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Arthur deserved a break.
That was the ultimatum he’d come to earlier that week after waking up with his head buried in the sea of papers on his desk, drool seeping onto the marked “sign here” space of one of them. His line of work never came with easy days - the fact becoming more evident as of late. This was particularly upsetting starting from the moment he’d obtained more…commitments in his life outside of work.
Namely, going out with the company CEO’s hunk of a son.
Though “hunk” was a rather crude way to put it, Arthur thought that the word suited his boyfriend quite well - blunt, comical, and stereotypically American. Of course whittling Alfred down to those three descriptions didn’t do the dashing young man any justice, but Arthur had his fun watching Alfred whine whenever he’d say something along those lines in public.
Which he hasn’t been able to do much recently, thanks to work.
But, thanks to the wonders of paid vacation days, Arthur’s managed to remedy that situation. At least for a couple of days.
He decided to surprise his lover by waiting for him outside his last class of the day. Even though they’ve only been together for a relatively short amount of time, the fact that their schedules constantly dance around each other have lead them to be very well acquainted with each of them. Arthur knew the exact time his class ended and started, along with which building of the campus it was in.
He just didn’t know what it was.
Which brings him to his current dilemma, wandering through the lavish halls of the building with nothing to do but wait for the end of class (which is a while from now, since locating this place took surprisingly shorter than he’d originally planned) and hope to catch Alfred within the sea of students.
Arthur sighs for the umpteenth time, rounding another corner to another flight of stairs and hoping some heavenly sign will point him in Alfred’s direction so that he won’t have to walk around for another half an hour—
“Watch out!”
—when he bumps straight into one of the students, losing his footing and making him stumble backwards towards the stairwell.
Right as he feels his center of gravity begin to tilt and send him tumbling down, a - rather strong - hand snatches his wrist and steadies him with a rough yank forward. Arthur’s frozen like that for a moment, processing what’d just occurred in the span of the last three seconds.
“I-I sincerely apologize for not looking where I was stepping,” he begins, attempting to get his wrist out of the surprisingly resilient grip. “Thank you f—“
“You’re perfect!”
Arthur doesn’t get a blink of time to contemplate the implications of such a statement before he’s pulled forward, being lead through the halls by a brunette girl with a floral hair decoration he (quite literally) bumped into just seconds ago.
“H-Hold on, I’m not injured there’s no need t—“
Cutting him off again (something that’s becoming quite a common occurrence with this student), they round a corner down a hall Arthur’s probably been down twice already. “Our sketch model just quit on us, if you wanna repay me for saving your behind back there then you have to be our sub!”
Now completely confused, Arthur whips his wrist out of the young woman’s grip, slightly panting from the immediate sprint-worthy pace she’d assumed before. “While I’m grateful for what you did back there, I’m actually looking for someo—“
“We’ll pay you.”
Now that gets his attention. He isn’t called “The Salaryman” for nothing, after all.
“How much?”
She smirks. “Normally we go for twenty-five an hour, but we can easily double that since it’s on such short notice.”
Promptly ignoring the fact that he’s being paid to stand still in front of an art class of god knows how many for fifty dollars an hour, he quirks an eyebrow in interest.
“Make it sixty and I’ll do it.”
“Deal.”
He’ll just have to call Alfred when he gets out - they’ll be having a quite expensive dinner this evening.
Quite satisfied with the way things have turned out, the brunette continues down the hall at a more leisurely pace, Arthur trailing close behind. “I’m Elizabeta, by the way, in case you ever feel like making this a more frequent thing.”
Arthur scoffs. “My name’s Arthur, and don’t count on it. This is just in return for saving me from falling down a flight of stairs.” Which was partially her fault, considering how sprinting down the halls isn’t exactly a very safe thing to do in the first place.
“That and a hundred-or-so dollars,” she adds.
“That too.”
With that, she ducks into an ajar door, holding it open for Arthur to follow. “No worries, everyone! Lovino’s still out, but I just got this guy to fill in for him!” A couple of relieved comments float back to her in incoherent unison before Arthur steps into the room. “Everyone just needs to double their contribution so he can get paid.”
A series of whines and grunts echo back to her, doing nothing to waver her beaming grin.
Meanwhile, Arthur takes a good survey of the class. It’s not a large one, per say - just around a dozen-or-so people dressed in smudged aprons and standing in front of easels with their back turned to him. The class is predominantly female, with the exception of three or four males all located in the far righ—
“Arthur!?”
At first, he doesn’t realizes that someone’s actually calling out to him.
Then, he realizes just whose voice that was.
“Alfred?”
There are a few seconds of silence before the class seems to burst into life, as if a scandal had just taken place before them.
“So that’s Arthur?”
“He’s shorter than I imagined.”
“Damn, Alfie, you got a good one!”
The last comment in particular made Arthur’s eyebrow twitch - ‘Alfie’?
Clapping loudly to get everyone’s attention, but for some reason looking very pleased with the current turn of events, Elizabeta silences the class and turns to grab a rather soft looking rag of fabric from a nearby table. She hands it to Arthur, gesturing towards a small corner of the room that’s been closed off by a thick, blue curtain.
“Take off your clothes over there.” She points to the cloth. “Use that to cover up your crotch - we’ll give you all the poses anyway, so all you have to do is stay still.” She turns away from Arthur and towards the remainder of the class. “All right everyone, we start in five minutes! Everyone get ready with their pose requests!”
Elizabeta leaves Arthur red and dumbfounded. He exchanges a glance with Alfred from across the room, who’s also put on a few of his own shades of the color.
Had he just agreed to be a…nude model?
Arthur isn’t one to go back on his word, yet despite his conviction (Elizabeta barred the door) to pull through with the deal, he still didn't know how these things worked.
However, the members of the class were more than helpful.
Perhaps a bit too helpful.
“And you’ll keep your hips like this,” a girl with short, blonde hair says as she shifts Arthur’s hips forward with one hand on his hipbone and the other steadying him on the small of his back, “and your cloth will go here.” She whips the cloth out of its original position, obliterating Arthur's dignity for the half-second he was fully exposed before she settled it back in a new position.
“A very interesting position, Bella,” he hears Elizabeta comment from somewhere in the room, his head position making a good three quarters of the students unseeable. This is the seventh pose out of the thirteen he has to do.
The entire thing was quite systematic. Two minutes to set up the pose, ten minutes to sketch, and a five-minute break with every five poses. Each student got a single pose request, and by the end of the day that added up to a good thirteen poses, one hundred and fifty six minutes of posing, and a nice 150 dollars for Arthur by the end of it (they spared him some pity and threw in a couple of extra bucks).
“What in the wo—is that a tattoo?”
Amidst a silence filled with only the sound of thick pencils scratching against paper, the room erupted into a tidal wave of gasps and mixed exclamations.
“Holy shit it is!”
“He didn’t seem like the type.”
“Did you know about this, Al?”
Arthur suppresses his smirk at the last comment. Oh he knows. He knows it very, very well in fact.
For them, the sex came before the actual dates. Arthur’s still thankful for that extra shot of whisky he’d downed that one night at the bar. Alfred just become of legal drinking age at that time - and although practically everything remotely attractive becomes game for Arthur by his fifth shot, Alfred made sure he remembered that particular fling.
Alfred was always the somewhat possessive type.
“Alfred, that's the fifth paper you've ripped through today! You're practically jabbing instead of drawing!”
And today, Arthur found it more amusing than anything.
Thanks to Bella’s accidental discovery, almost all of the succeeding poses exploited the tattoo on his upper leg. Although it was always partially hidden by the cloth in order to preserve the remainder of Arthur’s dignity, the lasting effect was still no less than the time they discovered it.
Judging by the class’ reactions (and Alfred's resulting ones), that is.
Then came the final pose - Alfred’s pose.
And it was, surprisingly but in a somewhat expected way, anticlimactic.
With no physical contact whatsoever, Alfred told Arthur to simply stand up, face the class, and hold the cloth straight over his front like a sign. The class was unimpressed to say the least. However, Alfred sketched in peace that time, leaving his peers to exchange giggles and remarks about how he was “totally jealous” and pulling out one of the most generic poses in the book because of that.
Eventually, the effect wore off any soon the extended class was over and people began putting away their sketches and leaving their easels empty and standing in place. Arthur, relieved that it was over and gladly accepting the fresh bills and bottle of water he was handed straight after the final pose, wrapped the cloth around his waist and walked over to the changing area.
“Alfred, since you will be staying back to leave with Arthur, will you mind putting the easels back?” asks a somewhat quiet-sounding boy from across the room, voice heavily accented.
“No prob, Kiku - tell Yao I said hi!”
And with that, they're left alone.
“I never knew you took up art,” Arthur comments, slipping his underwear back on as Alfred piles the folded easels a little ways away. “I thought you were the business type - the future tycoon who waits for the day he inherits the family company with baited breath.”
Alfred almost laughs at that, the noise instead coming out as an almost pitying chuckle. “Nah, that’s my dad’s delusional jargon getting to you.” He folds up another easel, walking it across the room. “Besides, this is just a minor anyway - drawing’s pretty fun, you know?”
“It was rather fun modeling as well,” Arthur says breezily, not bothering to slip anything else on at the moment. “Your class certainly seemed to enjoy it.”
Arthur wouldn’t have noticed that jolt if it wasn’t for the way the easel Alfred was folding up clattered, but he smirked either way.
“What’s wrong, Alfie?” The nickname is a tease in the form of a lilted question and Alfred knows it. “Didn’t you enjoy drawing me today?”
Without a second to spare, Alfred yanks them together with an arm around Arthur’s waist. He pulls Arthur into a rough kiss, stopping with a groan as he turns to biting Arthur’s lower lip and sliding his hands over the Englishman’s brief-clad behind.
“You didn’t see the way they were looking at you,” he whispers hoarsely, shifting one of his hands to the back of Arthur’s head, “sizing you up like fucking mongrels.”
The comparison is too clouded, too out of line, but Arthur enjoys his boyfriend’s distress all the same. “But isn’t sharing supposed to be a good thing?”
Alfred growls. “I think I made this clear that night at the bar,” he hisses out before smashing their lips together for a few electrifying seconds before he pulls away. “I don’t like sharing.” And he kisses him again, longer this time.
He feels Arthur’s lips smirk against his, the bastard.