The Muse: MMF Bisexual Romance

by A. Anders

  “Yep. Here it comes.”

  “Here what comes?”

  “Look, you can perform for the cameras all you want. But I know what your deal is.”

  “You do? Then please explain it to me because I’m shit lost.”

  Victor paused and then sourly asked, “What do you want?”

  “I was looking for Brad. Do you know which cabin he’s in?”

  Victor opened his eyes giving me a once over. “Oh, you’re one of those, are you?”

  “One of what?” I asked getting pissed.

  Victor rolled over and mumbled, “You’re in my light.”

  I looked up at the night sky. Finding nothing but stars, I assumed that that was his way of asking me to go away. That dude was yet another loose nut.

  I wandered around the grounds after that. Apart from looking for Brad, I had hoped to run into Ian. I didn’t find either one.

  I only saw a couple of people: the guy with the mustache from the night before (Gray?), a round-chested dark-skinned guy, and Buck-Naked Billy, who was still naked. I gave them their space.

  I didn’t see Ian again until dinnertime. We ate dinner together at the commissary and then took our desserts and hung out by the pool. Most of the guys had done the same thing. So, when Thorin the Pale returned from his solo date wanting to brag about it, he came to those of us sitting outside.

  It didn’t take long before Thorin had a crowd. Mustache Gray was the first to ask for details. Thorin didn’t give many. He was more interested in letting everyone know that Rose was now his “girlfriend,” which made a few of the guys bristle.

  Strangely, their reaction wasn’t because he had declared his relationship after only one date. It was because at least two other guys had already done the same thing. I considered declaring her my girlfriend as well to see how many of them I could make cry. But I didn’t.

  Shortly after that, Ian and I followed our pawns back to our room. We were being instructed to dress for a cocktail party, to ready ourselves for another elimination. Getting dressed, I kept wondering if I would get a rose. I then wondered if I even cared. But for some reason, I did.

  I certainly wasn’t in love with Rose like everyone else seemed to be. In spite of what Victor believed, I didn’t care about having a storyline.

  I think it was about fairness. I had jumped onto the back of a thousand-pound bear and saved two people’s lives. I didn’t need a metal for it, and I definitely didn’t want anyone making a big deal about it. However, a simple “Atta boy!” wouldn’t have hurt.

  So what would it say about Rose, and humans in general, if, in return for saving two people’s lives, I was eliminated? It would be proof that no justice is left in this world. So yes, I cared whether or not I was eliminated, but that still didn’t change the fact that I had to get out of this place.

  As we lined up in front of Rose, I counted the flowers on the tray. Two people weren’t getting a rose. Faced with those odds, I began to second-guess myself. Should I have asked for time alone with her at the cocktail party? Should I have had to, though? Hadn’t I already proven myself worthy to stay, whatever that means?

  Do you know that feeling when you are sweating profusely, and you can’t figure out why? Your back is drenched and your forehead’s wet, while everyone else is dry.

  Seriously, I’ve had bombs explode around me, yet an 110-pound woman armed with a rose was making me flop sweat. Why?

  To no one’s surprise, Brad was the first to get a rose. Mustache Gray, Thorin the Pale, and Victor Vodka followed. Soon, only six roses were left, then four.

  I began to worry when there were two roses remaining and Buck-Naked Billy got the second to the last one. The man was wearing socks, black shoes and a necktie around his dangling manhood, yet he had gotten one before me. Talk about a bad sign.

  In the end, it was my two roommates and me with only one rose left. I shook waiting for the last name to be called. My heart pounded so hard that my ears rung.

  What the hell, man? Why was she taking so long to say the next name? Why? Why?!?

  “Ford, would you consider spending the rest of your life with me?” Rose asked.

  I practically knocked the guys over racing to her. It was not my finest moment.

  “That sucks, man,” I later told Ian. But I was starting to understand how things worked on the show, and I began to see that Ian had brought this on himself.

  He hadn’t participated in the challenge. I hadn’t either at first, but I ended up getting into the ring. That’s what you have to do if you want to stick around. And having seen these shows before, Ian had to have known that.

  When Pete led me back to my cabin, it felt empty. Lying in bed, I started thinking about Kurt. What had happened to him on the dock? The terrified look in his eyes as he collapsed was genuine. He wasn’t acting. But what had made him fall?

  I took a step toward the door, and Pete moved to block me.

  “What’s up, Pete? I just wanted to get a little air.”

  He didn’t move. Could I have pushed past him? Of course. Did I want to force my way past him? Not if I didn’t have to.

  “Pete, where’s the bathroom?” I asked, knowing the basic language of this type of bot.

  Pete’s fingertip scanner lit up, asking me to touch it. I did, and he led me to the bathroom. When he attempted to enter behind me, I objected.

  “Woah, privacy, man.”

  It froze right outside the door as if standing guard. I slipped in and moved fast. On the right were five sinks. On the left were five stalls. Ignoring both, I took a few large steps toward the small screen-less window at the far end of the room.

  At near full speed, I jumped up and wrenched my arms in the window. A man of my size wasn’t meant to fit through such a space, but one shoulder at a time, I pried my way out, scaling the outside wall like a spider. With only my legs left, I flung myself forward, landing quietly on the grass.

  I paused, waiting for some sort of alarm. Nothing came. While Pete waited on the other side of the building for me, I sprinted through the pools of light toward the surrounding trees.

  I didn’t want to be seen heading to the dock this time. Never leaving the shadows, I plotted a course parallel to the path. If you’re careful, you can run through the woods without making a sound, and I was careful. It’s amazing how quickly things come back to you.

  Jogging at nearly full speed, the lights from the dock quickly filtered through the trees. I stopped at the edge, taking refuge behind a bush. Peering from behind it, I spotted Ian. He was standing at the end of the dock just as Kurt had.

  I looked around for his pawn. I found it at the shoreline, floating motionlessly. As far as I could tell, nothing was unusual about the scene. In fact, Ian looked bored.

  Was I being paranoid? Maybe. Okay, probably. In fact, the longer I stared, the more foolish I felt.

  What did I even think I was going to find? We were on a game show, after all. People won money or pretended to find love. This show wasn’t a place where real things happened.

  Still crouched at the edge of the trees, I wondered what I was I doing there—not just in the bushes, but on the show. Was I running from real life? Had my break up with Laura affected me more than I had realized? Was that why I had left my job?

  I didn’t love working as a corporate recruiter, but it did pay well. Jobs were hard to come by nowadays. Yet, I left that job and ended up here, risking my life for the amusement of others. Sure, fighting a grizzly bear was better than having to wear a tie to work, but not by much.

  At that moment, I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Ian had coughed.

  I centered myself and waited for his pawn to react. Kurt hadn’t had a pawn close by. Triage bots had emergency responses built into them. First they evaluated, and then they took the appropriate actions. So, why wasn’t Ian’s pawn moving?

  I watched Ian as he dropped to his knees exactly like Kurt had. It killed me not to run in and try to save him. But what could I do di
fferently this time? I was as helpless now as I was before.

  But the show, they had to do something, right? They wouldn’t just let a second contestant die. Not with a pawn right there. So, why weren’t they doing anything?

  Ian’s head hit the dock with a crack, and I felt the pain. Now, he was choking. He was dying, and I wasn’t doing anything to help.

  Ian’s chest lifted and fell in exaggerated breaths. He was slipping away. I wanted desperately to go out there. But what if I interrupted the process? What if this was just a part of the show, and in the end, he was going to be fine? I mean, someone had to be seeing this scene, right?

  Ian stopped moving before I could finish the thought. His listless eyes looked at me. I didn’t need to check him. He was dead. I had sat and watched him die. Worse than that, I was sure that the show had killed him.

  It wasn’t a coincidence. The people eliminated from the show were all dying. How close had I gotten to being one of them? If Ian was right, I wasn’t even meant to last this long.

  I had to figure out what was going on, and I had to stay alive to do it. It was time for me to get my ass in gear. I had to get into the game.

  But how would I do that? Damn it, I didn’t even know how these shows worked. However, I did know one person who did.

  Could I trust him? I didn’t know. But as he once said to me, “let the games begin.”

  Chapter 3

  I stared at Ian’s lifeless body for as long as I could stand it. After thirty minutes, nothing changed. The pawn didn’t move, and no one came to remove it.

  Knowing I needed to return to camp, I hurried back to the bathroom. Climbing in through the window, I met Pete still standing guard outside the door. He escorted me back to my room, and I had another sleepless night.

  “You look like shit,” someone said from across the table.

  I looked up, and it was Brad. After two days of looking for him, there he was. He placed his tray on my empty table and sat across from me.

  “You’re still here,” he stated with a smile.

  “I don’t think you’re the only one who’s surprised.”

  “I like guys who are full of surprises,” he grinned.

  “Then you’ll love me,” I said with a chuckle.

  Brad tilted his head, looking at me curiously. “So, why are you here, Ford?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re all here for something. Fame, fortune… love. Ha! So why did you grace us with your presence?”

  I thought about that. Why was I here? The first thing that popped into my mind was, Why not be here? I have to be somewhere. But I knew that was me dodging the question. I then thought about Laura and leaving my job. Neither of those things explained why I chose to come here.

  “Those questions, I guess,” I told Brad.

  “Which questions?”

  “You know, the unemployment questions. Didn’t you get them?”

  “No.”

  “I told my cyber assistant to fill out my unemployment forms, and it began asking me questions. I think it was a program that helps you find your next job.”

  “You mean questions like, ‘How do you like to spend your time?’” Brad asked curiously.

  “Yeah. And, ‘Would you rather climb a mountain or kayak across a lake?’”

  “I didn’t get those.”

  That surprised me. I had assumed that everyone here had heard about the show through his cyber assistant. Brad was looking at me, confused, so I explained further.

  “I think it’s a program that monitors you over time, assessing your interests. My assistant would ask me the questions everywhere. I would be watching a drama feed through my contact lenses, and it would ask me about the professions on the show. I would walk into a store, and it would ask me about the environment and whether or not I felt comfortable there. They were endless.”

  “And after assessing you, it suggested that you audition for a game show?” Brad asked, intrigued.

  “No, it didn’t suggest anything. It would just make random statements like, ‘You are unfit for ninety-eight percent of all professions.’ And, ‘The odds of you finding a job are 1 in 10,000.’”

  “Damn. That’s brutal.”

  “Yeah, I know, right?” I agreed. “Then one day it told me about an opening. It was for this show, and I had been prequalified. All I had to do was show up. So I did.”

  “That’s weird,” Brad decided.

  “I guess.”

  I took a second to think about it. I hadn’t talked to anyone about this part of the process before. I had just assumed all cyber assistants presented their results that way.

  However, now that I was thinking about it, why had it presented the information in a negative light rather than a positive light? Instead of saying I was “unqualified for ninety-eight percent of all jobs,” it could have said that I was qualified for 500 jobs, or whatever number two percent represents.

  It almost felt like my assistant was grooming me. It was trying to scare me into taking whatever job it suggested next, and it had worked. Was that normal for an assistant?

  “I could tell that this wasn’t your life’s passion,” Brad said, recapturing my attention.

  “Huh?”

  “Watching you, I could tell that being on a game show wasn’t your life’s goal.”

  “Oh. Yeah, you’re right,” I replied with a smile. “I hadn’t even seen a game show before coming here. You?”

  “Well, let’s just say that entertainment is in my blood.”

  I froze. The word “entertainment” was often used as a code word for a few unsavory things. What was he telling me?

  “But,” he added with a broadening smile, “I’m proud to say, I’ve made a pretty good living, and I’ve done it without them putting a chip in my head.”

  Well, that narrowed things down. What’s more, it impressed me. Never having given it much thought, I just assumed that everyone in entertainment had chips. Of course, I didn’t have a chip in my head, and I was here. So maybe it was time to adjust my thinking.

  I turned my attention back to Brad as he continued. “If you watched the game show feeds, you’d probably recognize me. I’ve done a show or two in the last few years.”

  Was this guy really game-show-famous? I considered it briefly until realizing that he had given me an opening.

  “Then you would know how this show works?”

  “This one? Hard to tell. This is a new one. New game shows pop up all of the time. Some never make it to production. Some are shot and never air. But the goal in all of them is the same: be the last man standing.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “The number one rule? Make allies.”

  “But this is a dating show. Why would I need allies?”

  “As long as people are being eliminated, you need allies to stay in the game.”

  Pete bumped my leg, ending our conversation. We were being herded together for a group date announcement. Gathered between the buffet line and the tables, Mustache Gray was given a card. This time the daters were Mustache Gray, his round-chested buddy Bob, Carl, a loner guy named Sam, and Buck-Naked Billy.

  I leaned over and whispered to Brad, “Why is that dude always naked?”

  “He’s a nudist. It’s his archetype. The producers cast the show based on our archetypes.” He pointed at Carl. “He’s the blue-collar construction worker. And that guy, Sam, he’s into meditation and all of that crap.”

  “So, Construction Carl and Sam the Spiritualist?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That’s probably what they called them.”

  “So, what are you?” I asked, thinking he would be the friendly bartender archetype.

  Brad smiled from ear to ear. “Can’t you tell? I’m the charming villain.”

  A chill ran down my spine. Was I talking to the man who was responsible for Kurt and Ian’s death? “So you killed Kurt?” I ask calmly.

  “Oh, I heard about that,” he said, less amused. �
�You thought you saw someone die at the dock.”

  “He did die. Did you kill him?”

  My muscles tensed waiting for his reply. I was ready. I had sized him up, and I was sure that I could take him.

  He became serious. “Just to be clear, no, it wasn’t me.”

  I searched his face as he looked into my eyes. As far as I could tell, he was telling the truth.

  “But you remember Kurt, right?”

  “From the first night? Yeah. The three of us were talking at the bar. He was a superhero looking guy.”

  A rush of air filled my lungs, sending tingles down my arms. I hadn’t realized it, but I had been holding my breath. I didn’t have to anymore though, because there it was. Brad remembered him too. Kurt had been real.

  I felt lighter. That was one mystery solved. Now I had to get to the bottom of Brad’s villainy.

  “So, if you didn’t kill him and Ian, who did?”

  “Ian? Wasn’t he the guy who got eliminated because he didn’t enter the ring?”

  “I guess.”

  Brad appeared to size me up before responding. “You do know that all of this is make-believe, right? That this is a TV show and that murder as entertainment is still against the law?”

  “What if this isn’t a TV show?” I countered.

  Brad looked at me with a smug smile. “I think I just figured out your archetype. You’re the paranoid one.”

  I had to tuck away that thought for later. “But, just because I’m paranoid…”

  He continued, “Doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you? Of course.”

  Brad mirrored my serious tone until a smile returned to both of our faces. I laughed.

  I was beginning to like Brad. He didn’t seem to have many layers. What you saw with him was what you got. It would turn out to be a real shame if he was trying to kill me. I only forgave my girlfriends for that.

  He continued, “So, my paranoid friend, lesson number one: recognizing your allies.”

  Brad pointed at the five guys trying to decipher the clue to their group date.

  “They are now the enemy. It’s us against them. They’re going on their group date tomorrow morning. We won’t see Rose again until the next elimination. That means that we have two or three days to make sure that one of theirs is the next one eliminated and not one of ours.”