AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Had Ari said something to him?
She remained very still the rest of the night, afraid that if she moved, the spell would break and Quill would release her and roll back over, shutting her out again.
18
Weeks passed. Or maybe it was months. It was so hard to tell with how the world all blurred together. Fucking and sucking and painting and being painted and being passed around.
Each time she felt there was some turning point between her and her master, it turned out to be nothing more than the same smoke and mirrors. He always pulled away again as if he’d catch on fire if he allowed even the slightest intimate ember to burn between them.
She had stopped lying to herself, stopped pretending that her master must share her out of fear of intimacy. That would mean he cared. And it was just another fantasy to keep her warm at night. Perhaps he just shared her because he got off on sharing her, on proving how deep her submission to him had grown, how lost she was, how enslaved.
And it had never been about what she’d stolen. She’d abandoned that theory early on. He’d only made the smallest pretense with the ledger. She wasn’t even sure he was still keeping a record of what she’d “paid off”. Quill got off on prostituting her, on being paid ridiculous sums of money to allow all of his wealthy perverted friends to part her thighs over and over.
So few men had the patience he had... to turn a mind and body and soul so that they craved the chains locked around them, so that they squirmed and mewled and begged shamelessly for more. He was an artist far beyond mere painting.
When Saskia had first been inspired by his work enough to attend art school, she’d imagined that somehow while there she would discover some artistry hidden deep within her. She’d credit Joseph Quill with inspiring her, but secretly she would know that all along she’d hadit, whatever that meant. His work would have just unlocked it. There would be parties and acclaim. And her work would be talked about in hushed, reverent tones.
But over time with him, she began to realize that maybe she didn’t haveitafter all. Maybe she’d only ever been kidding herself. He must have believed in her at one point. Why else would he have become so frustrated when she couldn’t deliver what he wanted on the canvas? If he didn’t think she could do it, he never would have invested so much of his own hopes and expectations on what she might become.
It had crushed both of them to see it just wasn’t in there. Nothing more than hollow technique.
Saskia stood in front of a canvas, painting another scene from the club with the bird cages. This one was a self-portrait. She was the focal point of the piece, locked inside the bird cage, blindfolded, a lost expression on her face like a lamb on an altar. Hands seemed to crawl up out of the cage itself to touch her. In the background were men who all wanted a piece of her, waving money. But she didn’t seem able to see or hear any of it. The only reality was that cage closed in around her, and the endless parade of hands poking and prodding her thighs apart.
It didn’t really matter anymore if Saskia painted the truth about herself. It wasn’t going to ever see the light of day. No one would care. No one would buy it.
She wasn’t sure why she painted now. There was no real reason to. She knew she’d never be good enough. She’d never please Quill on any artistic level. Perhaps with her body she could please him—until he finally grew bored with that. But they were not colleagues. He was not her teacher. She was not his prized pupil.
The work wasn’t about him anymore. It wasn’t about the imagined outcome. It wasn’t about money or fame or acclaim or respect. It wasn’t about gallery openings and parties. It was just this thing inside her that pushed its way out onto the canvas in spite of all the ways it had been beaten down along the way. When she’d run out of places to hide behind polite landscapes and had run the gauntlet of trying to force the work through a filter of the imagined expectations of others, what was left was an undiluted, raw work that may never hang in any gallery—even this one—but it felt honest, at least.
Saskia stood back from the still-wet painting to take it in, trying to experience it as a stranger seeing it for the first time. She didn’t hear Quill come in. She jumped when his hand rested on her shoulder.
“Yes,” he whispered.
ThatYesfrom him...It was everything she’d thought she wanted to hear. And yet, it was the beginning of the end for her. Soon after, more work came, flowing out of her in a great rush like Ari’s waterfall in the white room.
When enough had accumulated that pleased him, there was a party in the private gallery. The walls were covered with all her work. Quill invited enough people to fill the gallery, and she never knew which of his aliases all the attendees knew him by because she didn’t recognize any of the faces of the guests.
But it couldn’t just be his art crowd.
It was a specific gathering of others like him—art married with kink. Not just in the subject matter of the work itself... but a comfort with the real thing. Saskia imagined that most of the people in attendance had been at the party when she’d been in the box. Sure, she’d seen those who’d touched her that night later on the video feed, but it was on a screen and in such brief snippets as Quill had fast forwarded through all but the most interesting interactions.
So if anyone at this party had been at that party, she didn’t remember them. There was a price on every painting of hers in the gallery. Not insane prices, but definitely respectable.
If Saskia had expected she would have some grand artist’s introduction in good taste in an evening gown, she’d been kidding herself.
The reason she knew this crowd had to be comfortable with the real thing was because she’d been put on display as an art installation once again. Only this time, Quill didn’t grant her the anonymity she’d so craved at that first party, the anonymity she’d reluctantly relinquished, even if only for Nolan. The installation was another “Jacob Hunter” piece. It was called “The Artist, Exposed”. Quill didn’t go much for subtlety.
For this piece, she’d been stripped bare except for her collar and chained down, straddling a large shiny black round piece of marble. It was a ball just small enough that she could manage to straddle it without too much difficulty. Once she’d been chained in place, a switch was flipped and the ball began to roll gently on top of a sort of platform it was situated on, engineered for such movement. Water gushed forth from small openings in the piece creating an effect of sheets of water flowing over this moving ball.
And as if that weren’t enough, the ball itself sort of pulsed and vibrated underneath her. The pulsing and movement and warm water caressing between her legs sent her cresting over the edge of orgasm repeatedly. If it weren’t for the intense sensations, Saskia might have been able to appreciate the artistry and engineering of such a contraption. Only from the mind of Quill could such a bizarrely erotic piece have been realized.
But tonight there was no box to protect her, nor any blindfold to keep her in the dark where she could pretend whatever she wanted to pretend. Tonight it was real exposure, and she wasn’t entirely sure which thing was worse, the installation she was a part of, or her art on the walls being judged by those with the money to buy it.
Mercifully, at this party, no one was allowed to touch her. It wasn’t part of the piece. They were only allowed to observe her. The oddest thing about all of it was that she must have had a good twenty orgasms in the length of time she was kept on the installation, and yet, they acted as if this were some serious piece of art that actually said something instead of Quill just looking for another way to display and humiliate his property.
They spent an equal amount of time studying her as they did studying her art hanging on the walls. There were a lot of “Hmmms” bandied about, and the sharp ripping of checks from checkbooks that had endless check-writing potential. She’d never seen so much check writing. The members of Quill’s circle must never have heard of the magic of the wire transfer. Or maybe writing a check was more convenient when one didn’t want to be bothered with technology and account numbers.
One by one most of the pieces were bought, except of course, for her.
