The Muse

Maeve has seen this man before. On her way from class to her apartment a few days ago, she remembers clearly seeing him sitting on the same exact bench, looking at nothing in particular. That day, he had caught her attention because he was wearing a red scarf around his neck while the rest of his outfit was that of a prestigious businessman. This day, he had on the same outfit, but the scarf had changed to a bright sky blue. Which did add to the vibrance of his otherwise solid black outfit, but also made it seem odd somehow. The other thing that is different today is that he is looking straight at her from where he is sitting. Before she has time to feel creeped out though, he gets up from where he is sitting, and walks away.

She enters her apartment with an odd sense, as if someone is watching her from a place she can’t see. The man in the park has left an impression. A weird one at that too. When her flatmate Natasha asks if everything is alright, she replies with a non-committal “I’m fine.” Natasha isn’t convinced one bit. She comes over and sits beside her on the bed.

“Are you sure, you look kind of spooked. Did something happen?” Natasha was the only person who seemed to care about her.

Since leaving her home to come to college, Maeve has found it very difficult to talk to people. Back at home, she wasn’t this introverted. It’s true that she always had a small circle of friends, but it never felt weird to her to talk to new people. But here, in a completely new city, in a college where there are so many people close to her age, and doing similar things, she finds it strangely suffocating. The classes started three months ago, and yet, the only people she has found herself interacting with most are the three with whom she has been grouped for the year-end project. And even with them, she prefers to limit her conversations to the subject matter. Every time they have invited her to join them for an evening snack or something else, she politely declines. It’s not that she doesn’t want to socialise with them, she just feels better at home, with her own and Natasha’s company.

Natasha is different. She seems to read her mind at times, and understand her as if she’s lived with her her whole life. How she manages to read into everything she does is beyond Maeve, but she is grateful all the same. In the three months they’ve lived together, it is as if they have created their own unspoken system of simply being there for each other. Which, according to Maeve, is often more than one can ask for, all things considered. And yet, when Natasha sits on the edge of the bed, looking at her face, and asks if everything is fine, she is unable to decide what or how to tell her.

“I think someone is stalking me.” Maeve blurts out all of a sudden after being quiet for over a minute.

Natasha puts down the cup she was holding on the table beside the bed. “Okay, and what makes you think that?”

“You’re making it sound like I’m having hallucinations.”

“Maeve, I promise that is not what I am trying to do. I believe you. But if that is really what is going on, and we have to take actions, then we need to be fully certain. You understand what I mean, right?” She holds Maeve’s hand in an assurance.

“Yes.” Maeve says quietly.

“Now, tell me what’s going on.”

“There’s this man. I think he’s in his late twenties or something. I have seen him thrice now on a bench in the park. He wears a dark business suit, and a weird looking scarf which doesn’t go with the rest of his outfit. The first time, I noticed him just because of the scarf. He was just sitting there, looking in my general direction, but definitely not at me. But on the second and third time, I’m pretty sure he was looking straight at me.”

“Do you want me to come with you tomorrow?” Natasha said.

“What about your classes?”

“Maeve, this is serious.”

“But I don’t even know if he’ll be there tomorrow.” Maeve says, her voice just a little louder than before.

“Then you take a can of pepper with you.”

“I feel scared.”

“I would expect nothing else.” Natasha says. “Now, you just need to be aware, and you stop taking the park route. You take the cab for the next few weeks. You understand?” Maeve nods. “Good. Now come with me, we still need to cook that spaghetti we bought last month.”

It is half past two in the morning when Maeve woke up feeling thirsty. She looks over at Natasha’s bed, where she lay covered like a cocoon in her dark maroon blanket. She picks up the bottle on the table and is irritated to find it empty. She walks to the kitchen to fill up the bottle, when she hears the siren. It’s a fire truck, about to pass in front of their apartment. Maeve goes to the window to see which direction it’s coming from, trying to see if the fire was nearby. Everything is quiet as far as she can see. Their apartment is on the fourth floor and there isn’t much of the city visible from there. But she spots the fire truck coming from the east pretty far away. She took a few sips from the bottle in her hand by the time it passed their building.

He is standing there on the street opposite to their apartment. He had on the same dark business suit, and the same sky blue scarf that she had seen in the afternoon on her way back. He is looking up, straight at her window. He couldn’t have seen her, but the shock was enough to send her reeling back, and she fell. The bottle fell on the floor with a loud metallic ding, which brought Natasha running to the kitchen in a little moment.

“What's wrong?” She asks, breathless.

“He’s there, on the street. He was looking at our window.” Maeve points at the window with a shaking finger.

“Who?”

“The—” the words stuck in her throat for a second. “The man in the suit and scarf.”

Natasha runs over to the window, and looks down to where Maeve had pointed. She sees a man, but he doesn't match the description which Maeve gave him. He is just an ordinary homeless guy with a grey shirt standing under the streetlamp holding a can of something. Maeve came to the window as well.

“I swear he was there.” Maeve said, grabbing Natasha’s hand tightly.

“Maeve. Maeve, listen to me.” Natasha says, turning Maeve to face her. “I’m not saying you’re lying, but I also think that you are too distraught by the person in the park. You have to calm down. You’re seeing the same thing I am seeing right now. You’re fully awake now. Two minutes ago, you might not have been. Come to bed. You don’t have to go to class tomorrow. We’ll go and get a complaint registered with the description of this guy, okay?” She holds Maeve by the shoulders. “Maeve, are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“Good! Now come, let's take some rest.”

<SectionBreak />

“When you said there was something special going on in your mind about the story, this wasn’t what I had expected.” Erin said after she finished reading the newest part Conrad had added to his story. “I thought this was going to be a story about a small-town-girl becoming a better version of herself. Not some small-town-girl becoming part of a crime thriller and-or becoming paranoid.”

They were sitting on the balcony of Erin’s flat. Her flatmates were all gone, and she had invited him over. Conrad had brought his laptop along to show what he had been doing with the story. He had already shown her the first chapter and she had liked the idea of Maeve being a lonesome character with an introverted complex. Erin read the whole piece from start to finish this time, and Conrad could tell that she was a little uncomfortable at the idea of the mystery stalker he had recently introduced. But he could also tell from her expressions that she was a little curious as to what might happen at a later stage. Overall, he felt confident that as the story unfolded in his mind, and he wrote it, she would find it more and more interesting. But he couldn’t just outright reject that he was uncertain of it himself all as well.

“To be honest, Erin, I am not fully sure where the idea of the stalker came from. But I find it kind of exciting. Like you said, Maeve has an over-thinking problem. So, having a stalker fueling her paranoia seemed like a great idea. Maybe. Like I said, I am not one hundred percent sure where I got the idea of the stalker from.”

“Hmm—” Erin said, closing the lid of the laptop, so they were once more shrouded in complete darkness on the balcony. “I find this new development interesting, albeit a little confusing. You’re right. It does amplify her already over-thinking nature. But I can’t help notice the uncertain tone and the slightly rigid tone which Natasha uses. Her tone doesn’t quite reflect the soft and sensitive person you portrayed her to be in the beginning. Also, tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Is the stalker going to be real in the story and she’s just too quick to spot the danger but unable to realise it for what it is. Or is it going to be one of those psychological things, where she’s succumbing to some deep-seated mental problem that is manifesting itself in a schizophrenic entity of the stalker?”

Conrad took a deep breath, and turned to her. “I don’t know yet. At this point, I am open to both of those possibilities actually, but I can’t yet tell for certain which route I’m going to take her. It’s kind of like I don’t quite know Maeve well enough to predict what she’s going to go through. I just know that she’s going to be drawn to this stalker in a curious kind of way, where she tries to figure out who he is, where he’s from. Investigating things herself. That kind of stuff. But I don’t yet know completely what the consequences of her actions are going to be.”

“You know, for a to-be author, you are awfully uncertain of yourself. And you make your characters a little too real, maybe even more real than they appear to be in your story.” Erin said.

“What do you mean?”

“Like right now you said you don’t know Maeve well enough. It’s as if she’s a real person.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“I think that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you are actually able to shape the story in a meaningful way or not. You see, when you started the story, you said you had two full chapters drafted in gender-neutral pronouns. Then we decided that the protagonist was going to be a girl. You created Maeve then. And now you have re-written one and a half chapters, completely discarding the drafts you had before. The story has kind of turned from the coming-of-age thing I thought it would be to a completely different psychological or crime thriller. And you don’t even know which one it is going to be.” Erin paused, “I’m not saying it’s bad, per se. In fact, I am curious too. To watch the process of a story coming alive like this. But it does make me doubtful whether you might abandon it halfway.”

“I know Erin, but I promise that I am not going to abandon it. You’re right that I’m being too impulsive in writing this one. And I think you are going to enjoy the final result as well. But for now, I think I am just going to surrender and trust the process here.”

“Like you’re trusting the process of distracting me with the story, while your hand is slowly creeping up my leg?” In what little light there was, Conrad saw her lips turn into the most lecherous smile he could have imagined.

“Yes.”

“You sneaky little—” Erin didn’t get to finish the thought as Conrad pressed firmly on her skin just below her panties under her skirt. She let out a gasp, “Connie!” and turned at him.

“What?” Conrad said, breathlessly nibbling on her earlobe.

“Stop, my flatmates may come back anytime.”

“It’s half past one. I don’t think they will.” He whispered into her ear, pressing his hand firmly on her nether folds.

“Would Maeve approve of her creator being so impulsive?” She said, with a gasp, her hand wrapped tightly around his neck. “And careless? And perverse?”

“I don’t think I care.” Conrad pressed his hips firmly onto her thighs, making her feel his arousal fully through the track pants he was wearing, while running his lips on her collarbone. “Although, the idea of her being real and judging us for our actions is thrilling, to be honest.” He pressed his lips onto hers with enough pressure to force them open if she had resisted. “Disapproving, but powerless.” He said, breaking the kiss, but not pulling away from her face. “Makes us the one with the power, doesn’t it?”

Erin kissed him back with just as much passion for a few seconds, before breaking apart. She pulled on the hem of his t-shirt aggressively and he let her pull it off over his head. “I like the idea of a fictional character being jealous of what I have. Too bad she can’t have you like this.”

“Too bad. Really.” Conrad said. He put one hand under the small of her back, lifting her hips slightly off the mattress they were laying on. Using the other hand, he positioned and guided himself deep inside of her with one long stroke. Erin gasped again, her eyes shut tightly. He could feel her nails digging into her back as she buried her face in his neck.

“Connie!”

They finished at the same time, and Conrad collapsed on top of her. He stayed like that for about half a minute, then rolled off to her side. She too turned to face him, and they looked at each other with a satiated grin on their faces, a tangled mess of partially covered bodies.

Much later, when he was almost at the brink of falling asleep, Erin dragged her fingernail on his chest, bringing him a little farther back into consciousness. He looked at her, feeling a sense of elation like he hadn’t felt before.

He remembered the first time they had made love. They were on the same balcony, and it was just as spontaneous. Now that he thought about it, everything about their relationship was spontaneous. However, he wouldn’t call it impulsive. He knew the difference.

“Are you awake?” Erin asked softly. He made a sound of affirmation, not a word. “Can I ask you for something?”

“Anything,” He said, wrapping an arm around her waist, an instinctive attempt at trying to change her mind.

“Make the stalker real.”

“Any special reason? Or is that one of your fantasies?”

“No reason. I just want to know you a little better. I want to know what you would do to this young girl if given the chance.”

“Getting a little too sexual and dark there, love.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, I mean the way you put it makes it a little awful to be honest.”

“Okay, let me rephrase. I want to know what a stranger like that in your mind is capable of. Take it as a challenge for you to improve upon your style of writing crime thrillers.”

Conrad took a deep breath. “I will try my best.”

“I expect nothing less.” Erin kissed him on his lips. A gentle, yet passionate kiss that made Conrad feel as if he could see the entire cosmos and yet be in the darkest corner of space at the same time. Unable to think of anything else to say he just wrapped his hands around her, pulling her close.