Christy answered the door as soon as I knocked. She smiled and looked a lot more like herself.
I slid behind her and closed the door. “Just in case we get any wild ideas,”
I explained. “Besides, it’s warmer with the door closed. I have a little case of shrinkage to recover from.”
“I forgot again, didn’t I?”
“That’s okay. I have a solution.”
“Oh? What?”
“Shower together.”
She stiffened.
“Not any time soon,” I laughed, “but eventually. It’s more fun that way.
Saves water too. Or so they say.”
She rolled her eyes and went back to her routine. A few minutes later she reached for the bottle of lotion. She did her legs and then glanced at me.
“Of course. Any excuse to get my hands on you.”
“Are you being a horndog on purpose?”
“You tell me. We’re together in a small room with only a couple of layers of terrycloth between our naked bodies.”
She turned pink from the terrycloth up.
“So yeah, I’m being a horndog on purpose. Now turn around and drop your towel. As far as you want this time. I’m going to see it all eventually.”
Her eyes widened in surprise, but she did as I asked. She stopped the
towel at the top of her butt. I pushed it lower. She resisted at first, but finally gave in and lowered it until I could see her entire ass.
I squirted lotion in my palm and began rubbing her shoulders.
“I know you think you’re kinda scrawny,” I said quietly, “but you have a really nice body. You’re just petite. You have curves in all the right places.” I squirted more lotion. “And even if you didn’t, I don’t care. It’s what’s on the inside that counts, right?”
“Right.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m dying to find out what your insides are like.”
She tried unsuccessfully not to laugh.
“Are they soft and squishy?” I wondered aloud. “Or firm and springy? Or
—?”
“Hot and slippery,” she said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear.
“That was gonna be my next guess.” I squirted more lotion and began rubbing the top of her ass.
She sighed but didn’t pull away.
I covered each firm, small buttock, and made sure not to stray where I shouldn’t.
“I can do the rest,” she said.
I nodded and gently turned her around. She clutched the towel to her chest. I looked down at the tent in my own towel, and her eyes followed mine.
“Oh, look,” I said, “he likes you.”
“You can say that again.”
“Oh, look, he likes you.”
“You can say that again.”
“Oh, look, he likes you.”
She grinned. Her mood had improved a thousand percent, so I bent and kissed her. She returned it with a simmering intensity.
“Better?” I asked quietly.
“Much. Thank you.”
“Good. We should get a move on, though. We have a lot of work to do.”
She nodded and refastened her towel across her breasts.
“And I’m gonna need a few extra minutes to get dressed. I’ll be useless all day if I don’t, ahem, take care of things.”
Her eyes widened.
“Yeah. Sex on the brain. Drowns out all rational thought. It’s pretty
common among guys my age.”
“Oh, please.”
“Hey, it’s your fault. This never happens when I’m alone.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dubiously.
“I swear. I’m limp as a noodle most of the time. Then when I see you…
boing!”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’m just sayin’. I might need to have it looked at by a penis expert.” I grinned as she returned to the sink. “You know anyone?”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“I’m sure you do.” I pulled her hair aside and kissed her ear. “’Cause it’s you.”
She smiled at me in the mirror. Then she dabbed moisturizer on her face and did her best to ignore me.
I did my best to make sure she couldn’t.
Chapter 30
We spent all day in the studio. I took apart the box and then Christy and her friends gingerly cut the pink mold material away from the clay sculpture.
They all knew what they were doing at this stage, so I kept out of the way and organized the notes for my final project writeup.
The trio of artists spent several hours checking and cleaning the mold segments. Then Christy asked me to reassemble the box upside down. They sprayed release agent into the first empty mold piece and added it to the box.
They did the same with the others and used quick-drying cement to hold them together.
Siobhan stopped by to check on our progress. She tested all the seams she could see. She took out a flashlight and peered into the mold cavity. She even checked the wooden structure of the box itself.
“I think you’re ready to pour,” she said at last.
The work at that point became semiskilled labor, so I joined in. Christy and Siobhan weighed out white Carrara marble dust on a big scale and carefully mixed in polyester resin and a small amount of catalyst. The other two stirred the mixture in five-gallon buckets.
The studio had a winch system to hoist containers over the molds, but it was designed for larger ones than our buckets, so it was quicker to do it by hand. I was the only one strong enough to hold them while the mixture flowed into the mold, so I got the job by default.
We started an assembly line with me at the end. I poured more than a dozen buckets of marble goop. I privately congratulated myself on the box, too. I’d only been worried about the mold material when I’d added the
support structure. But the marble slurry added hundreds of pounds to the entire system, so I was glad I’d overbuilt it in the first place.
My muscles ached by the time the marble-resin mixture finally overflowed the mold. I thought we were done, but Christy rolled over a table with a half-dozen red plastic beach pails. They were small molds.
“Fill these too, please,” she said without explanation.
“Um… sure.”
She held a funnel to the opening of the first, and I poured the mixture until it filled the small cavity. We repeated the process five more times. Then she took out a rubber mallet and tapped around the circumference of each pail.
“Air bubbles,” she explained to my curious look.
Next she took the mallet to the big mold. She whacked the plywood until her arms gave out. Punk girl took a turn, followed by the tall guy. I took my turn last and pounded away until Christy told me to stop.
“No more bubbles coming up,” she said. “That’s all we can do.”
Siobhan put an arm around her and hugged. “Now we wait.”
“And pray,” Christy added as she crossed herself.
“Oh, sure. We pray.”
Christy and I walked home in high spirits. We were bone tired and speckled with dried marble goop, but our mood couldn’t have been better.
“How long will it take to cure?” I asked.
“At least twenty-four hours. Then we’ll take the mold off, and I’ll spend every waking moment getting it ready for the show.”
“Will it really take that long?”
“I’ll be lucky if I finish in time. I want to display it in the round, but I might have to hang a backdrop and treat it like a relief.”
“You mean just clean up the front?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s no good. What can I do to help?”
“I didn’t want to ask, but…”
“Get real. I like spending time with you. And if I can be useful as well…”
“You can do rough clean-up. But I’ll have to do all the finishing work and
fix any problems.”
“Sounds like a not-date.” I draped my arm around her shoulders, and she smiled up at me tiredly.
We walked the rest of the way in happy silence.