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Saskia slid to the ground under the table between his legs as he undid his pants. She took advantage of the still numb sensation in her throat to take Quill as deeply as she had the ice pop. He let out a pleased groan. His hand pressed against the back of her neck, a gentle intimidation, but he didn’t shove her down any harder.
When he came, she swallowed the results of her efforts and he stroked her hair.
“Lacy, Saskia will be having breakfast now,” he said loudly enough for her to hear.
Saskia went back to her chair, trying to force the heat from her cheeks.
13
Weeks passed like this, and Saskia forgot the outside world existed. Quill kept her working in the studio nearly every day and long into most nights. He was a man possessed.
They alternated days. One day would be focused on her work. The next, on his. On the days he painted, he chained her up or chained her down—depending upon the apparatus of choice. He’d give her pain then give her pleasure until she was wrung out. Then he would paint the results of what he’d done to her. Each painting he produced seemed to dig deeper and deeper inside her soul, so far that she wasn’t sure what she could possibly have left to create her own work with.
Before long, the gallery was filled with her image in oil, somehow more alive than a photograph. Each night, she stared out from between bars in the cage he still made her sleep in at the paintings trapped inside their own cages of glass. Surely they couldn’t breathe in there. But could she out here? Her reality had tilted and turned into a fun house mirror.
Each night, as she was about to drift off, Marcus’s strong familiar hands would creep through the bars of the cage to touch her. Her legs would fall open for him; he’d stroke her until she came, and then she’d return the favor. Hand jobs had been deemed acceptable.
After the first few days at the estate, Quill had let her move most of her things into one of the rooms in the main house. She wasn’t living in the main house, but at least most of her things were.
A minimal amount of clothing at a time was left for her in the bathroom in what she’d oddly come to think of asher buildingbecause it certainly wasn’t a room or a suite or an apartment. It was just where Quill kept his private collection of art.
It might have taken this full couple of weeks for that reality to sink in—that she existed as part of the collection. And that might be all.
It was her day to paint, which meant nothing but sexual frustration because, to Quill, playing with her was meant only to prepare her to be put on his canvas. It was all work to him—one way or another. With each day he continued to refuse her his bed, she’d grown increasingly convinced he didn’t want her that way at all.
Maybe he was just into Marcus. She was sure something was going on between the two of them again. Maybe while she slept. It was hard not to be jealous, no matter what Marcus said about them not being interchangeable cogs. She felt she was nothingbutinterchangeable. Replaceable. Forgettable. Just like everything she painted.
Maybe Quill could close his eyes and imagine her mouth on his cock was Marcus’s mouth, but he could never fool himself that way if he fucked her.
Quill looked over her shoulder at the new painting and sighed.
Every time he did that, she deflated a bit more. Somehow, his disapproval each time she painted something new was more humiliating than anything else that had happened between them. At least she was managing thealla primatechnique admirably. It was just what she painted with it that earned his disdain.
The first week he’d been content with—or at least tolerated—her dark photocopies as she’d begun to think of them. She didn’t know why she couldn’t let the things inside her out. It was what he wanted, and all she wanted was to please him. She couldn’t even fight with that thought anymore. It was too exhausting.
She wanted him to want her. She wanted him to fuck her. She wanted to sleep in his bed. She wanted him to look at her paintings with pride and satisfaction. She wanted him to think her work was brilliant.
Saskia felt as if at some point she’d jumped onto the wrong train, pulled into the wrong station, and then just decided to stay at the new destination, scrapping every other plan she’d made for her life—such that they were.
Quill was the wrong train. But he was the train she so desperately wanted to ride.
She wasn’t sure she had the heart to beg him anymore. She couldn’t handle more rejection.
He sighed again. “No. Why am I wasting this time on you if you’re not going to give me anything?”
He took the canvas off the easel and flung it across the studio until it hit one of the glass walls, flinging tiny specks of still-wet paint onto both it and the floor.
Saskia slid to the ground and started to cry. “I’m sorry, Master. Maybe it’s not in me. I was kidding myself to ever think I could create like you.”
In a rare shimmering moment, his expression softened. He sat on the ground beside her, pulling her into his arms. He petted her hair and rested his chin on the top of her head. It was familiar in a way he never allowed himself to be with her.
“If I didn’t believe in you, I wouldn’t bother. I’m frustrated because I know itisin you. But this isn’t working.”
He got off the ground and picked up the painting to put it with her others. She stayed there, still crying, while he cleaned the mess he’d made as well as the mess she had. He was so particular about his tools and paints that she was almost afraid to ever help him with the clean-up process, afraid he’d snap at her when she put the tube of burnt umber next to the cadmium yellow. He had a system, and even though she’d watched him, she didn’t fully understand it or want to do yet another thing wrong to disappoint him.
“I’m sorry this is so hard on you... that I’m so... intense,” he said.
Intense. Or abusive. But he was the typical temperamental artist, and no one had ever bothered to rein him in. And it wasn’t as if she had the power to. Or the will.
