The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  The first full thrust ended the quivering.

  The second flung her into white heat and bright light. He thrust through it, changing nothing about his tempo or depth, but she could hear tight little grunts that made her think of air forced through clenched teeth. Her legs trembled until she relaxed enough to let her weight rest on his thighs. A second wave of pleasure hovered promisingly behind the first, something that had happened before, but never came to much of anything before her partner finished, so she let her head droop to the mattress.

  Except, he wasn’t rushing to finish. His hand scudded across her sweat-dampened skin to cup her sex. She flinched, anticipating contact on hypersensitive nerves, but he hushed her and curled around her, and did nothing more than press the pads of his fingers to the top of her sex. The pressure against the bundle of nerves added momentum and power to the climax building deep inside her.

  “Oh, God,” she said indistinctly.

  Seth didn’t respond, just curled around her, his cheek stubble scratching her erratically through the curtain of her hair. It was in her mouth, and likely in his, and all she could think about was the second wave looming like God’s own fist. Someone was making sharp cries, almost in time to the sharp smack of skin against skin, the box spring had developed an audible squeak, and her arms and legs were shaking with the strain, and she was going to come again. Hard. Now.

  The pressure of his fingers against her clit and his cock, stretching her each time it buried deep inside her, drowned out everything—sound, sense, sight, everything—for a long moment. She came to when he finally, finally slammed into her, the rhythmic pulses of his release riding the ebbing crest of hers.

  “My leg hurts,” she said. That knee had never quite been the same after three surgeries.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled and shifted to one side. She lay down flat on the mattress. At some level she knew she would be sore tomorrow. She knew there were things in her mind that would trap her, but for the moment, she savored the absence of anything threatening, anything at all. Laughter welled up in her chest. That worked. That really, really worked, although in hindsight, she had no idea how touching him would add depth or unity to her drawings. Amazing what the brain could come up with to rationalize desire.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “I can’t believe I told you that would help me learn to draw.”

  He laughed, a short, rough, satisfied sound that rasped over her nerves like a cat’s tongue. “I haven’t heard that one before,” he said. “Okay if I get dressed now?”

  “Of course,” she said, answering the smile she heard in his voice with a real one of her own.

  He snagged his clothes from the bedroom floor on the way to the bathroom. She pulled on a robe and headed for the hallway, returning to her original goal of paying him. “I’m surprised no one else asked for private sessions,” she said, and held out his fee when he approached her and scuffed into his shoes.

  He thumbed through the bills. “There’s too much—”

  His head came up, eyes sharp with something so potent her body recognized anger before her brain did. She felt herself go quite still in response.

  “Is that the going rate for a rent boy?”

  She blinked, astonished, then it all came together. The text, for private sessions. The simmering charge in the air between them. The conversation about getting aroused while modeling. The request for him to leave his shirt off. Sex. Money exchanged.

  “No. No! Oh, God. It’s a tip. See?” She took back the money, thumbed the bills into two groups. “Two hundred for the session, plus a twenty percent tip. Forty dollars. I’m not . . . I didn’t mean . . . I’m not paying you for sex. I swear. I didn’t plan this, or think it would happen. It’s just a tip.”

  He stared at her.

  “Oh, God,” she repeated, then shoved her hair back from her face. The strands snagged on the ruby ring. “Look, the going rate for a rent boy in Manhattan starts around four hundred dollars an hour and goes into the thousands if you want a good companion. A friend of mine has a standing arrangement with one of the best. If I wanted a rent boy, I would have called her and asked for a referral, not texted you on the vague hope you’d sleep with me.”

  His lips, still full from kissing, curved ever so slightly.

  “I probably seemed desperate,” she said. “It’s been a while. I swear to you I didn’t plan that. I just wanted to draw you.”

  She’d meant to stop at draw because draw you sounded so needy. But she’d told him the truth.

  “You didn’t seem desperate,” he said. “You were amazing.”

  His voice swirled around the words, heating them, making her heart pound. Face flaming, she neatly stacked the bills, aligning the edges lengthwise, then slid both piles onto the table between them. “Whether you take the tip is up to you. I apologize for insulting you.”

  Without a word he picked up both stacks, combined them, and zipped them into one of the pockets in his messenger bag. As she watched him, so careful with the money, so careful as he checked for wallet, keys, phone, testing all the straps and clips and buckles, a wave of remorse flowed through her. She should have told him beforehand, before he took off his clothes and posed for her, much less let her touch him, even less took him to bed. Wanting him to help her work off some stress was no excuse for using him without his full consent.

  She opened her mouth to tell him, but he spoke first. “Why are you taking the drawing class?”

  I have panic attacks. I’m trying to find a way to cope with them. She’d admitted this to any number of professional therapists, counselors, advisers, life coaches, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words, to bring them into this. Adding My family has just been accused of running a Ponzi scheme, standing under the blinding glare of the klieg lights shining into every nook and cranny of her family and personal life, made it that much harder to admit this long-standing weakness.

  “I used to draw. My life is a little complicated right now,” she said finally. “I needed something . . . uncomplicated.”

  She almost winced when she heard the words, implying nothing would come of this. Seth, however, didn’t seem to notice, or if he noticed, didn’t care. He nodded at the phone. “Uncomplicated works. You know how to find me.”

  After she let him out, she tossed her sketchpad and pencil box on the sofa, then folded the easel against the wall by the fireplace. Reclaiming the sketchpad, she curled up on the sofa and studied her first sketch, fumbled one of the pencils out of the box, and strengthened the line created where his legs were crossed, retracing the shared edge from his thighs over his knees to his ankles.

  It did help, touching what you drew. The tactile experience informed what she saw in a way she hadn’t expected. Except touching Seth wasn’t like handling a pear, an apple, and an empty wine bottle from a still life. Sharing skin and breath with Seth was more than creating a shared edge.

  The inspiration ran out when she tried to clean up the lines of his hand and bent arm, but it was enough, a good stopping point. Maybe Betsy was right. Maybe the drawing class and Seth were exactly what she needed, distraction and stress relief in one hard-muscled package. She set the sketchbook on the large leather ottoman and hefted her laptop instead. With the noise inside silenced, she could deal with her email.

  A window popped up from her calendar, reminding her of Melissa Schumann’s baby shower over the weekend. Arden checked her email and found one from Mel, staunchly assuring her that of course she was welcome at the shower, that she was one of Arden’s oldest friends, and it wouldn’t be the same without her.

  Another perfect distraction, thinking about new life and soft, pretty things. In all the chaos of the last weeks, she’d forgotten to buy a present for Mel and baby girl Schumann, due just as fall was beginning. Arden knew exactly where to go for the perfect present.

  – FIVE –

  “Thanks,” the lawyer said. “They’re about twenty minutes out, so if you could step on i
t, or pedal fast, or whatever.”

  “No problem. My pleasure,” Seth said. He zipped the ring of keys into the front pocket of his messenger bag, pushed through the door to the law firm’s reception area, and hit the button for the ground floor. He didn’t ask questions about deliveries, but assumed the lawyer now hurrying back to her office was renting her apartment to out-of-town visitors for the weekend. The guests were on their way in from LaGuardia and would meet Seth farther up in Midtown.

  Outside the office building he unlocked his bike, looped the Kryptonite chain around his waist and secured it with the disc lock, then set off uptown. As he rode, his mind wandered to all the different kinds of sex he had had since the IED went off. He’d had what he called “I didn’t die in Afghanistan” sex, a frantic encounter with a woman he met at a bar near Lejune hours after he touched down on American soil. He’d been drunk as hell and barely remembered the encounter.

  He delivered the keys, then spent the next three runs—a bag of cold medicine from a Duane Reade in Tribeca, lunch from Whole Foods in Union Square to a town house in the West Village, and a dress coming straight from a designer’s workshop to someone he assumed was a celebrity, based on the enormous sunglasses and skeletal frame—working his way through the memories of a series of one-night stands interspersed with memories of buying the motor home, his bike, and registering with delivery services. He hung out with Phil, sent money to Brittany and Baby B. He picked up women, had sex, went home alone. For a while now, his life fell into the “I didn’t die at all” category.

  Until the moment Arden kissed him.

  The next customer was waiting outside a gallery in the West Village, arms folded as she watched a mother push an empty stroller while her toddler studiously navigated her doll’s stroller along the sidewalk. “Thanks,” she said, and took the thick envelope Seth had picked up at a printer’s office.

  He paused on the corner of Bleecker and Hudson, and swiped the app to refresh available jobs. Nothing below 110th Street at the moment, so he took a break to drink some water and categorize what happened last night. He remembered the look on her face as she drew him the first time, all fierce focus, gripping the pencil so tightly her knuckles were white. He liked that, a woman who squared up for an assault on whatever was in her path, but not for art. Drawing came from a different place, and while she obviously thought the contour drawing suggestion was bullshit, when she settled in and started to draw, it was like she saw every single cell in his body. There was a longing, a want in her eyes, all the more powerful for the fierceness in every line of her body. But the real kicker was the way he responded to it. She wanted like he wanted, from so deep in the body it felt raw and red and hot, like an open wound.

  The memory made his cock lift as blood pulsed into it with his heartbeat, something that hadn’t happened during the session, thank fuck, but he’d had to purposefully block her out during the first sitting. Physical exhaustion was pretty effective at shutting down his libido during the workweek, but on the weekends, it was like all the stored-up testosterone needed an outlet. So far, the series of no-last-name hookups had somewhat successfully pushed down the questions he didn’t want to answer. So far he’d not associated the urge to have sex with a particular woman.

  Then Arden’s touch, her tousled, witchy hair, the ragged edge of her breathing, hooked on something deep inside him.

  He wasn’t quite sure what to call what they had done. He had gone to her apartment expecting to model, and left with his worldview completely reordered. Not just because they had sex, either. There had been little, startling jolts the whole way through, the way the lamplight picked out the gold highlights in her hair and her jeans hung from her hipbones. The way she took charge of the sitting, then reluctantly gave it back to him. She was accustomed to being in charge, in some ways held herself like an officer, but there were these flashes of vulnerability. Like the way she asked to touch him, but once he said yes she had gotten really bold, really quickly. The scars on her shoulder and knee, a couple on her chest that were probably from ports and indicated a longer hospital stay. She was a paradox, strong and fragile. Ferocious, fighting something he couldn’t see but knew had to be there.

  There was something else. Something different. It niggled at the back of his brain, just out of his reach. He tucked his water bottle back into the mesh pocket on his bag, switched to the browser on his phone and typed Arden Upper East Side Manhattan into a search engine. The first couple of hits, the promoted ones, were links to some cosmetics company, but underneath that were hours-old news reports about Arden MacCarren, daughter of Donald MacCarren, sister to Charles, both of whom had been indicted in a massive Ponzi scheme a couple of weeks prior.

  “Damn,” he said, then let out a long, low whistle as he clicked through to a couple of pictures showing a smiling Arden in posed family portraits, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. MacCarren, an investment bank so powerful it didn’t need a description like Bank or Investments or Fund or Brokerage behind the name. Simply MacCarren. According to the articles, Arden headed the MacCarren Foundation. He read her bio on the foundation’s website, then a couple of lengthy articles detailing the rise and fall of the MacCarrens, Arden’s brief tenure with the investment side of the family business. He knew the Ponzi-scheme details, but the newspaper article repeated speculation from various unnamed sources that the reason Arden and her brother Garry had left was because they discovered their father’s illegal activities and refused to be a part of it.

  Seth shut the browser window. That explained the hunted, haunted look on her face. The fact that she was upright and coherent made him respect her even more.

  The delivery app beeped with new jobs added. He closed the browser, scanned the new jobs, and jumped on one that required him to pick up a book at Three Lives and Company and deliver it to an address less than two blocks away. When he’d handed over the book, he locked the bike to a no-parking sign and swung into the post office branch on Hudson. At the counter he bought a money order with Arden’s twenties and the tips he’d accumulated over the past few days, then sent it registered mail to Brittany. Back outside, he tucked the confirmation slip in his jersey and called her.

  “Hey, Seth,” she said when she answered.

  She sounded tired. No surprise. “Hey, Britt,” he said. Two shops down from the post office was a stationery store that always had really interesting window displays. Today was no exception, a dragon made of sticky notes breathing flame at a brave knight defending a castle below. “How’s it going?”

  “The usual,” she said. “Baby B’s teething again, so he’s not sleeping well and he’s fussy during the day. My mom’s coming over to get him before I go to work.”

  He studied the window display. It was the kind of thing he used to draw, back when he drew. One of the shop’s employees, a tall woman with tousled black curls, smiled at him from the other side of the window display, then lifted a leather-bound notebook from the stack comprising the castle’s walls.

  “That’s six teeth?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Two on the top, four on the bottom. I just . . .” Baby B’s whimpers cut off, replaced by a satisfied smacking sound. Seth heard Brittany’s sharp intake. “The only thing he wants to teethe on is my finger, but those tiny teeth are so sharp,” she said.

  Her voice trembled, increasing in pitch toward the end of the sentence. “I know,” he said, although the only thing he knew about babies and teething he’d learned from Brian—who compulsively read ahead in the baby books—and other Marines with kids.

  “I just . . . it’s another thing he won’t see.”

  Brian had been home for the birth of his son. Cut the cord. Held him, sung to him, brought back a hastily made photo book of pictures he showed to anyone who would sit still. Seth did a lot of sitting still. He’d seen Britt with her exhausted-new-mother smile often enough to memorize it and draw his own version for Brian. And now he would see Baby B’s baby teeth come in, and later fa
ll out, his first steps.

  “Tell me about it,” he said gently, watching the dragon sway as the stationery shop’s door closed. The knight’s sword was so small and flimsy against the dragon’s fiery paper flames.

  “It’s just poked through the gum,” Britt said. He heard the sound of the fridge opening, then closing. “I freeze damp washcloths for him,” she said, her voice going soothing. “There you go. Ouch. I wrapped it around my finger, but it sure does make my finger stiff.”

  Brittany cut hair at a discount salon and was going to school nights to become an elementary school teacher. “I just sent you something,” he said.

  “Seth,” she said. “I’m going to pay you back. I promise.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “We take care of our own, Britt. That’s all I’m doing.”

  “You must need the money, too.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Did you get the car plated?”

  “Yes, a couple of days ago. It’s such a relief to have a car I know will start every time I turn the key. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Where did you get that kind of money, anyway?”

  “A tip,” he said, remembering the moment Ryan Hamilton handed him an envelope with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash inside it. He’d wired it to Britt so she could replace her clunker Escort with a used Nissan Altima still under warranty. “You wouldn’t believe New York money,” he said, remembering Arden’s town house. He’d expected an apartment, not the whole building, fireplaces in every room he saw, original brick and crown molding and hardwood floors, new windows that shut out the city sounds, her own private garden in the back.

  “I probably wouldn’t,” she said. “I have to go. My mom’s here.”