Abuse by the Muse

Abuse by the Muse

All characters who engage in. sex in this story are above age 18.

My gratitude to MikePaulWrites for his gentle but incisive editing guidance.

Please, please note: This story, to be told in six chapters, has themes of infidelity, unwilling cuckoldry, a bit of voyeurism, and dashes of group and lesbian sex.

It has no, repeat: ZERO misogynistic elements, no retribution, none of those "BTB" plot points LW readers have demanded from my past stories. If you're looking for revenge, you won't find it here. I like these people. Well, most of them.

Also, please know that this series evolved, more or less, from the story "Tippi&Drew&Tyler,Too," published earlier on this site. The characters and the storyline have changed considerably, but some of the verbiage and plotline from that earlier piece is contained in the first chapter of this series.

Chapter 1: "If it's for art, is it cheating?"

Tyler Matcalf's cock had come back to haunt me.

The enormous horizontal triptych panel was the exhibition's centerpiece, dominating an entire 20-foot wall of the Petrossian Gallery. It consisted of three five-foot canvases, four feet high, hung flushed together to form a single image depicting a male torso almost spread-eagled on a couch. The man depicted in the painting stared directly at the viewer, his facial expression reflecting a disturbing mixture of intense desire and wrenching vulnerability. His hypnotic eyes were like vortexes, commanding the viewer to peer inside and share his longing, a demand bordering on predatory. Yet there was something decidedly sympathetic behind those eyes.

With many of the exhibit's pieces, including a half dozen portraits of the same subject and two semi-pornographic images depicting that same naked figure entwined with a faceless woman, the artist had skillfully rendered surrealistic images with masterful, brutal photo-realism, with just enough distortion to make them truly disturbing.

The flow of the triptych's panels invited the viewer's eyes to travel from the unflinching gaze of the man's face to his long and powerful arms, outstretched as if reaching impatiently, almost desperately, for something just beyond his reach. An embrace? An assault? Impossible to know, but the artist had imparted the heart-breaking certainty that those arms would never, ever grasp what they were reaching for. Inevitably, the viewer's eyes settled upon the center panel.

In the middle of that panel, at the center of the center, was perhaps the most disturbing feature of the canvas: a depiction of the subject's menacing genitalia. The man's penis was outsized, in a stage of semi-arousal, curving upward and its purplish, bulbous, mushroom head pointed directly at the viewer, the small urethral orifice at its tip exaggerated, leaking fluid and seeming to blink like a third eye. Most remarkably, the helmet-shaped glans had a decidedly purplish color, almost as if it had been tattooed or dyed in a plum-like hue. The frenulum, a fold of skin just beneath the glans, resembled a nose, and in Drew's imaginative mind's eye, human eyes appeared on each side of that feature, transforming the organ into a sinister face. An ugly face. Mean and mocking.

The shape, the color, the size of the penis gave it a sinister appearance, as if it were a medieval gargoyle.

The ultimate effect of the piece was to create the feeling that the man's arousal was directed at the viewer. Insistently. Compellingly. Threateningly. The man wanted, no, needed, to ravish the viewer, and the power of the painter's technique rendered the viewer helpless to resist. "A disturbingly memorable image," wrote one critic.

And I remembered it all too well. That fucking asshole, Tyler Metcalf and his freakish gargoyle penis.

Many who viewed the piece at this high-profile Chelsea gallery exhibition would come upon it and look away, as if it were too intimate, too personal, something that should have remained behind closed doors. Some denounced the painting as sheer pornography. A piece that had no place in public view. Others, including most critics, regarded it as an intense and masterful reflection on human nature, on what is universal and essential in our species, the place where our spiritual and sexual needs coincide.

The red dot on the wall next to the painting indicated that it had already been sold, and I'd been told that the purchaser was the Museum of Modern Art, which had acquired it for their permanent collection.

The series of paintings, described by the gallery as a mid-career survey, had taken the artist years to complete. It had its origins in a town a thousand miles away, about five years earlier, on a weekend when the artist encountered--or re-encountered--her muse and began the slow dismantling of the life we shared together. At the time she began that monumental painting, artist Tupsa Nielsen was my wife.

Years after our breakup, I'd remember the weekend when the dynamic in our marriage had so radically changed. Were there signs leading up to it? Did I miss signals she'd been leaving over a protracted period of time. Had she been slipping away from me, undetected, for weeks or months or even for years? Or was it a sudden recognition, a flash of awareness that she needed something more in her life and in her work, like the visual sparks that inspired her paintings? She was prone to sparks and flashes. It's what made her who she was. And it's what made me fall in love with her a long time ago.

Either way, I'd been left blindsided. Five years later, the shock hadn't completely subsided. There were nights when I would lie alone in my plush Brooklyn Heights brownstone duplex and stare at the ceiling, wondering what the fuck happened to a six-year marriage that seemed so very perfect.

She had been stuck. Creatively blocked. It was a terribly sad thing to behold. For about three months, I would walk into the converted garage that served as Tippi's studio and see her, sometimes with her palette in hand, staring at a blank canvas. Or, painting over some forms she'd reconsidered again and again.

As the weeks went by, I'd see tears in her eyes as she emerged from the studio, trailing that smell of turpentine, mineral spirits and linseed oil that had become as much a part of her olfactory profile as the light musky-sweet smell that her body gave me when I held her close. Having spun her artistic wheels without result, her sad face would reflect her frustration.

Our dinnertime banter, which had always been so filled with the events of our lives, our observations of the world, all the connections that made us so bonded as a couple, had become stilted. For the first time since we'd come together, there were lapses in conversation. Not the good kind, not the silences that come when two people are so comfortable with one another they can share a loving silence. It was the other kind: the awkward quiet of two people who no longer communicate.

Neither of us was particularly interested in the school reunion weekend to which we'd each been invited. It was to take place at a resort hotel on Lake Alsea, about 30 miles from our house in Millport.

I hated those things: the forced geniality, the relentless reminiscence, the phony nostalgia. I didn't want to see old classmates with their children, or even with pictures of their children and I didn't want to compare career paths in that subtly boasting way that resembles a comparison of penis size. We had remained in contact with the people from our school years who we wanted to be in our lives. I didn't need to make small talk with the others.

I was surprised, then, when Tippi decided to go.

She held her chin in her hand, the way she often did when she was thinking when she told me. "You don't have to come," she'd said. "In fact, I would prefer if you didn't. I think I need--maybe we both need--a weekend away from each other, from the house, from my studio. And the only really good thing I remember from the school years--aside from you, of course--is the art I was making. I was so open then, so unselfconscious. Maybe it will jar something. Maybe it'll help me become unstuck."

I was okay with it, having recently launched my own design and marketing firm with two partners, and we had a big project coming due for our most important client. I could use some alone time on the weekend to get some work done.

"Say hello to everyone from me," I said. "And have some fun."

She left Friday evening, wheeling a small suitcase and carrying her big sketchbook under her arm. When she returned on Sunday, I knew right away that something was amiss.

There was a sense of unease and a stiffness to the hug she gave me when she came through our front door that evening. She set the luggage down inside our door and hugged me weakly, pulling away subtly as I tried to draw her near.

Her light blonde hair was bound in a ponytail and the warm light from the sunset filtered into our living room, bouncing off her porcelain-white skin. She seemed to be glowing. She wore no makeup; she almost never did. She was wearing the cerulean blue embroidered top I'd given her for Christmas--it was her favorite--and the color echoed the blue of her eyes and complemented her golden hair. Even after almost six years of marriage, the effect never ceased to dazzle me.

Tippi seemed distant that evening, avoiding any eye contact as she smiled, a little weakly, and gently detached from my welcoming hug. She picked up her overnight bag and made her way to our bedroom to begin unpacking.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked, as she walked away.

"Yes," she said, but a slight intonation in her voice added to my sense that something was wrong.

"Did you do a lot of drawings?" I asked. Even on those days, when her studio work had become painfully blocked, Tippi habitually sketched at almost every gathering of friends or any time she attended an event. She often carried her sketchbook and a compact pencil case, but in those moments when she was without her pad, when she sat in a restaurant, on a plane, or just on the phone in her office, she would compulsively draw on whatever scrap of paper she could find. Those ad hoc drawings filled half a dozen boxes in our garage: figures and abstract shapes drawn on napkins, hotel notepads, scraps of newsprint.

These days, those drawings are probably worth a fortune.

Tippi was usually eager to show me the sketches she had done. But not on that night. She carried her big 18" x 24" pad into her garage studio before coming back to change into evening loungewear. When we were by ourselves, we usually wore our pj's at dinner before settling in for the night.

Later, much later, I would come to appreciate her honesty. Tippi never lied about what she did that weekend. She came clean, at least about part of it, within a few hours of her return.

For me, the weekend had been productive. I was happy with the work I'd gotten done. Without any distractions, I'd been on the computer and on the phone with my partners all weekend, passing ideas back and forth. By mid-afternoon Sunday, we were all feeling pretty good about the new website and marketing plan we'd be showing to our client, so I took a couple of hours to prepare a welcome-home dinner for my wife.

Our kitchen table was our happy place. We enjoyed cooking together, and the kitchen was the deciding factor for us in buying that house in Millport, a bit of a distance from both of our jobs and about 45 minutes from Cutler, where we'd grown up. The previous owners must have been into cooking, too, because the kitchen had been remodeled with a great double sink, a six-burner stove and plenty of granite-topped counter space.

The rest of the house was just okay. A two-story, nondescript three-bedroom tract home on a suburban street. But it made sense for us: one of the bedrooms made a great home office, and there was a large garage that had easily been converted into Tippi's studio. It was well-insulated, and we had splurged on good air-conditioning and heating for the room, so Tippi could paint comfortably all year long.

That night, I'd made a terrific French pistou soup and some chicken cacciatore. We sat down to eat and download each other on our respective weekends. I gazed into Tippi's deep blue eyes and noticed she was unusually quiet. She was picking at her food, moving it around her plate, seeming distant and preoccupied. She seemed reticent to say much about the reunion.

"A lot of people didn't show up," she said. "Darcy came, of course, and Sarah was there. It was good to see her after all this time. I hadn't seen her for at least two years, not since she got married. She's still doing sculpture, mixed-media stuff. And then Louisa showed up with her new baby girl. It was fun to draw the baby. I gave that one to Louisa, and it seemed to make her very happy."

"How about your old boyfriend, Tyler?" I asked. I caught a moment of unease as she looked quickly away, seeming to stare at her plate. Tyler and Tippi had been a couple until their breakup in her last year of school, before she entered university and attended art classes with me. It was a breakup that I was quick to take advantage of. She shifted a little in the upholstered kitchen chair, pausing before answering my question.

"Yeah, he was there," she said. "We talked for a while. I did a drawing of him. Actually, a couple of them. I always thought Tyler had an interesting face. His features are so sharp, as if they're carved from stone. His marriage has been kind of bumpy. He and Becca are separated now. It's awkward. She moved into a little apartment that's connected to her shop. Tyler said they'd been trying to work things out, but it wasn't happening."

I felt a pang of jealousy at the thought of Tippi spending time with Tyler, drawing him, talking to him, just being in his presence. I never liked Tyler, and I didn't trust him to respect Tippi's boundaries. He was the town's rich kid, and he'd been an incorrigible bully in our middle school years. It didn't help that he was also good at sports, especially football, where his position as a linebacker allowed him to indulge his violent instincts.

But I kept those feelings to myself.

"I never could picture them as a couple. Does Becca still have her health food store near the campus?" I asked, my mind picturing the black-eyed brunette flashing her wide smile behind the register.

They were both retail businesspeople in a way: he was gradually taking over his father's car dealership while she was running the health food store she had proudly opened just a year earlier. Everybody had warned her: owning a retail business could be a heavy burden but Rebecca Saltzman, a dedicated nutrition nut with an entrepreneurial spirit, had been determined to make it work.

"We should shop there sometimes, if only to give her some support," I said.

I had once had a crush on Becca Saltzman, long before she had married Tyler. We had all gone to school together since 7th grade. She seemed so exotic back in our school days, dark and mysteriously beautiful. She was the only Jewish person I knew and her family was one of only a handful of Jewish families in Cutler. Her father was the town chiropractor; her mom was my teacher in second grade. Everyone in school was mildly shocked when she married Tyler Metcalf because Becca was so highly cerebral and Tyler was such an anti-intellectual jock.

And then, too, there were the rumors swirling around Becca's sexual orientation. It had been whispered that her sexual preferences leaned more toward girls. By the time we reached college, those rumors had been partly verified. Becca wasn't entirely gay, but she took no pains to conceal her occasional lesbian flings, right up until two years earlier, when she married Tyler. Nobody thought it would last. And, apparently, it hadn't.

Among those of us who had grown up in Cutler, everybody had some history with everybody, and everybody seemed to know everybody's business. It was that kind of place.

After we got into bed that Sunday night, I reached for Tippi and tried to wrap my arms around her, as I always did just about every night since we'd been married. Our nightly hug wasn't necessarily sexual--we hugged even on nights when we were too tired for sex--but on that night I felt some urgency and some intense horniness.

I'd been looking forward to reunion sex following the two days she'd spent away. My hand reached for her breast as we hugged, cupping my hand around it, feeling her nipple harden and grow. Her breasts were small, compact but perfectly formed, with quarter-sized areolas and nipples that protruded a quarter of an inch when they became aroused. I loved those nipples. I thought of them as being the essence of the female principle, of raw femininity. They assumed the shape of a pencil's eraser beneath my touch and their arousal never failed to excite me.

I pushed my hips toward hers as I reached for her, my hardening penis pressing against her, my hand stroking her neck and shoulder, dipping down to trace the velvet smoothness of the skin around her clavicle. I felt her flinch. Did I do something wrong? At that moment, I smelled the scent of that sandalwood soap her friends had given to her upon their return from a trip to India. Tippi had taken a shower while I was still downstairs in the kitchen. Why? I wondered. She almost never bathed at night.

"Did you just shower, Tippi? Didn't you have time to clean up at the hotel this morning?"

Tippi didn't answer. She pulled away from me and in the quiet of our bedroom, I could feel her gently weeping. Her body curled up in a semi-fetal position, as if to protect her from some unseen danger. I sat up in our bed and asked what was wrong.

"I missed you, Tippi," I told her gently. "And I was looking forward to making love tonight. What's going on?"

She seemed to hold her breath before she murmured, "Drew, I'm so sorry, sweetie. I can't keep this from you. I had sex with him."

I lay down on my pillow again and stared at the ceiling in stunned silence. The walls of the room seemed to draw closer before I could find a response.

"With Tyler?" I asked, my voice rasping; incredulous.

She unfurled her torso and rolled over to face me, and even in the half-dark, I could sense her pleading look. She seemed to shiver as she answered. "Yes. Oh God, Drew. It just happened. I had had a few glasses of wine. Actually, maybe more than a few glasses. We were in a common room--a suite--that they'd rented for socializing, and it got late and everybody else had left. I asked him to lie on the couch so I could draw him in a reclining position. I did a couple of sketches and then I had a sudden impulse to draw him in the nude. I know I shouldn't have done that, but I'd had a couple of glasses of wine and I wasn't thinking clearly."

"We were both nervous. I know I was giggling, because even though it was late, people could come into the room. But he stripped off his clothes and lay down on the suite's couch and his cock sort of flopped out. It wasn't rock hard, but it was kind of pointing toward me and it gave me a sense of déjà vu. I remembered it like an old friend."

Tippi paused before she continued. "I was drawing his body and then - I don't know this happened - I was drawing his dick. I'm sorry, but back in those days, I was fascinated by its size, and its peculiarities. The tip has a purple color, and the shaft has a strange, curving shape. It was even stranger and more beautiful than it was in my memory, and though it was still mostly soft, it seemed to loom out of his body. The underside has sort of a face on it. I've never seen anything like it. The veins were so distinct and, in a weird way, exquisite. I moved toward him to draw some detail, and I could see him starting to get bigger, to get hard. I wanted him to cross his arms over his chest, like that pose I had you take last time I painted you. Remember? But I looked down and saw how hard he'd gotten. And, you know, it had gotten so stiff that I was aroused despite myself. I didn't want that to happen!"