Ocean Of Need

12 The Doll In The Box

April 29th

You seem distracted today. Up and down from your seat at the easel. Huffing and sighing. I keep my focus on my open notebook. Continue crafting my words. The way I have become an expert at doing, since I met you.

I've stopped writing about running. Stopped mimicking my peers. According to my audience, my writing is now, fresh, sexy, and hot as fuck.

It's because of you. And because it's real. We both know that.

Your work too, is getting more recognition. Your paintings line the walls of our room. Over the last two weeks you've started to bring buyers here. Sometimes you've packed up your paintings into your pick-up, and taken them to the buyers.

I hate the days when the walls are empty and you're not here. Being left alone, without the images of me, reflecting back the parts of me I never knew existed.

I am growing to know those parts. If not yet to understand. How is it that you have been able to slide into the corners of my mind and make them shine?

You've moved around the furniture of ideas that once were my world. You've helped me escape the chains of the ideas that bound me to the past. To society's idea of what a woman should be.

I never held much truck for those ideas, but somehow they stuck anyway. Waking me in the early morning hours. The idea of a time line of a woman's life that I never understood, but still lurked in the back of my mind. The hands of my body clock ticking down, making me question the worth of my life, as a woman who gives birth to poems, rather than babies.

And now I am untethered from that time line. From that shame of not conforming.

Not that we've discussed any of these things. It's the darker, more disruptive ideas of who we are, and how we pin our thoughts to the page or the canvas, that we take our time over.

It wasn't like this with Jameson. He's my Daddy, he values me, protects me, and I'm his partner in crime. But sometimes I felt like a doll in a box. A product to be put on display as a distraction for the deal makers. A hair-flicking, eye-lash-batting, object. An empty doll, to be filled with a man's idea of what a woman should be.

Me and Daddy laughed at those men. How shallow they were to assume I was an empty vessel for their ideas.

But as I sit here, crafting my poems, between staring at the ocean and the page and watching you paint, I would wonder if I could have been more than a distraction? Couldn't I have had a bigger role than an empty doll?

Your chair scrapes across the floor as you stand up from your seat suddenly, disrupting my thoughts again, you say, 'Amber, I have an idea. Do you have time to help?'

You're using that voice, the one that immediately has my attention, and I know it's not a question. This is not going to be a simple task. My heart thumps in my throat.

'Sure, what do you need?' Immediately I hear my own mistake.

You turn slowly to me as my heart drops from my throat into my pussy, and you say, 'Ask properly, Miss Amber.'

'Please Sir, may I know how you would like me to serve you?'