A Muse to Live For by Katherine Wyvern

Author:Katherine Wyvern [Wyvern, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773398945
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nathaniel

When I finally wake up in the morning, I am alone in the bed. Light, silent hands have laid my own coat over me, on top of the blankets, and I am still warm and comfortable.

It’s the grey light of dawn that woke me, that and the soft clink of thin enameled metal. I turn towards the sound, and there is a young man in the room with me.

He stands naked by the basin and ewer, under the skylight. The room is cold, and the water in the ewer must be colder still. His skin is tight and dimpled with goosebumps and utterly white in this frigid light.

The whip-like marks of the corset have gone … but not all of them. There are real scars, too, silk-white on the velvet-white of his skin. The back of his legs is a ghastly collection of old, faded bruises, gone to mucky yellow and sickening cloudy purple.

He is impossibly thin. As he bends to wipe his legs quickly with the washcloth, his spine stands out and every rib ripples under the skin. I could draw his skeleton bone by bone just by looking at him like this.

There are no long, golden locks. No, there are, lying on the chair, on top of his—her—folded clothes. The hair, sitting there like that, is strange and utterly lifeless, like an abandoned bird-nest, coming apart in a long season of hard gales.

Perhaps I breathed in. Perhaps I shifted. He stands still, stricken for a moment, and then he straightens up and turns.

The light from high up on his right casts shadows around his eyes, twin pools of descending darkness. His own hair is soft, short and ruffled, a dark brown, almost black. He smiles, just a little, and nods.

“And this is the other half of the truth,” he whispers.

“I see.”

“You see? You do? What do you see now, Nathaniel?”

“I see you.”

He sketches the tiniest of bows, like a reluctant jester. “Gabriel. The name’s Gabriel.”

I recognize his voice now. It’s the deep voice I heard, once or twice, breaking though Gabrielle’s softer, huskier tone.

“Gabriel,” I repeat. And put out a hand for him, not to shake, but to call him to me. I need … I need to know him. I need to learn him, as I have learned her.

I need him close.

He just stands there.

“Come here, please? Gabriel?” I say hoarsely.

He comes. As he sits on the edge of the bed, his head bent, I cannot speak.

I take his face in my hands, and make him look up, at me.

He truly is naked.

I have never seen anyone so naked.

He has shed more than just clothes. Shorn of the long hair, the cigarette, the feisty wit and the cynical manners, he has shed a whole layer of himself, and become something else, perhaps something a bit smaller, a bit frailer. He’s tall for a woman, of course—he’s tall even for a boy—but naked, he is a slight young man with a dark, fragile head. His hands, Gabrielle’s hands, so long and stately, look delicate and almost insubstantial now, on him.

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