It was times like these that made me wish my parents were assholes. If they were, then I could just break the rules because I wouldn’t care what they thought. But the truth is, I kind of like my parents. I didn’t want them to worry about me or think that I was tied up in the trunk of some car. Or making out with rock stars at Sunset Strip hotels.
Damnit.
I tried to play coy. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” I murmured, pulling him down so that my lips just touched his as I talked. “But I’m not like other girls.” The Jack-and-Cokes had definitely made the flirting part of the night easier. Whoever had mixed them deserved a medal.
Simon said something that I didn’t quite hear, and then he took my hand and, while the firemen kicked everyone out, he led me down the hall, back toward the stage, and then out a door and we were outside in a little courtyard, away from the fans who were camped out by the tour buses, away from firemen and Crazy Arm Woman and whoever else might interrupt us. All I could see were headlights cruising up and down the Strip, and the air smelled really good and salty from the late-night ocean fog that blew east and the sausage vendors that always set up camp after the shows. It was like our own private Emo Eden.
Once we were by ourselves, it got intense. More intense, in a way, than things had ever been with Evan. We had been each other’s firsts and neither of us had seriously dated anyone before, so it was always a little awkward and fumbling. Not bad, but not mind-blowing. Simon, however, knew what he was doing. It was the kind of kissing where you had to remind yourself to breathe in order not to pass out and miss even a second of it.
After a few minutes, he put his hand under my shirt and began counting up my rib cage with his fingertips, and I wondered how far this was going to go. Or, more to the point, how far he expected me to go.
“Wait,” I gasped. “Just…wait for a second. I need a minute.”
We were both breathing hard, and he moved his hands so that they were on either side of my head, pressed against the wall. He laughed a little and brushed some hair out of my eyes. “Don’t be scared, baby,” he said. “Like you say, it’s all good.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Liar.”
“No, I just need a minute. Breathing is important to me, you know.” I was trying to make a joke, but he was right. I was lying.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not gonna suffocate.” He ducked his head back down toward mine. “I won’t let you.”
We kissed for another minute, slower this time, but then we picked back up and when he put his hand up my shirt again, I didn’t stop him. The air around us was filled with traffic sounds and crickets chirping and Simon moaning against my mouth, and I could feel myself starting to not care about anything except him, not parents or curfews or Victoria or anything else but how his hand felt on my skin.
“Come on, Euterpe,” he suddenly whispered. “Inspire me.”
The sentence hit me somewhere in the back of my head, and not because it sounded so bizarre. I had heard that name before. It was Greek. My dad always liked Greek mythology and used to tell me stories about gods and goddesses when I was a little kid. (My mother also had to talk him out of naming me Hera, which is a tale for another time.) But I remembered Euterpe. She was a Muse, one of the nine Muses.
“Wait, what?” I said, trying to pull away from him long enough to talk. “What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘Inspire me.’”
“Before that part. What’d you call me?”
“Euterpe.” He smiled against my mouth so that our teeth touched. “I said, ‘Come on, Euterpe, inspire me.’”
The next time I broke off our kiss, I could tell he was getting a little annoyed. “What?” he said. “Now what?”
“It’s just…do I inspire you? Like right now?” I was starting to get a bad tingly feeling in my toes.
“Well, yeah.” He laughed a little and shook his hair out of his eyes. “That’s what you do for everyone, right?”
“Um, not really,” I said. I was trying to be cool about it, but my pounding heart was suddenly everywhere but in my chest.
“Oh, come on. I’ve heard ‘Audrey, Wait!’ It’s like ‘Sexy Sadie’ for the Beatles, right?” Simon started singing into my ear. “You came along to turn on everyone.…” And just as he was about to move his hand even further up under my shirt, I remembered who Euterpe was: the Muse of Music.
And everything clicked together.
“Oh God,” I said, and pulled away again. “Oh my God.”
“What? You don’t like the Beatles?”
“No, I love the Beatles, it’s not—” I took a deep breath and looked at him, trying to see what he really wanted from me. “I’m not your muse. I’m not anyone’s muse, all right?”
“You know about the Muses, baby?”
“Enough to know that I’m not one of them.” The Jack-and-Cokes were long gone and I felt disgustingly sober. “It was just a fucking song, Simon. I didn’t even write it.”
“So help me write one,” he said, and tried bending down to kiss me again. “We can be famous together. Let’s help each other out. We can be—what’s that word? Symbiotic. Use each other to survive.”
“I know what symbiotic means,” I snapped. (I didn’t mention that it had been one of my favorite PSAT words last year, and that now he had totally ruined it.)