Page 9 of The Muse
“The girl with the bike helmet, the one at the gallery? She needed me to take a picture of her and the tourists.”
“Welcome. Can I get a dressing room started for you?” A young woman, who looks like Barbie, asks while taking the men's clothes from Callie.
“Thank you,” she says to the woman.
“Is Mr. Rawlings meeting us here? Because those clothes are not my style.”
“Flynn,” Callie says, “I don’t think you have a style, but we’ll find one for you.”
“Jeans, a T-shirt, and black boots are a style. Probably the most classic style,” I say.
She ignores me while browsing more racks of clothing.
I obey.Ruff. Ruff.Try on clothes. She picks the winners, and we leave with bags of shit I’m calling uniforms because I have no desire to wear them around my friends. They’d probably steal them right off my back and sell them.
“Dude, did you rob a store?” Monroe asks after I open the apartment door and toss the bags of clothes onto the sofa, which doubles as my bed.
This place always smells of fabric softener. Naomi, his girlfriend, thinks all of Monroe’s clothes reek of gas and grime. He’s a diesel mechanic, so that tracks. Personally, I’d rather smell gas than fabric softener or overpowering perfume.
“No,” I say, grabbing a beer from the fridge while Monroe washes the dishes because we don’t have a dishwasher, and Naomi gets pissed if this place isn’t clean. “I took a customer’s car for a joyride and got caught. So now he owns my ass unlessI want to be charged with grand theft auto, which is not what happened. But who’s going to believe me?”
Monroe pauses his scrubbing. “So he took you on a shopping spree?”
“No. His wife did.”
“Are you banging his wife?”
I smirk behind the can at my lips. “No. She supposedly doesn’t like sex. I think it’s an issue isolated to wealthy people. Maybe when you have the money of a king, it’s more satisfying than sex.” I take a long pull of my beer before shrugging. “Poor folks like us have to fuck. It’s really the only form of pleasure we can afford.”
Monroe snickers. “One hundred percent. So, are they adopting you or what’s the deal? Why do they care what you wear?”
“Mmm, that reminds me.” I set my beer on the counter, pull my phone from my pocket, and search upmuse.I don’t think my job has anything to do with Zeus and Mnemosyne, so I look at the second definition.The source of inspiration for a creative person.“I’m the muse for this rich dude’s wife,” I say. “They live in an old mansion overlooking the lake. Huge garage. Fancy cars. And supposedly he thinks she’s going to kill herself, and I’ve been hired to inspire her to … I don’t know. Not kill herself? So she bought me clothes to wear. Ridiculous clothes.”
I empty the bags onto the coffee table littered with weird things like fake plants in a vase atop a stack of books and some sort of stone statue of a chubby dude. Buddha or some shit like that. It’s all Naomi’s. “This shirt was over five hundred bucks,” I say, holding up a lime green bowling shirt with weird-ass designs on it. They might be seahorses. “It’s printed silk. Ever heard of that?”
“It’s butt ugly,” Monroe says.
“I know. And linen pants.” I hold up the light gray pants that I will never wear when I’m notinspiringCallie. “Isn’t linen something you sleep on or use to wipe your mouth?”
He laughs, drying his hands with a towel while shaking his head. “Don’t know, man. I’ve never had linen money.”
“Italian leather loafers.” I pull the shoes from the box. “The lady at the store said to wear them without socks. Can you see me wearing leather shoes without socks?” I toss them onto the sofa and sigh while parking my hands on my hips and inspecting the rest of the preppy wardrobe. I wonder how much I can sell it for when this gig is over?
“What do you do to inspire this rich woman?” he asks.
“Good question. Today I drove her to a gallery to pick up a painting she had framed. Then we shopped for these clothes. After that, I returned the van to the shop, got chewed out by my boss for the joyriding incident. But then he hugged me, which was uncomfortable, and said Mr. Rawlings would be good for me.” I collapse onto the sofa covered in clothes.
“How long do you have to work for them?”
“Dunno.”
“How much does this muse job pay?” Monroe opens a bag of Doritos.
“No clue. I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. He said my needs will be taken care of. Whatever that means.”
Monroe slowly chews on a chip, gaze pointed toward the floor.
“What?” I ask, because I know that look. He’s not telling me something.
