Inspire (The Muse #1)(18)
Author: Cora Carmack

I suck in a breath, and cold air stings my lungs. I’m shivering, and maybe it’s the memories or maybe it’s my damp dress in Wilder’s cold room. Either way, I force myself to pull back from the past. I don’t want to think about the moment I found her, nor the fury who had been standing over her lifeless body, blood dripping from her sword. I don’t want to think about the Earthquake Poseidon had caused to cover up Mel’s … to cover up Mel.

The only thing that matters about that night now is that I not repeat it. Because that’s what the Argus’s threats mean for me. Step out of line, and it could be me facing the swift justice of a fury’s blow.

And the string.

When I’d talked to my sisters afterward, we’d all experienced the same feeling, as if the cord binding us together, the thing that intertwined our fates with Melpomene’s, had been cut.

I’d known it was fate, but I’d always assumed that those kinds of heavy ties only existed because my sisters and I were bound by blood, by purpose. Because we were immortal. I’d never felt it with another person. Certainly not a human.

I glance back at Wilder. The sheets are tangled around his hips. He has one arm folded behind his head and beneath his pillow. The other is sprawled wide where I left it. Bare skin gives way to inked designs on his arms and upper chest, and he looks … sexy doesn’t do him justice.

I don’t feel that kind of pull to him, do I?

I don’t.

It’s just attraction. The lure of the forbidden fruit. It will disappear with distance. With time. And I’ve got plenty of that. I sneak into his closet and borrow a t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts with a drawstring waist.

Okay, so it’s not borrowing, since I don’t plan on ever seeing him again. But my dress is wet, and what else am I supposed to do? It’s not because I want something of his. It’s necessity. That’s it. And yeah, it makes me an even bigger jerk for stealing from him, especially after all he did for me last night, but …

Why am I reasoning this out with myself? I just need to leave before he wakes up.

I grab a cheap pair of plastic flip-flops that are way too big, but at least they’re shoes. Add them to my tally of sins.

With one last glance at the sleeping man in the bed, I ignore the twist of my heart, and sneak out of his house into the pink early morning sky and begin my walk home.

I learn that it’s Saturday morning when I get back to my apartment, which I’d apparently left unlocked the night before. Though if someone tried to rob or vandalize it, you certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell. Not with the way I left it. It takes me the entire weekend of near constant working and cleaning to undo the damage of my dance with inspiration.

That word … Inspired. It’s the last thing I tackle, and though I’m able to scrub the ink away, it appears I went over the word so many times that I scratched it into the floorboard. I have to settle for a slight rearrangement of my living room so that the rug in front of my couch now covers the carved word.

I sit on the floor, and place my hand over the spot on the rug that I know covers the word.

“Enough,” I speak aloud to the empty room. “You can’t change this. You can only live with it.”

So, that’s what I do.

I live with it.

With the guilt. With the memories. With the longing.

I bury it as deep as I can.

I won’t be Melpomene. I won’t allow myself to crumble under the weight of this life. So I box up those memories and seal them away. Wilder, too. I refuse to be like Mel, and it’s not possible to be the girl I’d been with him last night, so all of it has to go.

There’s only one thing I can be. The only thing I’ve ever been.

Someone’s muse.

And if it stings a little that the very nature of my life, of what I am, requires me to be someone’s possession, someone’s tool, then it’s a sting I do my best to ignore.

To live with.

PART TWO

Wilder

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”

Albert Camus

Chapter Nine

It’s a bleak fucking Christmas.

Mom spends most of the holiday working double shifts at the hospital. And I pick up whatever extra hours Mr. Gibson will give me at the firm. There’s plenty to do as the year draws to a close.

It’s necessary, and if I’m honest, I prefer that god-awful boring office to being at Mom’s. That probably makes me a dick, but it’s just a little too much for me to handle. Without the distraction of classes, I can’t even pretend that I don’t see how miserable Mom is. Gwennie, too. It’s hard on her because she’s still young enough that she doesn’t quite grasp what’s happened. Oh, she knows Dad’s gone. I caught her playing prison with her dolls once too, so I know she gets that part, at least a little.

But she thinks it’s all temporary. Like the bad version of a vacation. That eventually Dad will come back, and they’ll move back to the old house with two floors and big rooms and a pool, instead of the apartment she and mom are in now. She thinks everything will go back to normal. To her, money is just the colorful sheets in Monopoly or plastic gold coins. She can’t even pronounce the word embezzlement, let alone grasp what it means for our family, the mess Dad left us in.

Sometimes she’ll say things … about how she can’t wait until we have a pool again or she’ll wonder what Dad will get her for Christmas, and I can see the way it affects Mom. She’d always appeared young for her age, but in the last year, her posture has changed, her shoulders curve downward. I don’t know if it’s fatigue or fear or the absolute fucking unfairness of it all that weighs on her, but it’s there and I can’t unsee it. And I’m doing my damndest to fix it, but I can’t fill the gap Dad left. I can’t even fucking fill the gap left in her bank account, but I will. I’ll get this damn business degree, and then I’ll get a job that pays decent enough to get back a little of what we lost.

And in the mean time, I’ll do what I can to make up for the rest.

Like taking Gwen out to find a dress for Christmas, second hand of course, because we can no longer afford to buy her the poufy monstrosities that she loves to wear for every holiday and occasion. She’s growing so damn fast that she doesn’t fit into any of her old ones, a discovery which had led to a complete meltdown this morning when I came over to take my shift as babysitter while Mom went to work.