Page 7 of A Virgo's Muse
Onyx Bradford showed up like a whisper, left like a ghost, and somehow… became the loudest thing in my head. I hadn’t heard from him since that night. No texts. No calls. No random visits. Nothing. He’d vanished. And still, he was everywhere… in the way my hands glided across a canvas now without pause, in the way I mixed my paints, letting my instincts override my structure. In the way I caught myself staring at nothing, remembering the sound of his voice when he leaned in and said, “Let’s create.”
I think that night awakened something in me, something I thought I’d lost forever. Because before Onyx, I hadn’t picked up a brush in nearly three months.
I was still teaching art, sure. I was still showing up at the studio for the kids, for the workshops, for the adults who said they just wanted to relax and have wine but still took their paint-by-numbers way too seriously.
But painting for me? That stopped the day I realized I couldn’t feel anything worth putting on a canvas anymore. Then he came unapologetic, mysterious, and focused in a way that made my chest tighten. He didn’t ask for permission to become my muse. He just was.
Now, my hands didn’t stall. My strokes were purposeful. My canvases bled in color again. And when I stood back and looked at what I’d created lately, I swear… it felt like I’d been painting him the whole time.
I just didn’t know if I was romanticizing something that wasn’t even real, or maybe I did know. Maybe that was my problem. I overthought everything.
A classic Virgo trait, right? I was analytical, obsessive, strategic to a fault. I even color-coded my anxiety. It was not cute. I’d gone through my entire security system footage four times just to make sure I didn’t miss him walking by one night. I checked for hidden social media accounts, searched his name on background check sites, even considered asking my cousin, who worked at the DMV, to run his plates… if I had them. I didn’t, though. Because he left nothing behind but a damn vibe and his lingering scent. Like he belonged here.Ugh.
I knew what people said about Virgos. We were control freaks. We thought we knew everything. We didn’t let ourselves just feel. We needed to analyze, dissect, and make charts about it.
But what they never talked about was how deeply we loved, how loyal we were, how we would carry the weight of everyone we loved silently, perfectly. Because failure felt like betrayal, even if we were the only ones expecting perfection. That brought me to the house.
Seven months ago, I watched everything I ever knew turn into ash. It was a kitchen fire. Small at first, it would have been manageable if I hadn’t stepped out to grab coffee. But by the time I returned, the sky was thick with smoke, and the house that held every memory I cherished was collapsing in on itself. I stood there frozen and useless. The home I had fought to keep after moving my parents into the nursing home… gone.
I grew up in that house. I learned to walk on its creaky wood floors, painted my first mural on its kitchen wall, and kissed the wrong boy in its hallway closet. It wasn’t just where I lived. It was who I was, and I failed it.
I couldn’t save the photo albums, the vintage record collection, the sketchbooks from when I was six and drawing people with triangle bodies. I couldn’t save the late-night laughter in the living room where my parents danced to old-school R&B and let me stay up just to paint them. It felt like losing them all over again.
My parents weren’t dead, but they might as well have been ghosts of their former selves. My mom had Alzheimer’s, and my dad chose to stay in the nursing home with her. Not because he had to, but because he couldn’t imagine her going through it alone.
He told me, “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, baby. We’ve lived ours. Let us rest.”
It should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t. Because I was an only child, that meant the weight of everything—memories, grief, responsibilities—fell back onto me.
So, I did what I always do. I organized. I labeled. I built schedules and backup plans. I kept my head above water by staying three steps ahead. I filed the insurance claim the night of the fire. I had bids for rebuilds by the end of the week. I smiled when people said I was strong and didn’t let them see the parts of me breaking underneath.
That was what being a Virgo looked like—controlled, efficient, and emotionally exhausted but composed.
People thought we were uptight or critical or cold, but we were not. We just didn’t trust the world to hold our broken pieces without dropping them. So, we held them ourselves. Every day since the fire, I’d tried to piece together a new version of myself in a home that no longer existed.
That was what Onyx reminded me of—being present in one moment, one breath, one creation. Now, every brushstroke I laid down felt like it was chasing that high again. But underneath all the colors and canvases was that gnawing ache…Where the hell did he go?
I shouldn’t have cared. He was a stranger, a mystery, a fleeting artist’s dream. But I did care, because in the time we spent creating, he saw me. He didn’t ask me for answers. He didn’t tell me to smile more. He didn’t pity me or preach to me. He just leaned in and made the silence feel safe, and I couldn’t stop replaying that… his hands over mine… his voice in my ear… the way he looked at me like he already knew my story and wasn’t afraid of the fire inside it.
Tonight, I would not paint for anyone else. I didn’t sketch outlines or prepare a class demo. I poured blue, black, and crimson across a fresh canvas, and I let my hands move without questioning where they were going. He was still here. Not physically but in the echo, in the curve of a brushstroke, and in the tension in my chest when I realized I was hoping the door would creak open and he’d walk in again like he never left.
Maybe, just maybe, he was thinking of me too.
Desire movedlike her thoughts were louder than the music playing inside. I stood across the street, leaning against the hood of my car, watching her through the glass windows ofMy Desires, the studio that bore her name. And every time I said it in my head,My Desires, it hit different because it was starting to become my reality.
There was something about her. Desire Howard was the kind of woman men didn’t get twice. If they were lucky, they didn’t mess it up the first time.
She had on that same paint-stained apron I remembered from the night I touched her hands in clay. Only this time, her chest was bare underneath it, except for a black sports bra clinging to her like a second skin. She wore black spandex shorts,those thick thighs carrying her from canvas to canvas like she didn’t even realize she was making art just by walking.
Her hair was piled high in a top knot with a few curly strands clinging to her damp forehead. Sweat slicked her caramel skin, catching in the soft dip of her collarbone. Freckles and moles danced across her face, but I knew each one had its own story. Her cheeks were smudged with white paint, which only made her look more like she belonged inside one of her own masterpieces. She was barefoot, pacing like her mind wouldn’t let her rest, and I couldn’t blame her.
Some people walked around searching for purpose. Others were purpose. Desire was the latter. Her eyes were hazel but looked green depending on the light. I remembered how they narrowed when she was focused, how they widened when I whispered something low in her ear, and how they darkened just before she pretended not to care. I saw it—the tension, the wonder, the way her walls cracked like clay in my palms.
She was soft spoken, but her presence was loud. Intelligent, but not the kind that flaunted it. She knew the weight of silence. She was charismatic in the quietest, most hypnotizing way. Beautiful from head to toe, but that was the least remarkable thing about her.
She painted like she’d been to war. Some strokes were rough and desperate. Others, gentle and left unfinished. Like she didn’t believe she deserved peace but still reached for it anyway.
And me? I’d been watching her. Not in some creepy way. Not to study. Just… to make sure I didn’t ruin her. Because I knew what I was. I cleaned up the dirt people left behind, recovered what they lost, and eliminated what threatened them.
