The Muse's Undoing

I hesitate to tell him this because how I feel is too toxic and corrosive to be love. Here in his bed, surrounded with his scent, there’s a moment where I need to take a deep breath to keep from letting the bile come up, and in the next moment, I’m scrambling from the bed, then hunching over the toilet when it inevitably does. I sink to the floor, my bare back against the cold, tile bathroom wall, my arm across my cramping stomach, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring my phone with me. I need to hear his voice. See his face. Something.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Yesterday was good. This morning was perfect.

I get that I’m a sensitive person—I always have been, but this is ridiculous. To think I recently went nearly three weeks without any meaningful contact with him. I can’t even remember how I did that. I’m thoroughly in love and probably something worse than that, too. I don’t remember anyone saying love would hurt like this. Maggie’s in love with Stuart, and she’s all smiles and laughs with him. Why the hell can’t I be like that with Fischer? Is there something wrong with me? With us? There has to be, right?

Normally, this time of day after an overnight shift, I would try to go back to sleep, but I feel like I’ve been shot up with adrenaline. I can’t stop thinking about him—how to be with him. How to arrange the other parts of my life around him.

I tend to get obsessed easily, but this is more. My sex drive is off the charts. But my heart is a hot fucking mess. What any of this means is a mystery to me, and where it goes from here is anyone’s guess, but I’ll fight for him. I don’t see it coming down to a fight, though. What I can picture is begging. Pathetic, desperate begging to please keep me in his life—keep me close.

As a child I remember Fischer distinctly, and I could always read his mood on the rare occasions he came around the house. He carried with him a distinct sense of “otherness” as though he wasn’t one of us, would never be, and didn’t want to be. He seemed conflicted. Always distant. Removed. He acted more like a reluctant friend of the family than a part of it. I didn’t like him back then. He fascinated me, but I was more in the camp of—if you don’t want to be with us, just go, dude.

So I got how hard it had to have been to need us when he was so severely injured. As a single man in his early thirties having to rely on a family he all but shunned had to have been humbling. But he’d opened the door, and I’d walked in of my own free will, determined to wedge the chip off his shoulder.

So now, we’ve crossed another line—we’re fucking. A lot. But maybe we’ve been casually dating off and on without realizing that’s what we were doing—or maybe realizing, but not acknowledging, and one of the reasons for that is why I’m so conflicted now.

I’m not sure people would understand. I don’t even want to consider what our family would say. It’s possible they could recognize the situation for what it is—we’re not blood related. We didn’t grow up together. We got close when we were both well above the age of consent. But he’s also thirteen years older than I am. And I don’t know what that looks like to someone on the outside, whether they know us well or not.

But now that I have him in whatever tenuous way I do, I’m not capable of letting go. He’d have to rip out my heart and watch me bleed out at his feet to get me out of his life. And that scares me. No one should need anyone this much. So why do I?

After one more round of nausea passes without further incident, I pull myself up by the vanity counter, rinse my mouth out, wash my face, and brush my teeth.

I could collapse again. Sleep the rest of the day. Suffocate myself in his pillow, holding my breath until he comes back to me so I can tell him he’s the one. He’s always been the one. That maybe the reason I was born was for him.

So he could have one thing that was all his—that he would never have to share or doubt.

At ten-thirty, Fischer calls me.

“You okay?” I ask instead of hello.

“Barely,” he admits.

“Mm…you still at work?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you have to stay so late? I had your show on, it ended a while ago.”

“You were watching?” He sounds surprised.

“On mute.”

“Why watch then?”

I run a hand through my hair and lean back in my chair. “‘Cause you’re hot in a suit.”

“Are you busy?” he asks.

“I’m expecting two more dogs in the next few minutes, but most of them have been out to do their business already. Answer my question. Why don’t you get to leave after the show?”

“There’s actually more to this job than being hot and articulate in a suit, you know?”

“No. I don’t. You should tell me more about it sometime.”

“Like when?”

“Whenever you want to,” I say. “You can tell me all about what it’s like to be a newsman while I warm your cock in my mouth. How’s that sound?”

He clears his throat. “Would you be paying attention?”