The Muse by Suzie Carr Page B

yearning to kiss her? Would she see a woman craving to run her fingers down the heart of her cheeks? Would she see a woman who wanted to lose herself in her long, thick dark hair? Or had I become so adept at hiding this woman, that all she’d see was fear in my eyes, and an insecurity and a lack of confidence so major that I never could’ve ever pulled off such a thing as a flirty vibe strong enough to send her reeling over the edge of self-control?
    I exhaled a shaky breath.
    I shook my head, walked away from my reflection and sat at the breakfast bar in front of my computer. Before checking my email to see if she’d read it, I reread my story. I cringed when I found two typos. Surely, she’d see these and see amateur, liar, dreamer, illusionist, idealist, or worse, failure.
    In essence, I had failed. I was twenty-nine-years-old and never been on a date, never held hands with someone, and never even, up until recently, flirted. How dare I attempt to write about a kiss convincing enough to curl the toes and fingers of Eva Handel? I’d imagined many people accomplished that already. What would she ever see in me, the coward who used computers as her shield against the cruel and bitter world? What would Eva ever see in someone like me if she ever met the real me, not CarefreeJanie?
    What if she wanted to meet CarefreeJanie?
    I couldn’t let it happen. I would never be as skillful without my keyboard and computer screen as companions.
    CarefreeJanie offered me a chance to taste the sweetness of delivering a compliment, to tickle a girl’s heart without freaking her out with my social awkwardness, to leap like a sexy cat over her and spin her head in wide, wonderful circles at my agility. At least in my mind’s eye, Eva would experience all of this.
    What if she read my story and didn’t like it? Would she scan it, looking just for keywords she could later cite when we tweeted again?
    If she hated my story, then she would hate my story. Nothing I could do at that moment would be able to affect the way she responded to it. I sat victim to the second hand click on my kitchen wall clock, shaking my legs and staring at my two glaring typos. If she hated it, better to know upfront and create my getaway plan before I got sucked in too deep into her enticing world. Of course, knowing what I knew about her already, if she hated it, she’d never tell me. I guessed by her sweetness that she never critiqued anything more than Old Bay and her own silly mistakes like mismatched shoes. If she read it and hated it, she’d probably send me a direct message saying something like my third grade teacher would’ve said to me, ‘Oh great job, sweetie.’
    Living life always in the midst of the shadows of doubt, I could read through the lines. When my mother would write me an email and use an exclamation point, I knew what she really meant was ‘nice attempt’ instead of ‘way to go’. When Doreen would fill her emails with three or more smiley faces, what she really meant was ‘I feel sorry for you so here you go my friend, some smiles to get you through your sad life.’
    If Eva responded with anything less than five adjectives, I’d know instantly that she didn’t like it.
    My throat dried up and a sense of dread scratched its way up my spine the longer I sat waiting.
    An hour later, I decided that if she hated it, I wouldn’t care. I would simply move forward in my life the way I always had, one foot, albeit a clumsy foot, in front of the other in a direction that suited me. If I couldn’t be a writer, maybe I’d go back to school for something completely opposite – accounting or chemistry or something that used the other part of my brain. Maybe I’d spent too much time trying to activate the wrong side of my brain? What if Barbara called it right all those years ago when she told me that I should never put pen to paper because all I ever wrote was icky and gross? Was I that idiot who thought she could sing, tried out for