Page 39 of The Muse (Beautiful Magic 1)
“Ooh, where would you take me?”
I stand and pretend I’m appraising the ensemble, though I’m really just enjoying the view of her. “I’d draw you a pair of jeans, a tank, and I say you’re ready to go clubbing with me in Oberkampf.”
“I love dancing.” She catches my hand and steps close, into a ballroom dancing pose, and pulls me into a few steps. She quickly stumbles, though, and catches herself with a giggle. “I never said I was any good at dancing though.”
Smiling, she does a turn on her own, her skirt rippling out. I am sad not to have my hand on her waist anymore, but happy to see it looks like she feels the same way.
“I’ve always been better at painting,” Clio says, spinning more slowly. “Or, at least, having an eye for paintings. Like that one.”
She stops turning and points to a Monet, an image of a street celebration in Paris in the late 1870s. “I remember when this was first exhibited.”
“What was it like? Seeing this for the first time? Before Monet became, well, Monet as we know him today.”
“It was heaven.” Her lips part as if she’s about to say something more, but she stops. Her question, then, seems to change its course. “What did your friends tell you about this curse?”
“Not much. They—Suzanne Valadon was their great-great-great-grandmother or something—only said that Renoir cursed your painting. There wasn’t time to ask more than that, so I don’t know how, or even if, artists can curse a painting.”
I end with a shrug, as if it’s not a big concern of mine, but I’m watching her closely as she silently looks at the calf then back to her shoes. I give her the chance to say more, but she doesn’t.
“Is there a curse on your painting, Clio?” I ask gently. “Is that why you’re trapped?”
“My shoes are starting to disappear.”
I take her elbow so she doesn’t trip again as the shoes dissolve into dust then vanish. Her feet are bare now.
She wiggles her toes. “I miss my shoes. I’ll have to ask you for a new pair every night.”
“I’ll happily draw you a pair every night, then.”
She’s quiet again as she laces up her slippers. I care too much about her to be impatient but also too much not to try to understand her. “You’re different than the others. You were trapped until you came to a museum, but now that you’re alive again, can you just leave? Walk out the doors?”
“I think I probably could.” She’s pensive about the idea. Me, I hate everything about the thought of her leaving here without me, but I’m trying to figure things out. “In fact,” she goes on, “I bet you could hold the door open for me, and I’d be on my way.” I hold my breath until she shakes her head. “But I don’t actually want to leave right now. I don’t want to go back.”
I’m lightheaded with relief, but then I wonder what she means by “back.” I would think she’d walk out into the twenty-first century, that she’d stay in this time and place. Does she mean she’d be transported somehow to where she started, if not when?
Instead of pursuing that down a hypothetical and possibly depressing avenue, I use it as a chance to ask more about her—what’s made her into the person she is now.
“So, what’s ‘back’?” I ask as conversationally as I can. “Where are you from?”
She waves a hand as if she’s dismissing the question.
“Do you have a family?”
“I was very close with all my sisters. But we worked all the time.”
“What kind of work?”
“This and that,” she says in that evasive way she sometimes has. She seems to want to be close to me, to flirt and talk and play and kiss, and to invite me to share all of that with her, no-holds-barred. But talk of her history, of her story, makes her dart and dodge. “That’s why I don’t want to go back just yet. I’d just have to work again. I got tired of working.”
It seems too cruel to point out that wherever her home is, it likely doesn’t exist anymore, at least not as she remembers it. Her sisters aren’t waiting around for her to pick up the household chores.
“Besides,” she says, and her eyes are playful now, “the other reason I don’t want to leave is I rather like this handsome man who visits me in the museum.”
That decides it. No more questions about where she would go if she walked out of the museum. I grin and let myself be buoyed by the effervescent humor in her eyes.
“Is that so?” I step closer to her.
“I do. I do like him. He brings me sweets, and he takes me to the ballet, and he makes me shoes.” She leans in and whispers like it’s the most scandalous thing, “And he kisses me. In ways that drive me wild. That make me want more than kissing.”
