The Muse's Undoing

I want to ask him if it always has. If he knew from the first time we kissed that we have the ability to connect in a way I’ve never experienced with anyone else. Whether it’s just our chemistry or more. Admittedly, we haven’t come up for air long enough to find out, and I’m growing exponentially more attached to him with every touch and kiss and look he sends my way.

I feel him getting more possessive, too. The way his hands spread themselves on me, the grip of ownership, the questions that force me to stipulate I’m his.

“How is it different?” I press.

“You don’t feel it?”

I feel all of it. His want. His craving. His confusion. I even have a slight sense of his heart fighting the pull I have on it because it makes my own chest ache. Ours is not a subtle connection. It never has been. “Tell me what you feel,” I say.

“I want to be with you all the time. I want to live inside you. I want you surrounding me. And I want you to want me so much you can’t see straight.”

“I can’t see straight, Matty.”

He sighs. “And?”

“And you’re always welcome with me.”

“How can you say always?” he asks.

“Because it’s always been always.”

“Do you love me?” he asks.

“I said I do…come to bed.”

“Answer the question.”

“Do you want me to love you?”

His words come out in a rushed whisper. “I do.”

“I want you to love me, too.”

His lips touch mine softly. “You think we’ll ever be able to have a useful conversation with each other?”

I grin. “It’s hard when your erection is digging into my hip.”

“What would you rather I do with it?” he asks.

“Fuck me well enough to make me accidentally tell you how I really feel.”

“Get naked,” he says. “Now.” He shoves off the wall and gives us both room to strip off our clothes.

I hate the thought of limping down the hall naked, but I have a feeling he’ll help me forget about that soon. However, as I start toward the bedroom, he snatches me by the waist, lifts me from the floor and slants his mouth over mine in a deep kiss.

I wrap my legs around him, and he carries me to the bed. While our size difference is insignificant, and I’m the big brother here, the way he treats me like the vulnerable, traumatized mess of a human I truly am at my core, does things to me I don’t think I’ll ever recover from. No one I’ve ever met in my life would believe I’d want to be carried to a bed, but Matthew does. I also would have refused if he’d offered, and I think he knows that, too.

40

MATTHEW

For the first time in my life, waking up without someone next to me in bed doesn’t make me annoyed, or anxious, or sad. It makes me physically ill. I sink my face into the pillow where Fischer’s head was when I fucked him, and I smell what’s left of him there. I nearly choke on the scent, fighting back tears and my own gag reflex.

I don’t need a psychology degree to know this isn’t normal. To know that resenting his job because it takes him away from me isn’t healthy thinking. To understand that this is truly a different thing than what I’ve felt for any other lover in the past. He’s not only a muse, but he’s my muse. He’s foundational. He’s inside me and he drives me, and this has been true from the moment he reached for my hand in bed that first time. I’m irrevocably obsessed.

That night changed my life, changed me in so many ways—ways that I could have described in detail two months ago and ways I’m only just now discovering.

He ruined me. No one in the world—not Valentine or Elodie or any number of the muses I’ve used and debauched over the intervening years—could have ever replaced what I believed I lost when he returned to his job overseas—my soulmate.