The Tutor
By K D Grace
We have five senses. We use them all without thinking, but as a
writer, I’ve always been intrigued by what it would be like to live without one
– one that we use most often. If you’ve read The Initiation of Ms. Holly, then
you know the story hinges on not being able to see the face of a lover. In To
Rome with Lust, I concentrated on bringing the sense of smell to the forefront
to the point of it being nearly a curse.
In The Tutor, I take away the one sense that we never lose, the
one we most rely on in our everyday life. I take away the sense of touch.
Sculptor, Lex Valentine is severely haphephobic -- not being able to touch
anyone else or allow himself to be touched. Within that context, I wanted to
explore intimacy and how it would develop – if it even could develop – without
the aid of human contact.
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Synopsis
Struggling writer, Kelly Blake has a
secret life as a sex tutor. Celebrated sculptor and recluse, Alexander ‘Lex’
Valentine, can’t stand to be touched. When he seeks out Kelly’s advice
incognito, the results are too hot to handle. When Kelly terminates their
sessions due to what she considers her unprofessional behavior, Lex takes a
huge risk, revealing his identity to her at a gala exhibition, his first ever
public appearance. When Kelly helps the severely haphephobic Lex escape the
grope of reporters and paparazzi, rumors fly that the two are engaged, rumors
encouraged by well-meaning friends and colleagues.
The press feeding frenzy forces
Kelly into hiding at Lex’s mansion where he convinces her to be his private
tutor just until the press loses interest, and she can go back home. They
discover quickly that touch is not essential for sizzling, pulse-pounding
intimacy. But intimacy must survive the secrets uncovered as their sessions
become more and more personal.
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Excerpt
She nabbed a cookie and came to
stand behind him while he drew, but when his efforts on the curve of her cheek
slowed and then stopped, she stepped back. “I’m sorry, am I making you
uncomfortable?” she managed around a mouthful of cookie.
He shook his head. “It’s not that.
It’s just that, well as lovely as you looked, in that dress tonight, stunning
actually, it wasn’t the real you. It was all show for the event and for this
nebulous Alexander Valentine you were expecting to meet.” He waved the piece of
charcoal in the air dismissively. “Black tie affairs are no less masked ball
just because you can see peoples’ faces.”
“True,” she said, plopping down in
the chair. “My feet may never forgive me for those damn shoes.”
“You’re real now.” He chuckled
softly and looked down at the charcoal gripped delicately in his fingers.
“Everyone’s a bit more real in the darkest hours of the night. And a lot more
vulnerable.” He shuddered.
“Nightmares, you mean?”
He nodded, but then made a dismissive
grunt. “I don’t sleep much.”
“Dreams about what happened at the
gallery?” She asked, slumping in the chair so that her feet hung over one arm
and her shoulder rested low on the other.
“Oh no,” He offered a flirty smile
that surprised her. “If I’d been dreaming about that, the dreams would have
been far from nightmares.”
She felt his words like a caress,
and a tingle ran down her body as though her skin were bathed in the expensive
Champagne from the gallery’s party. “Then I’m sorry that you weren’t dreaming
about the gallery.”
“Me too,” he said, and then he
flipped the sketchpad to a blank page. “Is it all right if I sketch you? Like
you are now, I mean.”
She nodded to the collection of
female nudes tacked to a corkboard along one wall. “As long as I don’t have to
take my clothes off.”
This time his smile was positively
wicked. “If you take off your clothes, woman, I won’t be able to concentrate on
sketching at all, and I’m not really in the mood to discuss my self abuse
problems right at the moment.”
She laughed and shook her hair back
over her shoulders. “Self abuse, oh pa-lease.” She shifted again to get more
comfortable and the hoodie slipped down off her shoulder leaving her neck and
clavicle exposed along with the swell of one braless breast.
“Leave it,” he said, when she
started to zip the offending garment a little higher. “I want to sketch your
erogenous zones.” And fuck if it didn’t feel like he had just touched her there
along the nape of her neck and traced a calloused finger over the her collar
bone and down onto the top of her breast.” He chuckled knowingly at the trail
of raising goose flesh along the path she had just imagined his hand following.
“Did you feel that? My sketching you there?”
“You have eyes,” came her breathless
reply. Then she caught a little breath and shivered. “Jesus, how do you do
that?”
“There’s a connection between what I
see and what I sketch. It’s a brain thing. That’s why people who are paralyzed
from the neck down can still draw even without the use of their hands. But I
think there’s a much bigger connection than simply exceptional hand-eye
coordination. I think it’s the ability to translate into physical form what we
perceive and how it affects us. I’ve read your books, Kelly. You do the same
thing, only your vision is all internal, but it’s no less magic when you elicit
the feeling you want in your reader.”
She shivered again and her nipples
hardened. “I’ve never made a reader feel this.”
“Oh, I imagine you have,” he said.
The look on his face was something beyond concentration, something very much
like Kelly had seen in the eyes of lovers in good romantic films when they made
love.
“It’s a substitute for touch,” she
managed in a breathless gasp.
“Of course it’s a substitute for
touch,” he said. “It’s the connection to the flesh that I’m no longer capable
of having in the real world. It’s tactile voyeurism. It’s everything I can’t
experience, but dream about.” He huffed out a little breath. “When I’m not
having nightmares, that is.”
“Jesus, That’s … that’s uncanny.”
She was suddenly struggling not to squirm in the chair. “Do you do this with
all your models?”
“God no! Of course not. I don’t know
them. They don’t know me. I …” He stopped sketching for a second and looked
around the room as though searching for the right words, and Kelly felt the
disconnect as surely as if he’d been caressing her breast and then stopped. “I
have no intimacy with them. When I sketch models for a given commission for
which I have a deadline, I sketch them … I don’t know … once removed. It’s not
personal. It’s a job. They do theirs, and I do mine, and it’s as if we’re all
working with a barrier between us. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I
don’t feel that with you?” He began to sketch again and she leaned back and
closed her eyes as the Champagne bubble feeling returned in force. She might
have moaned. Just a little. And he might have done the same in return.
“You know what you said about
self-abuse,” she finally managed, struggling to breathe.
He only grunted in reply, his hand
moving at speed over the sketchpad, which he didn’t look at. His eyes remained
locked on her.
“Well, what happened at the
apartment when we were together …”
“There’s a connection, Kelly. That’s
all I know. I know you aren’t the kind to take advantage. I knew that from what
Dillon’s nephew said. You gave me the first true intimacy I’ve had since the
accident. Does that sound like taking advantage to you?” He laid the charcoal
down on the easel and began to stroke the sketch with his ring finger, blending
and shading and she practically came out of the chair, the response of his
touch was so strong. Her nearness to orgasm was startling and a little bit
frightening.
“Are you fucking feeling this?” she
gasped. “How can this be? How can I feel what you’re doing on that sketchpad?”
“Of course I’m feeling it. How could
I look at you, at your response and not?”
“Jesus, Lex. Jesus!” His eyes were
on her but his finger still stroked the paper on the easel. “If you don’t
stop.”
“Do you want me to stop?” His voice
cracked with the last word. From where she sat, she couldn’t tell if he had a
hard-on, and though his voice was as tight and breathless as her own, he
clearly wasn’t touching himself. One hand gripped the edge of the sketch pad
and the other made strokes and circles on the paper, blending, shading, evening
out the tone. She knew that, of course she knew that, so why the hell did it
feel like what he was doing to a simple charcoal drawing, he was doing to her
body?
“Of course I don’t want you to
stop,” she hissed, shifting against the phantom sensation of what she imagined
his fingers were doing to the sketch of her. “Oh … Oh God! I definitely don’t
want you to stop!”
The room dissolved in the sound of
heavy breathing and moans and grunts --some hers, some his, all blended
together. In the beginning, she might have been posing on the chair, but the
situation had devolved to the point that she could not have held still if her
life depended on it, and there was no other word for what she was now doing in
the chair but writhing.
From behind the easel, Lex stood and
gave the stool a hard shove, knocking it over with loud kathunk on the floor
that resulted in a hissed curse. He mantled the sketch of her like a hawk over
its prey. When she could focus through the growing fog of arousal, she saw that
he once again sketched with the charcoal, his hand moving with a motion not
unlike how she would want him to stroke her right now, with her so close. How
she had fantasized about him stroking her since that night in the apartment,
even though she tried not to. And she couldn’t keep from wondering if he were
stroking the drawing there, right where she needed it. His other hand still
rendered and smoothed and shaded and moved across her body, until the only
thought she could hold in her head was the thought of his hands Don
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