The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  She was looking at him, eyes wide, lips parted. He’d been in plenty of strange situations, but this one, kneeling on Arden’s bed, both of them shirtless, the world held at bay by brick walls and silence, the sheer shroud of secrecy they created together, this one was the strangest.

  “How many tours together?”

  “Four,” he said. By the end they thought they were invincible. Why wouldn’t they? They were young, infallible, and the quest didn’t end with a mortality rate of seventy-five percent. It didn’t end with the heroes dead and the mute scribe sent back to tell a tale.

  “Which ones are from the other tours?”

  He pointed at the dragon, then at his version of the devil dog, a stubborn-looking bulldog braced on squat legs, eyes narrowed as it peered into the distance. Semper Fi Do or Die ringed the image.

  “And the last one?” she asked, scanning his chest.

  He looked at her, his voice throttled.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, his misery reflected in her eyes. “God, I’m sorry. I should have thought.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You didn’t know them.”

  For a minute he thought she was going to reach for him, pat him softly on the shoulder and tell him he’d get over it, that in time he’d heal. He braced himself for the pity he didn’t want, the empathy he couldn’t bear, but then Arden handed him a gift.

  “Would you turn around? I’d like to see the sword and dragon from the back again.”

  Relief swamped him. He swiveled around, presenting his back to her, and used the time to get himself under control. The dragon’s muscled back and lashing tail extended nearly to his hip; the sword down his back was the reverse of the one on his chest. To a casual observer they looked the same.

  “The runes are different,” Arden said with a questioning lift at the end.

  “Yeah,” he said. He’d done them himself, using a book of Elvish he’d bought off the Internet. God, what a geek he’d been, believing in heroic quests. So fucking young. Only the extremely poor joined the Corps for the money. It was about the mission, the platoon, his friends. He was stupid enough to believe in honor and duty and service.

  She gave a pleased little noise, and for a few minutes the only sound in the room was pencil against paper and his heart, beating in slow, agonized thuds, reminding him of all the times he’d prayed it would just fucking stop. His heart. The universe. Something to end this.

  “Take off your pants, please,” she said behind him.

  He laughed, swung himself off the bed, and shucked the rest of his clothes. “Same position?”

  “Please.”

  It really shouldn’t be hot, the way she said please with that distant, dismissive air of expectation, like someone raised her with both manners and the unshakable confidence that she’d get what she wanted. He settled on his heels with his back to her, and waited while she sketched, his cock thickening and lifting with his heartbeat. He thought about her in that coffee silk bra and her too-loose pants. He thought about the tight, hot clasp of her sheath, the way her eyes closed as he pushed into her.

  “Okay.” Distracted. Like she was somewhere else.

  He turned around. The sight of her was like a fist to his chest, and had nothing to do with his erection. She’d seen something in his back, in the sword.

  Before he could investigate, her gaze flicked down and she smiled a rare, broad smile. “How come that never happens in class?”

  “Two reasons. I’m not an exhibitionist. Micah made it abundantly clear that if I got off on women looking at me naked, I’d be thrown out of the class and blacklisted from every art school in the city. Modeling for art students is the easiest money I’ve ever made.”

  “Have you made most of your money in the Marine Corps?”

  He laughed. “Yeah.” The mood shifted, with his not-quite-a-lover, not-quite-a-friend. He used to laugh all the time, with Manny, Doug, Brian. Life was tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror, but Christ, they laughed.

  “What’s the second reason?”

  “It’s usually fucking cold in the rooms,” he said, and reached across the pad for the button at the top of her pants. He could curl his fingers into the waistband with room to spare.

  She laughed again, while beckoning him forward. All four fingers, like a motherfucking boss, not like a flirty girl. Good. Get this back on her territory, not his. He left his hand in her waistband and knee-walked forward until he could fit one thigh between hers and tugged gently. Sketchbook in one hand, pencil in the other, she got to her knees and let him unfasten her pants and push them down. Pencils clinked against each other as they worked off her pants, leaving her in the bra and panties, and him utterly naked. When he tossed the khakis to the floor, she lifted the sketchpad and held it in front of her like a shield.

  “Just a little more,” she said, and this time it was softened with a smile.

  He wanted her, but he could wait, let the desire that pushed away the memories simmer under his skin until she felt it, too. “How do you want me?”

  “Lie back,” she said.

  He stretched out, head and shoulders on one of her big pillows, one hand tucked behind his head, the other resting on his hipbone. Close enough to his cock to make him calculate the distance in inches between fingertips and erection. “No, look at me,” she said when he turned his head away from her.

  He’d never felt this vulnerable.

  She scooted closer, and he watched her lose herself in drawing. Her shoulders relaxed as she worked; he’d only noticed how much she had hunched over after she straightened. He tried to shift into soft focus, make her a blur of pale skin and gray silk, but all he could look at was her bra strap, slipping in slow motion from her shoulder to lie against her biceps. The cup gaped a little, giving him a shadow glimpse of nipple each time she exhaled. He didn’t want to want this.

  He couldn’t look away.

  His fingers twitched. He stilled them, breathed in for four, out for four, in, out, then found himself reaching for his cock to squeeze it, take the edge off.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Your face changes when you want something.”

  Another direct hit to the solar plexus, stilling all the motion in his body. Blood, breath, everything dragged, stopped flowing. The response of prey to a hunter, or a Marine laying a trap. He wasn’t sure which role he played right now. He dragged his gaze from her breasts to her face and found her looking at him. Not his body, not his erection, but his face. His fingers curled, but he forced himself to move his hand back to his hip. His cock throbbed, and a bead of precome formed at the tip. His hips shifted restlessly, another involuntary movement, and his hand tightened in the hair at the back of his head.

  She exhaled slowly, and because he was looking at her face, he saw the blood stain the skin of her cheeks, her lips soften and part. His movement had drawn her gaze down; she flipped to a clean page and went for the torso and hips now. He’d never had a woman look at him naked like she did, seeing, seeing, putting together pieces he hadn’t realized were broken. Some thinking part of his brain knew this problem wouldn’t be fixed by gripping his cock, but fuck, he wanted nothing else.

  “Go ahead,” she said. Like she’d heard him thinking. Like she knew all his secrets.

  He wrapped his fingers around the shaft and squeezed. Relief rushed through him, followed hard by a surge of sensation, sweet and hot and sticky in his veins.

  She was watching, her pencil halted, midline, gaze fixed on his hand. He drew his fist up the shaft, slicked the precome around the head, stroked back down. Her gaze trailed up his torso, watched the muscles clench in his abdomen, then continued to his face. Knowing that his face had changed, he wondered what she saw, tried to discern it from the tiny shifts of muscles and the pattern of her breaths.

  “That’s good, too,” she said, and resumed drawing, her arm moving in the big sweeping gestures of capturing the essence of a man with his cock in his hand.
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br />   It was need, he realized. She showed it in a completely different way, leaking out behind the tight restraints of blank expressions and not reacting. The deeper they sank into drawing and sex, the more she cracked. But he was the one in real danger. She drew him back into his body, made him want, made him feel; both those things would keep him from taking care of the people left behind.

  The room had darkened while she drew and he casually stroked himself, until her face was deeply shadowed and the city’s ambient light was the only thing illuminating his body. With a frustrated sound, she set the sketchpad to the side and rolled off the bed. His eyes were adjusted to the low light, so he saw her hips sway as she walked, the lower curve of her buttock revealed by the silk tucked into the cleft. She closed the blinds, then turned on the lamp beside the bed.

  A disquieting blend of lust and emotion simmered inside of him, tipping to one side, then the other, swirling together. He wanted the scale firmly weighted to the side of lust, not emotion. It was time to put things back in balance.

  Holding her gaze, he lifted his hand and beckoned her forward.

  – FOURTEEN –

  His spine. God. His spine, as straight and strong as the sword alongside it. She’d die with that image burned into her brain, muscles and bone forming a deep groove, the sword steel-straight alongside it, the hilt stretching across his shoulder blade. How did the Marine Corps make men like that? What kind of man chose that sort of tattoo? In the sword, the dragon, the dog, she’d been given the key to him, if she could just find the lock it opened.

  The ordinary white lamplight, filtered by the shade, gave him an unexpected, unreal cast. It dispelled the shadows, but at the same time transformed him into an alien creature, and unlike turning on the lights to make nightmares flee, it did nothing to lessen the dangerous edge to his face.

  She’d never had a man like this in her bed. She wasn’t sure she’d ever had a man like this in her life. She knew of a few boys who’d attended one of the military academies or joined the officer training corps after their junior years in college, but they were few and far between. Their path just didn’t include the military, the possibility of dying in battle.

  The surface shifted like his tattoos when he moved, hinting at textures and depths and dimensions she’d barely glimpsed. Then he let go of his cock and gave her the same beckoning move she’d used on him. Come here. Now.

  She padded to the bed, knee-walked across it to his side, stopping to lift the abandoned tray off the bed, then straddled him. Hands by his shoulders, knees by his hips, her lips pressed to his. His mouth was soft skin that firmed as she kissed him, the pressure making his lips swell, heat. His tongue flickered against hers, the touch lightening as she held herself away from his body—mouth, breasts, hips barely caressing him. He arched up into her body, his hands firm on her hips. Strength restrained. He could pull her down, roll her, fuck her, and they both knew it. The control implicit in his grip sent heat streaming from her back brain down her spine, trickling over her ribs and hipbones to pool in her nipples and sex.

  “You want that?” she murmured against his mouth.

  “You know it,” he said, and closed his teeth on her lower lip.

  She lowered herself to her elbows. A hard beat of pleasure coursed through her at the full body contact, although silk still covered her breasts, pressing against his chest, and her mound against his cock. Sweat slicked the skin where they touched, and the incomplete, out-of-rhythm contact of their breathing drew attention to the bare-skin contact at their abdomens. It felt like a tantalizing promise of the synchronicity that could come.

  His hand closed around her buttocks as his hips circled under hers. A faint rasping sound, the friction of hair against silk, rose into the air. She smiled, then bent and kissed him, still not giving him anything more than light pressure, a brush of lips, a hint of tongue. She wanted to tease him, but this was also for herself. These islands of time in a sea of turmoil only grew more important to her each time she found one. She washed up on the beach of him, clung to him like a life preserver with no thought of how she’d swim to shore, content just to be with him and breathe until the wreckage washed up on whatever solitary island she’d live on for the rest of her life. Seth wasn’t in her future. The last thing she needed right now was a man.

  But this wasn’t just any man . . .

  “Hey,” he said softly. “Come back.”

  She snapped back into the moment to find herself sprawled on top of Seth. He was looking up at her, brow wrinkled.

  “Sorry,” she said, hastily. No man wanted proof positive of a woman’s mind wandering during sex.

  “No big deal,” he said, gently smoothing his hand from the top of her thigh, over her butt cheek to her hip, then back down.

  “How did you know?”

  He smiled. “You get distant. Nervous, tense, kind of twitchy. You stop breathing.”

  Oh, God.

  “It’s all good,” he added. “Still into this?”

  The question was amused. He knew how into this she was, just not why, exactly. And she was into it. But this possible shift, this tenderness, made her skin itch. To combat it, she shifted her weight to her left elbow, hitched her hips away from his just a bit. His hands tightened, then relaxed, letting her do what she wanted to do. She slid her fingers into the elastic waistband of her panties. They were damp, clinging to her skin. His eyes followed her hand, watched intently as she spread her folds and drew her fingers through the slick heat between her legs. She made a soft noise at the contact against sensitized skin, and carefully circled her clit, then withdrew her fingers.

  He watched her hand the whole way up to his lips. She drew the moisture across the skin, starting to swell from her kisses, then exhaled a shuddering breath as she bent to kiss him. This time she didn’t tease, just licked the taste of her arousal from his mouth, and when he gripped her wrist and turned her hand to his mouth, she helped him lick it from her fingers. Then his hand guided hers down again, back into the hot silk between her legs, his fingers twined with hers, gathering moisture. She relaxed the muscles in her arm and shoulder, let him guide her fingers this time to the tip of his cock. He circled the tip, smearing their fluids together. His cock flexed, the muscles in his abdomen jumped, and heat speared sharp and electric between her legs.

  She forgot everything but the skin-on-skin contact, their breathing, shallow but falling into rhythm. Transfixed by the image of his bigger hand enclosing and guiding hers, the pulse of blood under the thin skin, she watched a moment longer, then glanced up at his face.

  Hot blood in his cheeks, his lips, his eyes. Their eyes locked, he let go of her hand to slide his fingers through her hair and cup her head, then wrapped his arm around her waist to hitch her closer. She draped her leg over his thigh and braced her head on her elbow, looking down at his face as she set a slow rhythm.

  Murmured words taught her what he liked, harder, slow. Precome slicked her hand as she stroked. He pulled her closer and drew her mouth down to his, giving her the rough, quick breaths, the tense and release of his muscles. He pulled her hand to his mouth and licked the palm, and when she started stroking again, the sensation was strong enough to make him dig one heel into the mattress and arch into her hand.

  She kissed him, the faint taste of sweat and precome dissipating in his mouth, deep then light. In the lamplight she saw sweat form at his temples, on his chest and abdomen, his athlete’s body shedding heat any way it could. The scent of sex and lust was in her mouth, her nose, her blood. He groaned, lifted his head to look down at her hand.

  “Say when,” she whispered.

  “Not yet,” he growled.

  She slowed her touch, drank his groan from his mouth. Her bra and panties clung to her skin. She’d never been so hot, so turned on, in her life, couldn’t resist rubbing her body like a cat against his. The movement sent her bra strap down her arm, making the cups gape away from her breasts. He looked, groaned, closed his eyes, looked again, hip
s thrusting up into her fist.

  “So fucking hot.”

  “Tell me why,” she whispered. She’d always felt ridiculous trying to be sexy, but with Seth, right now, it felt totally natural. She leaned forward, let her partially exposed breast graze his chest. “Tell me why.”

  “You look messy,” he said indistinctly. “Like you’re about to get fucked, like you really, really want it.”

  Emboldened, she let his cock slap against his belly and hooked her thumb in the elastic of her panties, then wriggled the clinging silk down to expose her hip, the top of her rear end, then pressed her hot, damp sex to his hip. His hand clamped down on her hip when she licked her own palm and set her hand to his cock.

  It was hot and sweaty, tantalizing and far too good to stop. Her hair trailed over his face until he tucked it behind her ear and drew her forehead down to his. Her arm was aching from holding her head up, so she stretched it above her and lay her head on her biceps. He turned to face her. “Gonna come,” he said in a near soundless voice. His gaze was locked with hers, eyelids quivering, his mouth brushing hers.

  “Yes,” she said, timing her downstrokes to the lift of his hips. It felt far too rough to her, harder than she’d expected, a full-body lift that only intensified when she rolled more of her weight onto his torso and leg. His cock swelled in her hand, then he groaned as his orgasm pulsed over her circled fingers.

  His heart was pounding, the beats too fast to separate into a pulse. His chest heaved as he drew in a full breath, his muscles quivering as the tension eased.

  “Be right back,” she said, and patted his abdomen.

  In the bathroom she washed her hands, the water cooling the hot pulse in her wrists, then wet down a facecloth for him. The woman in the mirror was nearly unrecognizable, suddenly possessing the mouth and eyes and tangled hair of a model. Her bra strap still drooped, and her panties barely reached her hips. She thought about tidying herself up, then didn’t. This wasn’t over.