Page 2 of The Artist and the Muse

“Wait, Daddy! You need Mr. Muffins! You can’t tell the story unless you’re holding Mr. Muffins.” Savannah jumped up to grab her plush toy from her room—a chef’s hat that bore a symbol of a cartoon muffin on it, which her Aunt Katerina had gotten her.

I chuckled and acquiesced, taking the toy from her and holding it like a microphone as I continued my story. “That was when I was living in Rome, and I had my paintings on display in a gallery…”

Just as I started to tell them the story of how I had met Georgia, she walked in from the kitchen and interrupted me, setting her hands on her hips. With her blonde hair now piled on top of her head in a messy bun and wearing a lemon-patterned apron over her nightgown, she was a comical—but beautiful—sight to behold.

“That’s not when things began for real,” she said. “Let Mommy tell you the real story.”

“Are you going to talk about when Daddy got arrested at the airport?” Sadie chimed in.

“We’ll get to that part later.” I shook my head and handed Georgia the chef’s hat. “Here. You can't tell stories unless you're holding Mr. Muffins.”

Georgia took a deep breath. “The story of the paintingofficiallystarts when I was late for school one day.”

“I thought you and Daddy met in the art museum,” Sadie interrupted.

“Back to the story,” I said, gesturing for Georgia to continue.

“Was Daddy late for class too?“ Savannah asked.

“No, actually. Your father was the teacher…”

Chapter One: Georgia Philips

Present Day

Have you ever had one of those days where everything that can go wrong does so catastrophically?

Today was one of those days.

I woke up late because I’d spent all night cleaning the apartment while my mom was on her trip to the Hamptons. She so rarely took vacations that I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle living on my own at the ripe old age of twenty-three. So, I’d sent her off assuring her everything would be fine. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I realized I only had half an hour to make it to campus, which was twenty minutes from our apartment.

But when I went to the garage to get my motorcycle, there was an enormous scratch along the side. After my bike had fallen over yesterday when I drove over a pothole, I’d hoped it was fine. Now, mylast dregs of hope fizzled out when it died following several attempts to start it.

Shelling out the cash for an overpriced Uber to campus, I hightailed it into Art History 201, the last class I needed to finally walk the stage the following November in a graduation gown.

After I sprinted into class and ran down the stairs of the cavernous lecture hall to the front row, I threw myself into the last available seat. Thank God there was still an empty chair in the packed room. Pulling out my pens and a notebook out of my bag, I opened it to a blank page, as I let my heart rate slow.

But my heart couldn’t catch a break when the teacher turned around.

George Devereaux.

My former fake fiancé.

He stood in front of the whiteboard, on which he’d scrawled ART HISTORY 201 in his messy handwriting. Behind his beard, he wore the same quietly amused smirk that still made my heart do a flip.

One of my pens rolled off the desk and landed at his feet. He picked it up and leaned down to place it on my desk, and as he did so, he said quietly, “You’re late.”

Checking my Seiko Lukia watch, I saw that it was 9:03. A mere three minutes after the class’s start time of nine o’clock. Not bad, since I was sweaty, out of breath, and flushed from running up three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator—which, of course, happened to be broken today. “I’m sure I didn’t miss anything important.”

The sass was a defence mechanism, especially as I currently felt naked without my layers of armour: cat-eye liner, foundation, and bright lipstick. Then again, George Devereaux had always made me feel more vulnerable than I liked.

He straightened, avoiding my gaze, and I saw that behind his lazy confidence and quiet amusement, he was shocked to see me here. Clearly, George hadn’t expected us to meet this way. I was just as surprised, since I’d signed up for this class at the last minute. I’d barely skimmed the syllabus, too busy hoping I could get in and acquire my final option credits for my degree.

George glanced away from me and faced the rest of the class. “Please try to be on time. We have a lot of material to cover in the next two months, and the last thing I want is to have to wait for you to catch up.”

He launched into a spiel about the syllabus and I started writing, hating how my fingers trembled as I scribbled down the date and name of the class. I’d hoped this class would be a fresh start, a blank slate—but this wasn’t any of those things. Not when the lecturer for this class had tangled my heart into more knots than a game of cat’s cradle.

I jotted down dates of quizzes and essays, hearing him talk about the artwork we would cover in this course. Behind me, two girls whispered about how they were only taking the class because they’d heard the lecturer was a quasi-celebrity in the art world and how they wanted him to autograph their prints of his work.

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