The Muse

"Cazzo! Porca Miseria!" Hank Cabeiri swore and hissed when the solder he was melting at an odd angle to join the two pieces of steel dripped from their intended spot and singed the skin of his fingers instead. He hobbled over as quickly as he could to the bucket of cold water on the floor he always kept nearby in the workshop, bent down and dunked his hotly throbbing hand into the water, hoping to dull the pain. Swearing some more in both English and his few remembered choice words from his childhood Italian, he moved the fingers gingerly under the cool water to test the range of motion. They were smarting and his fine manual dexterity, so crucial for the small but complicated work he was doing, would be shot for the rest of the day.

He pulled his hand out of the water, shook the droplets off angrily and then kicked the blameless bucket across the workshop with his good foot, spilling water everywhere, drops hissing off the burning red forge. The violent outburst only served to make him lose his balance and nearly topple over on his bad leg. Gripping the side of the long wooden worktable he steadied himself, then looked back and surveyed the sculpture he was working on. Hank shook his head in disgust. He was hot and sweaty both from the blazing forge and the past hour of fruitless labor. He was so tired, and his left foot and leg were aching from standing for so long. The piece he was working on was pointless and he had to admit now looking at it from a bit of distance, no closer to what he had originally imagined and sketched it could be.

It was nothing but an ugly twisted pile of steel, not even close to something he would have been able to do in his first year of apprenticeship, much less now with the threat of his first gallery opening in less than 4 months. Threat of failure, of public humiliation loomed over him larger than life. What the hell was he going to do?

He overcame the urge to upturn the whole workshop in anger and frustration and toss the pile of steel back into the forge to melt, to destroy everything, obliterate everything. He took a deep breath instead and decided to call it a day and just go back upstairs to the loft he shared with his wife Vena and pour himself glass of scotch. A very large glass of scotch.

Grabbing his cane from its spot propped up against the wall he moved toward the spiraling stair that led from the entrance to the warehouse up to the loft. He sighed and decided he didn't have the patience nor physical strength that day to slowly navigate the twists and turns of the staircase, and instead walked toward the freight elevator on the other side of the room.

It was a short ride on a rickety and loudly grinding old elevator, the sound would no doubt irritate Vena, but he didn't care. He just could not deal with any more frustration and disappointment at the physical limits of his body. He hoped she would understand.

Grunting with effort, he closed the gate and then the heavy steel doors, pressed the button for the hydraulic engine and rode the screeching metal box up to the home he made with his classically beautiful but sometimes uncompromising wife.

When the elevator stopped Hank pushed the doors open with his cane and then slid the creaking gate open. The loft was all open concept, a modest but modern living room area, kitchen, dining area and bedroom arranged in logical format, decorated sparsely but tastefully by his wife. One could see everything and everyone from the entrance of the elevator.

So Hank was surprised to see Aaron standing in the space between the bed and the sofa, almost as if he were in mid-stride between the two distinct areas of the loft. Surprised, since he did not see nor hear him come in, nor was he expecting a visit from his business manager that day at all.

"Aaron! Hey when did you get here? I didn't even see you come in." Hank left his cane in its usual spot propped against the leather chair facing the bed and limped a bit as he walked over to greet his wife's distant cousin. The men shook hands and Hank clapped Aaron warmly on the back in greeting. Hank gingerly moved to the kitchen area and opened the cupboard to pull out two glasses, then to the fridge to get ice. In the cupboard under the sink far in the back was where Vena hid the 12 year old Scotch from him; he bent and pulled that out and poured himself and Aaron two generous glasses.

"I guess I must have been really into the work, I didn't hear you come in at all."

"No," Aaron laughed nervously and accepted the glass from Hank with a slightly trembling hand, "you were really intense when I came in and I...I mean I am here to see you, I just... I came up, I didn't want to disturb you. I figured I would visit with Vena a bit ...just talking... and wait for you," the younger man stammered.

At the mention of his wife's name Hank realized she wasn't there, which was strange. He turned his head around just as she emerged from the washroom tucking a few stray strands of her dark hair back into the tight knot she always wore and smoothing the non-existent wrinkles on her skirt. Out of the corner of his eye, Hank noticed Aaron mirror the gesture, passing a hand over the legs of his suit trousers. While he thought it a bit of odd behavior, Hank pushed the thought away and greeted his wife as she approached him, kissing her lightly on the proffered cheek.

"Calling it an early day Hank?" she whispered to him, glancing at the glass of scotch in his hand. Her face was a mask of self control, although Hank knew she disliked him drinking so early in the day, she did her best to conceal her distaste from reflecting in the deep pools of her eyes and smooth planes of her face.

Hank studied her face now, and really every chance he got. She was, he always admitted to himself, extraordinarily beautiful; a placid beauty like some sculpted Grecian statue of finest Carrera marble. Pale skin, clear green eyes, a high regal forehead and arched cheekbones under warm thick chestnut hair always pulled back severely and knotted into a ponytail or twist, highlighting the sharper bones at her cheeks and temples. What she was doing married to him, an older man, ugly and body twisted by the accident and just plain old age, was a question most who saw them together asked and, lately, he found himself asking as well.

He reached out to cup her face tenderly, and rub away with the pad of his thumb the slight smear of her lipstick at the corner of her mouth, the only thing currently marring her perfection. No matter how much Hank felt the failure in his workshop or in himself he could revel in and be inspired by Vena's beauty enough to give him hope to start again fresh the next day.

From behind him Aaron cleared his throat and set his untouched drink on the stainless steel kitchen table.

"Well I better get going," he said and reached for his dark navy suit jacket thrown carelessly on the opposite leather chair. Shrugging it on, he made his way toward the spiral staircase.

"Wait though," Hank called him back, "you said you were here to see me. Was there something you needed to tell me?"

Aaron nearly stumbled on the edge of the carpet delineating the living room as he spun around abruptly. His eyes darted to Vena, then to Hank and back to Vena quickly. He raked his shaking hand through his sandy blonde hair.

"Umm, ah, oh it was just, uh..." Aaron searched his spinning mind for something to say "oh just wanted to see your progress on the installations and uh...yanno see how far along you were. The show is in four months." He needlessly reminded Hank.

Hank knew all too well he was no where near where he should be in his projects for the pending gallery show. Hank downed the rest of his scotch in one gulp and looked askance at Aaron in clear irritation.

'Yeah I know. But you didn't even stop to look in on things downstairs." Hank's left eyebrow crept up on his forehead in question. Again Aaron's searching eyes shifted to Vena.

"He's on his way out Hank, he'll come another day and have a look at things downstairs." Vena said firmly. Aaron sighed slightly, relieved, and Hank grunted and turned his back on the man to place his quickly emptied glass in the sink.

"Sure, ok. See you around Aaron." Hank leaned against the edge of the sink his back still turned, dismissing him, and he sensed Vena moving away from him and toward Aaron.

"I'll see you out Aaron, thanks for coming" she said pointedly, but Hank was already deep in angry and self-pitying whorls of thought.

A few moments later Hank realized he was being rude, but Aaron had hit a sore spot with his reminder. He realized the younger man was not to blame for his current frustration and he shouldn't have unleashed his foul mood on him. The projects he had set for himself were failing, he felt unable to transfer his grand ideas into the physical form of his metals. He felt uninspired and empty. But that was his task alone, his curse as an artist. Aaron's job was to remind him and ride Hank about his responsibilities, to see the bigger picture and the cash value of his art. It was his acumen with money and the business side of things that Hank appreciated most in Aaron.

Hank limped over to the wall of windows at the far end of the loft; maybe he would catch Aaron before he left and give him a conciliatory wave and smile, a goodwill gesture to apologize for his rudeness. But as he looked out the window he saw something that stopped him in his tracks and made him step back to avoid being seen. Vena and Aaron were embracing. But something in the embrace, a certain lingering, her fingers entwined in his hair at the nape of his neck, made Hank think this was not the friendly hug between cousins or even close friends.

With a sudden sharp stab of jealousy Hank realized he could not remember the last time Vena had held him, her husband, in that way. Thinking back to the scene earlier, Aaron's jittering nervousness, Vena's untucked hair and smeared lipstick, Hank felt a sick tightening in his gut. What was going on? He glanced out the window again but the pair were gone, and he heard Vena's graceful dancers' steps on the spiral staircase coming up.

Hank watched Vena float across the floor toward him. Her face was slightly flushed and she wore the fading remnants of a smile. Hanks eyes unconsciously narrowed into slits as he watched her.

"I'll get dinner started," she said and slid past him toward the refrigerator, ignoring his stare. Hank gave his head a shake to clear some of the fogginess of the scotch before he spoke. He didn't want to have an argument.

"What's up with Aaron?" he asked, trying to sound casual and nonchalant.

Vena slowly turned her head to regard her husband. He couldn't read a single emotion on her face this time, as though she had turned back into the marble statue he was so accustomed to seeing.

"He's having a rough week at work, the bank is pressuring him. He's doing his best for you, for us, managing things. I think you were a bit hard with him. I'm not sure why." She had a way of admonishing Hank for his poor behavior that made his face burn and made him feel like he was again a 10 year old boy getting a lecture from his long suffering grandmother for some perceived social transgression.

Hank blew out a harsh breath and pushed himself off the counter. "I'm taking a shower," he informed Vena and walked toward the bathroom, ending the conversation in five short strides.

Later that night after a mostly silent and brooding meal, they both retired to bed early, back to back each on their side with a wide canyon of space between them. Hank tossed and turned sleeplessly most of the night, but when he did finally fall asleep he was plagued by cloying and vivid dreams.

In his dreams he saw his wife with Aaron; he knew it was Aaron though in the dream he was faceless. They shifted from the same embrace he saw them in when he was watching them from the window to a shimmering naked writhing coupling on the very bed he and his wife slept on each night. Hank watched, as he had watched them before from the window, it seemed from a not too far distance but they did not see him nor realize he was so near. It was as if Hank were watching the pair through a thick pane of watery glass or a semi-sheer curtain of fabric.

The faceless man was at times rough and gentle with Vena, his hands grasping and molding the soft flesh of her body closer to his, in an effort to get more of her into his arms, more of her on his lips and in his mouth, his crazed hunger palpable. Hank watched the man penetrate Vena, sliding a sizeable hard cock slippery with her juices in and out of her repeatedly with such force her entire body shuddered. Her head was thrown back in a voiceless cry of passion, her hair cascading down her shoulders and back in an undulating chocolate wave and a sheen of sweat slicked them both, their bodies glittering in the half-light of Hank's bluish nightmare world. He saw Vena pull and grasp at the man's back, his thighs and ass, trying to get more of him into her, pacing him faster and harder, her hips undulating and gyrating to meet each of the man's thrusts. They made no sound, and at the moment of Vena orgasm, her eyes shut tight and her mouth wide and wild as he had never himself seen in their life together, the brightest hottest flames of red and orange light burst from the pair on the bed, like the very heart of the fire in his forge.

Hank woke with a muffled shout, his own body trembling. Hank was sweating, and he eventually noticed, his cock was fully and illogically erect.

Vena murmured softly next to him from her sleep and Hank slowed his breathing so as not to wake her. He gently swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat on its edge resting his pounding head in his hands. The dream was so vivid he could easily remember all the details. What was going on and why was he now so goddamned ... aroused? The events of the dream should have made him angry, jealous, and furious, even if just a dream. But this? This was just confusing.

Shaking his head a bit as if to shake out the last lingering images of his dream, Hank stood up slowly. Realizing he would never get any sleep if he didn't take care of his current rigidity, he quietly walked to the bathroom to get some relief without waking Vena. It was surprisingly quick work, he stroked himself a few times recalling the most potent images from his dream and came with a muffled groan pressed into his forearm. He could not remember a time when it was so easy, or when he was so turned on. It only added to his confusion; why should a dream about his wife having sex with someone else make him this excited?

He decided, once he was finished and had washed and dried his hands, that the only way he could put this to rest was to confront Aaron the next time he came by. Or to catch the two either in the acts he imagined or, if it was just his over-active imagination, innocent of anything he could have conjured. This idea pleased him in many ways he could not quite understand as he tumbled it around in his mind like a river stone, and he returned to bed and eventually drifted again into a more dreamless sleep.

Days passed and Hank continued to wrestle with his metals and the fire of the forge, and with his preoccupied mind. As he hammered and cast, his mind wandered, recalling images from his dream. He also started to recall events from his early childhood in Sicily.

He vaguely remembered stories of men driven to mad violence at insinuations of being a 'cornudo', in which the wife was 'giving him the horns' and sleeping with other men behind the man's back. He remembered once asking his beloved grandfather, the town's blacksmith with whom he first learned to love and respect the fire and iron, what the hand gesture he saw the villagers make had meant. The 'cornos", first and last finger up and pointing at a man's back while the thumb pressed the second and third finger down toward the palm, Hank saw his neighbors make this gesture behind certain villager's backs and even, he would never say aloud, at his grandfather's back.

Hank remembered the old man gingerly touching the iron horn of his anvil, the anvil Hank inherited that now stood in his own smith shop, and the old man sighed deeply. His grandfather's deeply tanned and arthritis-withered hand caressed the horn gently. Hank knew the gesture, the 'tocca ferro' was for good luck, but something else in the movement, something almost sensuous, gave the young boy pause at the time and made his neck prickle with slight embarrassment. "They don't understand," was all the older man had said, and Hank never broached the subject with him again.

One day in late Autumn Hank heard a car approach outside. He knew instinctively it would be Aaron. Hank turned his back to the door and began a steady but measured hammering on the piece he was working on, but listened intently in the silent spaces between each strike. He heard the soft creak of the door, and after a short pause the lightened step up the spiral staircase of someone trying very hard not to be heard.

Hank turned his head, still hammering, glancing at the stair just in time to see the bottom of Aaron's dark navy pinstriped pant leg slip from view. Hank fought down the urge to drop everything and follow Aaron up the stairs, but he knew that if he wanted to catch them at anything, if they were in fact doing anything, he had to let them think they were safe enough to do it, or to start something at the very least.

Hank felt excited rather than angry, which surprised him. It was if he was more excited to catch Aaron and wife together, to finally get the chance to actually watch them in the flesh together rather than just in his imagination than in being right and indignant or angry. Hank didn't want to imagine them together again, but imagine he did, and between the feigned hammer blows he felt his cock again getting inexplicably hard.

After a few more minutes Hank abandoned his work and slowly, painfully, made his way up the spiral staircase to the loft upstairs. Muffling his grunts of exertion, he managed to climb with as little noise as possible to announce his arrival. A few steps short of the top riser he stopped, crouched and peered up and across the loft toward the bed.

All of Hank's feverish dreams over the last few weeks could not have prepared him adequately for what he saw. Vena was laid naked on the bed, her alabaster skin pearly in the softening mid-afternoon light from the wall of windows. Her hair undone, it was longer and fuller than he had ever seen it, rippling about her face and shoulders, silky as fur, stray wisps clinging to her flushed face. Her eyes were firmly squeezed shut; she could not see Hank watching. She bit and gnawed her lip in an effort to silence her gasps and moans and her body trembled, her shuddering causing her small perfectly round breasts to shake, the nipples hard tight buds tracing unseen arcs and shapes in the air above them. Her shuddering was caused by Aaron, kneeling at the foot of the bed his face firmly and deeply pressed to the mound between her legs, his head rising and falling in small motions only to occasionally kiss her inner thighs, drink in deep draught of air and utter small moans of pleasure himself. Vena's long tapered fingernails raked mercilessly through Aaron's hair, scraping his scalp and pulling him ever closer.

Aaron placed his knees, still in his blue pinstriped trousers, on the bed, wound his arms under and around her trembling widely spread thighs and with a fluid motion straightened up and hoisted her high up off the bed, hooking her knees over his shoulders, as if wanting to take her further, deeper into his hungry insatiable mouth. Vena lost her careful control then, head thrashing from side to side on the bed tangling her hair, hands grasping and nails digging into and tearing the pale blue coverlet of the bed and she let out a low keening sound Hank had never before heard from her, a guttural animal noise he never even knew she could make.