Photo Slave (The Art of Domination #2) (6 page)

The day after my
nightclub encounter with Nolan Beal, he had called me to ask if I was going to
renege on my end of our new agreement—that I would let him explore me as a
photographic subject and he would help me explore my taste for sexual
submission. Like he was doing me a favor. Bastard. So goddamn charming,
affable, and entertaining. And such an arrogant, conceited, sexy fucking…
bastard. If there was a favor to be had, it would have been to reemphasize how
destructive and emotionally exhausting that lifestyle was. And with Beal being
the unabashed sensualist he was, the personification of appetite, I was sure it
wouldn’t take long to renew my healthy avoidance of a life without structure or
rules, without safety or security. For now, just for now, I’d play along…
indulge.

The next day, he’d
wanted me to tell him about my last lover. Had I ever been dominated before?
What was my favorite sexual position? I’d hung up on him without answering any
of his questions. But I’d also been unable to stop thinking about the answers,
about the bland dates and the lukewarm boyfriends who never seemed to stick
around for more than two or three months. To be fair, I never missed them much
afterward. Maybe it had been all that missionary position sex and never looking
at each other while doing something supposedly so intimate. Maybe the lack of…
passion.

On the third day, Nolan
had asked why I hadn’t told him I was a painter.

Thanks,
Cheri
.

The questions had only
grown more personal, if not always outright intimate, from that point. Who was
my favorite painter and why? What style and medium did I use in my work? Why
were Cheri’s eyes light blue when mine were chocolate brown? Was Darcie as
beautiful as we were? Had I ever left the stereo playing during sex? What kind
of music? Had I ever shaved my pussy? Was it because a lover ordered me to? My
refusal to answer most of his questions had only encouraged Beal to ask more.

By the fifth day, he
was making me call him Nolan over the phone, all the time. He had known what my
reaction would be, I was sure. After all, he had already established his name
as my cry of release, as a trigger for an instant and overwhelming sense of
intimacy and vulnerability, as assurance of obedience. It had become harder and
harder to avoid answering his questions while in that frame of mind, with my
hands and knees shaking and my sex trembling and wet.

By day six, I had
started to wonder why Beal hadn’t summoned me to his studio. For a photo shoot,
for sex, whatever. I couldn’t ask without sounding like I wanted to see him. I
didn’t—want to see him. I just… wondered if Cheri was there, if she had
insisted on signing another model release despite my desperately unorthodox
intercessions.

Day seven, Friday
night, yesterday, Beal had called to tell me to shave my sex for him. That was
all. Not, “Do it and come to my studio.” Not, “Be ready to present to me, Iva.”
Nothing. Had he known how arousing it would be to shave my sex bare, the soft
skin exposed and sensitized by the careful, controlled fiction of the razor in
so tender and protected a place? Had he known how frustrating it would be to
just wait around then for instruction, for attention? Had he known how much I’d
hate him for making me feel that way? How much it would make me want to have
rough, angry sex with him?

Yeah, that was what the
smart money said.

Now I stared at my
smartphone and tossed aside the small charcoal stick so I could use the hem of
my shirt to rub the fingerprints off the screen. No missed call message. No
text. Twenty minutes ticked by—then thirty, forty—while it grew dark outside
and I googled Nolan Beal despite my embarrassment at feeling such fascination
with him.

I found a few mentions
of the photographer on art blogs and a couple of brief interviews on the
websites for well-known art magazines. Some of the information about his past,
like where he’d grown up and gone to school and who he had studied under,
contradicted other sources. More than one passage began with the caveats “Rumor
has it….” or “Though Beal declined to confirm or deny reports….”

The popular stories
made him out to be the son of some posh British socialite who had been wooed by
an American businessman. In some accounts, his parents had disowned him for his
brash manner and bad boy ways. In others, they had paid for all the best art
schools and a true classical education and encouraged him to embrace the
artist’s journey of self-actualization no matter where it took him. The only
thing that made sense in the jumble of contradictory PR was that smooth
undertone to his voice; presumably it was a touch of his mother’s inflection.

Then the phone buzzed
in my hand, and I jumped like I’d been caught doing something illicit by an
authority figure. On the other end of the line was Nolan Beal’s British
American rock star accent.

“I’m ready to take your
picture, Brown Eyes. Don’t keep me waiting.”

After eight days of
nerve-racking phone calls, eight days of wondering what Nolan Beal intended to
do with me, he could damn well wait long enough for me to wash my hands and
change my clothes. Yet I hurried, not because I wanted to please him but
because I had to know what he was doing and with whom, why he had put me off so
long, what game he was playing now. If I could be sure of one thing, his next
move was all about upsetting my balance, taking me off guard. He’d want me in
an uncomfortably sensitive, intimate, and
receptive
frame of mind for the sake of taking my photograph and using my body.

At the Cathedral, I
knocked at the door but got no response. Strange how long only a minute or two
could seem when doing something as awkward as standing at a closed door
wondering if anyone was going to answer, knowing someone should have been
there, feeling at the same time like I should and yet couldn’t walk away.

Ultimately, it was a
be-flannelled Viv, the long fall of her straight red hair knotted at the back
of her head, who cracked the door and welcomed me with a roll of her eyes and a
nod toward the din of raised voices. “Sorry, everyone is busy melting down,”
the teenager explained, then parodied, “Viv, get that goddamn door,” in a clipped,
cutting accent that had to have referred to Rilla.

Inside, the scene was a
bit more nuanced than a generalized ‘meltdown’, with Nolan calmly tending to
his collection of Nikons where they sat arrayed on one of his long work tables.
For all the agitation around him, Nolan looked steady enough, broad shoulders
relaxed and hands manipulating his cameras with unhurried skill. In fact, the
more heated and erratic his surroundings, the more focused he seemed to become.

Part of me had to
wonder what kind of a life he’d had growing up if drama made him calm, but also
if part of that constant frenetic activity around the man was his doing,
engineered to maintain a state that felt natural to him. I shivered at the
thought, not enamored of it at all but legitimately queasy. It made me… made me
feel almost sorry for Nolan, like I wanted to shelter him from this chaos
somehow, insist people give him a few moments of peace. That was probably the
last thing he actually wanted.

Stan, in a retro button
front shirt with a colorblock design and silky sheen, was leaning back against
the edge of that same table. Strange little man, I thought and not for the
first time. The assistant had one arm folded under the other elbow to support
the pudgy hand he had covering his eyes and brow as he shook his head at some
bad news I’d missed. While it wasn’t the suburban luau style he’d sported the
other times I’d seen him, he was still thrift store chic, watchable, strangely
huggable.

Rilla was a sight, as
well, in a blush pink dress cut too low for anyone but a fashion model, for
anywhere but a runway, and for any day under sixty degrees. She hovered behind
Nolan giving him what for in what sounded like three different
languages—English, German, and probably Portuguese. That was what people spoke
in Brazil, right? Whenever she cussed, she used English and stuck with that for
the next two or three sentences. I gathered something about a letter to the
newspaper, a local interest piece with one of the late night news anchors, and
a last minute booking cancelation for a Ferragamo shoot. And she had plenty to
say about what Nolan should have been doing about all of it.

Cheri was there as
well. I literally cringed when I caught sight of her stepping around from
behind Rilla to interrupt—unsuccessfully. Unable to get in a word, my little
sister moved back and forth between patting Nolan consolingly on the back and
rubbing the lean muscles of Finn Garvey’s shoulder and arm through his ironic
preppy polo, the thick black lines of goth tats just visible under the edge of
his white sleeves. The male model paced anxiously behind the rest of the crowd
and periodically sucked on the whiskey bottle he held. He made for an
interesting contrast to the image I retained of my first glimpse of Nolan as
the eerily composed lord of the Bacchanalia.

Cheri’s interaction
with these two men caught my attention for all the wrong reasons, because I was
trying to decipher her feelings toward them, what role she played for their
sakes. Her touch along Finn’s arm lingered longer, and her gaze sought his out
repeatedly, to reassure or perhaps to be reassured. I knew I should have been
asking myself if dating a male model with a taste for whiskey and gothic
tattoos was the best choice for Cheri, but instead all I kept thinking was that
I was relieved she wasn’t looking at Nolan Beal the way she looked at Finn
Garvey. That sense of respite faded quickly enough beneath the slow creep of
guilt over letting my attraction to the photographer supersede my better
judgment.

From the relative calm
of what I gathered to be minimum safe distance, I asked Viv, “What’s going on?
Bad timing? Because I can go. I mean, Nolan called me to come over, but if
something has happened….”

Stepping up beside me
with arms folded, the teen shook her head and frowned with surprisingly adult
pragmatism. “Nah, this is starting to burn out. They’ve been like this just
about every day for a week. Things quiet down until someone shows up….” Viv
threw me a pointed sidelong glance. “Rilla,” she mouthed. “They gotta rehash
all the details—who said what when, who did this, didn’t do that. Everyone’s
boxers get knotted up, mostly because Nolan isn’t panicking like they are. Much
shouting and waving of hands. Twenty minutes later they’re all tired of
arguing. Rinse and repeat. All because some dumbass TV reporter who wouldn’t
know art from his ass called to ask if anyone had a comment on the boycott.”

“Boycott? Of what?”

“Some lady from Mothers
for Moral Media has been writing letters to the editor and talking to the TV
station about her campaign to get Nolan’s pruri— peri— his pervy photos pulled
from fashion magazines and billboards.”

“Prurient?” I
suggested.

“Yep, that. His booking
agent called last Friday while he was out at Haute to say this Pamela Wiley
lady had been contacting all the designers who use Nolan’s photographs. She
wanted them to know they were encouraging the….” Viv’s dramatically lined eyes
rolled and went out of focus while she struggled to remember. “The
objectification and degradation of girls and women. Not a Helmut Newton fan, I
guess. She’s threatening to organize a national boycott of the designers,
magazines, and galleries that feature Nolan’s stuff.”

I stopped myself from
marveling aloud that the teenager knew the reference to the provocative twentieth
century fashion photographer. She had obviously kept her eyes and ears open
while doing the odd tasks around here for Nolan, and she deserved a lot better
than patronizing surprise for staying sharp and learning something. Instead, I
asked, “So this group doesn’t like the erotic domination tinge to Nolan’s
photographic style, and they are trying to shame the designers into not using
his work?”

“Yep.”

I frowned. “Because
ass-high mini dresses and sheer blouses aren’t really the problem as much as the
positions the models pose in. We won’t even get into the issue of heavy-handed
editorial staff using Photoshop to turn size four models into size double zero
models with hips narrower than their head. That’s a great example for everyone
to aspire to.”

Viv shrugged. “The real
panic is the possibility of the gallery exhibition getting shut down before it
even opens.”

My heart lurched in my
chest. “Is that likely?” No exhibition, no point in a model release. I would
still have had to deal with Nolan Beal for the time it took me to… to stop
associating him with all things chic and passionate and artistic, with the
heady scent of photo chemicals and spiced citrus, and to get my attraction to
him under control. To get him out of my system, as I’d said in the club. But at
least I would no longer have had to worry about Cheri insisting on modeling for
Nolan and revealing an all too private side of herself to unforgiving eyes.

When Nolan looked up
from his cameras and saw me, focused on me, a disconcerting wash of emotion
flushed my skin. I felt… ashamed of myself for seeing the personal advantage to
what was clearly an unfair situation. Despite Beal’s first class rogue routine,
I couldn’t sign off on censorship or selective shaming. His work might have
been sexualized and provocative, controversial and confrontational, but it was
also good, both in technique and in composition. One might not have liked what
he said with it, but at least it said something, and more than just, “Buy
this.”