Muse

by M. Lynne Cunning

  Lauren doubted it, and a quick glance in Dean’s direction confirmed it. He was watching her, and evidently from his amused expression, her turmoil over this was written blatantly on her face. The fact that he was enjoying it was what really bothered Lauren.

  She knew she couldn’t get around it. She had moved all the way from Texas for this, uprooting her life with her husband. This was supposed to be what she wanted, to have the opportunity to think outside the box and break down the walls that blocked her literary abilities from coming back up to the surface. Instead, she was over-thinking it, quickly coming up with a multitude of reasons why she couldn’t possibly go along with such an outlandish assignment. She needed this, and she needed to remember that. Lauren could practically hear Nadine saying the words again in her ear.

  What would Sarah do?

  “You have until the beginning of tomorrow’s class to hand in your work,” Anthony was saying. “Be bold! Be brave! And be sure to skim through the first chapter of the textbook so it at least looks like you’re being taught the tedious things the school board requires me to teach you.”

  Lauren wasn’t bold or brave, but she had created the character of Sarah and she knew Sarah could be exactly those two things. Instead of finding all the reasons why she couldn’t or shouldn’t do this assignment, Sarah would be tackling it with an enthusiastic fervor. She didn’t have to like Dean in order to succeed in this assignment, she just needed to take control of it and use her imagination. Lauren took in a sharp breath and turned to Dean.

  “Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “I think the key here, Sarah, is that there still has to be that tension and conflict, even with romance or erotica.” Dean tapped his pencil against the plastic arm of the chair, watching her as he contemplated their next move. She let out a sigh of frustration.

  “You’re just thinking it through too much,” he offered.

  “I have to think about it in order to decide what to write, Dean.”

  He arched a brow at her response. “Play with the idea. Don’t treat it like it’s work. You’re too rigid. It’s play, not work.”

  After two hours of remaining huddled up in the back corner of the lecture theater, she and Dean had barely made any leeway on the assignment itself, but the building up of their idea was almost palpable. They were on the edge of something poetic. Ideas were scribbled haphazardly across the pages of his notebook, each of them taking turns grabbing for the pencil, jotting things down as the thoughts entered their minds. Alone, the words meant nothing, but together, there was something different there, Lauren could feel it.

  What would Sarah do? It was time to try a new tactic. She breathed in and out, then began to talk herself through the concepts she was working with.

  “Readers of romance are drawn to the darkness, the vulnerability of the characters they are reading about. What if…” Lauren grabbed the notebook from Dean’s hands, the pencil audibly scratching across the page as she pressed it erratically against the paper. Dean watched her, seeming intrigued. When she handed the pencil back to him and turned the notebook back over, it was Lauren’s turn to watch his reaction to the words she’d written.

  The reckless robbing of breath and passion of others, the beating heart and boiling blood, halted by the creation of a…

  Dean looked up at Lauren incredulously, and she blushed. “What? Too much?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s fantastic. Dark, definitely deep. However,” Dean held the page out, then added a few words of his own and handed the notebook and pencil back to Lauren. “Your thought wasn’t finished yet.”

  Lauren lowered her gaze to the page in front of her and bit her lip to hold back the gasp trapped in her throat.

  Halted by the creation of a monster.

  “A monster?” Lauren said.

  “At first glance, my initial thought was of a need that can never be met, a passion and an urgency that can never be quenched. Not a physical monster, an emotional one.” Dean’s eyes locked with Lauren’s and a small grin played on his lips. “Maybe that’s what love is.” Then he shrugged. “You wanted darkness and vulnerability.”

  His eyes were sparkling with mischievousness. Lauren felt engulfed by the train of thought, the words suddenly tumbling from the depths of her imagination with such reckless abandon she could almost hear a seductive voice in her own mind whispering them to her, begging for her to eternalize them on the page before her.

  “Give me that.” Lauren picked up the pencil again and began to write feverishly, the adrenaline and urgency overtaking her. Dean turned his head awkwardly to see her words as they appeared on the paper, staying silent as he let her work through the thought. Finished, she gave him a satisfied grin and handed him the page.

  The longing to stake and burn my inner demons overcomes me, yet the unbearable hunger for release overpowers all else.

  “Christ, Sarah,” Dean whispered. He raised his eyes to hers and smiled fully this time. “It sounds like a living, breathing monster, but that monster is within us all. The desire, the physical need that takes over our rational thinking. It’s dark, it’s vulnerable, but it’s also truth in its most raw form. Spectacular.”

  Lauren returned his smile with one of her own, feeling accomplished and proud. She’d finally had a good idea and been able to put it down onto paper. That was more than she’d been able to do in weeks.

  “You’re pretty spectacular yourself, Dean,” she admitted, and she meant it.

  CHAPTER 9

  The sun was already beginning to set when Lauren made her way back to the dormitory. The excitement and sense of accomplishment she felt after spending the day creating such a poetic piece of writing with someone so passionate and intrigued by the craft had relieved her so much that she’d walked an extra fifteen minutes in order to pick up a bottle of cheap wine, in a carton no less, at the closest convenience store.

  It wasn’t the greatest wine, but it didn’t matter. Lauren had been freed of her writer’s block, her imagination had been set on fire by collaboration with a like-minded fellow student, and she felt fantastic for being able to aid in the writing of a piece of work she may never have delved into otherwise. She deserved a little celebration, and if cheap wine and an evening of working on her own novel was what she wanted, she hoped her newly unlocked imagination would allow for it.

  Once inside with her dorm room door locked, Lauren set the carton of wine on her desk and reached for her cell phone as she kicked off her shoes, hoping to hear Michael’s voice and tell him of the day’s achievements. For the second time that day, the phone continued to ring three times and then went to voice mail. Upon hearing the disembodied robotic male voice advise her to leave a message at the tone, Lauren did her best not to sound too deflated over not being able to get in touch with him.

  “Hey Michael, it’s just me. What a day. Call me when you have a moment and I’ll tell you all about it. I love you.”

  She ended the call and set the phone up to charge. She knew she should call Nadine and rattle on about the day’s events, but decided to wait. Hopefully, she would be able to share her feeling of pride with Michael first. He would call her back. She would wait for him.

  After changing into her silk pajama pants and thin-strapped tank top, Lauren sat down in front of her laptop. She twisted off the plastic top to open the wine while she waited for the computer to boot up. One sip from the carton was all it took for her to know she wouldn’t be buying cheap wine in a box again. Nevertheless, bad wine was better than no wine.

  The computer flashed to life and the screen displayed the same scene Lauren had been battling for weeks, the flashing cursor at the end of the same sentence. In the scene, Sarah had just glanced up with the intent of coolly dismissing the valiant voice that requested to buy her a drink, only to meet the gaze of a man whose eyes have caused her breath to catch in her throat. He was meant to be the one Sarah needed, the man who wasn’t intimidated by her self-assured ways. However, she ha
d been such an independent and assertive character from the beginning, Lauren struggled with creating the kind of man someone like Sarah would want. She didn’t need to be taken care of, protected, or babied.

  Lauren struggled with the concept that a woman like Sarah would desire an equal, someone to match her strength and complement her passion for life. The more Lauren thought about it, the more she realized her struggling was caused by her own inability to identify with Sarah, not the mysterious love interest that eluded her.

  Until now.

  Today, Lauren had gotten the first forbidden taste of what it was like to be Sarah, to feel that power and confidence in her every pore. She had found out what it was like to face a situation that Lauren herself would have cowered at, while Sarah relished in it and controlled it so that she could use it for the creative outlet that it was. Sarah was powerful, impressive, and intriguing as a character, and until today, Lauren had never thought of nor met anyone who could match her assertiveness as well as her creativity on such a passionate and intimate level.

  But Dean could. While her first impression had been of a cocky and possibly even juvenile twenty-something, his love and passion for the beauty that could be held within the written word was almost contagious. He had been able to see Lauren’s idea, the mere few words she’d written on a piece of paper, and follow the shadowy path to express the darker side of desire exactly how Lauren had intended. She was only assuming, but she guessed that some of the giggling teenagers in the front row wouldn’t have had a clue what they had meant. Dean, however, hadn’t missed a beat.

  Lauren took another swig from the carton of wine, curled her nose up as she drank it down, and began to hit the keys on her keyboard, describing him and his presence. Sarah would love him, from his dark eyes to the poetic way he spoke and owned the space he occupied. As the rhythmic tapping of the keys became faster and more urgent, Lauren knew this moment was the sole reason she had come all the way to New York.

  She had come here to bring out her inner Sarah.

  CHAPTER 10

  There was an energetic buzz among the students the next morning. It seemed Lauren wasn’t the only one filled with nervous excitement over handing in their first assignment. Also, as Anthony had so dramatically explained, the assignment had evidently brought the paired students, and perhaps even the class as a whole, closer together. The bodies were now crammed into the first nine or ten rows of seats in the room instead of being scattered about. Lauren herself had boldly moved closer to the front, choosing another aisle seat only nine rows back.

  She sipped her coffee and turned in her seat to look for Dean. When she didn’t see him, her initial thought was to panic. Calm down, she told herself, there is still another fifteen minutes or so until class starts, and Anthony isn’t even here yet. She wrapped her gloved hands tighter around the coffee cup and turned back around.

  “Hi.”

  The closeness of the voice beside her startled her, and Lauren almost dropped the cup in her hands. Eyes wide, she gripped it tightly and turned her gaze to the blond woman who had slipped into the seat beside her. “Oh, hey. You scared me.” Lauren offered her a sheepish smile as she attempted to slow her pulse rate.

  “I noticed, sorry. I guess you were intent on looking for someone and didn’t realize I sat down. I’m Libby.” The woman held out her hand. Instantly, Lauren wondered if her smile was genuine, then she mentally chastised herself for being so judgmental. She reminded herself that this was her time to change the ways she was set in. She was supposed to be Sarah, after all.

  “Sarah. I’m Sarah.” Lauren removed a gloved hand from the warm cup and shook Libby’s hand gently. “How’d you fare with yesterday’s assignment?”

  Libby bit her lip and sat back into the seat, unzipping her jacket partially. “I was late, actually. My plane got in late and I didn’t get here until everyone had been paired up. One of the girls in the front row told me what the assignment was, so I did my best on my own to come up with something. Let’s just say that sexual exploitation through words is not really my forte.”

  Lauren laughed. “It wasn’t that bad, was it? I mean, it was interesting to have to collaborate with someone else on a project like that, but I think Dean and I did well.” Lauren didn’t want to sound too sure of herself and, at the mention of his name, cast a glance toward the doors, still not seeing him.

  “Dean? Oh, I think I know who you mean. You two were up toward the back of the room, right? I’m sure that was a bit awkward, discussing sexual tension with a man you’d only just met.” Libby’s amused grin was contagious.

  Lauren shrugged, struggling not to seem embarrassed at the thought of it. “Like I said, we collaborated well. I think the outcome of our efforts was both mature and insightful.” The assertive statement escaped Lauren’s lips before she had time to realize it might come across as short if taken the wrong way. Immediately, she flashed a smile at Libby and added, “But I do hope to not have to do it again anytime soon.”

  Lauren’s gaze landed on the door opening at the left entrance of the room. She watched Anthony shuffle in, his armful of books and papers and a laptop bag slung over his shoulder making it difficult to get past the heavy door that threatened to close before he and his luggage were safely inside.

  “Looks like class is about to start soon,” Libby said.

  “Here we go again,” Lauren muttered quietly, and Libby laughed, reaching over the arm of the chair to pat her hand.

  “I will leave you two to go at it again,” and she winked at Lauren. Questioningly, Lauren arched an eyebrow and watched Libby stand, smiling at the sight of someone beside her. Lauren turned to see Dean coming down the central aisle, his eyes set on her.

  When Lauren turned back to tell Libby she didn’t have to leave, Libby was already side-stepping past other students and making her way to a seat toward the front, giving Lauren a quick wave before lowering herself into a chair. Lauren wondered if she knew some of the students in the front of the room.

  “Hey, sorry I’m late for the big reveal,” Dean remarked as he placed his book bag and jacket into the chair beside him. He sat down and watched Anthony prepare for class, a stack of papers placed in front of him.

  “Big reveal?” Somehow, Lauren didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Yeah, Anthony told me yesterday afternoon when I was handing our assignment in that he was going to be reading a few of the submissions to the class. I don’t think he intends to name names though.”

  Lauren’s first inclination was to groan in protest. Her intention had never been to show that assignment to anyone other than the professor himself. It was a written secret between Anthony, Dean, and herself. She wanted to protest. She wanted to agonize over other people being privy to their little secret. Instead, she did what Sarah would do.

  “Interesting. I’m curious to know if our masterpiece will be chosen.”

  Dean smiled. “It was a masterpiece, wasn’t it? We work well together, you and me.”

  Lauren bit the inside of her lip and faced the front when she heard Anthony clear his throat.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Anthony said. “Well, it’s safe to say that yesterday’s assignment was an eye opener for some of you. Some of you obviously struggled with the genre, feared the subject at hand, or even showed reluctance to delve into the sensuality and sexuality I had hoped you’d attempt to convey. That said, it was also blatantly obvious that some of you took a no-holds-barred approach and tackled the subject matter with such exquisite raw strength that I look forward to reading your upcoming assignments. We have a classroom full of literary geniuses in the making, my friends!” The excited whispering that followed his exclamation was quickly cut off as he continued.

  “Every now and then, a piece of prose comes along that makes a reader and writer stop in his tracks. When that moment occurs, the world as we know it seems to temporarily stop turning on its axis and the way we view that world is forever changed. I had one of those rare momen
ts last night while I sat in my armchair at home reading through some of the assignments handed in.” A few of the girls in the front row visibly deflated, their shoulders slumped in disappointment. Either they had waited until that morning to hand in their assignments, or they hadn’t handed one in at all. One way or another, they seemed to know Anthony wasn’t referring to their work.

  “One pair constructed something so darkly seductive, so riskily pensive, that I dare say their words could be used to define not only the unsustainable hunger for the most intimate of desires, but also the innate drive that causes all of us to act in our day-to-day lives despite our knowing that right or wrong fails to always exist when the need for power and control overwhelms the whole of our being.” Anthony’s hand came up to his chest, a gesture of how much he meant what he was saying.

  Dean and Lauren turned to look at each other at the same time, their eyes transfixed in a knowing stare. There was no arrogance or cockiness in the fact that they both knew Anthony was discussing their work. They had felt it as well when they’d written it together. The despair, turmoil, and internal hatred at wanting and needing something or someone so intensely that no amount of physical or emotional release could ever quench the unyielding thirst for that person’s mind, body, and soul. It was the thought they had attempted to portray through simple words, and evidently their attempt had been successful.

  “The reckless robbing of breath and passion of others…” Anthony’s voice echoed loudly throughout the room as he read the words Lauren and Dean had painstakingly pieced together the previous day.

  It was a short poem, but the hours it had taken for them to get it just right had been worth it. Even as Lauren heard her professor recite the words she now knew so well, she was struck by the demanding presence of the piece, how she heard the words as though she could see their meaning with her eyes.

  She thought she would be humiliated to have those sensual, intimate words read out loud, but upon hearing the artful seduction of the poem they’d created, how perfectly it all had come together, she felt the sudden urge to announce to everyone that she had been so intricately involved in the making of it.