Jess had stopped looking in mirrors sometime in her thirties. It wasn't dramatic — no shattered glass, no tearful vow. Once gray Tuesday, she'd just noticed, catching her reflection in the hallway mirror before she could look away in time, that same quick private wince she'd trained herself to feel and swallow in the same breath — and decided that avoiding mirrors was simply how things would be now. To not see her short, unflattering figure, the breasts that looked deflated, nipples pointing downward, the unruly, untrimmed pubic hair and, of course, the unsightly mole on her chin was her only means of avoiding what she’d heard in whispers her whole life.  She was, simply put, unattractive.

When Denise reached out, she jumped at the chance to meet with her over a few drinks.

They'd known each other since college, drifted the way friends do, then reconnected over drinks that Jess almost canceled twice. She almost didn't recognize her. Denise had always been uneasy on the eyes. She was kind and funny but easily overlooked — but she walked into the café that afternoon with a straight-backed ease that seemed to precede her by several feet. Her skin had a warmth to it Jess couldn't place. Her laugh, when it came, was unguarded in a way Jess didn't remember it ever being.

"You look incredible," Jess said, and meant it as more of a question than a compliment.

Denise waved it off, though she was clearly pleased. "It's Blake," she said. "I've been sitting for him. A painter." She said it the way people mention therapy, or a good vitamin — offhand, but with an undertone that invited more questions.

"Sitting for him how?"

"Nude, mostly." Denise laughed at Jess's expression. "It's not like that. He's not — it's not a seduction thing. He just looks at you. Really looks. I didn't know what that felt like until he did it." She turned her coffee cup a slow half-circle on the saucer. "I stopped hating my body somewhere around the fourth sitting. I don't know how else to explain it."

Jess laughed, uncertain, the way you laugh at something you don't quite believe but want to. "That sounds like a cult."

"It sounds like one, I know. It isn't." Denise studied her for a moment, the way old friends do when they're deciding whether to say the true thing. "You should go. I mean it. Not because you need fixing — God, don't look at me like that, that's not what I mean. Just — you'd understand if you went."

Jess didn't call the number Denise pressed into her hand for three weeks. But she kept it in her coat pocket, and some nights her thumb would find the edge of the paper the way a tongue finds a loose tooth — worrying at the possibility of it, unable to leave it alone.

Blake's studio smelled of linseed oil and old coffee when she finally climbed the stairs. He was younger than she'd expected, maybe fifty, with paint permanently ground into the creases of his knuckles.

"Denise sent you," he said. Not a question.

"She said you'd just look at me."

"I will." He gestured to a stool by the window. "Just sit. However is comfortable."

She undressed with her back to him, out of habit, and sat with her arms crossed over her stomach, her shoulders curled forward like a question mark.

"You can uncross your arms," he said, not looking up from where he was mixing color. "I'm not painting your arms."

"What are you painting, then?"

"I don't know yet. That's the interesting part."

He worked for three hours that first day and showed her nothing. She came back the next week because he'd been kind and friendly and hadn't once made her feel like an object under glass.

The sessions became a rhythm. He talked while he worked — about light, about the particular blue that gathered in the hollow of a collarbone at four in the afternoon, about how age settled into a face the way sediment settles into a riverbed. And as he talked, she felt the strange thing Denise must have meant: a warmth tracing where the brush moved, as if the paint were finding her before it dried.

It started with an overall tingling around her body.  He’d rinse a brush, dip it into some paint, and as soon as he started moving the bristles over the canvas, she felt it.  Along her neck and shoulders, like fingers slowly grazing her skin.  She squirmed slightly as he painted the curves of her breasts, like they were being cupped, fondled.  He rinsed the brush and dipped into another color and she was suddenly hit with the sensation of a tongue tracing slow, careful circles around her nipple.  Her nipple hardened, aching for more as he circled around it, deepening the color on the canvas.  As he moved to the other breast, she realized it was more than just an odd sensation.  She was getting turned on.  She was wet.

Jess shifted slightly in her seat when she felt the first tingles along her inner thigh.  Her legs parted slightly, as if he was between them, dragging his fingers up and down her skin, parting them so he could bring his mouth closer.  A moan escaped her lips as her legs parted. 

As Blake painted her thighs, she began rocking slowly, willing the brush higher.  She was now soaked, and she found her hand moving to her breast, teasing her nipple as he painted. She stopped, flushed with arousal and embarrassment, and whispered an apology.

“It’s ok, Jess.  I can paint you while you touch yourself.”  Blake smiled at her and pressed the brush harder over the canvas.

Hearing another moan, Blake stopped and asked, “Would you like to cum for me while I paint?”

“Yes, please.” Jess could not believe this was happening.

“Please do.” And with that, Blake turned his face back to the canvas.

Jess parted her legs, slipped her hand down, over her now matted pubic hair, and as her fingers found her swollen, aching clit, she felt that brush moving along her lips.  Blake’s strokes matched her fingers.  As she moved faster, so did the brush.  If she circled her fingers over her swollen nub, she felt the brush circling with her.  

Jess slid her fingers lower, shifted her hips forward, and plunged two fingers into her drenched hole.  The sound of her wetness was muffled by the moans flowing freely from her mouth. She pushed her fingers deeper as she picked up the pace.  Blake’s hand was flying over the canvas, matching the speed of her fingers. 

A puddle of wetness between her legs, her fingers wiggling deep inside her, she looked up at Blake and announced that she was going to cum.

“Not yet,” was all he said.

“Please,” she begged.

“I almost have what I need.  Do not stop, do not cum until I tell you.  You will do this for me or the painting will be ruined.”  This order from Blake made her pussy throb even more.  She wasn’t sure she could hold out.

Blake leaned into the canvas and grabbed another brush.  He brought the bristles to the canvas and began painting again.  Faster brush strokes, more pressure on the canvas meant an increase in the pleasure between her legs.  Jess slipped a third finger inside, fucking her sopping hole in short, hard thrusts. “Ppplease..I I I can’t..”  She stuttered.

“You will cum soon, I promise,” Blake offered, without looking at her.

She held her fingers in check, slowed her motion until she heard, “I see it now.  You can cum”

That was all she needed.  She thrust her fingers as deep as she could, wiggling the tips against the inside wall of her pussy.  She pressed her palm down over her clit and instantly felt her pussy tighten around her fingers.

The intensity of the orgasm was like she’d never felt.  From her mouth came a warbling, almost growl-like moan.  She felt a stream of fluid slide down over her fingers, pooling between her legs.

“I have everything I need.  I can finish the painting without you. Blake motioned his head to the anteroom where her clothes awaited her. 

Jess stood, feeling the last remnants of her orgasm sliding down her thighs.  As she walked slowly toward her clothes, she already felt better about herself.  This man had made her feel special, beautiful and appealing.  She couldn’t wait to see the finished produce.  She knew she’d be coming back, again and again, as Denise does.

She let herself hope, in the weeks that followed, for the thing Denise had gotten. She caught herself imagining the reveal — some version of herself made luminous, forgiven, remade the way Denise had been remade.

Six weeks later, she received a text.  “Come to my studio” was all it said.

She walked in, practically floating on air.  Sitting in the middle of the room was an easel, the painting covered, waiting for her before being revealed.

Blake walked over to the canvas and in one, quick motion, yanked the cover off the painting.

There was a kind of forgiveness in it. He had painted her as she might have been, or as she was on her best evening, in the right light, seen by someone who loved her: the weight there but softened, settled into something closer to warmth than heaviness; the small mole at her chin barely a shadow, more suggestion than fact. Something in the eyes he'd rendered — that same flat, unremarkable blue — had been given a light to catch, so that they seemed to hold amusement, or patience, or some private, sturdy contentment. Wit, maybe. Depth, certainly. He had painted a woman who was, simply, better than she was, and he had not tried to hide that he'd done it, and he had not tried to pretend he'd found it instead of made it.

"That's it," Blake said, almost gently. "That's what I saw."

She sat very still for a long time, the way you sit after a piece of unexpected good news, before you're sure you're allowed to believe it.

"Denise said you find something," she said finally. "She said you look until you find it."

"I look until I find what's worth keeping." He began cleaning a brush, not meeting her eyes. "There's always something worth keeping."

She didn't cry, though she came close, later, on the train.

The painting, signed B.E. Holder, stayed in his studio, unsold, unshown — the kind of kind work that has no market and no honesty in it either, just mercy, hung on a wall for no one.