Painted Red

I was totally bullshitting, of course. Trying to see how far I could push my flirting before she got fed up. I may have been an artist but I didn’t tend to take my business lightly. I lived in Miami; I saw beautiful women every day, but it wasn’t often that those beautiful women had me behaving like a goddamn idiot.

“No I-” she stammered a bit. “We should get started right? Do you have any paperwork you need me to sign?”

Her abrupt change of subject left me amused, I knew she was trying to give off an air of confidence but her rapidly rising chest and complete inability to meet my eyes let me know that she was feeling the heat between us just as much as I was.

Attraction and lust definitely weren’t new feelings to me. But there was something about the heat that seemed to burn between Rosie and I, even after only having known each other for a few hours, that felt completely foreign. I still wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not, but I was leaning towards the former rather than the latter.

“We’ll deal with all that official shit later.” As much as I wanted to have her confined in the tight space of my tiny office, I wanted to show her my work even more. I wanted to see her face transform like it had the night before when she saw my studio for the first time. “C’mon, I’ll show you around.”

I took the lead as I gave her a tour of the warehouse, making sure to stand close enough to catch the faint fruity scent of her hair. She seemed to be genuinely interested in my paintings, and not just because they were Dex Quinn originals, but because she was intrigued by what they represented. That level of untainted fascination wasn’t something I experienced a lot.

At the ripe old age of 30, I had been selling my art professionally for over a decade. After a few years of making a grand or so here and there and hawking my favorite pieces in local flea markets, I finally earned a nice life for myself. I had enough money to buy myself a luxury sports car, two houses on two separate continents, and garner the attention of some of the most influential people in the world. Of course, all of those things also came with expectations. Expectations of hastily produced paintings, stuffy dinners with rich benefactors, and tons of other shit I definitely didn’t want to do. Expectations that I was tired as shit of having to entertain.

Managers and gallery owners were constantly up my ass, demanding work without giving a single fucking thought to the artistic process. I was tired of it. I was tired of the lights, the flash, and all the rich pricks who bought my art to sit above fireplaces they never even used.

My work didn’t tend to have any overt political inspiration or heavy social statements, but it still meant something. Every brush stroke, every perfect color mix, every seemingly artistic mistake meant something special to me. Seeing Miami socialites and rich dicks flaunt my work like it was nothing more than mantle decoration made me sick to my fucking stomach.

I was the same sellout piece of shit I always promised to myself I would never become. But seeing Rosaline stare at my work like that, her eyes full of light and a thousand questions made me want to paint something that didn’t feel completely worthless.

Rosie’s tour of the warehouse went much quicker than I originally wanted but seeing her fawn all over my paintings started to fuck with me a bit too much. I quickly steered her away from one of my progressive paintings and into the tiny office space in the corner of the studio.

I pointed her towards a neat stack of papers on the desk. “Here’s all the shit you need to sign.” I flopped down in the only chair as she leaned over the desk to start flipping through the stack. “My last assistant put it all together so I guess it’s all there.”

“You didn’t look through it?” She looked up at me with confusion written all over her face. “Are you going to look through it when I finish?”

“Probably not. I’ll have you file that shit away somewhere so I’ll have it on record, though.” I dug my teeth into my thumbnail. “My accountant will handle payroll.”

“How are you going to know I am who I say I am?” She placed her hands on her rounded hips, a move that made my mouth water. “How do you know I’m not going to try to scam you or something?”

“You’re not going to scam me, Rosie”

She swallowed harshly.

“How can you be so sure?”

I stood up in front of her, towering over her for the second time since she showed up that morning. I leaned down until our faces were almost touching. A simple purse of my lips and I could have been feeling those plump pink lips against mine. The thought of it caused the front of my jeans to tighten a little.

“You’re far too sweet to lie to me, Rosaline.” Her eyes narrowed. “I can see it all over your face. I doubt you’ve ever lied about anything in your life.”

“You don’t know that!” she exclaimed. “I could be some type of con-artist, attempting to seduce you to-”

She stopped abruptly, her cheeks flushed a deep red color that extended down to her long, exposed neck.

“I’ll tell you what. If you lie to me, I get to punish you.” I sat back down in my chair, making sure to spread my legs out, showing off my half-hard cock under my jeans. “Now fill out those forms, Rosie. We have a long day ahead of us.”

3

Rosie

My first day as Dex’s assistant passed by without a hitch. After the little ordeal in his office at the beginning of the day, he somehow managed to keep the flirting to a minimum. Well, what I imagined to be a minimum for a man like him. The heated stares, lip licking, and smirking were still just as present. I tried my hardest to ignore them but it never seemed to work. Instead of spending my first day immersed in a mountain of paperwork and new procedures, I finished the day off with soaked panties and brief flashes of imagining his dumb smirking face between my thighs.

Around 6 P.M., Dex returned to the little office where I spent the majority of my day organizing all of his files to my liking and silently panicking about the overwhelming task of being someone’s assistant.

“That’s it for the day, kid.”

I looked up surprised, checking the time on the computer, and noticing I still had 45 minutes before the next bus arrived at the nearest stop.

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, I still have a little bit more to do here so I’ll probably be a little while.” I hoped the admission would dismiss him. “I will make sure to lock up before I leave.”