Page 24 of Dark Ink

“Then we’re done here?” she asked, rocking like a schoolgirl back and forth on her heels, hands clasped behind her back. “I suppose the commission on a drawing like that would pay my rent for a month.”

I balled up the piece of paper. Threw it toward the waste basket. Eithne was already glaring when I said, “I want you to draw your pussy.”

The second attempt was even more than the first, mostly because the lines were thicker, rougher. Drawn with the untrained fist of a caveman. She was angry and she was taking it out on the page. Good. I might make a professor of myself after all.

“I want you to draw your pussy,” I said.

“I did.”

This time I did look up at her. It felt almost like a weapon, my eyes on hers. Our standoff lasted several tense seconds where I thought she was either going to hit me or tear off my clothes.

“No,” I said finally. “You did not.”

Several more attempts all resulted in failures. In balled-up pages. In increasingly frustrated huffs of breaths. Once she added so much artistic flare, trying to please me, I’m sure, that it was unrecognisable as a pussy. Another was, amusingly, I admit, done in a cubist style. Still another was an abstract mess of scribbles she had to inform me was a “pussy, feck ye.”

It was growing increasingly harder for me to maintain my composure as the period wore on, the disappearing stack of paper marking out the time like an hourglass. Eithne gripped the charcoal pencil with a fist, pumped it hard across the page as her breathing grew louder, more frantic. As her body grew slick with sweat even after she pulled off her sweatshirt to reveal a skin-tight white shirt underneath.

I imagined she was gripping my cock instead of that damn charcoal, her moving over me like she moved over her drawings, hearing her grunts of effort as if she were pouring them into my mouth or against the wiry hair of my groin. It was impossible to not get hard, so I just hid behind the lectern, gripping the edges of it to keep myself from slipping my hand inside my pants.

“No,” I repeated for what felt like the hundredth time when Eithne again came to me, childlike with her cherry-red cheeks and flustered hair.

My little Raglan Road girl also seemed to feel the same frustration, because she parroted me, jabbing the page at me. “No? No? What the feck is wrong with it?”

I refused to take the page. What she’d drawn was vacuous, clinical, passionless. I shook my head. Eithne balled up the page and threw it to the floor.

“Will any of them be right?” she asked angrily. “Or is this just another fucked-up, twisted, demented point you’re trying to make?”

The throbbing of my dick was distracting. It made my tongue heavy, my words hard to find.

“Draw it like you drew the orchid, Ms Brady. Then it will be right.”

Eithne threw up her hands. “What in God’s name does that mean? I drew the orchid, I drew the pussy. What’s the difference?”

“You’ll see the difference when you see the difference. Now draw your pussy.”

Eithne let out a quick scream before stomping back and collapsing to her place on the floor. My imagination ran wild with her frantic sounds. I could see her between my legs. I could see her digging her nails into my chest as she bucked her hips harder. I could see everything, anything. I could see my arm careening back, I could see the rippling of my muscles as I held nothing back, I could see the violence of the brush-turned-whip, the fury as I covered her with paint-streaked cum.

Another rejection would threaten to send her over the edge, but I would not accept anything less than what I was looking for. I wanted Eithne to see the beauty of her pussy in the way she’d so clearly seen the beauty in the orchid. Once recognised, I wanted her to do more than just that: I wanted her to claim it as she had the flower. To draw it with power and self-assurance. To see it as her own. To not be afraid to soften the edges of its petals with her tongue-wetted thumb. To smudge the lines that were too perfect, to embrace imperfections with a gentle gaze. To see a part of herself in it. To see herself lovely and delicate and sensual in it. I wanted most of all for it to stir something inside of her, as I knew it could, as I was damned determined it would.

It wasn’t a surprise, the failure Eithne brought me. Nor was it a surprise the tantrum she threw upon hearing this, though I suspect it was also not a surprise for her. She seemed ready to throttle my neck. To shove at my chest. To tear my clothes from my body.

Anger boiled inside of her as she paced back and forth in front of me as I remained as calm as possible. Not watching the bouncing of her tits behind that thin, buttery-soft material. Not yearning to be the cause of the red flush across her throat. Not letting myself rut my erection against the side of the lectern. No, definitely not that.

When I considered it mostly safe to speak, I said, a broken record if ever there was one, “Draw your pussy, Ms Brady.”

“I am!” she shouted, whirling on me.

Up until this point I’d managed to maintain control. But this sent me over an edge I hadn’t realised I was so close to. Eithne’s self-denial. Her throwing away her God-given talent to sit in some cubicle for a meagre salary. Her walking across the street at exactly the wrong moment to throw her into my self-destructive path. Her pushing me away as I tried to make her cum. Her terror at her own pleasure. Her refusal to accept that her need for pleasure was normal. All of it. All of it came rushing up in my throat like bile.

“You are not,” I shouted at her, startling her. She walked back as I approached like a summer thunderstorm, fists at my sides. “You’re not being honest. An artist has to be completely honest with herself. Or else how is she supposed to know what she wants in this godforsaken fucking world?”

It wasn’t about art. It never was. I knew this. Eithne knew this. Rage clouded her face as she jerked her chin up at me, suddenly defiant.

“Why don’t you draw me then?” she said in a low, threatening voice. “If you see me so clearly, Professor Merrick.”

My name was a snarl on her curled lips. I panted as she fell to her knees. The thud echoed round us, too loud, too violent. Eithne shoved at the charcoal pencil and it rolled across the wood floor, coming to a stop at my toes. She was breathing heavily herself as she glared across at me, hard nipples clearly visible.

I licked my lips. My cock twitched. I knelt to pick up the pencil.

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