“Wait! Does this still count as using my accrued muse-vacation time?”
She laughed, one of those infectious, rolling laughs that made the whole world feel like eightp.m. on a Friday night.
“I’ll talk to HR about it,” she said and then vanished to answer my door.
Cursing whoever dared to step on my property without warning, I wrapped my fingers around my erection and closed my eyes. I thought of Sunny’s hot mouth, her sweet cunt. Her tits—I wanted to lube them up and fuck them and then orgasm hard enough that it landed on her lips and hair—
Ropes of cum jetted from my tip, landing warm and slippery all over my fist. I used it to give my dick several more hard, slick jerks, until I’d emptied myself and my muscles had started to loosen.
Sunny was probably right that I should save all of my sexual obsession for the muse.Shedidn’t know this, but sex was all I could offer anyone anyway. My heart had been buried with Brooklyn, and the part of me capable of love and romance along with it.
But also surely a little extracurricular activity of the carnal variety until I found a muse would be fine? And then after I found the muse, they would just have to deal with the fact that Sunny was my roommate and she was here to stay as long as she wanted. And that I was going to make my roommate eggs and listen to her sing to herself in her terrible little alto, because the idea of not doing those things made me want to brick myself behind a wall.
Like normal roommate stuff.
The muse would understand.
Grateful that there was some clean—if cold and wrinkled—laundry in here, I changed into fresh clothes that didn’t have Kelly Jelly streaked all over them, and then walked to the tall double doors that made up the mansion’s front entrance. Sunny was there, chattering at the skeptical face of one Steph D’Arezzo, talent manager.
I sighed. Kallum and Nolan loved her, claimed that she used her powers of evil for good—or, at least,theircollective good—but I’d been trying to stay off her radar since the wedding. She’dtold me at the reception that she wanted to help me turn my career around, and I’d told her that I didn’t want a career at all anymore. I wanted to make this last album, pack it full of pine-scented bullshit, and then become a mummy in my own bed.
I’d said this completely honestly, and instead of recognizing that I was pathologically unmanageable and therefore not worth her time, her eyes had glittered.Glittered. Like I’d just challenged her to an epic quest or something.
“But I thought you and Teddy were just in town for the wedding,” Sunny was saying now.
Steph stepped deeper inside the mansion, her stiletto boots tracking in tiny heel prints of snow. I shut the door behind her, although in this marble-lined part of the mansion, there was very little difference between the inside and the outside when it came to temperature.
“The latest installment in the Duke the Halls Expanded Cinematic Universe is actually filming here in town over the next two weeks, so Teddy thought it would be good to oversee the production. And I thought it would be a good chance to take a meeting or two. With you.” A fast, white-toothed smile that was distinctly carnivorous.
Ahhh, why wouldn’t she leave me alone? “Look, I’m flattered, but—”
“Just hear me out,” she said. “I don’t think the problem is in your head, Isaac.”
“No, it definitely is,” I told her.
“And you’re not broken.”
“I unquestionably am.”
“And I think there’s a way to make this album that will be a fresh start for you.”
“I don’t want a fresh start. I want to decay in peace.”
“And I think we can make sure that the next phase of your creative life is sustainable and matches your needs.” Steph heldout her card, which she’d already given me at the reception, and already sent me in the mail once a month for the last four months, but there was no avoiding taking it. I took it and put it in my pocket.
“Thanks, Steph. I appreciate the concern. But I don’t really need a manager now—or ever again—because once I’m done with this album, I’m done for good.”
She walked up to me, pressed both palms to my jaw so she could look me straight in the eye, and said, “Isaac Kelly, we both know that what you want to be done with is other people’s expectations. You deserve to feel like making music is yours again, not your label’s, not your dead wife’s, and definitely not your mother’s. Work with me, and I’ll make sure you get to create on your terms, on your timetable, and without anyone expecting you to be the same happy, romantic man you were five years ago.” She let go of my face, patted my head like I was a misbehaving but irresistible puppy, and then opened one of the double doors and left.
Sunny sighed in a horny, melancholy way. “She’s so hot,” my roommate said longingly.
“She’s terrifying and bossy and I think her high heels could rip through the space-time continuum.”
“Like I said,” sniffed Sunny, and then she went into the kitchen to make herself some eggs.
Chapter Nine
Sunny
