Calendar Girl (February) Chapter 3:
Mia has decided that she really wants to bang Alec, but he’s so busy creating art! The muse has gone haywire from the sight of her breasts!
Objectively, when a woman removes the top half of her clothes and you’re a hetero male, it’s not too far a leap to think the muse is going to go haywire. All men are pigs in one way or another.
I don’t thing every time a hetero male sees a topless woman, the creative juices get flowing. Maybe a certain kind of juices, for sure, but not necessarily creative ones is all I’m saying. NOT ALL MEN.
Today, Mia heads downstairs and finds a note in the kitchen telling her to meet Alec in the loft when she’s ready. She has breakfast and goes to meet him in the loft, and one of his assistants freaks out that she’s super late and starts trying to pull her along despite the fact that she’s on crutches. Mia flips out at him, and Alec comes to her rescue:
“Enough. You,” he pointed to the waif of a man, “are an idiot. Do you not see she is injured and cannot run with crutches?”
“I was just trying…”
“Assez!. No. Shut your mouth before you dig a hole so deep you’ll never find your way to the surface,” Alec grated. He looked around the room and held his arm out, scanning the space. “Now, to everyone listening, and I know you are…” A few people tried to look away as if that was going to hide the fact that everyone had been paying close attention. “This woman is Mia,” he pointed to me. “She is the entire muse for ‘Love on Canvas’. As far as you are concerned, she is as precious and priceless as any of my paintings. Treat her as such. Now, back to work.” He clapped his hands together twice before coming to my aide.
The assistant is obviously meant to be a douche, but I feel a bit bad for him too. It’s really unclear to me why Alec didn’t explain all this in the first place before Mia arrived or the first day she was there. Also, this morning, why didn’t he make it clear that he never gave Mia a time he wanted to get started on the shoot? And I bet he freaks out at this assistant all the time for people being late, so he probably was just super stressed about the situation and wasn’t thinking clearly. Alec sounds like a shitty boss.
“How was your sleep?”
This was my chance so I took it. “Would have been better with a nice warm body lying next to me,” I finished boldly. He stopped and stood still, his gaze on mine, tawny eyes turning a shade darker, pupils dilating.
“Is that so?”
“I never lie,” which wasn’t exactly true. I lied all the time when it suited me or I was stuck in a bind. Even though this suited me, this was not one of those times.
So…it is exactly a lie. Most of the time when people lie it is because it suits them or they are stuck in a bind. I guess we’re supposed to be impressed by her moral fiber because she doesn’t lie for the lulz or something.
They get set up for Alec to begin his artistry, when Mia catches sight of some of the paintings he’s already done of her. It’s obvs amazing. Mia looks super tortured and beautiful. Not only is she living everyone’s dream of becoming a sexy call girl to only sex, rich men, but she is also being painted by a famous artist! She should really be thanking her dad for his gambling debts.
But things aren’t as easy as they sound. Mia is horny, but Alec just isn’t playing ball:
I groaned but hopped back over to the seat, plopped down and rolled my eyes before he came around and knelt in front of me. “Do you ever think about anything other than work?”
“Are you referring to the fact that I want to kiss you until I’ve stolen all your breath? Or the fact that if I could, I would shred your shirt, and suck on your pink tips until you begged for me to make love to you?”
If “pink tips” is the kind of dirty talk we have to look forward to from this guy, I’m all for him focusing on his work.
“Make love?” I snickered even though his words made me hot and bothered; they were hot…and bothered me…a lot!
“Of course, chérie. the French make love. There are many forms of making love. Hard. Fast. Slow. Deliberate…”
You know what the strangest thing is? I have heard rumors that you can have sex all those different ways, but I didn’t think the rumors had any merit until this sexy French man confirmed them for me. I wonder if you could even have sex that was not deliberate but totally chaotic and purposeless. The possibilities seem truly endless!
Then he puts “goopy cherry red paint” (which sounds hazardous) on Mia’s lips and makes her kiss the picture of herself. She does this, and Alec is like, “THIS IS PERFECT! OMG YOU ARE AMAZING!” which seems like a really extreme reaction to this one act of accurately kissing the picture of herself when he guided her to do it.
Later, as Mia continues modelling nude from the waist up, she asks Alec if he’s ever hired another muse. He says he hasn’t, which relieves her, because she was jealous at the thought of not being his only hired muse. Maybe this is keeping with Mia’s one character trait of falling in love really quickly or something, because I do not understand where she is coming from with this.
“What are we doing anyway?” I asked facing the blank section of canvas on the unfinished picture.
“I’m going to make you love your image. Which will translate to the viewer as loving yourself.”
I’m certain my eyes narrowed unattractively at his statement. “Come again?”
He let out a tired breath. “Ma jolie, I need to finish these stills so I can paint and have dinner with you, make love to you, then paint your image onto canvas. There is much to do,” he said like a broken record.
Yeah, Mia, some of us are trying to work here. Confusing art isn’t going to make itself, now is it?
Mia gets angry because making love to her sounds like a chore to him! Mia is really starting to freak me out – she has only been here two days! And she is working for him! Why is she acting this way? It seems like it’s only to create tension since otherwise this is all going too perfectly.
Alec calms her down and helps her find her creative inspiration to pose like someone who believes she is beautiful, which somehow causes her to flashback to happy and then sad childhood memories.
Instantly, I was catapulted to a memory of being a small child. It was before my Mom abandoned us. We were a happy family of four then. I had just won the lead part in our county’s children’s play. Mom was even happy for me, and she usually was primarily focused on her own desires and wins. But not that day. That day, she gave me a hug and a kiss, and told me she was proud of me and would always love me. Then my Dad scooped me into his arms and held me close. He whispered into my ear how he always knew I had something special. Something no other little girl had. And in that moment, secure in my dad’s arms and my mother’s love, I believed him. Best day of my life.
The camera clicked like wild. Then the memory continued, the next day, Mom left and never came back. I never did star in that play. For a long time I thought it was my fault that she left. Because I did something so well and got all Dad’s attention, something I knew she craved a lot of, even when I was only ten years old. Now as an adult, I knew different. Well, mostly.
Does anyone else find what her dad said to her when she got the lead part in a play kind of creepy and weird? Also I am very confused by the fact her mother craves the father’s attention and then just up and leaves him? Obviously there was more at play here, but that detail seems off to me.
Mia is really sad now, so she abandons her work and goes to drink wine and cry.
Alec comes after her and asks why she doesn’t love herself. This is the chapter’s cliffhanger, apparently.