The artist turned away from me as his voice went to ice water. “Ah. Yeah. Well, I can’t have a person who’s uptight. I need a free spirit. So, if you’re uptight, that kind of person….” He shrugged.

My potential escape from the grayness and disappointment of every day was evaporating before my eyes. The last year, my senior year, I’d spent hours painstakingly applying to entry-level human service jobs and heard back from exactly zero. Enter Plan B: work like crazy over the summer and move to Boston in the fall with my friend Jamie to job-hunt in person. Except, the day we met up to look at apartments, we sat down to lunch and Jamie’s first words were, “Would you hate me if I backed out of this?”

He had a long-term plan, practicing emergency medicine. It didn’t make sense for him to work for a year and juggle med school applications while playing house in the city with me. My long-term plans at that point consisted of moving to the city, hitting the pavement and hoping for the best. Jamie and his family had another idea, and an offer for me – would I consider house-sitting in Vermont instead, in the home of a recently departed great-aunt? The house wouldn’t sell for six months, at least, and I’d live rent-free while figuring out what to do next. 

The house sold in six weeks, and it turned out the job market in southwest Vermont was not particularly in need of recent liberal arts grads. The only opportunity that sounded at all like where I wanted to be was Bridge School. And when it turned out that it wasn’t, the wanted ads in the skinny local paper were all for waitresses or truck drivers. “It doesn’t sound like anyone in your class is setting the world on fire, honey,” my mom would say when I made one of my rare calls home. “Except for Drew, he’s playing basketball in Europe.” 

My classmates may not be setting the world on fire, but they were persuing defined paths – law school, grad school and med school, mostly, with some Teach for America sprinkled in for good measure. Meanwhile, there I was, an incompetent child care worker who spent my days off haunting the bookstore and the local laundromat without having one real conversation with another human being. One time, I arranged to meet up with some friends who were still in school at a documentary showing taking place at the art museum. This was the era just before cell phones appeared in everyone’s pocket, so when they couldn’t make it at the last minute they called the front desk of the museum and asked the staff to tell me. 

I was sitting by myself at a circular table in a crowded room, with art and film types buzzing all around me, looking for their faces when a grandmotherly woman dotted up to me. “Are you the young woman who’s waiting for Chelsea and Hilary?” when I nodded, she crowed, “I knew it! They can’t make it tonight. I was wondering, how was I going to find you in this crowd of people? And then I thought, I know! I’ll look for a little college girl who’s all alone!” 

“I’m not uptight!” I declared to the artist, slamming my mug down next to a blank canvas. “Let’s do it!”

The artist turned back to me, his ice water vibes melting into sunshine. “Good! Good! I thought you were my kind of girl. Come right over here and you can get undressed.” He gestured to the sagging bed. “You can pose right up here.”

I kept all thinking at bay as I untied my boots and stripped down. No thinking about the lonely existence that awaited me on the outside of this shabby barn door, no thinking about what absolutely everyone I knew would say about this situation. No thinking about the artist, who hovered at the foot of the bed as I rose up on the mattress. “Beautiful, beautiful. Stand with your back to me,” he instructed, and not looking at him made not thinking all the easier. My perception shrunk down to myself balancing on a sagging four-poster bed. I heard rustling behind me, and vaguely thought that the artist must be assembling his supplies. 

“Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Rock your hips side to side. There you go now,” instructed the artist, and even as I obeyed him, realization began to creep back in. I didn’t hear any pen or brushstrokes, hadn’t heard an easel being set up. Slowly, I turned my head to the side, as if I had a cramp in my neck. The artist stood behind me on the floor with his pants down. 

I kept breathing. I kept rocking too, as I tried to figure out what the fuck to do next. Was he going to touch me? Sweet Jesus, did he have a weapon? I didn’t know. Meanwhile, no one knew where I was, here in this old barn on the side of a remote country road on a pitch black night. The door was on my left, and even if I ran for it, I’d have to grab my keys and sprint naked through the snow to reach the safety of my car. 

Had he locked the door? I tilted my head slowly the other way, my body keeping its rhythm of side-to-side even as my eyes scanned the doorknob. I couldn’t tell. Was it safer to take the chance and run, or take the chance and wait it out? Maybe he was a lonely liar. Maybe he was a serial killer. How would I know the moment to make a break for it? The calculations were raging in my once-sleepy brain, when the artist sighed, “Oh yeah. Now stick your fingers in your ass.”

My whole body screamed, “NO.” I plunked down on the bed, grabbed my clothes and started getting dressed, before realizing I needed to keep my ears pricked up for any sounds of the artist moving closer. He didn’t. Instead, he muttered, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I know my place.” 

I was pulling on my boots when he shuffled up beside me and deposited a stack of bills beside me on the mattress, muttering “I know my place,” again as he retreated. I considered not taking the cash. But the whole point of me doing this art model unexpectedly turned soft porn job was, after all, to earn money. Plus, I’d been drilled by my Grandma Ginny to pick up every coin I found on the sidewalk, and walking away from a stack of cash that I’d earned, however strangely, felt sacreligious. 

I jammed the money in my pocket and stalked out the door.

Wondering how we got here? Check out Part 1.

All photos from Pixabay. Feature image by Prawny, for sale image by Meria, ladies on phone by 7089643, and cash by PublicDomainPictures.