The Muse Read online

  After that first panic attack, she had developed a number of different tactics for dealing with stress, but tonight nothing appealed to her. Having converted one of the unused bedrooms into an exercise room, she had installed an elliptical machine, a rowing machine, and a treadmill, as well as a full complement of weights. She had an enormous bathtub with massaging jets she could soak in. She had cable, streaming video, seasons of television shows she hadn’t seen, books available on her e-reader. If there was any time in American history to suffer from a self-enforced house arrest, this was it.

  Except, she wanted to do none of those things.

  What she wanted to do was draw. Specifically, she wanted to draw Seth. Right now she wasn’t questioning impulses, desires, needs. She had to do something to stave off the panic attacks.

  She texted Betsy and asked for the instructor’s phone number. Betsy sent it to her thirty seconds later, no questions asked. Still moving on autopilot as she paced the apartment, she texted Micah, and asked if he thought Seth would be willing to model for a private session. Micah’s response came equally quickly; I don’t know, ask him, followed by a phone number.

  She then texted Seth. Hi, Seth. It’s Arden from the drawing class. Would you be interested in modeling for me?

  She reread the text. She purposely did not include her last name; she hadn’t used it at their first class and there was no point in asking for trouble. Her brain raced ahead, composing explanations or justifications for why she was asking him, but in the end she decided not to include any. It was a simple question, easily answered with a yes or no, and she didn’t need to explain herself.

  She tapped send, then set her phone down and went to the kitchen to make herself something to eat. She wasn’t hungry, hadn’t felt hungry since the FBI showed up at Breakers Point a lifetime ago, but she knew she had to eat. Already her clothes were loose enough to tell her that the five pounds she always wanted to lose were long gone. She made herself a spinach salad with a piece of broiled salmon on top, and only after she finished it did she let herself look at her phone again.

  Sure. When?

  Alrighty then. Tonight?

  She sent the text, and as she watched, the dots appeared on the screen indicating that he was composing a reply.

  Address?

  She texted him her address then added Just off Fifth.

  Give me 30 minutes.

  She added his name to her contacts, then looked around her living room. Betsy had gone to the efforts of setting up what felt like an art class, but Arden settled for sliding the rug in the center of her living space off to the side, taking the glass-topped coffee table with it, and moving one of her dining room chairs into the cleared space. She found her easel in a top-floor bedroom closet and carried it down to the living room to set it up off to one side from the chair so the light from the setting sun would fall on Seth. She arranged her sketchpad and her pencils on the easel, then quickly tidied up the kitchen.

  Her heart was racing, and not in a good way. It fluttered like a trapped bird, with the occasional bumps as the bird knocked itself against walls and ceilings in an effort to get free. Her mind began to spiral What if drawing didn’t work nothing else had worked not cognitive behavioral therapy not biofeedback not talk therapy not exercise or diet nothing worked she had no control over this if drawing didn’t work either she had no idea what she would do

  The buzzer rang, startling her nearly out of her skin. Her heart gave one last gigantic whump, forcing the sweat from her skin, then did something very odd. It settled into a regular rhythm, fast, but one where she could count the beats. She took a deep breath, then walked forward to open the door.

  He stood between the potted miniature evergreens, and the sheer, visceral presence of him was like tripping and stumbling into a wall. Before, she had been overwhelmed by his energy, the way he moved as he walked into the room and took off his clothes, but now she could pay attention to the details. His hair was dark brown and showed the indentations of the bike helmet. She’d retained an impression of caramel; on closer inspection, his eyes were an odd, unique shade of light brown and fringed with dark thick lashes. He had a strong nose with a couple of bumps in the bridge that came from breaks. She knew this because both her brothers had had their noses broken—Garry’s in lacrosse, and Charles’s in baseball. And her mother despaired of the unsightly bumps that came as the broken bone and cartilage healed. Charles eventually had plastic surgery to repair the damage, but Garry flatly refused.

  It looked like Seth had also refused, or perhaps that simply wasn’t an option.

  “Hi,” he said. His eyebrows lifted as the end of the word did, and she came back into herself with a start.

  “Hi! Hi,” she said in a more normal tone of voice.

  “Where should I leave my bike?”

  “In here,” she said, and stepped back to let him wheel it into the foyer.

  He did, lifting the single strap of the bike messenger bag over his head and setting it down on the floor by the door as he looked around.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s very quiet.” The town house was still in her grandfather’s trust’s name, along with the farm in upstate New York, and had been renovated a few years earlier. Despite leading to the Reservoir, the street was infrequently traveled, and had lots of private town houses that had been in families for generations. Charles and Serena thought it was too small for their brood, which included a nanny, a housekeeper, and Serena’s personal assistant, who accompanied her everywhere; they had opted for a larger space on Park Avenue. Arden loved the location, just down the block from Sarabeth’s and around the corner from The Corner Bookstore, and had happily moved in.

  She led him to her main living space, a front room furnished with cozy castoffs from their property upstate, Hollow Hill Farm, and Breakers Point. Her bedroom, on the same floor, overlooked the town house’s garden and had an en suite bathroom. She turned on the floor lamps, casting pools of light over the ottoman that held her laptop and tablet, and a couple of coffee-table books. “Did you have any trouble finding me?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “None,” he said. Something in his wary expression eased when he saw the living room furniture and the easel, a single straight-backed chair between them.

  Best to get the financials out of the way first. “How much do you charge?”

  He shoved his hands in his cargo pants pockets and looked at her. “Micah pays me seventy-five for classes and a hundred even for the session at your friend’s apartment.”

  She did the mental math, and factored in how stressful the next few months were likely to be. “I’ll pay you two hundred per session. It will run just like any other class, warm-up exercises, a ten-minute sit, two forty-minute sits, with breaks in between. Plus, of course, your travel time. Does that seem fair?”

  He was shaking his head before she finished. “It’s too much. It’s no big deal for me to bike from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”

  “When I’m learning a new skill, I can be rather tenacious about it, and I’m at loose ends at the moment. I want to make this worth your while.”

  “You want to make it worth my while,” he repeated. His eyes were amused, and one corner of his mouth lifted. “In Manhattan, models are a dime a dozen. I’ve been doing this for a couple of months and nobody else has asked for private sessions.”

  There was something dark and delicious about negotiating for his time like this, especially because he seemed to take it all in stride. “Going once,” she said lightly.

  “It’s your money,” he said, the shrug both verbal and physical. He reached back and pulled his T-shirt over his head.

  Flustered, she made her way along the wall of windows, lowering the white silk blinds but angling them to filter the sunlight rather than block it entirely. The effect muted the light, and for moments, the dust, raised by the movements of lowering the blinds, hung suspended in the warm, pearly air.

  W
hen she turned back to face him, he was naked.

  She could no sooner stop herself from looking at him than she could stop herself from breathing, her eyes flickering from jaw to throat to the sword arrowing down his left side, the ridges of his abdominal muscles, the line of dark hair beginning below his navel and narrowing over his groin. From this distance, the scar tissue nestled in the hair on his legs was invisible other than small spots where the hair thinned. The light did nothing to soften the hard muscles and planes of his body but managed to heighten the colors in the tattoos adorning his forearms, biceps, and chest.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She skirted the open area, and therefore him, and took up her position at her easel. When she nodded at him, Seth pushed a button on the watch he wore. It beeped and he took a position, standing with his feet together, his arms outstretched, and his head tilted back. It was an excellent starting pose, and Arden raced to draw a quick line at the center of her paper trying to capture the indentation of his narrow waist, the swell of his chest, and the curve of his throat. The watch beeped, and Seth folded his hands under his chin, and crouched down. This time the line was about the curve of his spine nestled in the deeply muscled valley running down his back. Another beep, another shift in pose, this time down into a runner stretch. She flipped the page and drew a single line from the top of his head around his cranium down his nape to his spine, caching the swell of buttock, thigh, calf. One line. One single line. For the ten seconds of the pose, it was the only thing on her mind.

  “That’s ten,” he said, resetting his watch.

  “Do you want something to drink before we continue? I have water, wine, sparkling water, cranberry juice . . .”

  “Water would be great, thanks. Staying hydrated in these temperatures is hard to do.”

  She trotted down the stairs into the kitchen and poured him a glass of water, and brought it back up the stairs. He drank most of it, completely unself-conscious about his nudity or the fact that she was dressed. She couldn’t remember another time when nudity wasn’t something embarrassing or mysterious, something to be revealed slowly, then hidden again. Seth was an open book.

  When he finished he set the glass down on the floor by the chair. “Do you have a pose in mind?”

  She turned the chair so that it was facing the windows. “How about if you sit down,” she demonstrated, slouching down so that her bottom was on the edge of the seat, her legs extended in front of her, and crossed at the ankles.

  She got up. He sat down and mirrored her pose, working his shoulders against the back of the chair until he was comfortable. “That’s fine. Where do you want my arms?”

  Back behind the easel, she perched on the barstool she’d snagged from under the breakfast counter, considered the pose, and then said, “Can you put one hand on your belly and let the other hang?”

  He tried it, resting first his right hand and then his left on his abdomen.

  “Good. Thank you.”

  He set his watch, settled into the pose. For a long minute she watched him breathe. The inhales and exhales animated his torso, lifting his shoulders, the sword moving like a held blade, threatening and protective all at once. She sketched in the big blocks of torso, head, thigh, calf, foot, the chair underneath him, then went to work at his shoulder. The line was wrong, too flat, lifeless, muddy. Frustrated, she set the pencil down and erased, then started over.

  “Do you mind talking?” she said.

  “Not if you don’t.”

  “How can you sit still for so long?” The question formed in her mouth before her brain knew it was coming. She was restless, her brain jumpy and anxious, constantly analyzing her internal state, always on the lookout for a threat or a way to defuse the threat of a panic attack. He seemed the opposite, resting in suspended animation until he brought his body to bear on the situation.

  A smile bloomed in his eyes without moving his mouth. “I learned when I was a kid, hunting with my friend’s dad. He threatened to leave us at home if we spooked the deer. I wanted to go hunting with them more than I wanted to move. When I was in the Corps, moving meant drawing attention to our position and possibly getting Marines killed.”

  “Oh.”

  Frowning, she sketched his arm, curved ridges of muscles and veins running under his skin, erased, tried again, added the general shape of his hand, then retraced her path back up the inside of his forearm, marking the faint tan lines.

  “Explain the different tan lines,” she said, distantly noting that her hand was moving of its own accord now. Shut up, left brain.

  “The one at my elbow is from rolled sleeves on my cammies, my uniform blouse. The one at my biceps is from the bike jersey. The one at my shoulder is from the shirt with the cut-out sleeves I wear when I’m running.”

  “Uniform blouse?”

  “It’s the Marine Corps. We have different terms for everything. A man’s shirt is a blouse.”

  “Um, why?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice slow and amused before he answered the question anyway. “Tradition. History. It just is.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said. This was working, as if one thing wasn’t enough to shut down the racing, chattering part of her brain. Two things, however—idle conversation and a tight focus on the shape of his chest, the way his ribs curved up to his sternum—and her frantic brain spun down. The tattoos were too much to replicate, so she focused on his body, making her way up to the notches of his collarbone, the hollow in between. Here the edges were smoother, more rounded, general. Shoulder. Chest. Until she really saw them, the way the collarbone emerged from the shoulder joint to sit atop the pectoral, lifting the skin at the base of his throat before disappearing into the strong line.

  Somehow the component pieces of him fit together, the line of his jaw, his full mouth, the twice-broken nose. Distantly noticing a confidence in her hand, she followed the shape of his skull, the way the muscles in his neck held his head up, then sweeping down to his abdomen.

  “Is that scar tissue?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it happen?” she heard herself ask, adding shading to the hollow of his throat.

  “IED,” he said.

  Funny how that came out so easily. An explosion, then, ripping through . . . what? A vehicle? It must have hurt, searing into his skin as it had. She’d lost the line, was back in her head, so the persistent electronic beep coming from his watch was actually a relief. “Okay if I move?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, and risked a glance at the page. The sketch was absurd, like something drawn by someone high on pot and red wine. It was going to take some time to regain her hand skills.

  “More water? Something stronger?”

  His whiskey eyes were smiling at her. She forced herself to stop fluttering and hovering, and met his gaze. “I’m fine. I don’t need a twenty-minute break,” he said. “Can I offer some constructive criticism?”

  Arden considered herself reasonably sophisticated, but never before had she been offered constructive criticism by a man standing naked in her music room. “Sure,” she said, not sure what he meant.

  “You’re working too hard at it,” he said.

  And there was another first. She’d never been told she was working too hard at something. The bar was always out there, always just beyond her reach. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re attacking drawing like it’s an obstacle course. You’re not getting graded at the end of the semester.”

  “If I put anything in the show at the end of the class, it’s worse than getting graded. At least grades are private.”

  He gave her an utterly disarming little smile that was mostly about the corners of his mouth. “I bet you got really good grades, and I bet you never bragged about them.”

  She bit her lower lip because he was right, on both counts.

  “Do you know what a blind contour drawing is?”

  “Yes,” she said,
her brain scrolling up an exercise she’d learned a long time ago, drawing with her pencil poked through a sheet of stiff cardboard so she couldn’t look at the picture and judge it. “You draw without looking at the page, following the edge with your eyes, slowly, attentively. It’s an exercise in seeing, in being in the moment, not accurately rendering the subject material.”

  Again with the smile at her automatic recital. “Next time try that.”

  It felt like admitting defeat, to attempt anything less than a perfect drawing each and every time. But while she tried to come up with a polite way to decline, he gave her that half grin again, then settled himself on the chair, elbows braced on knees, fingers woven together. “Grab a chair and come out from behind the easel,” he said as he set his watch. “Twenty-five minutes. Go.”

  Fine. Fine. It was one session. She pulled the sketchpad from the easel and spun a wingback chair to face him, braced the pad on her lap, and looked at him.

  Dear God. He couldn’t possibly be real.

  Edges. Start with the edges.

  She chose one at random, the point of contact between the sole of his foot and the wide-plank floor, then followed the curve of his heel to his calf and up, not looking at the page, moving her pencil very slowly, seeing each dip, hollow, and swell. She tried not to look at the page, but her gaze kept flickering back and forth, checking in, judging.

  “You’re looking. Don’t look.”

  He was so close. She could smell his skin, almost taste it. Exasperated with herself, she started again, this time with his ear. In her peripheral vision, she could see his eyes, fixed on her face, his mouth solemn, easy to hold.

  “Don’t look,” he said, a split second before her eyes flicked down.

  “Dammit.” She lifted her chin, and this time looked straight into his eyes. The connection was visceral, immediate, and as her hand moved, she really saw his face. Dark stubble emerged on his jaw, highlighting his full lips, the sensual curve of the lower lip, the bracket of the upper lip, the twin ridges leading to his nostrils, and from there to his left eye.