Page 4 of Penn
“That’s kind of cliché, isn’t it? Writer struggling to strike creative gold goes off into the woods looking to find her muse?”
I can’t completely tell if she’s teasing or not, so I just nod. “So, did you find him?” I ask. “Or…her?” I never know what to picture when people talk about their muse. A man or a woman? Do muses have genders? Are they like angels? Devils…
“I wasn’t really here for that, to be honest,” Hearth says. “I have lots of ideas for stories. It’s just, no literary agents seem to be interested in reading them. Or they think other people won’t want to read them. ‘Average readers,’” she air-quotes, somehow without even raising up her hands. It’s in the set of her mouth.
“Maybe I could read some.”
She gives me a look with only that plump lip again, it’s half smile, half challenge. “To be honest, I really just needed a bit of time alone.” She pauses. “Is that weird?”
That’s exactly why I come out here, too. “Not weird at all,” I admit. “So what do you do… when you’re not writing?”
“Now who’s the curious one?” Her eyebrows lift up at me.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be trying to keep you awake. You probably need to get some sleep.”
“Probably.” Hearth yawns on cue. “I make jewelry,” she says sleepily. She grows heavier on my arm, my chest.
“Jewelry? That’s cool.”
“I don’t love it. I kind of don’t hate it, though. I’m just really good at it.”
“It isn’t your passion,” I state, thinking her little brag is adorable.
“Passion,” she echoes, in such a quiet whisper I almost don’t hear it.
“Mmm.”
“What’s so special to you about this place, Penn?” she asks me long after I think she’d already fallen fast sleep.
“Didn’t you see it? It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Lots of places are beautiful.”
“No one else comes here,” I answer more pointedly.
“Hmm. So you like it because it’s like,waslike, all yours.”
I keep the tent vented open or it’ll get way too fucking hot in here—it’s sweltering outside as it is. A wedge of moonlight falls on her hair. The forest comes more and more alive the later it gets. I inhale deep, the scent of Hearth’s shampoo mixed with campfire smoke annihilating my senses, and my arms pull her tight against me, on instinct. “All mine.”
This is hardly the time to pitch my own tent in my shorts, but she’s warm and soft and she fits right into me.
Fuck.
“Sorry I messed that up for you, Penn.”
Mess it up?She sure fucking did.
“Everything’s okay,” I whisper to nothing and no one, since I am pretty sure she’s asleep this time. “Everything is going to be okay, baby, I promise.”
Meeting Hearth wasn’t on my Bingo card for this camping trip. But dammit. I want to either stay forever out here with her…or take her right back home with me.
Two
Hearth
I’m less aware of my eyes flickering open as I am the shafts of bright, white light that drill into them. I close my eyelids tight once again, and the second I do, I fall back into the dream.
The smell of the woods. The campfire smoke. A man. Heat, horrible, blistering heat. And then warmth like I have never known.