The Forbidden Muse (Inferno Falls #2)

by Aubrey Parker

  This time, I shush her. I run my hand over her hair then wipe a tear from her newly freckled cheek.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I tell her. “Don’t you ever be sorry.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Gavin

  Two days later, on Sunday, it’s both my off night, and Abigail’s. It’s a day I’ve been dreading and anticipating at the same time.

  We’re sitting in my apartment, which I’ve cleaned up more than usual for the occasion. It’s not terribly difficult; I’m reasonably spartan and don’t make much of a mess. The only thing that’s littering the place — and this is a change, stuff added beyond what’s normal — are sheets of paper where I’ve scribbled many fragments of song. The sheets from my guitar case on Friday turned out, on further inspection, to not be as terrible as I’d figured. It made me wonder about all the songs I’ve tossed, but it also made me keep what I’d written … and what I ended up writing over the next two days. There’s not a lot of music here. But it’s a start.

  My guitar is in my lap. Abigail’s across from me. Her freckles are gone again, but it felt wrong to tell her that I like them — probably because it would involve reminding her of the sorry emotional state I found her in on Friday, after we played and sang together. She was so sure I was angry, even after I told her I definitely wasn’t. She slinked around all night even after Freddy said he wanted her help. Even after I assured her that apologies were unnecessary. She simply got drinks and rarely looked toward the stage. And maybe, in the end, that was fine. Because if she’d looked at me, I might have played the new song. I doubt she’d have joined in again, but I remember the refrain. I could wing it. Or I could play the melody and remember the feeling of what may have already been forgotten.

  She seems happy but reserved. Whatever made her sing that first night is gone, but the ghost remains. It’s as if Abigail feels she did something terrible and now must atone. This despite my unstated assurances that all is well, that I took no offense. But because “took no offense” isn’t the same thing as “it didn’t bother me,” I keep my words to myself and try to show her all is well through my smile, my body, and words that feel safer.

  The song, on Friday, was close to the bone. It was about me. And Grace. It was about tragedy. And moving on.

  The way I remember it making me feel as I played, it’s hard to disbelieve in muses or the magic of creation. What Abigail sang, she barely should have known or even guessed. I could have written those words myself, if I’d been brave enough. And good enough.

  Because Freddy was right about that much, for sure. Abigail told me that she’s a writer, but never that she wrote lyrics. She probably didn’t even know she could, but she’s a natural. The way she describes getting stuck trying to write stories and books, that’s an asset in creating the few words a song needs to live and breathe. Abigail, writing anything long, second-guesses every sentence then never gets off the ground because she rewrites everything. But for lyrics — that’s exactly what’s needed.

  She’s a natural.

  I won’t let her try our song again, and she seems happy enough without it. That song is too raw — both for its content and for Abigail’s sense of unwanted intrusion. I don’t feel like she’s intruding, but she sure does. To me, if I could bear the song’s message as a whole, I’d find her work on it appropriate. Because what I had with Grace was beautiful, and Abigail’s words made the song pretty enough to hurt. The way its story unfolded felt true enough to crush me.

  Sorrow. Despair. And then moving on.

  This is hard enough. From where I sit, I can practically see Grace’s ghost sitting beside Abigail on the love seat. Grace never greeted the day in this apartment, but she did sit on that couch. She wrote on that couch. With me across from her, just like this. And the way Abigail writes lyrics, it’s like she’s channeling her spirit. I can hear Grace’s throaty voice singing every word. It’s as if the song is bespoke, custom crafted for us. Just for me. And then just for us — this time, apparently, me and Abigail and Freddy — all over again.

  I never cheated on Grace. Not until now.

  After a few hours of working, I simply stop playing mid-song and set the guitar aside. The longer we played, with Abigail singing bits here and there to try them out, the more clearly I could feel Grace’s hand on my shoulder. I’ve slept with so many women since her passing that I might have forgotten the way we made love. But now I see that our time in bed wasn’t the way Grace and I made love at all.

  It was this. It was writing. It was my mind entering hers, and hers entering mine. The two of us blended to create beautiful things. New life was born, a combination of what was mine and what was hers, becoming what would forever be ours.

  “What?” Abigail says after singing an extra word beyond my final strum. “Want to try it from the beginning?”

  But no. I’m spent. I’m dry. I’ve had too much delirious creative lovemaking, and now the guilt is settling in. I could no longer meet Abigail’s eyes. I looked up from the frets that last time and had to stop mid-thrust, my energy limp.

  “Let’s take a break,” I say.

  And in my head, I hear Grace’s voice, not really Grace’s voice but maybe just my voice, add: Forever.

  “Didn’t you like that one?”

  But again: No. It’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s that I liked it too much. It was too easy. Too fluid. The words were almost coming to me at the same time she was singing them, even though I’d never heard them before. I’m a shit lyricist, but Grace always said that finding the right words was easy once you saw well enough where they needed to go. She said that my music cast a shadow, and that all she had to do was to look at the shadow’s shape to see what was missing. It’s been like that with Abigail, but now I see the shadows, too. I couldn’t do this alone. I couldn’t see the shape without her guiding me. But with her here, it’s as if we could write all night. I’ve saved money for studio time, enough to cut an album, and there’s enough behind either Freddy or Abigail to make it happen immediately. She wouldn’t ask her parents, and I wouldn’t ask her to ask. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Tonight, I feel the will. And see the way.

  It took Firecracker Confession years to claw our way toward a deal. But whatever this is, here, could go indie, and we could cut an album on our own in weeks at this pace, once Freddy’s involved. A few weeks, and we could pass all that Grace and Charlie and I fought for. And with Freddy’s brain, we could make it, too. We could be big. Enough to turn my old friends into a footnote.

  “I just need a rest.”

  “But we didn’t even finish the song.”

  “It’s enough.”

  Abigail looks like she might ask further, but understands enough to give me space. I doubt she truly gets all that’s in my head, but I’m comparing her to Grace inside my mind enough that she’d be blind not to sense it. She writes like Grace. She thinks like Grace. Even though Grace’s hair and complexion were different, Abigail even looks like Grace sometimes. It’s not physical. It’s deeper. It’s a similarity of the person under the skin, as if the same soul gave them breath. They stand the same way. They walk the same way. They laugh the same way and smile the same way. Their eyes light up the same way when something strikes them as funny, and they shut down the same way when I say something stupid. They even kiss the same. I’m afraid to find out what else might be the same, but given the way Abigail’s hair shines in the sun, I’m sure they’d look the same asleep in the morning, as the day’s first rays beg them to greet the world.

  Instead of speaking, she stands from the love seat, half circles the coffee table, and joins me on the couch. If I still had my guitar, I’d be stabbing her, or jabbing her with my strumming elbow. But with it gone, she fits against me as neatly as words into a song’s shadow.

  “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”

  I nod. The way she’s leaning, she’s below me and can’t see it, but she must sense the movement, and the fact that I don’t feel quite stro
ng enough to respond out loud.

  “I only want to do it if you do.”

  I laugh. It’s not a real laugh; it’s me trying to break the moment. “Freddy wants it.”

  “Freddy can go stuff his hat.”

  I actually sit up, away from Abigail. I look her full in the eyes.

  “‘Stuff his hat’?”

  “You know. Piss off. Go away.”

  “Is that a real expression?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “You don’t just get to make up old-timey-sounding expressions.”

  “Apparently, making things up is now my job.”

  I resettle. Abigail leans back into me. The exchange should have been funnier, but it’s too familiar. I’m living a replay. I can’t help but feel like this is Take 2, and that this is a road I’ve been down before. One take replaces the one before. And what’s more, I already know how scripts like this end if you get too vested in the story, and I can’t endure another final scene like the one I had to live through.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I say.

  “Other than music.”

  “Mmm. All work and no play makes Gavin a dull boy.”

  “What do you want to play?”

  “It was an expression.”

  “Like ‘stuff your hat’?”

  “That’s not an expression.”

  Abigail wiggles against my side like a cat getting comfortable on a blanket. “I could tell you about work.”

  “That’s too depressing.”

  “Well then, what? I’m a waitress when I’m not whatever this is, which you don’t want to talk about.”

  “Tell me about you.”

  The words leave my lips like refugees escaping malevolence. I don’t want to hear her answer. Which is to say that I very much do, but can’t. We should talk about work. If I cared about sports, we could talk about baseball. Or maybe the weather.

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  But I started this. So more words escape, now running for the fence because the guards are asleep.

  “You have siblings?”

  She nods against me. “Three sisters and a brother. All superstars.”

  “Superstars?”

  “My oldest sister went to the Olympics. My brother is a NASA physicist.”

  “Lightweights.”

  “He got his NASA job at age eighteen.”

  “Pfft.”

  “My mom is a best-selling author. Have you ever heard of Sally Powell?”

  “No.”

  “Well, trust me. She’s famous in the right circles. Her book was called Mesmerize. It’s all about psychology, about understanding people on a practical, real-life level so you can relate. Mostly in business, but it applies to personal relationships, too.”

  “What would it say about us?”

  Abigail peeks up at me. I shouldn’t have said that. I meant to imply a working relationship, but she clearly took it as personal. Abigail and I and the relationship I can’t bear to have. And here she is leaned against me, cuddled up and cozy, as if for a Friday night movie.

  “It would probably say that I’m not good enough.”

  “For me? That’s hard to imagine.”

  “Just in general. ‘Achieve more, Abigail! Be like your sisters and brother!’”

  “Oh, she couldn’t have said that.”

  “Go get the book. Nobody’s names are used, but you can easily see the do’s and don’ts. It’s clear that some of the author’s kids did right by their inborn talents, and one didn’t.”

  “At least she says you have inborn talent.”

  “Yes. For an Ivy League education. But I couldn’t do that anymore. It never felt like it was about letting talents go. It felt like a decision not to be part of something shitty.”

  “You mean Princeton?”

  She nods. “Princeton, and my fiancé, Brian.”

  Fiancé. I’d heard it before, but this time I flinch.

  Abigail was almost married?

  The idea unseats something inside me. I’m not sure how I feel, but it’s definitely a convergence of emotions I’m not sure I have any right to. I’m a bit irritated that she’s kept this from me, even though we’re not exactly at the point where we’re sharing all our secrets, and she doesn’t even know about me and Grace, about why the loss of my bandmates is so particularly difficult — and hard for the two of us, together. But I’m also something on the spectrum of jealous. And I’m curious, because breaking up with a boyfriend is one thing. Stopping a marriage? That’s something else.

  “What happened with him? Why ‘something shitty’?”

  “He was the perfect man for who I was supposed to be. That’s what makes the idea of going home again, even just for a holiday, so hard. Because my parents didn’t approve of my breaking it off any more than they were happy about Princeton. To them, I was probably a little like a dog that suddenly turned one day, after years of companionship, and bit them. I tried to explain, but they just didn’t get it. Worse, I don’t think they believed me about him.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was sleeping with everyone. Like it was his job. And certainly at his job.”

  “Your parents didn’t believe it?”

  “Didn’t believe it or didn’t care. Maybe that’s how high-ticket marriages work. Like marrying princesses and princes from different lands to make the kingdom stronger, and maybe the prince and princess have an understanding, that they can take their needs to other people, or at least not pretend to take them with each other. My folks know his parents. They know that Brian’s marriage and perfect life went on after I left. I just wasn’t part of it.”

  I shift. “Well, good for you.”

  “Tell that to my mother.”

  There’s a minute or two of quiet between us. It’s almost entirely silent. I don’t know what my neighbors are up to, but it’s either nothing, or they have very quiet televisions and personal lives. Abigail and I could be alone in a cabin in the woods for all I hear stirring. The thought makes me uncomfortable, and I want to stand to break our half embrace, but my body won’t obey. Because as much as I can’t allow it to happen, looking down at Abigail just makes me want to kiss her. I want to reach down, tip her chin up toward me, and gaze into her eyes. I want to wipe that self-conscious concealer from her face and tell her how beautiful she is when she lets her nature shine. She left home behind. She left school and an old life and a stodgy family behind. Her life is here now, but nobody will come stalking. She doesn’t need to hide, and certainly not from me. Not from who she is.

  I should end the night. I should pack up and show her to the door, promising we’ll start tomorrow — or, even better, the next day or the one after that. We’ve been too close lately. It’s like we’ve come through the back door into a relationship I didn’t intend or give my permission for. We’re acting like people in the comfortable stage, after the getting-to-know-you and awkwardness is past, even though we never trudged through what came before it. We’re settled without ever having adjusted. We’re dating without having dated. That first date doesn’t count. Now we’re an old couple, and suddenly if it’s to be over as … as whatever we are … I feel like I’d need to stage a breakup. It’s not fair. I didn’t want this. So I should end it because of how badly I crave it.

  But I don’t. Instead, I feel Abigail’s warmth against me. My defiant hand, almost of its own accord, reaches down and brushes a sheaf of red hair away from her face.

  “How are you doing this?” I ask.

  Meaning bewitching me. Mesmerizing me, maybe. Stealing me from my clung memories like water stolen through a wick. Making me do things I’d normally never do, like resisting. I don’t normally oppose my impulses with women. It’s a bit of a paradox, and a real ballbuster. She may be the first girl I’ve ever had to my apartment without taking her to my bed, as if she were a human being instead of a thing, or a pill to temporarily cure what ails me. But this time, something in me
warns me not to scratch the itch. We’re in a bubble, and I’m terrified of popping it.

  But because that’s not what I really mean, not to Abigail and definitely not to myself, I clarify.

  “Most of the songs we’ve been working on, I’d have thrown away. And I sure don’t have lyrics for any of them. So how are you making the words?”

  “They’re just coming to me.”

  “But they fit. Perfectly.”

  “Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”

  But I don’t just mean that the rhythm of the words fit the rhythm and meter of the music. I mean that they fit the situation. They’re telling the story that I didn’t know I was spinning. They’re too true. It’s like my reflection is speaking to me, informing me of what I realize I already knew.

  “I guess.”

  “Why don’t you write your own lyrics, anyway?”

  “I’ve tried. They never come out right.”

  “Not ‘right’ how? Like you can’t find words that work?”

  “Like they’re a joke. They’re shallow and worthless. Grace’s — ”

  I stop. Grace’s lyrics were true, and mine always sound like lies, is what I was going to say. But I didn’t mean to say her name. As Abigail looks up at me, trying to keep the surprise from her face and failing, I feel like I’ve dropped a precious glass bauble and it’s shattered. Or rather, it almost shattered, and now someone who shouldn’t touch it is about to reach down to retrieve it. But that thought is enough to finally pop the bubble, and I cut Abigail off before she can repeat Grace’s name, ask questions, or prompt me to continue my cut-off sentence. I’ve led us into something raw. A place where I should tread alone. A hallowed ground of sacred pain. I feel myself gathering armloads of precious torture, holding it tight, savaging myself with ancient torment. It’s mine. This is my hell, not hers. Not anybody’s. I’ll walk it alone, and want no company.

  “It’s getting late,” I say, sitting up.

  It’s not. Not for us. Not for two people who work into the wee hours. But I’m standing a second later, and Abigail stays on the couch, half-slouched, looking whipped.