Painting the Sky [1]

Vaska led Ingrid through a series of narrow hallways inside the airship, mostly naked steel but some painted bright turquoise. There were oval bulkheads spaced out that required a bit of a hop to fit through and there were pipes running along the ceiling. The occasional porthole allowed light into the craft and this was the only light though there were dimmed lamps which might have been lit at night.

Vaska's room jutted out from the middle of the craft, glass windows sandwiched between two half-circles of steel and sparsely furnished. The wall which was pressed up against the airship was covered in its entirety from floor to ceiling with bookcases, each with every nook and cranny packed with haphazard stacks of old leather-bound books. Vaska must have run out of space because almost every other piece of furniture in the room had at least one random book placed on it.

Much of the space in the center had been devoted to tables piled high with engineering diagrams. There was an empty wooden easel not far from the bed. Dozens of paintings were stacked in the corners and leaning against the glass windows, most of them landscapes but there were also a few which depicted nude women.

Ingrid began to explore the room and she quickly discovered a particular painting hiding on the far side of Vaska's bed. It was an outright pornographic painting of Vaska making love to another woman who could have been Ingrid. She had the same red hair and blue eyes and gold branding on her pale skin.

Ingrid blushed.

"You're not supposed to see that one!" Vaska protested. She took the thing away and hid it under the bed. Clearly embarrassed she quickly changed the subject. "That sunset is pretty. I need to paint the sky!"

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The sky outside was a soft pink color and there were some thin purple clouds on the horizon. Ingrid and Vaska walked up to the windows together and stood side-by-side watching the sun slowly sink toward the ocean.

They didn't watch very long before Vaska began gathering her painting supplies. A palette and some tubes of oil paint and some brushes with old paint dried on the wooden handles. She put a blank canvas on the easel and started fussing over the paints. Then she pointed to the apex of the windows and she said, "Stand there Ingrid."

"Why?"

"I'm going to paint you!"

"How long is that going to take?"

"Just do it. I'll paint the sky first while it looks pretty. I'll leave the part of the canvas where you are standing empty so I can fill it in later."

Ingrid stood there awkwardly while the woman frantically painted. After a little while she nodded in satisfaction and then she showed the result of her work. Just one corner of the canvas was painted like that lovely rose-colored sky, a wedge-shaped splash of color ending in a curved border with the blank canvas which might have resembled the edge of Ingrid's hair.

"Um…" Vaska said. She was blushing.

"What is it?"

"Will you pose naked?" Vaska asked.

Ingrid blushed. "Only if you paint me naked."

"Sure!" Vaska said. Then she started taking off her clothes.

By the time they were both naked they had forgotten about the painting and the sunset. Soon they were pulled down as if by gravity into the inviting comforters atop the bed and there, blushing furiously, they recreated that erotic scene from the oil painting hidden under the bed.