Muse [18+] • REVISING

42 | Soul

When I attended class the following week, giving my professor the best spiel I could've ever given about this newfound interest in the way something as raw as sex is told through art, she simply smiled at me, breathing out relief like she had been waiting the entire semester for this moment. The moment that I connected. That I realized that wanting to be kicked into the world, not coddled, was never truly going to happen if I didn't just do it myself.

Years of quitting, of giving up my spot because I didn't fit in quite like everyone else because fitting in was believed to be exactly what you're supposed to do, and all it took was a middle-aged woman and naked bodies in a textbook to tell me that I had a choice. What do you want to do? The question racked my brain before every big decision I made, and by the time I turned twenty-one, that little mouse I used to be suddenly evolved into a luna wolf when the biggest decision I could've ever made landed me exactly where I am right now.

What do you want to do, Vera? I asked myself every single night as I put off registering for my senior year of college, and the only consistent answer I had for myself was, well, I just wanted to shake up the fucking world.

As ready as a twenty-year-old who hadn't traveled beyond state lines could be, I booked a plane ticket and found myself on the edge of Europe. And I did what I said I would do. I immersed myself, spending nights confined to a room with nothing but brushes, tins of paint, and paper, setting up exhibits, stepping into rooms filled with men who sometimes looked at me as nothing more than a piece, and burying myself in all of the work that would eventually shift the notice of France onto me.

I caught eyes and altered minds. I allowed people to get caught up in the sensuality of life and let loose in the same breath.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, could've ever prepared me for a man like him. Someone that not only catches eyes and alters minds, but can take hold of you so tightly without ever having to lay a finger on you. And I remember when I first realized he had exactly that kind of grasp on me as well. Earlier in the night, the only one that was supposed to happen between us, I had seen a piece of his for the first time, showcased in my exhibit, and unknowingly holding the focal point of something so intimate, I fell.

No. I didn't fall. I crashed and even bled. Because the way Damien Dupont made me feel was nothing short of explosive.

He made sure I knew that. That I felt the intensity that permeated everything he ever did, everything he ever touched. As an artist, your whole job fixates on the kind of emotion you can evoke out of whoever's watching. How do I make you feel? Do I understand you more than others do? Are you itching for more? Questions that reached out and gripped the necks of those wanting to give in to something you've conceived, but are too afraid to admit that your kind of strokes excite them.

Over the last seven months, I finally started believing that anything I put together was sure to fire you up because a woman knows how to touch you in the right spots, even if it was just emotionally. But because of the veracity, the fucking prurience that effortlessly dripped from everything he created, he was the one that got in between your legs and made you wet. The one that skipped right over the questions and had you on your knees, ready to fully submit to a man who knew exactly what it took for you to unravel.

In other words, he was a religion. One look at a painting of his and the man could make you feel like he had just fucked you hard in the dark, tiny space of a confessional, sins spilling from your mouth in repentance. He made you feel everything you'd been too scared to ever divulge, and oh, how I fucking felt it.

The two people he brought into my life made me feel it too. Cordelia made sure my chin was always up and Nicolas always told me things straight, never coddling me. The one element to our friendship, however, that I knew would tether us, was that they saw me as their equal. I didn't have to question myself around them or be made out to feel like a fool. I was just as important as they were. No one ever believed in me like the three of them did, not even my own blood. Their certainty was one of the few things that kept me together ever since I left home.