I hold up my hands in peace. “I know it wasn’t my place to say anything when you specifically told me not to. I just … I had to defend myself. I had to defend you. What we have.”
“But I don’t know what we have,” she cries out. “What we are.”
I twist in my seat to look at her, trying to find the patience. “What do you want? How about we start with you? What do you want from me? From us?”
She looks away, and I reach out, pressing my fingers under her chin until she turns her head to face me. I dip my head, searching her eyes. “Hey? What do you want? Do you just want us to fuck for the rest of the time you’re here? That’s it? Just the sex? Then fine. If that’s what you want, I can do that. I don’t want to, but I will do it for you. I respect you too much to go against your wishes.”
She blinks. “What do you want?”
“No, no,” I say, dropping my hand and placing my palm on her forearm, giving it a light squeeze. “This is about you right now.”
“But you are part of it,” she says. “Don’t you see? I don’t … I can’t trust how you feel about me.”
I pull back, my heart squeezing. It feels like I’ve been slapped. “You can’t trust me? How can you say that?”
“Because!” she cries out. “I’m your muse. I’m the model for your statue. You need me to inspire you, and when you’re done creating art, then what? Then you’ll tire of me. You won’t want me anymore.”
“Grace,” I say roughly. “That is not true—”
“And you treat me as if I’m a problem to fix. Like a wounded bird that crashed into a window. Nursing my broken wing.”
“But you’re my bird.”
“So you see, it’s true!”
I breathe in sharply through my nose, trying to calm my thoughts. “I am not trying to fix you. We’ve talked about this. I am trying to help you. That’s all. And I don’t even need to help you anymore, or maybe I never did. You’re coming out of your shell now, your wing is fixed. It was all in you this whole time. You just had to … find yourself. And maybe you found yourself in me, or maybe you found it in yourself, or in this country, or at the bottom of a wine glass, but you’ve come so far. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you see that you don’t have any broken wings?”
A long breath escapes her and she leans back against the seat, staring at the ceiling. I watch as her chest rises and falls.
Moments pass.
“Musa,” I say softly. “I know this isn’t easy for you. All I’m asking is to put the fear aside for now and take a chance on me. You say you’re worried about Vanni and Jana, and I know you are. But I think … I think if you take a moment you’ll see that it goes deeper than that. Can you imagine, please, just for a moment, if Jana and Vanni weren’t an issue? If they were happy for us? Can you then imagine you would let yourself be happy?”
Her jaw twitches, as if something I just said stoked a fire inside her.
I press on. “So you fear I will grow tired of you when you are no longer my muse, but that’s not how this is. I will never grow tired of you. I will never stop wanting you and wanting to be around you. You have to let yourself believe that. You have to let yourself believe in your own happiness. You’re so afraid of it. That’s what you’re scared of. All these scapegoats, and really you’re just afraid to be happy. What is it that makes you push it away and say, no, that’s not for me?”
I don’t expect her to say anything, so it surprises me when she clears her throat and says, “Because it can be taken away.”
I nod, wanting to reach for her again but trying to give her as much space in this cramped car as I can. “Because it makes you vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable too. Don’t you know I find your vulnerability beautiful? It shows me who you really are. It lets me climb inside your soul and look around and be … I am just so overwhelmed by you, Grace. By your deepest, darkest, purest parts. You have no idea how far your outer beauty bleeds inward.” I exhale, my breath shaky. “I could drown in it. I am drowning in it. Drowning in you.”
All this time I am gazing into her eyes, because even though I’ve never been this vulnerable with her before, I need her to see it. I need her to believe it.
I need it like the air I breathe.
Her beautiful blue eyes begin to swim with tears and she squeezes her eyes shut so they spill down her cheeks.
She’s her purest, rawest self.
Something I’ll never be able to capture in art.
Nothing can transcend her.
“I … I…” she begins and then she starts to bawl. She throws her arms around me, and I put mine around her, holding her tight as she cries into my chest. Her sobs are loud and heaving, and I know this has been a long time coming. Sometimes I’ll catch her looking weepy-eyed back home, holding back tears, trying to negotiate the loss of her friend. But nothing like this.
All this grief has had nowhere to go.
So I let her cry. I keep holding her, my hand at the back of her head, cradling her, and I murmur to her, telling her it’s going to be okay, telling her I’m here for her, telling her that I always will be.
Whether she wants that or not.
Whether she believes it or not.
She cries for a long time until the cadence of her breath is more even and she’s relaxing in my arms.
Eventually she lifts her head, wiping her nose with her hand. “Ugh, I’m so sorry.”
“Shh, shh,” I say softly, kissing her forehead. “No apologies. I am so glad that you cried.”
“I’m not,” she says glumly, pulling away and sitting back in her seat. I move closer so that my arm slips around her shoulders. I need to be touching her.
She raises her chin to meet my eyes. The whites of hers are red, her mascara in black streaks below, yet she’s still so beautiful that she knocks the air from me.
“I guess I needed to do that,” she says after a beat. She clears her throat. “And I guess I don’t need to tell you that. You’re so … you know me, somehow, and so well.”
“You have a lot of grief you’ve been carrying with you. Tell me, when was the last time you cried like that over Robyn?”
She gnaws on her lip and sniffs. “It was a long time. Back when it happened.”
“Grief doesn’t have a schedule. It doesn’t follow patterns. It happens when it happens and the only thing you can do is let it flow through you. Fighting it does no good. It will only build and come out later, in a more destructive way.” I pause, tucking a strand of silky hair behind her ear. “You miss Robyn and you always will. And you will move on with your life because you cannot sit in grief either. You feel guilty for writing on your own, for having your own career, maybe even for finding me, but you have to remind yourself, this is what Robyn wants for you. She wants you to continue writing. She wants you to stand on your own two feet. And maybe, just maybe, she wants you to meet a nice man with a magic cock who will set your heart on fire.” I swallow. “Maybe that man could be me.”
A delicate smile curves her lips, and she squints at me thoughtfully. “I would like that to be you,” she whispers.