Sweet Muse

by Ava Cummings

  “I’ve wanted this for a long time,” he says.

  I tentatively look up, scared to meet his blazing eyes, frightened by the intensity. He leans down ever so slowly. My heart races. I’ve ached for this moment since I fell into his arms at The Bubble Lounge.

  As he slowly moves in, I close my eyes and tune in to my other senses, feeling the roughness of his strong hands on me, smelling his mix of sweet smoke and spicy warmth, listening to the sound of his breath, now ragged with emotion, so close to me. His lips graze mine, as though he’s tasting a delicate sweet. They feel soft but firm, full of feeling and history.

  He goes deeper, like he’s exploring, measuring, learning me and all my lines, curves, and angles. He presses his lips to mine, and threads his firm, sculpted arms around my waist, pulling me toward him in one commanding move. I respond, returning the pressure of his lips. It feels like two pieces of a puzzle coming together. I fall into him, reeling from the headiness of it, of him.

  We’re all hands and lips and mouths, furiously releasing a sea of emotions that’s been building for weeks. I feel as if I could cry or laugh; I’m not sure which.

  He pulls back, hands cupping my face again, looking deep into my eyes, into my soul, where he pauses for several beats. I meet his gaze and hold it, riding the waves of emotion that flood between us.

  “I have plans for us,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  19

  Cradle of Joy

  Damien intertwines his hand with mine as we walk down Lafayette and round the corner of Bond Street. It’s beautiful out, perfectly warm and clear. The city feels alive with possibility, like it’s cradling me in its arms and giving me a gift. I look up to the sky and the buildings aglow with lights, and I feel on top of the world.

  “Hey, what’s going on in there?” Damien turns to me and points to my head. His broad shoulders and muscled chest fill the space between us.

  “Oh…,” I hesitate, taking in the strong line of his cheekbone, the shimmer of city light on his forehead, his burning eyes fixed on me. “Just having a New York moment…when you feel like there’s no other place you could ever live.”

  He nods. I feel heat coming off him in waves of warmth. As if basking in the summer sun, I want to close my eyes and drift.

  “This city can be the most unique, intense, wonderful place. You can reinvent yourself, become whoever you’ve wanted to be, who you’re meant to be,” he says, taking the loose thoughts that have been tumbling around in my mind for years and crystallizing them at the exact right moment. Like a caterpillar that turns in a butterfly, I came here not fully formed but ready to blossom into my true self.

  “This is my favorite restaurant in the city,” he says, stopping in front of a beautiful little gem of a place. I gaze up to the softly illuminated sign above the door that reads, Il Buco. “It’s my home away from the studio.”

  The funky, cluttered restaurant is small and cozy, and its dark wood walls are lined with wine bottles. It feels sophisticated but in a low-key way, not like the places Alec took me. This is honest, come as you are, lovingly presented. We’re shown to a corner table that’s warmly secluded, like we’re in our own private space.

  Damien orders a bottle of pinot grigio, which we drink quickly, cutting the first-date tension. We’re both feeling the effects of the wine as we graze on cod croquettes and tuna carpaccio with honey-roasted plums.

  He reaches out and rests his hand on my arm, studying the curve of my elbow. His fingers smooth the black fabric of my silken shirt, eyeing the way the light hits the folds, how it drapes from my body. Damien’s strong hands, Damien’s rough fingertips, Damien’s surveying eye.

  “What are you wearing underneath that beautiful outfit?” he asks, looking into me, through me. I give him a coy, funny look. Suddenly, I feel seen, bared to him, as if he can uncover me completely. It’s stark, fearful a little, yet also thrilling.

  “Anything sexy?” he continues, unfazed.

  “Maybe,” I say, unsure how to respond. This is not your usual first date, get-to-know-you chatter. Nothing with Damien is ever by the book.

  “Really?” he says, perking up.

  “Well, I do get a lot of freebies at work…sometimes I get lingerie,” I venture, thinking of the Cosabella thongs I got from Bernie.

  “Are you wearing it now?” he says, leaning in, his hair falling into his eyes, heat radiating from his fingertips.

  “I don’t know. Would you like it?”

  “If you’re wearing it,” he says, his fingertips squeezing my arm.

  His directness, his intensity careens from him, across the table, and hits me with a physical crash into my chest. I can’t breathe. I need to get some air. I feel out of control, overwhelmed. “Excuse me for a sec,” I say, pushing back from the table.

  But before I can go anywhere, Damien crystallizes another preformed thought. “Look at you. Your eyes. You are scared to death, Anna Starr. I can tell, because for what I suspect is the first time in your life, you’re not in control.”

  I open my mouth to tell him he’s wrong, but my throat closes up on me. He’s sitting right there, breathing so close to me with his thick lips, staring into me to the very core of my heart with his delicious amaretto eyes.

  I wet my lips and get up, taking a step backward.

  “Sit down, Anna. You’re staying right here. With me. Tonight, I’m getting to know you.” Like in a romantic movie, he grabs my hand and kisses it.

  I sit back down and lean into my chair. He doesn’t let go of my hand, physically assuring me that he will give me the strength and courage to peel back some of the layers.

  “It’s that sort of night, isn’t it?” Damien tips his head back and swallows the rest of his glass of wine. “Anything could happen.”

  His questions are intimate, personal. I find myself sharing things I never tell anyone. Like opening a Pandora’s box, a flood of emotions has been released. The words keep coming out. I’m terrified, yet emboldened with my palm safely tucked inside his.

  “It’s my dad,” I say, when he asks me about disappointment. I pick up my empty wine glass and turn it around in my hand. My nerves are bustling and zinging. I go on to explain how he left when I was nine to go study in India with his guru and hasn’t been around much since.

  He doesn’t respond with words, but I see something in him change. His face takes on weight, as if the air has grown heavy on him. Before I build up the courage to bravely probe, the waiter brings over the most gorgeous tiramisu and two forks. Damien, palpably relieved, jumps to explain that the chef’s mother comes in and makes it every day. That her recipe has been passed down through four generations of Italian mamas.

  “It’s heaven on a fork,” he says, cutting off a piece and bringing it up to my mouth.

  I lean in as he slowly slides the fork, piled high with cake and cream, toward me. With his eyes focused on my mouth, he watches as I taste the ambrosial concoction, an explosion of sweetness and creaminess enveloping my tongue.

  “It’s incredible,” I say, the heavenly tiramisu still arousing each and every taste bud. I feel close to him in a way that’s thunderous.

  “Favorite color?” he says, softballing a question. It’s a relief to talk about something easy after the intensity.

  “Pink. I’m a girly girl at heart,” I say, playing with the corners of my napkin, folding it in a hundred different ways.

  “Pink…interesting,” he says, nodding his head. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a pink girl.”

  “Underneath this tough exterior, there’s a sweet little girl,” I say, running my damp palms down the legs of my jeans.

  We eat the last of the tiramisu. I put my fork down and rest my hand on the table. Damien softly takes hold of it, gently stroking the top with his thumb. I’m struck by the tenderness, the closeness of the action. How it’s something a well-worn couple would do.

  “What’s yours?” I ask.

  He moves his strong, broad-shouldered body back i
n his chair, fingers his wine glass, the white liquid glinting in the warm light, and eyes me thoughtfully. “It’s hard to ask an artist that question. Not a simple answer. Color is like a life form, a medium that imparts meaning into my work. I like to use it, even saturate with it. But I like the absence of it, as well.”

  “Haven’t answered the question,” I say teasingly. He uncrosses his legs and leans forward on his arms.

  “If I had to, I’d say red. It’s a primary color, so it’s powerful. And it’s powerful in its raw form too. So strong, vibrant, commanding, a statement, impossible to ignore, complex in the moods it can draw, with its many shades from bright with love to dark with blood, like birth and death all rolled into one.”

  He pauses, not feeling the awkwardness that’s settling on my side of the table. The way he’s looking at me, seeing me again, studying me like he’s assessing the angles, shadows, colors, the hundreds of shades of reds, yellows, blues that come together to form the image he’s gazing at. I look down at my lap, at my hands, which are crumpled into tiny balls. Unfurling them, I mold them around a golden cappuccino that has magically landed in front of me and take a tiny sip.

  “Favorite movie?” he asks, going in for a sip of his, taking care not to break his gaze. He scans me like he’s committing the pixels and lines to memory, filling himself up on me. I pause, look down, and smooth my dampened palms again on my lap.

  “What is it?” he asks again, demanding.

  “You’ll make fun of me.”

  “No need to pretend with me, Anna,” he says, seeing me with more than his eyes. “I want to know all of you. And I’m not yet satisfied. Not even close.”

  I’m not comfortable, but I don’t think Damien wants me to be. I think he would say comfortable is boring. It’s not a state of being where creativity is born, where things happen, where possibility sits. It’s not where the truth lives, either.

  “Okay, but it’s not because of its cinematic excellence. I was just inspired by this movie to take my life in a certain direction.”

  He holds his cappuccino cup up to his lips and pours a sip into his mouth, pausing again in silence, holding the moment in his hand, waiting patiently for the vibrations of my voice to give him an answer.

  “Working Girl.”

  He folds his muscled arms in front of him in a professorial pose and then a genuine smile builds on his face as a quiet laugh erupts. “Coffee, tea, me?” he says, quoting the famous line.

  “I have a head for business and a bod for sin,” I say, quoting another well-known line.

  “Why, yes, you do.” Damien leans in, like a leopard going in for the kill, giving me a devilish, feral look.

  “And gets the guy in the end, too.” I feel my face flush and scrape my nails into my hands, trying to physically take back what just came out. He nods his head imperceptibly and leans in for another drink of his cappuccino.

  “What’s yours?” I say, eager, even desperate, for more of the delicious thoughts that draw from his brilliant mind. I want to know him, understand his mind, bask in his ideas and inspirations.

  “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” he says, explaining that it’s a French musical with Catherine Deneuve, from the ’60s. “I love the color in the film, it’s saturated with candy blues, yellows, pinks, reds—a feast for the eyes and senses. And it’s a heartbreaking love story.” He explains that the guy and the girl don’t end up together. That they still love each other and always will. “They just aren’t meant to be together,” he says, “but somehow it’s okay.”

  I start, surprised. Jolted out of my cradle of joy. Unrequited but somehow okay? He let slip something big. The whispers of a tortured, tampered soul that lurks inside him.

  How could that ever be okay?

  20

  Tears for Fears

  I arrive early to get settled, sip an overpriced cosmo, and pack up the memories of my last visit. I wince, recalling Alec tearing my panties off at the bar, and how far I went to try to make something work that was so wrong.

  Damien blows into the Oak Room in a flurry of intensity—an earnest, fervor-like presence rolls out from the very core of his being. His Ray-Ban aviators are nestled atop his thick, wavy chestnut hair, and his dark-washed jeans hug just right, hinting at the muscled quads and calves underneath. The way he moves, the commanding stride, smooth swing of his arms, he draws people to him. I spot most of the room turning to look as he enters, drawn to it just like me.

  As if on the tail end of the same gust, the questions, insecurities, and unknowns swirl around me and hang heavy, like the smoke from a cigarette in a stale room. Go with it, I tell myself, repeating it like a mantra, in an effort to take it in, believe it, try to feel it. Go with the goodness. Maybe, just maybe, good things can happen to me.

  After I finish my cosmo while he sips a Scotch, he whisks me up to a suite. Room service delivers a three-course dinner, served by candlelight on a white tablecloth adorned with a beautiful flower centerpiece.

  We feast on dry-aged rib eye and the most heavenly Gorgonzola mashed potatoes. He looks at me with his hungry eyes, as though he’s digging into my soul. As though he could see right into me and read my thoughts, without my saying a word.

  After dinner, Damien flops down and pats the spot next to him. “Come here, Anna.”

  I curl up in the good artist’s arms. God, it’s heavenly. Breathing in his spicy, sweet scent, feeling his rough, strong hands on my body, his hard, muscled arms wrapped around me. It feels like home, or what I always wanted home to be.

  “I need you to see it,” he says, with closeness and urgency, as he tells me that he’s screening The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. That he brought his DVD and had guest services set it up in the room.

  He’s right, the film is a beautiful feast for the eyes, bathed in rich, yummy colors and filled with idyllic street scenes of the tiny French town of Cherbourg.

  It’s a love story, but typically French, in that it’s tragic. Catherine Deneuve and the local car mechanic fall hopelessly in love. She becomes pregnant. He leaves for the war, and then, under pressure from her mother, she becomes convinced he isn’t good enough for her and ends up marrying a rich jeweler from Paris. The jeweler is the safe and practical choice and agrees to take care of her child as his own.

  It’s beautiful, yet overpoweringly sad. Love isn’t always enough; it can’t always overcome. Is there a hidden message in here? Are we not enough for each other? I shudder, chilled. I would want to fight for us. I’m already fighting my own issues for us. Can’t he do that? Would he be able to walk away and go on with his life, just thinking of me as a moment, a lost love that wasn’t meant to be?

  I roll over. Damien is next to me, just beginning to stir. His tousled hair looks boyishly cute. His muscled arm and artfully sculpted chest are outside the sheet as he lies on his side facing me. My eyes slowly close, and I let my head fall back in release as I imagine my body pressed to his, feeling heat rolling off him in waves, bathing in it.

  “You fell asleep,” Damien says, as a slow smile spreads across his face.

  “Did you take advantage of me?” I tease as I face him, feeling the warmth of his strong body next to mine. Lying next to him feels so foreign, yet so comfortable. The energy emanating from him draws me closer and makes me want to curl into him, completing with our bodies the human jigsaw puzzle we began to solve when our lips first met.

  “I took your jeans off so you would be comfortable. But I didn’t touch anything. Scout’s honor,” he says, arms up, palms forward in a hands-off gesture.

  “Nothing?” I say, frowning and crinkling my forehead.

  “Well, I might have peeked…”

  We both laugh and simultaneously snuggle into the blankets, like a couple that has been together for decades and mirror each other without thinking or trying. It feels warm and close, easy.

  “Sorry to crash out on you.”

  “I like taking care of you, Anna,” he says, with his intense, surveying artist’s
eye that bores into me. I’ve never been taken care of; when my dad left, that sense of being cared for flew right out the door with him. It throws me, hits me deep.

  “I always thought it was so tragic,” he says of the end of the movie. “But watching it with you, I saw it differently for the first time. In the last scene, she runs into him. She pulls her car up to get gas at his station, the one he finally saved up enough to buy so he could be his own boss. All the feelings and emotions are still there. They may not act on them, but they’re still there. I thought it was a story about how love isn’t enough. But it is. It does last. It’s always there. They may not stay together, but they rest in the knowledge that they will always love each other.”

  Damien leans over and pulls me to him. I lean my head back, my eyes closed. My body feels supple, pliant, ready to mold to his.

  “You made me see that. You…you…” He looks at me, studying me, like he’s truly seeing me in his mind’s eye. “You make me see things differently. In a new way. Thoughts, insights appear that have been right in front of me the whole time but that I couldn’t see. Anna, you inspire me.”

  Damien rolls over to his night table to take a sip of water. The muscles in his back alternately flex and release, and his shoulder blades move gracefully under his smooth, olive skin. While feasting my eyes, I notice a small tattoo on his right shoulder blade: the numbers “8484” under the head of a lion.

  “What’s the tattoo?”

  He turns back to face me quickly, almost jumping in surprise. His eyes grow dark and his mood changes, as if a storm cloud has taken over his thoughts. “I don’t talk about it.”

  I know what darkness is and can tell when someone else has known it, too. I want to ask, but he’s giving me the warning sign and I need to heed it. He deftly shifts the focus back to me, staring directly at my nipples visible through my shirt. “I can’t help myself,” he says.