Love in Troubled Times

by Gayle Riley

  “Are you going to let go of my hand?” he asked, then tilted his head and smiled.

  I hadn’t noticed that I was still holding his large, powerful hand

  “Yes, yes. Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

  He laughed a deep, masculine belly laugh. I snuck another glance at his crotch. The snake had grown bigger, unfurled further down his leg. It wasn’t only long, but thick. I licked my lips again, felt the flood of moistness in my panties. What would this man do to me if he had me alone? The next time I masturbated he would be on my mind. I couldn’t wait to get out of the gallery and rush into James’ arms. I was a bitch in heat. I needed a good fucking tonight. I needed James to slam me up against the wall, pull my hair, smack my ass, and call me all the filthy names he could think of. I wanted to be punished for my slutty desires. Oh, God, I needed to be punished.

  He said that he wanted to meet somewhere for coffee to discuss my work. He was on the hunt for an up and coming young artist to work with. He had heard my name from some people in the industry and he had come with the sole purpose of seeing my work. He added that my latest paintings were well ahead of those of my artistic peers.

  I blushed deeply. I couldn’t believe that this man, this patron of the arts, who could probably have been chatting with any New York artist right now, offering to put his money behind their careers, was actually taking an interest in me.

  “There’s a real European vibe, but also something uniquely American. Are you from the Midwest by any chance?”

  “Ohio,” I said.

  He told me that he used to travel to Ohio on business. But now he was full-time in the art world. He realized that artists were always looking for financial backing and he had the money to make that happen. It gave him great pleasure to be able to help out ambitious, young talents. He gave me his card and said he would call me, or have his assistant call me, to set up a meeting in a few days. My eyes followed him as he walked away.

  “Watch out for him,” Simon said, “He’s a dangerous one, especially for sweet little things like you.”

  I didn’t pay much attention to what Simon was saying. I was still under the spell of this gorgeous, mysterious man.

  On the way home in the taxi, I thought how this night would change my life forever. My first show in an NYC gallery. Sure it was a small venue, and not many people had showed up, but there did seem to be a buzz in the air, as if people were really connecting to my work. After months and months of frustration and working in virtual obscurity, it felt like I was finally going to break through, like my name was going to spread throughout NYC artistic circles. And that critic, I think he was from The Village Voice, he had stood for a long time taking notes in front of all my paintings. A good review in tomorrow’s Art & Culture section was all I needed. It would finally put me on the map as an up and coming artist. I couldn’t wait to tell James.

  I ran up the steps of the apartment building, my body buzzing with excitement. I heard loud sounds coming from down the hall. The sounds got louder as I approached my door. It seemed like they were coming from inside my apartment. Was James cleaning up or cooking something special for me? Maybe he was trying to surprise me. But he had said that he would be working late. As it turned out his idea of working late was a little but different than mine. There was a trail of clothes that led from the front door down the hallway. My heart sank. I heard wild screams coming from the bedroom, high-pitched screams coming from a woman who was probably quivering on the verge of orgasm. I approached slowly, sure of what I would see. I saw long blond hair draping down a young woman’s back, a woman who was riding James cock like it was the last cock she would ever experience.

  I screamed. The woman jumped off of James and landed on the floor. James scrambled out of the bed, wrapped the sheet around himself.

  “It’s not what it seems,” he protested. The woman on the floor covered her breasts and stared at me defiantly. Fucking bitch. I knew exactly who she was, Anne Marie Henderson. She had been a slut in art school. I guess she hadn’t changed much. We had been rivals during school, ever since she had seen me with James. Every young female artist wanted to snag a guy with a great job and powerful cock and I had beaten her to it. She had never forgiven me for that.

  On what should have been the greatest night, the most monumental night in my artistic career, she had finally gotten him, gotten my boyfriend to succumb and fuck the hell out her. That cock was supposed to be all mine, it supposed to be the cock that I could call my own. But he had betrayed me, given it away to another, and not just any other but a woman whom I hated.

  “Get the fuck out,” I yelled. “Just get the fuck out.”

  Anne Marie got dressed slowly, seemingly enjoying the pain that she was causing me, knowing how much she had just ruined for me. James kept pleading for me to understand, kept telling me that it was a mistake, that there was an explanation for everything that happened. I slumped to the floor and started crying. When he came over to comfort me, I lashed out at him, scratching his face. He recoiled. There was fear in his eyes. He had never seen me so enraged.

  “Fucking, bitch,” he said. “Stupid, fucking bitch.” Then he began taunting me. “Good luck trying to make it without any money, you little spoiled brat.”

  I saw Anne Marie smirking. She would have his cock and his money. I thought that things couldn’t get any worse, that I couldn’t feel any lower, but I was wrong, very wrong, because the next day things did get worse.

  Chapter 2

  The next morning while I was still trying to recover from the previous night’s trauma, I received another piece of bad news. Simon called. He said that there would be no review in The Village Voice, but he assured me it wasn’t because the critic hadn’t liked my work. No, that wasn’t it at all. He had said some nice things about my work and he was interested in seeing more of my stuff. The night had not been an artistic failure, but something much bigger had happened in the art world, something that people would be talking about for months, maybe years into the future.

  A super talented young artist, one of the city’s starlets, a woman whose work had been featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker had been found dead. I clicked on The Village Voice website. The story was front page news:

  Rising Star in the Art World Found Dead in Her Apartment

  New York—The NYPD is investigating the death of the promising young painter Amanda Lavreaux who was found dead at 5 a.m. this morning in her swanky West Village apartment. Lavreaux, a sensation in the New York City art world, was considered to be one of the most dynamic and innovative artists of her generation. Her death has been ruled a homicide.

  I couldn’t read any more, the story made me sick. I had heard of Amanda, but had never had a chance to meet her or really appreciate her work and now she was gone. Her life of promise and stardom had been cut short. It appeared to be a crime of passion. An ex-lover, boyfriend, admirer? Maybe some sociopath who had fetish for killing female artist? No one knew, but everyone was talking. Her untimely death made me sad, but all I could really think about was the lost opportunity—my lost opportunity. This should have been my day to celebrate. I should have woken up in James’ arms. We should have celebrated by having a fuck fest all morning, going for brunch of lox, bagels and mimosa and returning to fuck our brains out some more before passing out in each other’s arms. This should have been our day. It should have been my day to celebrate finally making it, finally gaining the recognition which I had been so desperately seeking since I had arrived in the city five years ago full of hope and energy and dreams. But everything was destroyed. I was still an obscure painter in a city that eats up struggling artists. And it was even worse than that. I was now single, alone and forced to face this harsh world without the help of strong, financial man. There was no way I could make it. No way. The best thing to do would probably be to head back to the Midwest. All the doubters had been right. I couldn’t cut it in the big city.

  My mind kept drifting back to James. No m
an had ever touched me like that before. The way his hands would rove all over my body made me wild with excitement and animal lust. The way he would push me up against wall, whispering in my ear, “Is this what you want? Is it?” He was the sort of man I dreamed of when I first came to city. Someone who would appreciate my creativity. Someone who would help nurture me and provide for me financially. He was the kind of man my parents had warned me against; the kind of man who try to keep me dependent on him in order to control me. But now he was gone, stolen away from me. I had two days to pay the rent, or else I would be out on the street, or couch surfing from one apartment to the next. I didn’t want to go back to my old Bohemian life. I was sick of it years ago. That’s part of why I fell so hard for James. I wanted something stable and secure.

  I could ask Samantha for the money, but that would be too embarrassing. The artist going begging to her well-paid lawyer friend. I wanted her to believe in me. I didn’t want her to see me as needy and desperate, crawling to her for money because I was stupid enough to believe that I could trust a man to take care of me. “Why do you let them treat you like that,” she would say, shaking her head, disappointed with how naïve I still was. I could go back to waiting tables at Nobu. The manager, Marianne, had always considered me one of her best waitresses and she was sad to see me leave. That job had helped get me through grad school. Going back to it now would be admitting defeat. It would make me just like so many other wannabe artists who come to New York seeking fame and fortune, but only ended up working one dead end job after another, returning home after work with no energy left for their art.

  But hadn’t so many of my former art school classmates, especially the women, given up? They had expressed their wild, creative sides during two years of late night orgies, group fucks and other art school shenanigans. At the end of two years, they had gotten all that rebelliousness out of their system and they had the good sense to settle down and marry men with promising futures in finance, law or medicine.

  I could always do the nude photo that had been offered to me a couple weeks ago by EDGE, the city’s hottest magazine for young artists. I didn’t think it was fair that female artists had to expose their bodies for public judgment in order for their work to get any recognition. I still had forty-eight hours to decide. If I accepted the offer, the money would probably sustain me for the next few months. If I didn’t, I was screwed.

  I wanted to be a star. Maybe it was stupid, but I could at least admit it to myself. But taking my shirt off for a photo shoot didn’t seem like the way to go about it. The thought of having to submit to that, to have my body as the subject instead of my work made me sick. It was time to admit I’d been wrong, call my mother and tell her that I had failed, that she had been right. “You’ll never be able to support yourself,” she had said. “What you need to do is settle down and marry a lawyer. What’s your back up plan”? One time she even suggested that I start submitting applications for law school. We hadn’t spoke for a week after that.

  I thought about my mother who had given up her dream of becoming a photographer in order to have a family and raise my brother and me. No way I was going to be like her. “Megan, why don’t you get married? You’re almost twenty-eight. You remember Sarah Peterson who lived on Watson Street. She just got married last week. The pictures in the paper were beautiful!” That was back home in the Midwest, Dayton to be exact. It was one of those places where the people who couldn’t make it in the big cities returned. I didn’t want to be just another young naive girl who went to the big city and couldn’t cut it. I didn’t want to have to admit that all those people who told me I wasn’t good enough were right.

  I couldn’t take my mind off that mysterious patron I had met the other night at the exposition. The way he peered into my eyes nearly made me faint. I felt his hands roving up and down my body. I wanted to paint him, every muscle bulging in his powerful body. He could crush all my previous boyfriends. What had I been missing up to this point? What was I thinking? I looked around my apartment at the stacks of art books, the empty paint cans scattered everywhere, brushes, easels lying on the floor. I looked out my window onto the street below. How would I ever grow if I stayed in this city? I couldn’t even afford to pay the rent. And now I had no one to help me. I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I found myself in such a difficult situation.

  What if that mysterious man became my patron? What if he made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse? He could possibly be the man I had dreamed of: a man to whisk me away and help support me as an artist. But maybe I was falling back into the same trap. I felt my body aching for him. I wanted him inside my swelling cunt.

  ***

  That night I stayed on the couch sipping red wine, eating potato chips and flipping through the channels.

  “Bang, bang.!”

  A powerful fist banged on the front door.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, James.”

  Why the fuck was he coming back? Even though I was drunk, I knew that I shouldn’t have let him in, but I did anyway. He slammed me up against the wall, then got down on his knees and thrust his head between my legs. His tongue was hungrier and more passionate that in had ever been. He was usually such a lazy pussy licker—the kind of guy who did just enough to merit a blowjob. But this was different. He tongue fucked my clit, slurped up my juices. He jammed two fingers in and out of my swelling pussy. He took the two fingers out and sucked on them. I threw my head back and closed my eyes. He thrust the two fingers into my asshole. I gasped. He worked the fingers deep inside me. We fucked passionately for the next three hours, then passed out in each other’s arms.

  I woke up the next morning with only my panties on. My mouth was dry from all the alcohol and cigarettes from the night before. My body ached from the intense fucking James had given me. I rolled over, reached out for his lean muscular torso. The other side of the bed was empty. I looked at my phone: three messages. I tapped the screen. They were from James. I froze. My heart sunk. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He was really leaving. He had just come back for one last fuck, and a good fuck it was. After three years, three years of making promises and plans for the future. He couldn’t even wait until the morning to tell me to my face. What an asshole.

  I got into the shower and let the warm water stream down my body. As the water came down, I began crying, then sobbing uncontrollably as I remembered everything that I thought we would build together. How could he leave me like this? It was all over. Everything I was afraid of was coming true.

  As the water streamed down on my body, I began to relax and fantasize. I imagined Thomas, wrapping his hands around my neck, squeezing me, pressing his hard dick into my back, smacking it against my ass. Twice my size, he could crush me if he wished. I imagined him pulling me by the hair, kissing my neck, then cupping my breasts, sucking on the hard nipples as my fingers rove up and down his chiseled body. Every one of his muscles glistened with water. I felt my pussy tingling, aching, opening, hungry for his strong cock. It was the most muscular cock that I had ever seen—so strong and thick with huge veins running through it. He could impale with it, leave my pussy aching for days. But he was so gentle with it, a skillful lover, powerful and graceful lover. With the water still streaming over us, I got down on my knees and begin working his cock two vigorous hands. When wrapped around his anaconda cock, my hands looked like those of little girl. I marveled at the dimensions of his beautiful dick. It continued to grow. With one hand I worked his cock while the other clasped his balls. I took one of them, then both of his balls into my mouth. I looked up at him and smiled. I jerked on his cock forcefully while at the same time shoving two fingers up his ass. He’s would be comfortable enough with his masculinity to let me do that; he actually encourages it. James was never like that. Even though he was a good fuck, he was really uptight with doing anything that didn’t seem normal. I had always hated that but I put up with it because I loved him. But this was something different. Thomas ma
de me feel that I could express all my desires with him, no holds barred. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes and groaned. He shot hot loads of come onto my face and began to jerk him even more wildly, pulling and pulling and pulling until every last drop had been extracted. I felt cum and water running down my face. He leaned over me, stared deeply into my eyes, then kissed me. I wrapped my arms around him and held him tightly. I was determined to never let him go. He would be mine, all mine. That’s what I hoped.

  Chapter 3

  Over the next few weeks, I spent several days with Thomas. I felt myself falling under his spell. He told me that he understood why I didn’t want to do the nude photo shoot, which several other up-and-coming female painters had decided to do. He told me that I had made the right decision by not compromising.

  “But I still have to make money somehow,” I said. He smirked. Maybe he has a plan, I thought, an idea of how I can raise some money. But I didn’t want to ask him, didn’t want him to think that all of the time we were spending together, the late night walks through Central Park, the talks about where we could travel, and even talk about moving into together was all about the money. It wasn’t. I felt safe and secure around him—this powerful hulk of a man who would always be able to protect me, unlike James, or any of my previous boyfriends in the city, who I never felt quite safe with. He put his hand on top of mine, his big muscular hand. There was no ring on it. He had gotten divorced two years ago he said. He and his wife had grown apart. They had two kids together. Every two weeks he went up to Westchester to pick the kids up and bring them back down to the city. We he had been dating for the last three weeks, but he had yet to ask me to meet his kids. I didn’t really worry about it, but maybe I should have. What did worry me was that we couldn’t see each other as much as I wanted. He was always busy and frequently canceled dates.