A Ruined Ratio

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

You awaken not to softness, not to the familiar ache of morning joints or hazy sleep, but to pressure—tight—looped around your wrists, your thighs, your ankles. A stinging pulse blooms beneath every knot, centering in the crux of your lower body.

The inside of the sculpture is warm from body heat, claustrophobic with breath and sweat, nothing like the warm, womb-like hug it had once been. You blink into the gloom, muscles stiff, the promise of a migraine between your eyes, but at present, you feel a pinch of pain each time you blink as if the skin around your sockets is bloated and bruised.

Across from you, Muse crouches wide, elbows on his knees, at the threshold of your clay mouth—silent, unmoving, watching. The ivory of his shirt wrinkles around his joints, forcing the hard ridges of his abdominals, cut deep above the slack of his pants, into a visual feast—a flayed open carcass of anatomy or a display of decayed meat... or both. Life. Rot. Those are his preferred mediums, afterall.

He looms closer. The space is tight, and his bulk blots out the entrance, but you take a shaky breath, fill your senses with cedar-wood cologne, and shudder in your bondage. At the sound you make, which you must, because someone—something—whimpers, Muse drops to one knee. Stained canvas pants sag low over his hips, bunching around thick thighs, and his chest heaves slowly beneath the stretched cream of his ink-blotted long sleeve. The mask hides his face, but not the weight of his eyes, not the way they settle over you like gravity.

And you can’t stop looking at him, even as your cheeks grow blotchy with that unidentified quiver. Even now, tied and vulnerable, you admire him—not just the visceral danger of him, or the unwashed violence clinging to his costume—but the art of him. The lines of his body feel drawn by design. Everything about him is deliberately crafted. And that stirs something low and shameful in your belly. You want him to look at you like this—with conscious esteem. With appetite, regardless of the blander bites.

Is this what Sylvan feels? The question tastes like rotten fruit in your mouth, and yet you understand it for the first time—the sick desire to be seen, maybe to take, too. But Muse is not Sylvan. You are not Sylvan. Sylvan simpers and flatters, ever circling, never landing. Muse studies. He unmakes. And you? 

You're not sure what purpose you serve anymore...

The despair at this realization must show on your face, because Muse laughs low, without warmth, and whispers, “There she is—my little half-formed masterpiece.”

One of his hands plants on the concrete beside your hip, gloved fingers splayed near your skin. The other drags up the sculpture’s inner lip, so close to brushing against you that the hairs on your arms rise. Then he leans forward, slowly, his head of white, capped in a black beanie, tipping just slightly as though trying to decide which angle he likes you better in.

Muse takes a loose lock of your hair, so close to your cheek that it feels like fire, and moves it over your shoulder. It's something you've done to your sculptures more times than you can count. The dehumanization of something that looks human, in this case, is human.

“You made this. Then covered it up,” he rasps, eyes flicking around the interior, the way your body fits so precisely in the hollow you carved. “How disappointing.”

His words don’t wound—yet—but there’s something curling beneath them. He tilts his chin, cocking his head, mockery in the breath behind his mask. “Derivative. They say mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, but this is a pretentious by-product of so-called inspiration. Isn't it?”

Your brow twitches. The heat in your face grows with a simmering rage, fueled by indignation.

“I’ve seen your work,” he continues, voice low like an insult. “That little exhibit. All smooth lines. The divine feminine made for the male gaze, disguised as purity. Imagine if you stuffed your sculpture's cunts with teeth.” His finger taps the clay beside your shoulder once, like punctuation. “Now that. That would be real expression. Twisted. Something Rodin—Gauguin had the courage to do. But this. Looks like another birth canal for men to crawl into.”

You open your mouth, but his words keep coming, crawling in between yours before they can surface. “You're afraid of making something ugly. Of liking it. Your hands keep trying, but you keep playing it safe. You just want to be liked so badly...”

He leans in farther, until his masked nose nearly touches yours, his breath a warm, damp exhale beneath it, moistening your trembling lips.

“Tell me—when you carved this open. Forced its cunt gaping for your creative fulfillment, were you thinking about what it would feel like to be similarly stretched open?”

The fury rises quickly, faster than you can bite it down.

“You—you crude fucking bastard,” you snap, chest rising so hard your breasts brush his hanging suspenders. It's electric. It fuels you, the warmth of wanting mixing with the heat of feminine rage. “You think you know me so well?! That art has to be vile to mean something?"

His red eyes blink. You spit curses and hiss as he slides in closer, forcing you tight into the mouth until you can't get away, and his forehead is pressed to yours, those bloodshot eyes boring into yours with wild waiting. 

"Go on," Muse presses, sounding shaken, manic, greedy for you to vomit it all up. Be honest, for once.

"That... j-just because you carve your masterpieces out of corpses, you’re some messiah of meaning? Nitsch, Hagens, even DaVinci. As if your so fucking original.”

A low sound escapes him—amusement, maybe, or the edge of something darker. His hand lifts, slides slowly up your arm this time, purposeful. Heat shoots across your skin like ink dropped in water, but you heave a breath and bleat out, “You think I need your approval?” 

"No. You just want it."

You scoff, jerking away from his touch, only to feel his gloves run up your thighs, cupping your shaking knees. More fire. More excitement—more fervor that you let deform into outrage because you can't recognize its desire. “You sound just like the critics you think you’re above—dressed in your blood and drama. You're the pretentious one.”

That strikes home. His weight shifts fast. Muse lunges forward, swallowing your throat in a single, rough palm, shoving you back against the curve of the sculpture until you feel it give against your body, softened by the heat boiling between you and Muse. 

“Critics observe from a distance. I'm the one who bleeds for it. Can't call yourself an artist if you don't do the same,” he growls, voice vibrating through your skin. Your head knocks dully, breath catching as pressure cinches around your neck—not choking, but enough for you to gag, understanding the warning. “I am what they pretend to be—a creator of something honest.”

His other hand braces on the mushy wall near your shoulder, his body a muscled, aromatic cage.

“And you," he says against your cheek, the lips behind the fabric formed into a parted grin, "You make art like you’ve never made yourself come.”

Your pulse jumps under his palm. Your lips part—not from fear, but because something snaps inside you. He’s right. It makes you want to scream. It makes you want to weep. It makes you want him to cut the ropes around your legs so you can envelop his hips, draw him into you, grind your untouched core into his groin until all that empty ache in your gut fills... then overflows... 

And yet, your voice stays oddly steady. “You’re right...”

His breath stalls, the threat of his smirk dim but there, firm against your face... gliding down to your jaw, tracing the angle to your ear where he asks, "What was that?" 

“I said, you’re right.” The grip on your throat shifts, just a fraction. 

You tilt your head to the side, shivering at the damp friction of his cottoned mouth dragging against the shell of your ear. His breathing is thick and shuddering, as you crumple against him. “I’ve held back. I thought... if I kept it clean, if I never let it get ugly... it would still matter. But I wasn’t making art, just doing everything to hide myself. Hide what I really wanted. Hiding me.”

Muse makes a sound—something inhuman and triumphant—and his grip slackens entirely. His hand trails down, dragging heat from your throat to the center of your sternum, where it pauses, twitching just above your breastbone. His fingers don’t spread to the edges of your breasts, but fuck do you want them to. Want him to mold them into your ribs, fist them and break your chest open like the fragile clay now in the alleyway, find something inside you and make use of it. Instead, his touch listens, like he's weighing your heart by the beat beneath bone.

“Art devours,” Muse murmurs, voice low and warmer, tickling your ear, smooth as the blood pumping through your veins. “You should try being the canvas sometime.”

You're not sure what he means by that, but right now, you'd agree with anything he suggests.

Muse leans closer, hips almost brushing your shins. Hot, diffused breath soaks through your hoodie, down your collarbones. You feel the warmth of him everywhere. Your own pulse thunders against your ribs, your wrists, your... cunt. His presence crushes down on your senses, and you arch involuntarily, gasping when the rope pinches tighter from the shift.

His hand jolts like he feels it too, and you expect him to touch you, squeeze you, wedge things inside you where you're soaked, dripping. Want him to. Desperately. But instead, he pulls back...

His fingers snap to the rope binding your wrists, and with a deft yank, the knot gives. You gasp as circulation rushes back. Then, without speaking, he draws a box cutter from his back pocket—the blade stuttering out—and slices through the hemp at your thighs, then your ankles, one by one.

You blink, stunned, legs slowly falling open as the last rope slides over a thigh, into the space between them, where your folds are swollen and wet. That thin blade catches the light, and your empty innards contract with—

Muse's eyes snap down, and you lick your lips, exhaling a gush, knowing he can see your bare, slippery flesh despite the darkness, maybe he can see it better because of it—maybe the limited light catches on your arousal clinging to soft curls... makes it glisten brightly... it certainly feels like it does... maybe he can take the boxcutter and cut—liberate more fluids, make you shine in the dark... slices and scores and fingers spread through blood to slide easier where you're hot and wet and willing.

“You’re not ready,” he says, his chest rising and falling hard beneath the bloodstained blot, mimicking his bleeding heart. He stands, looming above you, lit only by the faint bleed of city light through the windows.

He turns, but pauses just as your thighs start to tremble. He can't just leave now... he won't leave you like this, will he?

“When I come back,” he warns, “you better be ready to show me something real.”

And then he’s gone as if you hadn't been hogtied. As if you untied yourself. As if the pounding emptiness between your legs isn't really there...

Don't you do it, the critic says, don't you dare move. But your fingers don’t listen. They slide down, trembling, slow, like they’re touching something with teeth. You gasp at the heat waiting there, soaked through... there's no bite, just softness...

It’s not even pleasure yet—just beautiful pressure. Pressure and the promise of relief...

Show me something real, he said.

You bite your lip and keep going.