Author's Note
This story was written for Literotica's Nude Day 2025 Contest.
I hope it invites you to look closer--not just at nudity, but at what it means to be seen. Truly seen. To be vulnerable. To be rendered not as an ideal, but in the raw truth of flesh, time, and memory.
A quiet piece. A slow burn. A meditation on the body as a vessel--for longing, for story, for the weight of what we carry and what we choose to share.
Thank you for reading.
--Sage Ashwood
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Humanity in Form
They told us to be objective. To render form, not feeling. To capture the way light bends around skin, not the way your chest tightens when someone holds your gaze a second too long.
The project was called Humanity in Form--a final thesis piece meant to explore the human body across age, gender, and experience. Three months. Seven models. Countless sketches. A gallery showing at the end if the panel deemed it worthy. I wanted it to be worthy. God, I needed it to be.
I told myself I chose the human form because it was timeless, but that wasn't true. I chose it because it scared me.
I was twenty-four, just finishing art school, buried under student debt, and more comfortable talking about shadow and tone than anything to do with real human intimacy. I'd never had a real relationship. I'd never seen someone undress in front of me without the flicker of a screen between us. I didn't know what it meant to be touched with purpose.
And yet here I was--asking strangers to step out of their clothes and let me see them, study them, sometimes for hours. I felt like a fraud, pretending I wasn't affected. Pretending my fingers didn't shake sometimes when the pose was too vulnerable, when a model's body carried more story than I was ready to receive.
They say the artist should be invisible. That the work should speak for itself. But I couldn't disappear behind my lines. Not when I was still trying to understand what it meant to see someone. Not when each sketch felt like I was pulling secrets from bodies I barely knew how to name.
I had models in their teens. In their thirties. A pregnant woman in her second trimester. A man with a prosthetic leg. All of them were generous with their bodies. Willing. Brave.
Most of all Jonas Vale drew my attention.
Fifty-three. Quiet. Not chiseled in the way younger men sometimes are, but in the way nature carves stone with wind and time. Scars on his shoulder, a burn along his ribs, the kind of body that told the truth whether you wanted it or not.
From the first session, something shifted. I wasn't just sketching him. I was telling a story of a life lived.
He stepped onto the platform without hesitation, shedding his shirt and jeans with a practiced ease that startled me. No self-conscious gestures. No need to ask where to stand. He settled into a seated pose, one leg bent, arms resting casually on his knee. Like it was his space, not mine.
"You okay over there?" he asked after a beat, his voice low, dry, not unkind.
I blinked. Realized I'd been staring longer than I meant to, charcoal still idle in my hand. "Yes. Sorry. Just--finding the line."
A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Artists always say that when they're deciding how much to look. Don't worry. I don't mind being seen."
I didn't know what to say to that.
He didn't move. Didn't gloat. Just held still as if he belonged to the light.
"You've done this a lot," I murmured, letting the charcoal finally touch paper.
"A few years now. Started after my divorce. Figured if I was going to start over, I might as well get comfortable in my own skin."
I didn't ask the obvious questions. I just nodded, tried to focus on the lines--how his torso curved with gravity, the way his abdominal muscles folded and flexed with the breath he tried to hold still. The scar on his ribs tugged the skin inward in a pale crescent, an old burn maybe, healed but never quiet. His thighs were thick with strength, dusted in dark hair, the kind of legs that looked like they'd carried weight, real weight, through fire or war or years of just not falling apart. His length--resting against his thigh, soft, natural--felt less like something lewd and more like another line on the map of him. A line my eyes returned to, again and again. It was impossible not to feel how aware he was of his body. Not arrogant, but seasoned. Well aged.
He looked at me sometimes. Not long, not intrusively. Just enough that I knew he was tracking my rhythm. Watching me draw him the way I watched him breathe.
"You've got a steady hand," he said after a while. "But your eyes flinch when you get to the hard parts."
"Do they?"
"You don't have to pretend with me," he added, voice soft now. "I've sat for enough artists to know the difference between technical curiosity and... real questions."
Unsure whether to apologize or deny it. Instead, I said nothing and dragged the charcoal slowly along the inside curve of his thigh. My hand didn't shake.
Jonas didn't move. I saw his breath, steady and assured.
We didn't speak again that session.
***
The next time he came in, the studio felt too small. The air too still. I'd rearranged the lights beforehand, hoping the shift would make things feel different. Professional again.
He walked in wearing a worn leather jacket and smelled like cold air and cedar--sharp and grounding. He watched me adjust the easel with a quiet amusement.
"New angle?" he asked.
I nodded, "I wanted to try a reclining pose. Something more vulnerable."
His brow lifted slightly. "For me or for you?"
I didn't answer Jonas gave a slow nod, then began undressing--shirt, belt, jeans--all peeled away with the same ease he always carried, like his body was just another tool, another language he spoke fluently. But today, something in the way he moved felt slower. Less mechanical. Less practiced. Like he wasn't just taking off clothes, but stepping into something else entirely.
He lay back onto the platform, one arm curled behind his head, the other resting loosely across his stomach. His legs fell open--not in invitation, but in comfort, unguarded. The low light caught the grooves of his torso, the shadows collecting in the hollows around his ribs, beneath the arch of his collarbone. His stomach was soft in places, firm in others, a landscape shaped by time. His thighs were strong, parted enough so that all of the lines of his body would draw eyes there.
His chest rose and fell slowly, like he was already half asleep.
But his eyes stayed open. On me.
I sat down. Picked up the charcoal. Tried to begin. The air felt thick. My skin felt too small. My gaze drifted over his form to his length, which lay soft against his thigh, but also to the way his scars tugged the skin in uneven patches. The faint burn on his ribs, an old wound with edges like torn paper. A jagged mark near his hip. The knotted ridge that traveled from his shoulder down his bicep like something half-healed, half-forgotten.
I wanted to ask about every one of them. Wanted to trace their shapes with my fingers, to feel where the skin gave way to memory.
The thought of touch bloomed in my chest before I could stop it.
What would it feel like to take him in my hands? Warm and heavy, just to know him with something other than sight?
The thought passed quickly--no more than a flicker--but it left heat in its wake.
He shifted slightly, the muscles in his stomach flexing as he breathed. Not a performance. Just a body, fully present.
"You're shaking again," he murmured, not unkind.
