The Muse's Undoing

I try to smile, but I’m not sure I manage it. “Okay.”

He runs a hand down the side of my face and presses his forehead to mine. “Rest,” he whispers.

“Okay.”

Then he lets go, picks up his backpack, and leaves.

16

MATTHEW

Ihave my music cranked, my welder’s mask on, and sparks are flying in the section of my loft where I create my sculptures. This one is my largest ever, standing around twelve-feet tall. It’s made of bronze wire I bought and shards of bottles I’ve found or drained myself. My sculptures aren’t abstract—not really. For example, this one looks like a tree, but when you get close enough, you see all the souls that make a tree possible.

While the glass leaves are nearly every color of the rainbow, Valentine says it’s a dark piece, thematically. To me, it’s a beauty piece. It turned out exactly like my vision. I’m not one of those artists that just throws things out there in order to express a mood. I have plenty of ways to express myself more privately. I design and create with the goal of selling pieces. So they need to be beautiful, interpretable, and unique. This is where a muse comes in.

Muses make me think outside myself. They get me out of my mental ruts, sparking parts of my being that lie dormant. They connect me to Jung’s collective consciousness. On my own, I obsess about myself—my needs, my flaws, my talent, my ideas—constantly. I have sketchbooks full of my own mind on paper.

Sculpture is different. It’s metaphor. The complication is that all my sculptures are as different from each other as the muse who inspired them. I’m told I don’t have a distinct point of view. But I’m working on that. I just need that one breakthrough piece, and maybe it’ll be this one.

I checked on Fischer about an hour ago. It sounded like I woke him from a nap, which made a wave of relief so strong wash over me, it’d almost taken out my knees. I’ve been completely unable to stop obsessing about him since I left earlier. Since I kissed him.

Our mouths weren’t open, but my lips had touched his for the first time, and they’ve been on fire ever since.

I’m expecting Valentine this evening before she has to go to work. I had it in my head while I was trying to sleep last night that I was going to break things off with her, but now I’m not sure. I’m all kinds of conflicted about it, just sort of hoping once I see her, I’ll know what to do.

I definitely need to have sex, though. Like some way or another I need to get this tension out of me, and sculpting only does so much. As I’m using all my strength bending the final bronze wire into the shape I need, I have a wad of bubblegum in my mouth, chewing it furiously, keeping my jaw busy to wear it out. I keep getting sideswiped with the visual of Fischer coming last night—all that thick cum I’d wanted to lap up with my tongue.

I’ve been attracted to him for a long time, but last night that attraction felt like a whole other person inside of me—viscerally real and starving. Damn near chomping at the bit to put my mouth all over him.

And then he’d fucking hurt himself again and knocked me all off balance.

Introducing sex into our friendship would be a mess. Even the idea of it is threatening to make it messy. While I definitely get the vibe Fischer wouldn’t push me away if I came on strong, I don’t get the impression that we’d be entering into some easy friends with benefits situation, either.

Fuck, I didn’t even know until last night he was bi. I’m still not a hundred percent sure that’s how he identifies, either. He’s only been with women as far as I know—at least since he and I got close. The congressman and whoever else in his past might have just been a phase he grew out of. It explains why he’s so comfortable touching me, but just because we’re affectionate doesn’t mean he wants to fuck. It’s too easy for those wires to get crossed in my mind.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my fully developed brain at twenty-eight. I genuinely have no idea how the rest of my life is going to turn out. I’m no less a slave to my own urges than I was at seventeen, jerking off so often back then, I injured myself. That was fun explaining to the urologist.

He told me I was normal.

Right.

He also told me I was bigger than average, leaving me more prone to injury, which I thought was great at the time, but it gives me a near constant awareness of my dick. That improved in my later teens when I started on ADHD medication, but the pills made my creativity take a nosedive. I took the pills for about a year, then quit. Hyper focus may be a pain in the ass, but it’s also my superpower when I’m using it in my workshop.

It’s also a double-edged sword. When I hyper focus on someone’s body—or a particular body part in general—that gets me into trouble.

I put my finishing touches on the sculpture just after sundown and clean up my workspace, sweeping the debris and glass dust off the floor before hitting the shower. If I do wind up ending things with Valentine, I’ll be going out tonight.

She shows up horny, all over me before I can get a word out, and I defer my decision. She smells incredible, and I’m sick of thinking anyway.

Within two minutes of her walking through the door, Valentine is kneeling on the floor between my legs while I sit on the edge of my bed, which is nothing more than a couple of box springs and a king-sized mattress. My cock is in her hand, and she jerks it fast, her hold firm and experienced. She feeds half my length into her mouth and sucks eagerly, blue eyes wide and locked on mine.

I’m struggling to get into it. To get hard.

Since I’ve never had this problem before, I get way, way in my head about it.

She works on me for several minutes and nothing. The longer I go without so much as a thump in my balls, the more paranoid I get that it’s never going to happen, and when hopelessness darkens my thoughts, I start begging.

“Switch places,” I urge her.