grin down at her.

  “Ansel!” She giggles some more. “Give that to me so I can hide it!”

  “Never.”

  We’re both laughing now, and Indy wraps her hands around my neck and pulls my face toward hers. “Give it to me,” she says, and her warm breath brushes across my lips.

  It’s meant to be playful, but having her so near, her mouth this close to mine, flips something inside of me. And our teasing moment turns into something else. Something that has my gaze locking with hers and my lips parting.

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Yes,” she whispers back, but her words don’t pack the punch they had before.

  She searches my eyes, and my gaze flicks down to her lips and back to her eyes again. I feel so fucking consumed by her that I barely register when the canvas hits the top of the dining room table with a soft thud.

  “Indy.” I want to ask her for permission. I want to tell her I need to kiss her. I want to make sure it’s okay. But when her lips part and her eyes grow needy and dark with desire, I can’t hold back.

  I push my hands into her hair and press my mouth to hers.

  Our kiss is hard and deep and so fucking out of control, I don’t know who is leading it. Her fingers dig at my shoulders and her legs tighten around my ass, and when she starts to grind herself against me, I lose it.

  “Fuck,” I groan against her mouth. “I need you.”

  “I need you too.”

  Between her words and the way she’s kissing me and pressing her tight little body against mine, I couldn’t stop this moment if I fucking wanted to.

  Which I don’t. Good God, I don’t.

  I grip the curves of her ass with my hands and carry her up the stairs and into my bedroom. She keeps her delicious little mouth fused to mine and kisses me like her life depends on it.

  Indy. Her name is in my mind, a constant chant, a continuous prayer, a fucking thank-you to the heavens above.

  We’re a chaotic mess of hurried hands and insatiable mouths, and it doesn’t take long before our clothes are a distant memory that litter my bedroom floor.

  I lay her on my bed and she stares up at me with those big blue eyes of hers, and I’m fucking done for. Her beauty is unmatched. She is everything I’ve imagined, pictured, painted. She is…breathtaking.

  Her creamy skin is bare, her breasts heave up and down with each erratic breath, and her hips vibrate with need. She is the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Ansel,” she whispers my name, and I can’t wait any longer.

  She reaches out for me, and I barely have time to pull a condom from my nightstand and slide it on. But I do. And then I’m hovering over her, locking my gaze with hers, and sliding myself inside of her.

  Fuck, it’s perfect. She’s perfect. We fit together so fucking perfect it’s as if we were always meant to do this, to be this. I slide my hand behind Indy’s neck, growling into another kiss as she whimpers in pleasure.

  I move my hungry mouth to her breasts, sucking and feasting on her skin, and her legs come up around my hips to pull me closer. It doesn’t matter that closer is an impossibility.

  Her eyes fall closed. Her lips part. She moans again.

  Fuck.

  I try to take my time, slowing my movements, savoring how good she feels, how good this feels, but when she opens her eyes again and locks that heady blue gaze with mine, it’s hard to hold back, to make the moment last. I’m caught between the intoxication of the climax and extending this moment I never want to end.

  Indy slides her hands into my hair and pulls my face to hers. She moans as she kisses me, deep and hard and with a passion I’ve never known before.

  We lose ourselves to chasing each other’s pleasure, chasing our own pleasure, chasing the high that is us, together.

  There is no going back for me after this.

  Indy

  Inside this room, Ansel’s room, there is nothing but twilight and shadows. Soft breaths and gentle caresses surround us in a cocoon of warmth and sated limbs.

  His strong body supports the weight of my lax one, and a delicious ache pulses between my legs.

  And the lingering memories of what we just did fill my head.

  I know what Ansel feels like inside of me.

  I know what he looks like when desire consumes him.

  I know the way his eyes melt and his lips part when he’s close.

  And I know what he sounds like when he comes.

  When I’m truthful with myself, I can admit I wanted to know all of it. Fantasized about it, even.

  And now that I’ve experienced it, I know my fantasies were nothing more than bland placeholders.

  Silence spreads across his bedroom, and we both let it linger as we continue touching each other. Never stop caressing each other’s skin. Never stop glancing into each other’s eyes.

  It’s magic. He’s magic.

  The guilt will come later; I know it will. But for now, I refuse to let it root itself in a moment I don’t want ruined.

  I’m loyal by nature. When I make a commitment to someone, I stick by it. I know what I did goes completely against that, I know I let myself play much too closely to the fire, but there has to be a reason I’m here.

  A reason I’m unable to pull myself from Ansel’s arms and leave like I should.

  “Are you okay?” His voice is soft, and he tightens his grip on my body, pulling me as close to him as physically possible.

  “Yes,” I say. For now, it’s the only answer I’m willing to explore.

  When it comes to this man, it’s like something inside of me shifts, and I can’t resist him. I can’t ignore the way he makes me feel. I can’t turn a blind eye to all of the crazy things that have brought us together. The things that I don’t understand at all.

  I can’t do anything but follow my heart.

  “What are you thinking about right now, Indy?”

  “The girl in the painting.”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you think she’s really me?”

  “Indy…” He hesitates and averts his gaze.

  “Just tell me,” I whisper.

  “It’s hard to tell you something I don’t even really understand myself, but deep down, yes, I know she’s you. The way you move, the way you talk, the things you do. They’re all the things I love about her.”

  All the things I love about her.

  “It doesn’t make sense.” A soft, incredulous laugh leaves his lips. “In fact, it’s the most irrational thing that’s ever happened to me.” He reaches down to brush a few pieces of hair away from my forehead. “I wish I knew why. But, Indy, I don’t. All I know is there is some intangible thing that draws me to you, and as hard as I try, I can’t avoid it. Can’t resist it. Can’t do anything but give in.”

  “I know what you mean,” I whisper.

  Delicate and haunting, Ansel’s knuckles slide against the flesh of
my cheek, down my neck, and across the top of my breast.

  “Let me paint you, Indy. Just like this.”

  My heart flips inside my chest, and I can’t come up with a single reason to say no.

  I can’t, and I don’t want to.

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah?” he asks, eyes widening in surprise.

  “Yeah.”

  I sit up, but Ansel pulls me back down on the bed.

  “What are you doing?” I question. “Don’t you want to go to your studio?”

  He shakes his head and drags his body to the end of the bed and out of it. “Stay here. I’ll be back with the paint.”

  He leaves the room without a single stitch of clothing, and I collapse into the sheets.

  My heart is racing, and I lean into the smell of Ansel all over the bed beneath me.

  He has a clear toolbox full of paint and a handful of brushes when he returns, but no canvas.

  I sit up, and the sheet falls down to my hips.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He raises an eyebrow like he doesn’t understand.

  “The canvas,” I say, even though I feel like it should be obvious.

  “You are the canvas, Indigo.”

  “What?”

  “I want to paint you. I want to feel the curves of your breasts and the pulse in your chest as I move the brush across you. I want to paint you in a way I’ve been dreaming about since before I knew you were real.”

  My teeth dig into my lip, and a new ache, this one needy and consuming, starts up between my legs.

  We don’t speak anymore as he positions me flat on the bed and gets to work.

  The glass-and-gold table in the sitting area becomes his workstation at the side of the bed, and his paints get lined up one by one on the top.

  Blues and purples and pinks, it’s all the colors I’ve loved all my life.

  My breathing shallows, and I’m not surprised Ansel hears it.

  When it comes to me, Ansel seems to hear everything.

  “I know. I don’t know how, but I just know, Indy. Everything about you, it’s right there in the open for me to see.”

  I nod. It’s all I can do.

  With a dip of the bristles in the bluest of indigos, he puts paint to my skin.

  Each stroke drags me a little deeper into the heaven we’ve created. He tugs at his lip with his teeth, and his forehead furrows with concentration.

  While he explores with the brush in one hand, his other roams the rest of my landscape.

  It is, without a doubt, the most beautiful art I’ve ever experienced.

  Ansel

  Indy’s chest rises and falls with easy breaths as I move the brush across the hollow below her collarbone. Her face is lax, and her jaw is slack, and her lips are parted in rapture.

  I watch in fascination as the feathered strokes I’ve left on her breasts move with the motion of her breathing.

  Her nipples are tight and pink, the perfect complement to the palette I’ve used around them, but the desire to paint them is too strong to let them be.

  I grab a clean brush and dip it into the pink paint before swirling it slowly around the peak of one, and then the other.

  Indy’s breathing changes from slow and steady to the deep, dragging pulls of arousal, and her legs fall open beside me.

  Untainted by paint, the area between her legs taunts me to take a taste.

  I lean down and press my mouth to the slick honey, and she gasps.

  She tastes perfect and pure and like my life’s greatest desire.

  Her moans drive me to explore with my tongue, around, to the top, and inside.

  In need of my hands, I toss the brush to the side and grip the flesh at the inside of her thighs hard enough to leave the skin mottled from my fingertips.

  The wet paint is slick beneath my hand as I reach up to palm the weight of her breast, and she arches into the feel of it.

  I move away briefly enough to get a condom from my nightstand and roll it on with my clean hand.

  Indy watches with dark, bottomless eyes and palpable want.

  When I climb back on the bed, I fit my hips between her legs and slide myself inside to assure that no paint gets where it shouldn’t.

  Her body feels warm under mine as I lean my chest to hers to let her paint cover me. It swirls and mixes between us, and I don’t even have to see it to know that it’s the most beautiful, perfect piece I’ve ever created.

  “Ansel,” Indy moans as I put my mouth to hers.

  “You…are perfect, Indigo Davis.”

  Our climax happens quickly, but just like with everything else between us, it’s completely in sync.

  Once I clean up my paints from the table and dispose of the condom, I kneel beside my sleeping angel and brush a few pieces of hair out of her eyes. “Indy,” I whisper gently, but she doesn’t stir.

  The truth is, I want her to stay here. In my house. In my now-dry-paint-covered bed. With me.

  So I don’t even bother trying to wake her again.

  I slide into bed beside her, turn off the light, and pull a perfect, painted Indy into my arms. She wraps her little body around mine like a vine and snuggles her face into my chest. And it takes all of two minutes for her breaths to turn soft and her body to grow heavy and relaxed against mine.

  “Good night, Indy,” I whisper into the dark room and place a soft kiss to her forehead. “I will never recover from this night. Never recover from you.”

  “Good morning, Ansel.”

  I blink my eyes open to find bright blue staring back at me and the early morning sun coming in through the windows. “What time is it?” I croak out, and Indy smiles.

  “A little before eight, I think.”

  “Too early,” I tease on a groan and make a dramatic show of closing my eyes. “Go away and don’t come back until it’s at least nine.”

  “No way.” Her giggle brushes against my cheek. “It’s time for you to wake up and make me breakfast.”

  I peek at her through my lashes. “Oh, so that’s how it is?”

  “Uh huh.” She adjusts herself under the blankets until her entire body covers mine. Her naked little body is warm and soft, and I move my hands to her ass and shut my eyes closed again.

  Mmm…perfect…

  “Hey,” she says and presses playful kisses to my cheek. “Wake up.”

  Eventually, I give in to her demands and work my eyes open until they’re face-to-face with bright blue again. The blue of her eyes, the blue of her body, and the blue on my sheets, my life is a perfect shade of indigo.

  Pretty sure I could get used to this every morning.

  “There,” she says with a grin. “That’s better.”

  A soft chuckle jumps from my lips. “Just for the record, you wake up too fucking early.”

  “I know, right?” she responds on a sigh. “It’s a hazard of my job, I guess. During the school year, I usually wake up by six.”

  I cringe. “Yeah, that’s way too early.”

  “When do you usually get out of bed to start your day?”

  “It depends on what I have going on,” I say and press a soft kiss to her lips. “But usually no later than nine thirty or ten.”

  She grins. “By nine, I’m usually well into my day.”

  I run my fingers up and down her back, and when my hand reaches the spot where her hips meet the curve of her ass, I remember something. “I have to admit,” I say and tap the right side of her lower back. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “Expecting what?”

  “This tattoo.” A red lotus flower etched into her skin. It’s delicate and feminine and yet still big enough to catch your eye.

  It’s beautiful and completely wrong at the same time.

  “Oh.” Her lips form a tiny O and then lift into a mischievous smile. “I guess your visions of me don’t show you everything.” We both laugh. “I got it a few years ago.”

  “I guess they don’t,” I agree, r
ather than go into the details of what made me bring it up. If I bring it up, I’ll have to tell her there is more than one painting of her, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that. I’m not sure if she’s ready for me to do that.

  I feel like it might be too much for her.

  “Lucky for you, seeing my paint all over your beautiful body this morning is satisfying enough to make me give in to your demands.” One last kiss to her lips and I push myself out of bed. Once I slide on a pair of sweat pants, I turn around to see she’s still lazing it up in my bed. “Are you expecting breakfast in bed, miss?” I tease, and she shakes her head on a laugh.

  “No, but I wouldn’t mind a shower.”

  She glances down at the dried paint covering nearly every inch of her body, and I shake my head.

  “Oops. Sorry. That’s the one request we can’t fulfill.”

  “Ansel.”

  With a swoop and a bend, I reach into the bed and pluck her out of it, tossing her over my shoulder for good measure.

  “Ansel!”

  “This way, miss. Your breakfast awaits.”

  Indy

  “What time does the clock above the door say?” Ansel asks from behind the canvas, and I glance up from my cozy spot on the leather couch to see the hour hand pointed toward the number ten.

  “A little past ten.”

  We were supposed to be on our way to the kitchen when Ansel claimed inspiration struck. We rerouted to the studio, Ansel tossed me a long-sleeved shirt to keep me warm, I settled onto the couch, and we’ve been here ever since.

  “Really?” he says and meets my eyes. “No wonder I’m so hungry. And I’m sure you’re probably starved by now too.”

  I offer a little shrug and grin. “Maybe just a little…”

  “Just a little?” He is unconvinced.

  “Okay, a lot, actually.”

  “I figured as much, you little liar.” A soft chuckle leaves his lips as he sets his brush down and runs a hand through his hair. “How about you stay put, and I’ll run down and toss some cinnamon rolls in the oven?”

  My eyes perk up. “You have cinnamon rolls?”

  “I do.” He waggles his brows. “Sit tight and I’ll be back.”