A Favor

by Fiona Murphy

  “Zoe, what ever happens, thank you for talking me out of there.” Sam’s face is tight and the words are sincere.

  My eyes meet his, “You’re welcome.” I don’t know what to say beyond that. There are a few touches I want to add and I turn back to the painting and continue. As he wanders around the room I notice the paintings he stops at and studies.

  “So why exactly are there so many paintings done and just sitting here if you’re so good? Why aren’t you doing more with this? I thought when you met Taylor you were pushing your paintings?” His hands on his hips draw my eyes to his waist and the loose faded black tee shirt and jeans he wore. Like me, he’s barefoot and after a deep breath I focus back on the painting.

  “Well, I was going to put them up on a website but the specialty pictures needed would cost more than I have in savings and I had thought I would need. I bought a website but have no technical skills and no idea what I’m doing.

  When I came to that realization a few months ago I got into contact with a gallery in Fredericksburg but one weekend he’s too busy, the next I am and one weekend Gertrude was acting spastic so I got scared to take the drive out there.

  Also there is nothing worse for an artist than contentment, apparently, because when I was at my last job and hated it, I was out on the weekend and selling them like a pimp. Now that I’m working in a job I like and enjoy, I don’t know, it just hasn’t seemed like a big deal. Not everyone gets to do what they want to do, sometimes you’re the responsible adult and you do what pays the bills. Now that it’s not such hard work to get through the day I’ve been content to paint when I can.

  There’s a coffee shop that let’s me put paintings up and they’ll go pretty quickly there which is nice but they do rotations and I’m only up once a year or so. None of the small galleries here in Austin want anything to do with me. You reminded me though, I’ll call that gallery owner again.”

  A buzzer rings from inside the house and Sam walks toward me, “Dinner’s ready, go get cleaned up and please change. You look so fucking cute in that I’ve wanted to bend you over that table and fuck you since I walked in here.” A rough kiss on my open mouth and he’s gone.

  I look at the work table I keep my paints and brushes in and know it would hold up to what he wanted. My face is hot at the thought of him, and my fingers are clumsy as I store what I had finished using. I don’t see him when I go back inside to change and clean up but I can smell something good cooking. A quick shower and I hope I no longer smell of turpentine. Dressing, I slip into a long black peasant skirt and long loose black tee shirt. The smallest devil inside me has me leaving both panties and a bra off again. It’s how I usually lounge around the house when I get home, after all. Pulling my hair out of the bun with a sigh I allow it to hang free.

  Walking into the kitchen, I’m in time to see him placing a plate on the table for me. There is a small salad waiting with a few different bottles of dressing, I pick a balsamic vinegar I like and I know the leaves are from a bagged salad mix but he had added some fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and black olives and it doesn’t taste bagged.

  “I can’t believe you did all this? Stuffed shells, they are so creamy and this sauce is good. Breakfast and now dinner, I could get used to this. Thank you. If I remember dinner it’s usually a frozen dinner or something from work, this is much better.”

  He easily opens the bottle of wine, without flair, and pours the both of us a glass. “You’re welcome. You mentioned you don’t cook and I like to cook, but I’m all for easy dishes. When we had breaks in leave I usually stayed with a buddy who had a condo in Virginia and he was bad about cooking. I had to learn to cook so we wouldn’t come off leave slow and sluggish from the crap food we were eating.”

  I remember now telling him that, almost as a warning I had listed my faults and not cooking was one of them. “Why weren’t you cooking for yourself when you were home?”

  “It was just me and it didn’t feel like it mattered much. Do you still want to do your website or have you decided not to?”

  “Well, like I mentioned, I’m kind of inept when it comes to all of that. I thought it would be much easier than it turned out to be. I keep paying for the host site but it just sits there, empty. I need the pictures first and the best photographer I could find in the area is in San Antonio and charges five hundred per photograph. Don’t make that face, there are photographers out there that want one thousand and higher. Photographing a painting isn’t something just anyone can do, for a person to really get the feel of it, it has to be done well. That’s why I thought about doing the gallery, to have the art kind of pay for itself. I’ve finally got savings and now that I do I don’t want to spend it on something that might not work.

  Then again the commission is so high on gallery sales I’m highly ambivalent about it. Which is probably why I haven’t jumped up and run to Fredericksburg. Also, some galleries won’t have your work if you are also doing a website so I don’t know. I go back and forth a lot on it.”

  “It just seems like such a waste to have a room full of great work sitting there and no one is seeing it.”

  “Thanks. This is really good, normally I don’t like spinach cooked.”

  “I remembered that and added a little more of the sweet cheese to offset the bitterness of the spinach.”

  “I told you that?” I’m trying to remember the drive and where it would have come up.

  Sam only nods at my confusion.

  My brain is ticking and then it clicks, “Sam, did you interrogate me?”

  His only answer is a smile and a sip of his wine.

  “Sam, I can’t believe you did that.”

  “It’s called reconnaissance baby. Once the target is acquired you have to find out everything you can so you can find the soft spot in.”

  I want to be angry and annoyed, anything but smiling and happy at his lack of repentance. “What’s my soft spot in?”

  “Zoe, now that would not be something I would be able to share. The target would instinctively attempt to evade or deflect. We can’t have that now, not when the end is where we both want to be. ”

  It thrills me, the slow way he rolls my name on his tongue. I shake my head and my head swims as I finish my second glass of wine. I’m embarrassed at being light on my feet after just two glasses.

  We finish dinner and I’m up clearing the table. “You cooked, I’ll clean.” I tell him as I wave him away. There really isn’t much to clean, he had done all of it, except the dishes.

  Sam shrugs and makes his way to the long leather couch and finds the remotes and grumbles over them while I load the dishwasher and wipe down the counter.

  I can’t help it, I laugh as I make my way to him. Sam growls and pulls me down into his lap. “What’s so funny?”

  A hand lands on his shoulder to keep me in place. “I thought all men just automatically knew how to work a remote.”

  “No, not all men automatically know how to work a remote. Why are there three?”

  “This one turns on the television, then once it’s on you select which input, cable or the DVD player, you also use it to turn the sound up or down on the television. Then you use this one for the satellite box, there are like five hundred channels. This one is for the DVD player so you can just ignore that.”

  Sam follows my instructions and settles back into the couch and settles me into him and with a little sigh I enjoy the feel of him. His scent is all around me and his body feels so strong and solid against my back. My eyes drift down as he flicks through the channels.

  Chapter Seven

  I come awake slowly, a slight shifting and I’m pulled back into heat and I know I’m lying in Sam’s arms. Opening my eyes slowly, I’m almost scared of what I’ll see as I had been dreaming of him. It isn’t as bad as I had feared. I’m almost entirely on Sam’s chest, he’s still asleep. In sleep all of his tension is gone and he looks much as he had that first day, except today there is something softer about him. His arm around me
is just below my left breast and I know I should move now, while he’s still asleep, but I want to stay like this forever.

  Closing my eyes, the word forever hurts, forever doesn’t last. What the hell am I thinking? Sam had only agreed to six months, but a little voice pipes in, he had said if it worked out he would stay. I have no experience with even wanting to make something work long term. Life had been so transitory my whole childhood I hadn’t looked beyond the end of each day, hell there had been times when even that hadn’t helped. Truthfully, my relationships hadn’t worked in the past because I had always been waiting for the other person to walk away. No one had wanted to keep me before, why would that change?

  With Charles, my first relationship, I had been young and naïve and fallen hard. I had wanted so badly to please him, in every way. I had no real starting point for a relationship other than sex, from everything I had read and seen it seemed to be most important thing that mattered. I had tried to give Charles everything he asked for but it hadn’t worked.

  We had lasted almost three years but in the last few months he’d pushed limits again and again until I no longer felt comfortable, or safe with him. It wasn’t that I believed what we did was bad or wrong but I simply didn’t enjoy it and wanted it to stop. I received no pleasure from the pain he inflicted. Yet, I didn’t have the courage to say no, so I’d tried to please him in other ways but he wouldn’t allow it. When he’d finally untied me the last time I had known it couldn’t go on but I hadn’t said it. I simply walked away. He had gone after me explaining he hadn’t meant to push me away and was sorry he’d done what he had but he wanted me to react. He wanted me to talk to him, share more than just my body. But it was too late, he’d gone too far. I couldn’t forgive him for what he had done and I couldn’t forgive myself for allowing it.

  My second relationship had been a mistake from the first week, I had just been too scared to admit it. In my painting, I preferred soft dreamy lines to stark and straight lines. While I have been painting for years, I was mostly self-taught and wasn’t very good at drawing. When I wanted to push myself a little farther, I had signed up for a drawing course, hoping to make my painting better. I expected bowls of fruit not the naked woman reclining on the couch seemingly without a care in the world. A part of me had been shocked and then jealous of the woman’s casualness of her naked body. It had been almost a year since Charles and I had taken a step back from anything even slightly sexual. Even at home I no longer felt comfortable naked. While I had often seen paintings of women naked and in various stages of undress and always thought them beautiful I had never seen a woman in person naked. I thought Tracy was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, at the time. My drawing was awful and I’d tried instead to do a painting but it hadn’t been much better.

  My efforts had caught Tracy’s eye and somehow in a way I hadn’t even been aware of, we had moved into a sexual relationship. At first I hadn’t stopped the progression because I thought since I did find a woman’s body beautiful and some photographs erotic, maybe it meant I could be attracted to one. Still, it wasn’t until after several glasses of wine that I was able to respond to Tracy’s kisses and not stiffen at her touches and I gained the courage to go further. It hadn’t been awful but it hadn’t satisfying and I wasn’t sure how to tell Tracy that, especially when Tracy had acted as if it was the most amazing sex ever. I felt horrible, I couldn’t tell Tracy the truth even as I lay under her trying to be enthusiastic when all I wanted to do was ask her to stop.

  Tracy had tried, she really had, including toy after toy during sex. It had only been a few weeks before Tracy had pressed the issue and with relief I admitted I didn’t want to continue anymore. Tracy had accused me of using her and the sad truth was, she was right. I had wanted to know if I could be in a sexual relationship again and after the strength and brutal treatment at the end with Charles, I hadn’t felt safe with a man again. I’d taken all the insults and recriminations Tracy had hurled at me as my due.

  After that it had been two very long years before I felt confident enough to get involved with anyone. No longer did I allow people to walk over me, I felt as though I had come into my own. Maybe I was still looking for someone who didn’t remind me of black haired and black eyed Charles because Troy was the exact opposite of Charles. Charles had been confident, cocky, rough and rippled with muscles, vain but rightly so. Troy had been lean, very pretty in a blond haired, blue eyed way.

  He’d worked in a bank and been very serious and restrained, even in the bedroom. He hadn’t been a bad lover, he had been unselfish but passion was seriously lacking. At first that had relieved me, and then slowly, it had bored me. Troy had a five year plan, written down and then crossed off. I had been in the right place at the right time for his five year plan and he’d asked me to move in on our two year anniversary and he’d made it clear the next step would be marriage. After a year, if all went well, he would propose. Then for our fourth year together we would marry. After two years, we would have two children, three years apart. As I sat listening to him layout my life for me, I hadn’t been able to say a word.

  When he’d finished, sounding quite proud, of himself I had only been able to murmur I needed to think about it. I’d gone home and simply laid in bed turning over his words for hours. A small part of me had actually considered saying yes. Knowing he thought that far ahead and saw me in his future had been comforting. Still, the almost cold and clinical way he’d gone through his plans step by step had me wondering would any woman have done?

  Then I thought of all the small things he’d done to change me during our relationship. It wasn’t until that moment I realized I hadn’t been as confident and unwilling to be led as I thought. The changes had come slowly and gradually and I had told myself it was for the better. Troy had molded me into what he wanted, and what really pissed me off was, I let him.

  When we’d met I’d been a size ten, and had felt comfortable in my body but I knew that on a small frame like mine it might appear to a bit more than on a tall person. Troy had talked me into going for runs, and hiking, all of which I hated but told myself couples did to spend time together. He’d been way too happy when I’d gone down a size. I had resented his overly soothing tone when he walked me through the aisles of the grocery store telling me why I shouldn’t buy one thing or another. He didn’t like it when I was dirty when I painted and that I walked around the house barefoot instead of wearing the slippers he’d bought me.

  I hadn’t been able to wait, it didn’t matter that it was close to midnight I banged on his condo door and told him I was sorry but no. Was it the late hour and that I had disturbed his sleep that had made him so angry? I don’t know but he wasn’t the crisp and tidy Troy he’d always been. He’d unleashed a torrent of anger and fire at me. Just remembering the words has me shivering, I had no idea he could be the way he’d been that night. I snuggle closer into Sam’s heat comforted by the feel of him against me.

  My hand moves in a slow caress over him, loving the freedom to touch him while he sleeps. What if in six months or two years, I hurt Sam the way I’d hurt others and he hates me for it? But what if I could change and not be empty and cold anymore? Already I felt empty when he wasn’t close, his touch warmed me in ways I hadn’t known a simple touch could. It didn’t matter I’ve known him all of two days I feel more comfortable with him than I had with anyone I’d ever known, even Christine. I feel safe with him, as if I can say anything, be anyway with him and he’d take me as I am without trying to change me.

  Charles had used me sexually and, sometimes I felt like his toy to be used for his pleasure. Sam had only given me pleasure and not asked for anything back. I’m not stupid enough to think that wouldn’t change but he’d been gentle and extremely intent on my pleasure, not his own. Tracy hadn’t thought I was feminist in my ideals enough, and pushed me to try and see men and the secret dream I had of being nothing but a housewife and mother as a way of keeping women down. Troy had made me feel like he wa
nted and deserved a platinum partner but was willing to settle for the silver plating he would put on me.

  On the drive to Austin, all of the bad habits I had listed hadn’t caused him to blink. My sarcasm had him laughing instead of annoyed. He hadn’t been bothered by me being dirty from painting, he’d found me so sexy he’d wanted to bend me over the table. He hadn’t cooked just because I said I didn’t like to cook, he had cooked to please me. Italian was my favorite food, I don’t remember listing it but from his interrogation efforts it would have come easily. Remembering that still makes me smile, if sex was all he was after, would a man really put so much effort into it? I want to think no but I’m not sure as I obviously don’t know as much about men as I thought I did. He’d teased me but never put me down, never made me feel small to make himself bigger, both Troy and Charles had done that, hell Tracy had as well.

  He seems genuinely interested in my art and intent on me doing something with it. No one had ever encouraged my art since I was a teenager, not even Christine. Sam wouldn’t want me to change who I am but he’d demand all of me, everything I had to give, I have that sense about him. Was that why he hadn’t taken unless I gave, because when the time came I would have to give him all? It doesn’t scare me because I know he’d give it back, he wasn’t out simply to take. But what did I really have to give him, besides my body?

  “Don’t,” The gruff, sleep soaked word is followed by a gentle finger smoothing out the lines on my forehead. “I don’t want you thinking too much about this. Just enjoy it baby. Would that be so bad?”

  Looking into Sam’s beautiful blue eyes, I force my fears down and can only answer by laying back on his chest and hugging him closer.

  “Good girl, damn just after six in the morning. Thank you, baby, I haven’t slept a stretch like this in years and it feels damn good.”

  “You really slept all night long?” It feels good to know I was the reason.