Brushstrokes by Lilith Fox

Sandra was more excited
about tonight than she had ever been about anything in her life. It was her
first opportunity to meet a famous artist and it she was afraid that the
butterflies in her stomach would become too much for her to handle. All she
could do was ignore them and pray that her nerves would settle down in time for
the show
    Getting ready had been
no small ordeal. It took several applications of shampoo to get the linseed oil
smell out of her hair from an accident she had in her makeshift studio that
morning. She was feeling overly inspired from looking at all of Leon's work in preparation for tonight and tried to create a few works of her own. While
the painting looked fine — at first — her accidentally
spilling clear oil while trying to dilute the opacity of her paint made a mess
of everything.
    The picturesque cottage
gained a decidedly ghostly quality, while her desk and floor became impossible
to clean. She fell right on her behind as she tried to get a rag, which is why
she wound up in the shower for hours on end. As it turned out, oil made up of
molecules that small is nearly impossible to get rid of.
    Upon hearing her alarm
clock in the other room, she quickly gave up on trying to completely remedy the
damage to her hair and jumped out of the shower.  "I only have an
hour and a half to get ready!"
    Patting her curvy body
dry, she grimaced at her shape and her hair in the bathroom mirror. "The
other women there are all rail-thin. I am not going to even bother trying to
compete with them." She pulled her long blond hair back and scrutinized
herself closely. "A tight pony tail and a dress that flaunts my bust will
have to do."
    After drying her hair,
she slicked it with what she thought was a decent-smelling hair product that
might be able to cover up the oil smell and tied a loose bun on the back of her
head.  She thought about the tall, broad man with the impossibly large
hands that she was hoping to meet tonight. The first time she saw Leon's work, she had only been an undergraduate student fresh out of High School. The
abstract colors and overt sexuality had offended her at first. After learning
more about how to create art herself, she marveled at his technique and longed to
be a part of the art world.
    It seemed as if
everything that Leon touched turned to gold. Everything she touched, on the
other hand, seemed to fall short of what she envisioned. The oil all over her
spare bedroom that she dubbed a 'studio' was just one example. She shrugged off
the moment of self-pity and studied her nude body in the mirror one last time.
Her hips were wide, but her waist dipped inward and gave her form a pleasing
hourglass-like curvature. A man she used to see once told her that her teardrop
breasts looked as if they were the modeled after Botticelli’s Venus. The soft
mounds perked into pink rosettes that had left all of her lovers breathless.
    She hoped that these
charms would be enough to attract the attention of Leon, if at least for a
moment of his time. Almost every artist she had met so far had been attracted
to women with smaller frames. Something about his art gave her the impression
that he was different than what she was used to. He gave all of his female
figures a decidedly worldly character, but whether he did this to appeal to
potential patrons or to express himself was up for debate.
    Passing her hands over
her body slowly, she indulged in pretending that her touch was his, if only for
a moment. Remembering that the real Leon was already setting up his show a few
miles away, she jolted out of the bathroom and into the bedroom.
    “I’ve got to get out of
here.” She said to no one in particular. Verbalizing her thoughts was a way to
keep herself focused. She pinned her stray hairs back with dark clips, pulled
on an attractive black slip and stepped into a flattering, yet ladylike dress.
A few minutes of expert makeup application later and she looked like a woman
poised to take on a man as