Page 19 of Marginally Yours
"Yeah, okay," I concede. “First draft first." She graces me with a radiant smile before throwing her arms around me and we both fall back into the bed.
Chapter Twelve
We spend the rest of the day curled up in a nest of blankets. We read in silence for a while, and then Callie regales me with tales of her previous charges. Apparently, muses have specialties, and hers is the written word. Her last assignment was a fiction writer who was working on a post-apocalyptic piece that was meant to be a warning statement about the current administration, and he was having trouble finding someone willing to publish it. Callie's job was to inspire him to change up the writing enough that it wasn't glaringly obvious.
We're still nested in the blankets when it starts to get dark outside, so I order us some dinner.
Callie jumps when my doorbell rings. My phone goes off at the same time, letting me know that our food is here. I bring everything into the bedroom and step back out to the kitchen to grab drinks and paper towels. When I come back, she's got little white takeout containers lined up on my desk. She opens one with what I'm guessing is wontons based on the little happy dance she does in the beanbag chair I dragged in fromthe living room for her. She glances up at me in the doorway, and waves me over to eat.
"If you don't take some of these now, I'm going to inhale them before you even get a whiff," she warns, plucking a crispy wonton out of the container.
"You sure about that?" I ask, snatching it out of her fingers just before she takes a bite and leaning in to steal a kiss. She slaps my chest and steals the wonton back before I can shove it in my mouth. I come around the desk and sink into my chair, starting in on a container of sesame chicken. Once she's got enough food in her for her stomach to stop rumbling, we pick up where we left off.
“So, how many assignments have you been on?” It feels like asking someone for their body count, but I have to know.
“Maybe a hundred or so,” she says. “I lost count. Not nearly as many as some of the others. I think my favorite assignment was Mr. Alighieri," she says, absentmindedly poking at her rice. My brows knit together as I try to remember why that name sounds familiar. "He was kind of boring, but Florence wasbeautifulin the 1200s." The chicken falls from my chopsticks halfway to my mouth as I gape at her.
"I'm sorry, 1200s," I choke out. "As in, the century?" She freezes, giving me a sheepish smile like she didn't just drop a bomb on me. I blink at her a few times, mouth still hanging open like an idiot, and then I open my mouth to let yet another stupid fucking question roll out of it. "Exactly how oldareyou?" I cringe as soon as I say it. I need a fucking muzzle.
Her lips roll into a thin line, and she puffs her cheeks out for a second with a deep breath before letting it out in a slow stream. "Well," she starts, fidgeting with the hem of the hoodie she's claimed as her own instead of answering. I raise an expectant eyebrow at her, and she lets out a heavy sigh. "I don'tknowexactlyhow old I am, honestly. I remember my first assignment was a woman named Rabia from Persia."
I pull out my phone and search for "Rabia Persia writer", not expecting much, but a Wiki article pops up. "Rabia Balkhi," I read aloud, and Callie jumps forward. "That's her!" she shouts, so I continue. "...Also known as Rabia al-Quzdari, was a... tenth... century..." My words slow to a halt as my eyes drift up to her. "Tenth century," I repeat. "As in 900 AD." It's not a question, but I wait for her to confirm it anyway.
"Yeah, that sounds about right," she says, pushing a grain of rice around the bottom of the container. "It was later in the tenth, though, so I'm like... just over a thousand I guess?"
Cool, cool. Yeah, nothing fucking bonkers about that. It's fine. I take a second to compose myself before I say something that actually offends her.
"Okay, that leads me to my next question. What's the uh... the lifespan of a muse? Like where are you at on the age scale? Toddler, teenager, adult...?"
She hums, scrunching up her eyebrows as she does immortality math. Fucking hell.
"Well, I don't think there's really a solid number? I think the oldest muse I know is the first Calliope, and I remember her saying she was about 900 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, so she's got to be like 3,000 at least." I let out a low whistle. "So, I guess, in comparison, I'm like 25 in human years." I purse my lips and nod slowly. I can work with that. That's something I can wrap my head around, like dog years.
"I don't know of any muses who have ever actually died, now that I think about it. There have been a few who were killed, but we don't really age much, and we don't get sick." Her lips tilt up. "Guess you're stuck with me for a while, huh?"
"Well," I say quietly. "I'm stuck with you for as long as you're stuck with me." It takes a second for my words to sink in, but I know it clicks when her gaze whips to me. Her lipspart, but she says nothing, just looks down at her lap. "Sorry," I mumble, reaching across the desk to take her hand in mine. I pull it up to my face, pressing a kiss to each knuckle. "Didn't mean to pop your bubble."
"No, you're right. A problem for another day?" She gives me a questioning look that turns into a small smile when I nod.
"Yeah, another day,” I agree, and mentally file that thought away under ‘future shitstorms’. “Okay, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I have a question.” She narrows her eyes on me, and I hope like hell that this comes out as curiosity and not offense. “If you’re a thousand years old, how is there literally anything you haven’t experienced? You said you’d never been bowling before, and you were so excited to meet the cows… I just… How is anything a new thing for you?”
“Well, like I said, I haven’t been on a ton of assignments. I’ve been told I’m not a very good muse,” she mumbles the last bit, cringing. I take her hand and squeeze silently, giving her the space to process what she wants to say. “Anyway, I only get to experience a tiny bit of the lives I get assigned to. I was assigned to a farmer’s son once, and I basically just had to hide out in his barn because he never left the property. Most of my assignments in recent decades were spent making coffee, honestly.”
My blood boils for her again, but I tamper down the rage. This isn’t about me right now. “What about when you’re not on an assignment?”
“The best of the muses live on Mount Helicon. It’s like the hub for muse society. They have apartments and technology and lives, but they spend most of their time on assignments and don’t actually get to enjoy any of it. The rest of us are housed on Mount Parnassus, which is basically just empty farmland and dormitories. We train our powersand do chores and that’s about it. Some of them form little cliques and spend their downtime together, but I’ve never been into all of that. We have a library, so I mostly just read.”
Ah, that explains a lot.I want to ask about a million more questions, but I don’t think I can bear her looking this sad anymore.
“So, about these powers," I start, hoping for a subject change. "Do you control them directly, or do you just think of what you want, and they make it happen?"
"Well, I mostly have control of them. If I want something to happen, it does. Sometimes, our magic just makes things happen, though. Like I choose my clothes in my head, and they change. But if I were to want to change but not make a conscious choice about my outfit, it just defaults to something I've worn previously."
"So, wait, your clothes aren't real?" I'm struggling to wrap my head around this much fuckery in one sitting, which is insane considering how much magic-based media I've consumed in my life.
"No, they're real," she says with a giggle. "They're just not always the same clothes, or even clothes at all, if that makes sense? Alchemical magic is matter-based, so what I'm currently wearing turns into what I want to wear. Say we went to Strikers and there were no bowling balls left at all. I could take off my jacket and make it a bowling ball and then turn it back into a jacket when we left."
"No fucking way," I blurt out. Call me Eddie, because that was fuckingeloquent. She raises an eyebrow at the challenge before slipping my hoodie over her head. When she pops her head out from under the hem, bright purple hair sticks out in all directions. I bark out a laugh because what the fuck else am I supposed to say to that? As she pulls her arms out, I see that her t-shirt and sleep shorts are now a light purple dress. Theone she was wearing the first time I walked into the store, actually.
