A Muse to Live For

by Katherine Wyvern

  Well. He has certainly seen me, now. He really has.

  He is not screaming.

  I pull him to his feet and I step out of my puddled skirts, and gently I undress him. Jacket and shirt and trousers and drawers, socks, everything.

  He is as tall as I am, which I had never noticed, because he always stands with his head bent and his shoulders slumped. He’s not muscular, but there is no fat on him either. He has well-built bones under his lumpy clothes—he badly needs a good tailor—and he would be rather handsome if he held himself straight, with his chin up, and didn’t look so much at odds with himself. He’s pale, but not as pale as I am, and there is just the merest spray of hair on his chest.

  I caress his skin all over as I undress him, and he looks transfixed, as if it had never occurred to him that it takes two to dance this dance. Perhaps he thought I’d make him spend the night on his knees adoring me.

  The heat of his skin is like a deep current, and it draws me to him.

  We stand here mute, the only sounds the drumming of the rain and the swish of falling clothes, and gently kissing lips.

  When I push him to lie on the bed, I have a moment of dread that he might want to do that to me. I cannot have it. I will not be taken that way ever again.

  I’ll make my living giving blowjobs for the rest of my days, I guess.

  But I am not afraid of him. I do not believe he’d be capable of hurting a fly, let alone me.

  “So, do you fancy that blowjob, finally?” I whisper in his ear, smiling, but he holds me close, too close for me to slide down along his body.

  “I love you,” he whispers, his lips on my ear, so that words are made into a caress, “I love you, I love you.”

  “Hush,” I whisper back, bearing down on him, grinding my cock on his. “Don’t say such things. It cannot be. It can’t.”

  “This night, this once, please, let me say it. I love you, I love you, I love you.” His body rises to meet mine, and I feel those tears spilling now, with joy, and grief, and pity. Pity for him, for me, for both of us, lost in this narrow garret under the drumming rain, orphans in this storm, desperately naked in this terrible iron city.

  “Only this once, then,” I whisper. “Tomorrow, you must forget.”

  And before he can answer or kiss me again, I slip out of his arms, and down, along his chest and belly, so he cannot see me cry.

  I have pleasured so many men this way, but never one I loved, and maybe it’s the same thing, and yet it’s something altogether different. He’s all silk and warmth and heaving life and fire pulsing, and his flesh matters to mine, so that my whole body loves his.

  “You—don’t—have—to do this,” he whispers at first, but then he surrenders finally, and lets the pleasure take him.

  I told him, the first time we met, that I’d do him for free. Who would have guessed, then, that I would end up doing him for love?

  And I don’t know if he’s a virgin—but he is indeed quick. His cock grows even tauter on my tongue, and he breathes in short, hard gasps a few times. When his body arches and heaves and his hand fumbles at my cheek, I hold him, and hold him, and hold him… He comes with a broken moan, hotly. I swallow it all.

  On the street I never do. But here, now, with him, I could not bring myself to spit.

  Later I lie flat on top of him for a while, my cheek on his chest. He holds me gently, stroking my hair. I am still wearing my wig, and my stockings and corset, even my boots, and yet I am absurdly comfortable, despite the cold.

  “You too,” he says awkwardly after a while. “I want to … pleasure you.” I can tell that he has no idea how, but I can tell also that he is utterly sincere in his wish.

  “I am pleased,” I whisper. And I truly am. I am happy to lie here on his warm body. I don’t need anything else.

  ****

  Nathaniel

  She is quiet then for a long time. The rain has grown less, and patters softly on the skylight. Finally, I turn to look at that one candle. It is a third gone.

  “Can I sketch you, please? Like this? As you are now? The real you?”

  She looks up at me, startled, and then down at the tumbled bed, the laces coming undone on her corset, the stockings, one of which had slipped down around her knee.

  Then she looks at me again, with a trembling smile.

  “And I thought your drawings would be quite proper.” But she smiles again, amused now. “Very well then. Do it like this.”

  She tucks her cock and balls between her thighs and when she lies down again, she is … a woman. Completely a woman.

  “But … I want to draw you as you truly are. All of you, my love. You said I don’t know what you are. But I do. You don’t have to hide bits of you. I love you just as you are.”

  “This is the truth. One half of the truth. Do it like this, this once. For me, please. For my pleasure.”

  I bow, then, smiling, and place a single slow kiss where the dark triangle of her pubis meets the delta of her white thighs. And then I sit down on the floor and I draw her, as she truly is. It’s just a quick sketch. The light is low, and the room cold, too cold for either of us to sit about naked for long. But the sketch captured the tempting smile on her mouth, and the tremendous curve and sweep of her flank and her long, slim hip, a shape whose sensual grace has surely no equal in this world.

  Later, as I lie in the narrow bed, she sits gingerly on the edge, her back to me, undoing the laces of her corset, reaching behind her back with her arms. With some hesitation—I never did this—I begin pulling the tight cords loose. They tug and slip, tug and slip, swish, swish, swish, deceptively silky. When she takes off the now shapeless, cardboard-like, dead thing and the wispy garment underneath, the skin of her back and her sides is marked red with the folds of it, all over, like she’s been whipped. I brush my fingertips on the red marks and she shivers. She takes off her boots and stockings and still sits there, naked in the cold.

  I want to turn her towards me and hold her, but she stiffens and lies down rigid and flat like her shed corset, her arms held tight around her bare chest, her back to me. When I try to turn her, she whispers, “Not now. Not yet. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is soon enough. Please. Please.”

  So I put my arm around her from behind, awkwardly pressing all the front of my body to the back of hers, to warm her up, and she becomes even more tense. She’s stiff and cold like ice, and for a moment it seems to me that she is shaking. I draw the thin threadbare blankets over both of us, and hold her tenderly until she warms up against my skin, and I finally fall asleep.

  I sleep fitfully, unused as I am to share a bed, and a damn narrow bed at that, and also anxious to waste in slumber a single minute of my time with her. But sleep I do, worn out as I am by those days of desperate madness.

  Chapter Five

  “…and, for many a time

  I have been half in love with easeful Death,

  Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

  To take into the air my quiet breath;

  Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain…”

  John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

  Nathaniel

  When I finally wake up in the morning, I am alone in the bed. Light, silent hands have laid my own coat over me, on top of the blankets, and I am still warm and comfortable.

  It’s the grey light of dawn that woke me, that and the soft clink of thin enameled metal. I turn towards the sound, and there is a young man in the room with me.

  He stands naked by the basin and ewer, under the skylight. The room is cold, and the water in the ewer must be colder still. His skin is tight and dimpled with goosebumps and utterly white in this frigid light.

  The whip-like marks of the corset have gone … but not all of them. There are real scars, too, silk-white on the velvet-white of his skin. The back of his legs is a ghastly collection of old, faded bruises, gone to mucky yellow and sickening cloudy purple.

  He is impos
sibly thin. As he bends to wipe his legs quickly with the washcloth, his spine stands out and every rib ripples under the skin. I could draw his skeleton bone by bone just by looking at him like this.

  There are no long, golden locks. No, there are, lying on the chair, on top of his—her—folded clothes. The hair, sitting there like that, is strange and utterly lifeless, like an abandoned bird-nest, coming apart in a long season of hard gales.

  Perhaps I breathed in. Perhaps I shifted. He stands still, stricken for a moment, and then he straightens up and turns.

  The light from high up on his right casts shadows around his eyes, twin pools of descending darkness. His own hair is soft, short and ruffled, a dark brown, almost black. He smiles, just a little, and nods.

  “And this is the other half of the truth,” he whispers.

  “I see.”

  “You see? You do? What do you see now, Nathaniel?”

  “I see you.”

  He sketches the tiniest of bows, like a reluctant jester. “Gabriel. The name’s Gabriel.”

  I recognize his voice now. It’s the deep voice I heard, once or twice, breaking though Gabrielle’s softer, huskier tone.

  “Gabriel,” I repeat. And put out a hand for him, not to shake, but to call him to me. I need … I need to know him. I need to learn him, as I have learned her.

  I need him close.

  He just stands there.

  “Come here, please? Gabriel?” I say hoarsely.

  He comes. As he sits on the edge of the bed, his head bent, I cannot speak.

  I take his face in my hands, and make him look up, at me.

  He truly is naked.

  I have never seen anyone so naked.

  He has shed more than just clothes. Shorn of the long hair, the cigarette, the feisty wit and the cynical manners, he has shed a whole layer of himself, and become something else, perhaps something a bit smaller, a bit frailer. He’s tall for a woman, of course—he’s tall even for a boy—but naked, he is a slight young man with a dark, fragile head. His hands, Gabrielle’s hands, so long and stately, look delicate and almost insubstantial now, on him.

  And yet still, he is the most gloriously beautiful person I have ever seen. His eyes … his eyes are still the same. In his eyes is all the darkness, and the sadness, and the wonder and mystery of the world. His black pupils are like tunnels, opened on … somewhere else. Another place entirely, which calls to me. I still want to journey there, somehow. I still want to know his soul.

  As I hold his cheeks between my palms, my thumbs brush his lips, the quivering edge of his nostrils, the tip of his nose, the underside of his eyes, where the shadows darken them like a bruise. As his eyelids close, his lashes flutter on my skin like moths. I run my fingertips over his eyebrows, smoothing them, feeling them. I have drawn them a hundred times, and I had never yet understood that their shape is like the wings of the wandering albatross gliding over the great southern seas.

  His chest is pure pearl-white, but with a spatter of dark, dark moles, like a star-chart to a secret island, buried treasure, Utopia, Atlantis, the lost city of Ys.

  There will always be an infinity to discover for me, in the shapes of him. He’s all the beauty of creation, made flesh.

  “I love you,” I whisper, leaning my forehead against his. “You are the whole world. To me. Stay with me. Gabriel. Please, stay with me.”

  He lays the palm of his left hand on the back of my right and turns slightly. Just enough to kiss the inside of my wrist.

  “You love this?” he whispers.

  I do not answer. I can’t.

  I kiss his lips, lightly. I kiss his eyes and his brows and his head and his throat. His head bends this way and that, leaning into my kisses until our lips meet.

  I know nothing, just that I want to be his, and him to be mine. And as I draw him closer and closer, as he straddles my lap, still kissing, our members stand between us, dancing their own dance.

  And so I lay him down, on his back, cradling his head in my hand so it doesn’t bump on the hard board of the bed. He’s that precious to me.

  As my tongue wanders along his neck, his Adam’s apple, circles his nipples, and a little later, as its tip traces the delicate shell of his ear, I know that I am seeing him as I have never seen him before, and I know, that I will never draw him the same again, that I have learnt something new, something different, something deeper about him. I will never see only her as I did before. There is him also in her. He, or she, is something more complete, more essentially whole than I ever imagined, and I must find a way to paint all this, and the texture of the skin of his throat, waxy smooth and faintly prickling all at once, and the softness of his lips, the butterfly flutter of his eyelashes when my lips linger on them.

  He is so precious, and I want him to be mine, mine to love, mine to hold, mine to draw, mine to worship. And it breaks my heart to think that he does not want me, that he wants me to go away, that he forbade me to say I love you.

  I will die, if I can’t have you. I will die of it. I was almost dead already, and you brought me back. Don’t send me away now, don’t send me away from you, I beg you, I think, but I dare not say it. I just trace kisses on his chest, from mole to mole, walking the star-chart over his heart with my lips, again and again and again.

  And then down, along that slender stomach, following the blue-green course of his pulsing veins, to there. I wanted to pleasure him, or her, yesterday, and I wasn’t allowed. Now I will not be stopped.

  I try to do to him what she did to me last night. His member hardens on my tongue, and my mind is in a fever of lust and wonder, that something so strange, something I never, ever thought of doing, could be so profoundly good. I never knew, or even suspected, or wondered, what a man’s cock would feel like in my mouth, its springy, muscular hardness wrapped in my lips, pressing and running on my tongue. As its velvet skin grows slick with my saliva, it’s easier to dance along it, up and down, my mouth pursed around its girth. I never imagined I could like this. But I am in a delirious state of happiness now that I am doing it.

  But maybe I am not as skilled as she is, or maybe he does not enjoy it that much, because although he breathes deep and gives a small, soft moan or two, and holds his hand lightly on my head, it becomes apparent, in time that he will not climax from this, or that my jaw will fall off before he gets there.

  So I let go of him. He looks at me with those huge sad eyes and smiles.

  “Sorry,” I whisper, and he smiles again.

  “Why?” he asks, softly. “That was so sweet. Thank you.”

  We lie together for a little while, kissing at first, chest to chest, and then he turns his back to me, snuggling in my embrace, as if he’d rather go back to sleep.

  I shake my head, and gently I make him sit up. I slip behind him, so he sits between my legs with his back against my chest. I kiss his neck tenderly again and again before taking his member in my palm.

  I am definitely more familiar with my hand.

  The fact has a grim irony that is not lost on me, and I laugh a little as I begin to stroke his cock.

  “Something funny?” he asks softly, his eyes close, and a half smile on his lips.

  “Never mind,” I say and kiss him again and again holding him close to me, as I stroke him to the rhythms I know and like myself, slow, then quicker, then slow again, to draw it out, take every ounce of pleasure. I have never felt guilty about it, or feared that my eyes would fall off because of it, as they’d like us to believe. And now that I am doing it to him it is like giving a gift, a gift of trust, and absolute intimacy, and shared bliss. When he starts to moan very quietly and tenses in my arms, and when I know he’s ready, I hold his member very close to his stomach, so that when he comes, I can see the sperm appearing, pearly white and softly shining, a spurt or two that land high on his chest and belly and then a feebler throbbing dribble that coats my hand hotly.

  I bring my fingers to my lips to taste it—I want him so completely.

&
nbsp; After that, he lies abandoned in my arms, as if the ejaculation has emptied him, and seeing how wasted he is, that might be literally true.

  I hold him close for a long time, rocking him gently. His slender hand has somehow come to rest on his member, which is still, surprisingly, at half mast. I am still excited and unspent and the sight stirs me more than I can say. But I don’t want to disturb him or to ask anything of him. I just want to hold him in my arms like this forever. My sketching pad is still on the chair that serves as bedside table and I take it, open it on the bed and begin to draw him, his fingers, his member, the interplay of veins and textures, velvet shaft and silky glans, the shiny pearl of sperm still twinkling there, caught on the edge of his lapping foreskin. Drawn like this, a detail out of context, it looks uncannily like a woman’s hand on a male member. I think Henry would like this drawing.

  Not that I would ever have the nerve to show it to him.

  Gabriel finally stirs and smiles sleepily. “What are you drawing, Nathaniel?”

  It’s a rhetorical question of course. He can see the sketch perfectly well.

  “You, all of you, my beautiful. I love you so. All that you are is perfect, my love, my angel.”

  He laughs softly. “Angel, forsooth… You don’t know what I am, Nathaniel.”

  He said something like that already, but as he repeats it now, so levelly, I finally pay attention. What can he possibly be? A whore, I know that much. And a man, apparently. When he’s not a woman. I know that, too.

  I always knew.

  What else can he possibly be?

  “What are you?” I ask, folding away my sketch pad and giving him my full attention. “What are you, then? Tell me. Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  I see him starting, as if a gun went off behind him, and then mastering himself.

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. From the beginning.”

  “You will hate me.”

  “Never. Never. It is not possible.” I draw my coat and the blankets over him, and settle down to listen.

  He puts his face in his hands, and curls up against my chest. I gather him closer in my arms and hold him, and slowly, as if from a great distance, he begins to talk.