The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [16]
“I’m not comfortable at all. Is that okay?”
Max smiled, eyes crinkling. “Oh, yes, be as uncomfortable as you like. How silly of me. Why don’t you just come and stand for me, like you are now.” He beckoned her with a come-hither finger.
She nodded again and approached, stopping a few paces from the table and clasping her hands in front of her navel, as if waiting at a teacher’s behest.
“Turn around,” Max said with a twirling gesture.
Fallon shuffled in place and focused her attention out over the green hills to the sea. She wondered if she was doomed to still be naked when the postman eventually dropped off the mail at this remarkably window-laden residence.
Max addressed her back. “I am glad you’ve decided to cooperate.”
“It’s worth it,” she said evenly. “It’s worth the discomfort. If that poor girl is brave enough to do it with everything she’s been through, I’ve got no excuse.”
“Well, that’s certainly an improvement.”
Fallon glanced at him over her shoulder. “Did you know she’s like half in love with you?”
“I did not know such a thing,” he said, sounding disinterested.
“Well, she is. And she’s thinking about not going to college so she can stay here.”
“That is a very stupid thing to do.”
Fallon spun back around, putting her fists to her hips but feeling silly doing so with her clothes off. “You have to say something to her, when she comes by here, next. You have to tell her to go. Don’t just offer her a ticket home. You need to scare her off.”
“How is that my job?” Max scraped dried clay off the table with a wooden blade.
Fallon’s blood came to a rolling boil. “It’s not your job. But it’s what a decent person would do, if they knew they could keep someone from making a big mistake.”
He met her stare. “Is it also my job to tell you not to be here, to not compromise whatever it is you clearly are? Why does the onus fall on me to tell people the mistakes they’re making?”
“It’s different with her. You asked her to come here, and she’s enamored of you, though God knows why,” Fallon added acidly. “She’s seventeen. She needs you to scare her off. You’re the only person who’s got the influence to change her mind.”
Max sighed and thrust his hand out impatiently. “Fine. Give me your phone.”
Fallon was taken aback by his sudden surrender. She suspected he was more annoyed by her argument than morally swayed but she grabbed her cell from her bag and handed it over. Max rifled on a shelf for a scrap of paper and went outside. Fallon crossed her arms carefully over her breasts and stared out the back windows for a couple of minutes, feeling ridiculous.
Max came back in with a furrowed brow and handed Fallon her now-dusty phone.
“What did she say?”
“She is not happy. She called you a very nasty name.”
Fallon’s jaw dropped. “Me?”
“Oh, yes. Seventeen-year-old girls are a mystery to me, but I suspect you are the other woman, as they say.”
She rolled her eyes. “God, you try and do the right thing…”
“There is no reasoning with teenagers,” Max said, smug. “You see why I mind my own business?”
“Well, is she going, then?”
“Yes, I believe so. She said she would come by later for the last of the money I owe her.”
“Good. That’s what matters.”
“Let’s do some work now, yes?”
“Yes, let’s,” she shot back. She put the phone away and took her place before him.
“Turn around again, please. Thank you.” Max’s voice took on the far-off quality of a distracted man. Fallon felt his eyes on her skin, her back, her butt. She listened to the rhythmic sound of the clay being turned, of tools being selected and put away. The sun warmed her front, her breasts and belly and legs, the languid eddies of stone particles in the streaming light calming her. She surrendered her awareness to their dance. Quite without meaning to, Fallon relaxed.
“You have extraordinary proportions,” Max announced a few minutes later.
Fallon fell back down to earth with a psychic thump. She glanced at her hips and thighs, whose voluptuousness had no business associating with her far tinier top half. “Yeah, I know. My body’s a mess.”
She heard the slap of