Lucrezia Magazine

It was early summer, a couple of weeks or so past the solstice, and the sun was still high and strong in the cloudless sky. It was early afternoon, with the sun perhaps ten degrees or so past its zenith and shining almost straight down on the world. Leonard was soaking in his hot tub out in the atrium, sitting directly under the summer sun. Since he was living on a large tract of land out in the countryside, he liked to enjoy his stays in his tub without wearing anything.

He felt much more comfortable naked than in a constricting swim suit. It was a few days after his thirty-fifth birthday and he was still trying to get used to the fact that he was another year older again and still living by himself.

He was leisurely playing with himself and fantasizing about the perfect mate and companion he had created in his mind. She was the sexiest and most stunning creature he could imagine for himself. Her classically chiseled features were framed by beautiful long blond hair. Her breasts were round and firm with pronounced dark-red nipples surrounded by slightly lighter colored areolae. She had a graceful waist and sensuous hips and buttocks tapering down into slender, perfectly shaped legs.

In real life, he had never even seen a naked woman before. For some inscrutable reason, the various women he had been with over the years always insisted on having sex only at night and in the dark. As soon as they stepped into a bedroom, be it their own or, on occasions, his own, they invariably headed straight for the window and pulled down the blinds or shut the curtains. Then they closed the door and turned off the light. They undressed in the dark so that he couldn’t possibly see anything, climbed under the covers up to their necks, and stayed there all night. Some of them even kept their bras and panties on and he had to struggle with their last garments before he could even do anything. It was just a big hassle for him.

He couldn’t even see them naked in the morning. They always made sure they had a nightgown or a bathrobe waiting for them right next to and sometimes even on the bed to put on as soon as they slid out from under the ever-protective covers. Even the ones he happened to take to his house asked for a bathrobe before they even started to get undressed, draped it over a chair, and moved the chair next to the bed. He, on the other hand, would have been quite content to get up naked in the morning, even have breakfast before getting dressed, but he refused to be the one without any clothes. So he always had his housecoat ready as well and put it on as soon as he rolled out of bed.

Sex became primarily a matter of groping and touching in the dark under the covers and being careful not to touch the wrong thing at the wrong time, or the wrong thing period. He was quite a tactile person, and he certainly delighted in touching the naked bodies in bed with him, but he also had a strong visual side and he really would have loved to see what he was touching and playing with. As it was, he had to rely on his tactile sense and do everything with his hands and fingers. But since he wasn’t used to anything else in the first place, it didn’t take him long to get used to this under-covers-in-the-dark kind of sex and became quite proficient at doing what he wanted to do and simply made the best of everything.

He wished he had been a sculptor so he could have sculpted his vision of physical perfection and kept it in his house as a constant reminder of what an abstract woman could become in a fertile mind. He was sure she wouldn’t have wanted to be in the dark all the time.

Had he been a sculptor, he would have worked on his project for days on end, driven by his all-encompassing urge to create. He would have spent as little time as possible on meals and on sleep just so he would have enough time to sculpt his vision of perfection and create the masterpiece he had in mind. The sun would have crossed the sky day after cloudless day, shifting the shadows in his studio across the floor and across the walls. At a certain point in the afternoon, the sun being just about half-way between its zenith and the horizon, the sunlight would fall directly on the sculpture and illuminate it with its bright sheen, creating a whole new pattern of shadows and light on his work.

But he wasn’t a sculptor. His was a much more cerebral personality. He preferred to do things with his mind rather than with his hands. He wrote furiously at his computer when the muse struck him, sometimes through the whole night, sometimes all weekend long, sometimes for good portions of his holidays. He was currently on holiday and had all the best of intentions for making it a very creative and successful vacation. He was sure he would begin writing very soon and very furiously, but for now he just wanted to soak in his tub and enjoy the first few weeks of summer.

What he was writing didn’t make him any money, and he had never intended it as a source of income. It was his passion, and he didn’t want to spoil his enthusiasm for his creative endeavors with thoughts about income and balance sheets. He made a good living as an English teacher at a high school where he tried to teach his students to appreciate the fantasies of others who had put them down on paper and published them in the form of books. He often wondered just how much of his teaching had any effect on the young people in his classes, but there were always the exceptions. It was mostly the more mature girls and some of the more intelligent and acute boys who seemed to be able to relate to what he was trying to teach them. He figured that as long as he managed to plant some seeds in just a few of the young minds, he was doing his job and should be proud of himself.

When he was in a writing mode, he always made sure he wrote at least something every day just to keep himself in a routine. Except Saturdays. On Saturdays, he always went to the Olympic-size pool in the city to swim away the stresses and the tensions of the week, think about his writing instead of about lesson plans, and generally relax his body and his mind. He made sure he kept himself on the same routine throughout the summer holidays as he did through all the other holidays as well.