Becoming His Muse, Complete Set (9 page)

“Vitamins. They neutralize the whiskey.”

I glance at the small ashtray by the window. He notices. “You won’t tell, will you?”

“Guess it depends on how many other rules you plan to break.”

“If you’re wondering if I’ve got alcohol on the premises then, yes, I’m guilty of that, too. Bottom drawer, left side. No other substances though. Do you work for Campus Police?” He smirks.

I leave off studying the details of his office, though I’m quite mesmerized by a cluster of family photos, most of which are old black and white ones, or faded-out color prints from at least twenty years ago. I want to ask about them, but at the moment I feel his gaze traveling up and down my jean-clad legs. My instincts tell me not to keep my back to him much longer. He has the energy of a coiled cat ready to pounce.

When I turn, I see that he’s silently stepped a little bit closer to me so that he’s looking down his straight narrow nose and into my upturned eyes. There’s a barely discernible divot in the bridge of his nose, as if it were once been broken and then quickly reset. I’d never have noticed it if we weren’t standing so close together.

“What about you being in my office? Is that against the rules?” he says quietly.

We both have our hands chastely by our sides, but then one of his reaches out and grazes mine. His index finger brushes along the outside of my baby finger. It’s a tiny movement, barely visible as motion, but it sends a shiver down my spine. I stare at the rise and fall of his chest under his white cotton shirt. Two buttons are undone and I can see the smooth texture of his skin underneath. It has a warm bronze glow to it, next to the white shirt, which means he had managed to acquire at least a kiss of a summer tan. From where I stand I see no chest hair, just smooth skin, and the edge of tiny scar beside his collarbone.

“You could be giving me a tutorial,” I say, unaware, until I utter those words, that my voice has grown rough and dry, as if some deep desire lodged in my bones has risen and is leaking through my muscles and skin.

“Is that why you’re here? For a tutorial?” His whisper is hoarse now, too.

I shake my head. Reality intervenes. What am I doing standing in the middle of his office with such desire radiating off my skin?… I feel as if I could catch fire.

“There are a few things I’d like to teach you, Ava,” he whispers.

My breath catches in my throat, but I manage to say, “If it goes beyond reading and writing then it is definitely against the rules.”

‘Oh, it does. Quite far beyond. Do you like breaking rules, Ava?”

I shake my head. I have a habit of following rules. That habit has served me well over the years. Because of that, some part of my brain takes stock of this situation and I step back, away from him, breaking the spell of words and charisma he’s weaving around me, the web of desire we’re weaving together…

“We can’t do this,” I say, shaking my head again.

“Do what, Ava? We’re just standing here in my office talking. Two consenting adults…”

He hasn’t made a move toward me but just his voice pushes me to the brink of wanting something I can’t have.

“I could report you for sexual harassment,” I say.

He look startled for a second, and then he laughs. But he also steps away from me and goes to stand behind his desk. He reaches for a cigarette but he doesn’t light it.

“Did I misread you, Ava? I though you were… interested. Curious. Or are you just scared?”

I could laugh this all away and walk out of his office right now. I could avoid this building and the paths around it for the rest of this year. I could never see Logan O’Shane again and I could forget I ever met him. Or could I?

“Do you do this a lot?” I say.

“Do what?”

“Attempt to seduce students when you’re working as a prof?”

“I only
tempt
the ones who seem worth it.”

Ones. Plural. I am not the only one.

“And how many of my fellow students have you successfully seduced so far?”

His eyebrow quirks up and he studies me for a few moments. “I think you’ve mistaken my intentions. I focus on quality not quantity. Never more than one per residency position. If that. And I hardly ever accept residency positions anymore. Don’t need to. This one’s an exception.”

“Why?”

He gives me a long look. “I needed a break from New York, and I need to finish this new novel.” He looks around the office. “This is a nice enough place to work.”

“But you could find an office like this anywhere.” All he had to do was take his ‘personal effects’ with him.

He twirls the unlit cigarette between his long fingers. I can tell he wants to light it. Oddly, he seems a bit nervous. He looks up from the cigarette and lets his gaze meet mine. Those beautiful dark green eyes... But instead of his practiced sexy searing look, he lets his long-lashed eyes go soft and searching as he says,

“Just anywhere wouldn’t include
you
.”

Me?… My knees feel unstable and I’m grateful for his next words.

“Have a seat, Ava. Relax.”

He sits in the chair behind his desk. I settle into the leather armchair across from his desk. As the cushions form around me, they released a sweet scent of tobacco. Not from cigarettes. It’s closer to pipe tobacco. I look around his office and locate an old, curved pipe sitting on one the bookshelves.

“You smoke pipes, too?”

“So you
are
curious. Just not about me. That pipe belonged to my grandfather, as did the chair you are now sitting in.”

I rub my fingertips into the worn leather. “Nice.”

“They travel with me because they’ve always been sources of inspiration. I’ve come up with a lot of ideas in that chair. The pipe is a link to my grandfather, a totem of sorts. He was good to me when I was young.”

“And the hat? Was that his too?” The Fedora sits atop a filing cabinet in the corner of the room. Logan glances at it as he absently runs a thumb along his side burn.

“No. That belonged to my father.” His voice has changed, it’s gone a bit darker, harder. “
He
wasn’t very good to me.”

Logan looks past me as some painful memory seems to rise up and sink back down, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to elaborate. I want to know more but I sense that now’s not the time to ask.

“So why do you keep it?”

His serious green eyes find mine, search them for a moment, and then his look softens slightly.

“I’ll tell you one day, but not right now.”

I glance at the photos on the shelf. I’m pretty sure there’s one of him as a teenager with his grandfather but I can’t be sure, and Logan doesn’t seem to want to talk about his past. I don’t blame him. Family dynamics are complicated, even for me. But I’m curious about him.

“I bet you were a troublemaker when you were young,” I say. “And a real charmer.”

He smiles, and I feel as if I’ve successfully drawn him back from a dark edge of memory.

“I think you see something in me that no one’s bothered to look for in a long time. I like that about you, Ava.”

“You mean because I don’t fawn all over you and your work.”

“A bit of that, yes. But more. You’re an artist in your own right. I saw that in the studio yesterday. Felt it.”

I laugh. “Even though I’m a
virgin.
”

“But you’re not. Of course, I knew you weren’t a virgin the first second I looked into your eyes. But you are inexperienced. In art and sex.”

“Hey!” Impulsively, I stand up to leave.

My reaction seems to amuse him. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he says, chuckling.

“You don’t know anything about me.” For some reason, I feel angry enough to knock over the bookshelf holding his grandfather’s precious pipe.

His face grows serious, his green eyes sincere.

“I’m sorry, Ava. I really mean that.” He glances at the door. “Run again, if you want, but I’d rather you to stay and hear me out.”

I do want to run, but at the same time I don’t. I can’t quite figure out how I feel about this man. One moment he draws me in with his intense complexity, and the next he’s turning me off with his cocky arrogance. I’m irritated
and
attracted, which isn’t a good combo for me. But I’m also curious, so I sit down again, breathing away my irritation.

“This chair you’re sitting in.” He gestures to it. “I told you I feel inspired when I sit there. All my novels have started there. I told you to sit there for a reason.”

“Why?”

“I’ve found another source of inspiration.” He lets that sentence hang there in the middle of the room. I hold my breath while he keeps talking.

“
You
, Ava. I found you.” He gets up from his desk, walks over to where I’m sitting in his grandfather’s chair.

“Since I met you a few days ago, since I saw you in the audience, I’ve had new ideas. New
feelings
.” He leans over me, one hand on each of the wide arms. His eyes bore into mine. I feel trapped all of a sudden. I can smell him. I can feel his heat. My brain is going all fuzzy. My body tingles all over.

“You inspire me, Ava. I haven’t been able to write for a year and now I feel as if I could write ten books all at once.”

I feel energy radiating off him, though he hasn’t touched me. Not yet. I shrink back in the chair.

“What exactly are you saying?”

“I’d like to get
closer
to this new source of inspiration. To
you
.”

“You want to
use
me?”

He pulls back all of a sudden. Paces over to his desk. I think this time I offended him. But what does he mean when he says I
inspire 
him?…

One of his hands rakes through his hair, the other he shoves in his pocket. Too fast for me to see if he’d gotten himself aroused. I hate to admit it, but his proximity inspired a surge of wetness between my legs. I don’t like that sense of losing control and now my back is up, I feel defensive, angry, even though I’m not entirely sure why. I stand up.

“Is this your seduction technique? You tell a girl she inspires you and that’s how you get her in bed?”

“Ava—,”

“—Of course, I get it, and I almost fell for it. As an artist, I know how important it is to be
inspired
—“

“—Ava! I don’t want to
use
you—“

“—What else would it be? You want me to hang around so what? You can fuck me? Or fuck with me until you meet your deadline? And then what? Toss me aside? Maybe give me a ‘thank you’ in the acknowledgments?”

He’s shaking his head.

“Oh, not even that? Well.”

His dark hair is sticking up at odd angles from all the hand rakes my nattering is
inspiring
.

“This is really not going well.” He seems to be talking to himself, not me, but still I respond, and more vehemently than is necessary.

“How did you expect it to go? Did you think I would just spread my legs at the thought of inspiring your writer’s genius. I guess it’s worked for you before, or you wouldn’t try it—

“—Ava…”

“—Is that what it takes to write your oh-so-famous-novels? You feed off young virgins, actual or just
virgins-to-you
.”

“Ava, please—“

“—Tell me, Logan O’Shane. When did you let the poetry of your soul get so tarnished?”

He takes a step away and then he spins back swiftly.

“You’re awfully young to be a cynic, Ava. When did that happen? Were you jilted? Did some asshole fuck you and leave you wanting?”

Now he’s crossing a line. I want to storm away but he’s blocking my path to the door. He strides over to me so quickly, when I step back I fall back into the leather chair. He places one hand on each arm and practically pins me there. Again. I’m breathing shallow and quick. I smell the musky, manly scent of him.

“You tell me, Ava Nichols.” His eyes hold mine with a sharp, challenging look. “Did some jerk—or many—leave you writhing, pink, wet and delicious on damp sheets, about to come, desperate for release, ready to explode and make his world larger than he’d ever known but he was too dumb to know it, too stupid to invest a few more strokes to witness the fall of heaven on earth that is a woman’s coming.”

His green eyes soften yet remain clear and strong. It’s as if he’s looking deep inside me and seeing all my dissatisfaction, all my hunger. Seeing for what it is in a way that I haven’t even known. Then he stands up, steps back from the chair, but still holds my gaze with a kind of searing intensity that makes me feel as if I deserve to be slapped.

“When you were posing for me on that podium, I got a glimpse of the desire trapped inside you, Ava. There’s enough there to make an artist, if you learn to let it out. That’s what I can teach you. But you need to be broken first.”

What was he talking about? Broken? No way.

“I want to break you, Ava. I want to break you with fucking. And with words. With fucking words. Only if you stand up to that breaking will my poetry be polished clean again.”

He looks over at the paper strewn on his desk. I see something desperate in his eyes when he flicks his glance my way again. To gauge my reaction, perhaps.

“‘Only the broken seek to break others’,” I say, quoting a line from his second novel, Wake of the Living.

His mouth stretches into a wide but pained grin.

“I didn’t think you’d read anything I’d written.”

“I’m trying to catch up now.”

He raises an eyebrow, catches my gaze, wary. “Why?”

“Because you wrote those books. You created them. And what a person makes matters. Because it’s trouble to make things—it takes the trouble of effort and it causes trouble in our lives.”

He sighs deeply, seeming defeated, but also relieved. He pushes away from the chair and moves back toward his desk.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re wise beyond your years?”

He perches on the edge of his desk and crosses his ankles. He’s barely an arm’s length away, but his retreat feels like miles.

“When I first saw you in that audience, when I first looked into your eyes, I thought you looked older and wiser than anyone there, as if you’d seen and done things to make you weary, to make you question the meaning of everything, and still come up an answer short. Maybe you haven’t seen or done much, you’re still young and you’ve been trapped here for close to four years, but that part doesn’t matter, because what I saw in you was a part of me. And that doesn’t happen to me very often, Ava. And it hasn’t happened in a very, very long time.”