Dark Art

Episode 7: Hetaira

When they were back upstairs at the apartment, Serafine took another shower, complaining about still having shampoo in her hair, and while she stood under the hot water, washing cum off of herself for the second time that day, she thought long and hard about her life choices.

Am I fucked up in the head or something?she thought, convinced her choices were the sole reason she was in the situation she now found herself in.

Why don't I just say no when I don't want to?Free drugs were hardly worth letting some random college boy do whatever he wanted. Even if he was rich, their relationship was far from exclusive, and the more she thought about the arrangement, the more she realized it really wasn't worth it.

If I'm going to wind up getting fucked in life either way, it should at least be for more than free weed,she thought bitterly.

When she got out of the shower, pulling on a pair of boxer-style underwear and another extra large t-shirt, it was late, past midnight, and by the gentle static sound coming from outside, the rain had picked up again. Careful to tiptoe around the creaky floorboard in the hallway, Serafine headed for the living room with a shoebox tucked under her arm, where a set of double-doors led to a small balcony.

It was the apartments best feature, and even though the balcony was only a couple feet wide and faced an alley full of trash cans, it was both her and her roommates favorite place to hang out, and fortunately, was also covered by a small overhang which shielded it from Chicago's not infrequent wind and rain.

Serafine cracked open the door and slipped outside. The air smelled of petrichor and the ground was wet under her feet, both sensations that greatly eased her mood. Glad to be alone, she pulled a small plastic chair close and took a seat, opening her shoebox to find weed, rolling papers, and a few lighters scattered around inside.

Using the back of her phone as a tray, she spent a few minutes crushing up pebbles of green flower, the occasionalsish-sishof a car passing or the boom of a fog horn from Lake Michigan the only sounds punctuating the rain, outside her own tumultuous thoughts.

She rolled a joint, lit it, and inhaled, relishing in the fog that clouded her brain before an intrusive memory of Ivan Masters pierced the cloud.

Was his offer serious?she wondered.

It seemed too good to be true, and she sensed that what he was asking her to do could get her in serious trouble at school if she got caught. She didn't fully understand how the museum-bank-university relationship worked, but providing Ivan with information that she herself only had access to because of her ability to login to the university's internal database felt, at a minimum, like some kind of breach of privacy.

He should have been asking someone else to do this, one of the adults. She felt a jerk of concern as she thought back to seeingGreek Slavein the attic in person.

She shouldn't have said anything, and regretted every word out of her mouth with another flush of her cheeks. She'd been acting like such a know-it-all. Trying to impress him, eager to show off how cultured and knowledgeable andadultshe was.

Well, it'd worked, she thought, exhaling sourly. He'd noticed her all right, but what was she supposed to do now that it'd caused all... this?

She took another drag of her joint, long and deep, until she coughed and it sent a pair of cats running down the alleyway. One of them stopped and stared at her, a pair of neon-blue lenses reflecting back eerily, as if in a glare, before it bounded off to join its mate.

Her thoughts turned back to Ivan as a gentle breeze picked up, carrying with it the scent of rain slicked asphalt, tinged with alley trash.

Did he even understand what he was offering? It was a lot of money, even at three percent of the paintings value.A life changing amount of money,she thought, maybe not for him, but certainly for her.

He'd said several times that he didn't know anything about art. Was that true? She found it hard to believe that he could be completely ignorant, considering his family's deep ties to the art world, but maybe it was like her friends had said.

He was an outsider, a real estate agent, who probably couldn't tell apart aManetfromMonet, and now found himself in charge of one of the most respected collections in the world. Maybe he really was out of his depth, desperate enough to take help from anyone, even her.

It still seemed a little too good to be true, but the upside was hard to ignore.

Greek Slavewas worth tens of millions of dollars. Maybe Ivan wasn't cultured enough to know that, but art had been her lifelong passion, and she'd worked with the collection directly for two years. Sheknewwhat three percent meant, and if he wanted to get rid of it, what did it matter if she was the one helping him do it or if it was someone else? Besides, where else would she ever get an opportunity like this?

With money like that, she could be free from the strings that were attached to all of her relationships in life today. Everything would be different. It was the ultimate fantasy: to simply live life on her own terms and not feel like she was somehow always second to the wills of the opposite sex.

Until now, the idea always seemed so out of reach. People had to be born into a life like that, or else get extraordinarily lucky -- which she never did. Ric and Noah were perfect examples of this. They'd started so much further ahead in life that sometimes listening to them talk felt like she was living in an entirely different reality.

Like, what even was a Roth IRA?

She smoked until the joint was burned down to her fingertips, then put it out on the concrete, deciding to go to bed quickly before the high wore off and she started thinking again, but when she got to her bedroom and pulled the sheets over herself, she couldn't fall sleep.

She stared at the ceiling in the darkness, counting the glow of headlights that occasionally shone through her bedroom window to pass the time. Instead of the relaxing grogginess she was hoping for after smoking, it was like her mind was on overdrive, questions and possibilities tumbling around her head like clothes at the laundromat.

Greek Slavewas sitting in an attic in Chicago collecting dust when it was supposed to have been back in Italy. That much she knew for sure, but the details ofwhywere as lost to time as the paintings own unfinished lines of charcoal.

To Ivan's point, it wasn't doing anyone any good sitting in the attic. It might have even been causing real damage, which made Serafine frown. If the art truly was just a pawn in some rich persons chess game, it at least deserved better treatment than that. As someone intimately familiar with the difficult process of restorations, she thought it'd be a real tragedy to have preserved something for so long, only to have it destroyed by the ignorance and negligence of a single man.

After a while, she reached for her phone, and although she felt a withering sensation of shame when she did it, she opened Instagram and typed in a name to the search:

Ivan Masters

Ivan had a profile there, too. Of course he did. She clicked on the first tile in the grid, posted just three hours ago. It was a video of him, shirtless, delivering a hard kick to another man, before throwing his body weight on top of him and putting his forearm against his throat, while two other guys on the edge of the frame applauded and provided commentary.

"You gonna let him treat you like one of his bitches, Tone?" said one, which prompted the guy underneath Ivan to sweep his ankle out and try to roll back on his feet, but Ivan was faster, bigger, and impressively strong.

He grabbed Tone's arm and pulled upward with a vicious twisting motion, which forced the man to fall back on the mat so that Ivan was on top of his back.

Tone tapped the mat several times, and Ivan jumped off, laughing, "That's three for three, fucker. Pay up!" before the video started playing again.

She swallowed, feeling that spot on her throat where his hand had been. So, she'd been right about him and his hobbies.He did do this often.She could sense it with certain men from a distance... but why did she find that kind of arousing right now?

Oh my god, what is wrong with me?she thought, before quickly hitting the power button on her phone and rolling to the side, trying to fall asleep by sheer force of will.

Moments later, she was looking at her phone again, curiosity baiting her like a lamp does a moth. When she scrolled to the next video in his feed, he was standing on a boat, tonguing a beautiful brunette woman in green bikini while he squeezed her ass, the same group of shirtless guys she'd seen in the other video cheering him on in the background. She glanced at the post date.

4 days ago. Location, The Playpen.

When she scrolled to the next tile, it was a still image of Ivan by himself, wearing a black suit and standing beside a sparkling, midnight-black Rolls Royce. Although she was ashamed to admit it, he looked amazing in that picture, like a GQ model.

Without really realizing it was happening, one of her hands dipped below the sheets, and she lifted her shirt up, tracing the small crease along the side of her breast that appeared when she laid flat on her back.

She put her phone down and then stopped herself, closing her eyes hard and biting the tip of her tongue.

Really?she chastised herself. Why was she thinking ofhimright now? Why didn't she hate him, like all her friends clearly did? Their remarks about him came so easily, yet somehow she couldn't bring herself to feel the same.

Ricard's voice suddenly cut through her thoughts.Hetaira, he'd called her. The word for the courtesan's of ancient Greece -- which she only knew because he'd said it about a girl once before in passing, and then laughed uproariously when Serafine thought it was her real name, quickly apologizing and urging her not to look up what it meant.

He hadn't used it again in front of her after that, until tonight. The word seemed to have a particularly sharp sting as she contemplated her current situation: an object for not one, but two men. One that was actually offering money in exchange for uninhibited access to her body... money that she'd technically already agreed to take.

Hetaira.Whore.

She hated how those thoughts made her squirm, but alone in the privacy of her room, she let herself give into them for a moment, reframing what Ivan had done to her as she pushed two fingers under the hem of her underwear.

He hadn'treallyhurt her, she reasoned. He could've done a lot worse, by the looks of what he liked to post on social media, but in a way he'd been kind of gentle. She'd gotten a better look at his muscles in the video than she had in person, but she already knew he was fit from their encounter in the apartment. His forearm had felt like cast iron under his shirtsleeves, and his grip was like a machine, encircling her neck like a boa.

Two fingers found her clit and she jumped a little at her own touch, her other hand roving up to squeeze her breast, the same one Ivan had fondled in the car.

"I knew you liked this,"he'd said to her as he pulled his fingers from between her legs in the attic. Did he think of her as a whore, too? At the thought, she let her fingers slide around her clitoris in the shape of a V, gently squeezing the bed of nerves from both sides, her legs spreading wider and her neck turning to one side as waves of pleasure crested within her body.

She'd always had a hard time sorting out her own feelings when it came to men. It was part of why she was so attracted to a career in the arts -- long hours spent alone in the archives, weeks spent pouring over books by herself. She felt at ease alone, unwatched, un-fantasized about. When Ivan was around, all those anxious, uncertain feelings she'd had about herself since puberty came rushing to the surface like boiling water.

Is he looking at me? Do I look OK? What is he thinking?

Most men looked at her the way Ivan did, but no man had ever overpowered her the way he did. She'd fought off her fair share of wandering hands and weird hugs her entire life, and was very practiced at shutting down boys with a stern glare, but none of it had worked on him.

She felt powerless to stop his advances: if she told someone, it would publicly ruin her life. If she didn't, he'd probably do it again. He knew where she lived, where she went to class, and given his new role at the bank, in control of vast sums of money and his own private security, he probably had the resources find out whatever else he wanted.

Why does that make it more exciting?

When she massaged her clitoris, she thought of his grip on her throat and the way his expression had been deadly calm while he assaulted her. It was scary and painful yet, unexpectedly... thrilling.

How bad could he really be?

Maybe he just had a kink, like Ricard. A guy like Ivan was always hanging around hot girls, right? He was probably used to girls that were confident, sexual, and down to reciprocate. It'd always been hard for her to behave that way, but part of her suddenly wanted to try.

He was just so ambitious, and the aura of masculine self-possession he exuded was magnetic. To Serafine, who struggled to even get noticed for class projects, this energy was like a pheromone that she wanted to physically absorb.

The thought of continuing to see him was darkly thrilling. Sure, he was a little scary when they were alone, but he also represented a certain lifestyle she'd been longing for as long as she could remember. If getting access to money and opportunities like this took enduring a little bit of mistreatment, she decided she would do it. How different could it possibly be to her normal life, except this time with a tangible outcome?

Fluid was flowing from her vagina to her underwear while she masturbated, her abdominal muscles clenching and relaxing as she edged, drawing up one knee and removing her fingers several times before she went too far.

"I'm going to fuck your face, and then I'll be done,"he'd said, and just as matter-of-factly, followed through with it.

Nobody had ever done that to her before.

These thoughts, combined with her own expert touch was beginning to overwhelm her senses, until the movements of her hand got faster and her back arched, her legs splaying a few degrees wider as she was lost in a burst of pulsating pleasure.

A small moan escaped her lips, and her entire body throbbed as she lay there, tracing her fingers around the entrance of her vagina until they came away coated in clear, slimy, lubricant.

She lay like that for a long time, one hand resting over her stomach with her legs propped open at an angle, letting her mind go static, thoughts drifting away in the darkness. It felt like no time had passed at all when her eyes opened again, but when she saw overcast gray light streaming in through her bedroom window, she sat bolt upright in bed, realizing that at some point in the night she'd fallen asleep for real, and it was now the following morning.

Her neck and arms were sore, and when she reached for her phone, it felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Through a crack on the screen, she saw that it was almost noon, and class was starting in exactly six minutes.

"Shit," she said, forcing herself to get out of bed and sift through the jeans scattered around her bedroom floor to find the cleanest pair.

Even if she could fly to the conservatory building in a helicopter, it'd be thirty minutes at least before she made it across town from here. She silently berated herself for this oversight as she put a plastic clip in her hair, pulled on her usual pair of dirty converse and ran out the front door with a backpack bouncing against her shoulders.

She didn't need to get on the professor's bad side anymore than she already was, especially now, when her ability to go unnoticed in class was about to work in her favor for the first time ever.

Arriving thirty minutes late so that everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at her was not what she had in mind she got to class that day, but that's exactly how it wound up happening.

Pushing open the familiar rolling warehouse door, Serafine entered the conservatory building, hyperaware of the rattling noise it made as the metal clattered along the track. As expected, several people looked up at her, all boys, wearing gloves and masks and white smocks to protect the art.

"Miss Irae," said the professor. "How good of you to grace us with your presence today."

"Sorry I'm late," she mumbled as she pulled the door closed behind her, hating how she could feel all their eyes following her as she walked toward a bench to put her stuff down.

The professor had the wrong impression of her, and she hated that, too. Often running late, and a little behind the curve with all the fine art terminology, she'd been the sole recipient of a scholarship aimed at diversifying the student body and providing opportunities for inner-city students...buteveryonethought she was only here because she was pretty.

"Power issues, again?" asked the professor, walking toward her with a thermos of coffee in one hand.

"Uh- no I just overslept," she said, instantly regretting it.Way to look like you don't care, dumbass,she berated herself internally.

He was silent for a moment, and then said, very gently. "You know, my first few years of school, I thought what I wanted more than anything in the world was a maths degree. Of course, a lot of this was because it pleased my parents, butmy heart, was always in the arts. I'm ashamed to admit now that it took years to make that distinction in my education. Have you yet examined where your passions truly lie?"

She had to physically bite her tongue to stop herself from saying the first thing that came to mind.

"It's not like that," she said, struggling to keep her voice low so it didn't carry across the warehouse. "Professor really, I'm sorry, I am. I do take this seriously, I swear I do. Please,pleasejust let this one slide, okay? I'll get up an hour earlier if I have to, every day."

When she looked up at him, her expression half-pleading, he looked away, seeming to soften just a fraction. Serafine bit her bottom lip as she waited, knowing full well the effects her own unique brand of eye contact could have when wielded against the opposite sex.

"Miss Irae, you must understand that I'm only trying to help you," he said with a bit of a sigh. "The Masters of Fine Arts program is very demanding, and your workload will only keep increasing. Historically, our curriculum has been only for men because, at a certain age, there's great natural instinct for females to... bear offspring. This... at worst, equates to a high rate of dropping out of the more challenging programs we have here, and at best, limited career potential in the field after graduation. You understand that I mean no offense by this, of course?"

Females. Instincts. Offspring.These words grated on Serafine like nails on a chalkboard, and she was keenly aware of how they had switched to talking about women like they were animals in a nature documentary, but she held her silence.

The MFA program was different than other classes at the Art Institute. Heralding back to the days when the university was very first established in 1799 -- before women were even allowed to attend the school at all -- it was a small, inordinately exclusive class made up of only five students, and up until now, they'd always been male.