The Muse (Interracial Mystery Romance) (Dark Art Mystery Series) (9 page)

“This is ridiculous.”

“Come on! Come on! Come on!” They both chanted. Their voices echoed in the tiny

space.

It was in that moment that I realized both of them were drunk. What else could it be?

Although the scent of alcohol didn’t radiate from them and they didn’t slur their words, I knew Hex only raised his voice when he was mad or drunk, and surely Elle’s typical art gallery behavior wasn’t screaming as loud as she could.

“Come on! Come on!” They continued to yell out encouragement. Their voices filled the space and probably caught the attention of the reception goers on the highest level. Elle’s fist punched the air. Hex clapped. I groaned and waved my hands to quiet them. The movement only motivated them to be louder.

“Okay. Okay.” I headed over to the low swing. “I’m getting on the damn swing, just

lower your voices.”

“Go. Go. Go.” Elle lowered her voice and did a somewhat quiet clap.

“Are you both drunk?” I headed up the ladder and propped myself on a swing with no

problem.

“Correction, dear brother.” Hex held one finger in the air. “We’re exquisitely tipsy.

There’s a difference. Drunkenness is done at a shady bar in ugly clothing surrounded by the mundane while exquisite tipsiness is performed in an art setting among geniuses.”

“Thanks so much for the distinction.” I rolled my eyes.

“Alvarez, you have to swing.” She continued to pump her legs back and forth. The

tuxedo material rippled along her body. Her long braid bounced in the air. The small breeze that she created from her swinging carried her perfume my way. “Come on. Swing with me,

Alvarez.”

How could I not?

I didn’t understand what was supposed to happen from our swinging, but the need to

make her happy bloomed in my chest and I couldn’t come up with a rational reason for why I had to please her. I pumped my legs with her rhythm until I traveled through the air just like her.

The lights in our area shut off. She giggled. I tensed and scanned the darkness. Music sounded, a soft piano melody with a little girl’s voice humming a haunting tune. Tiny lights materialized above us. They weren’t in the ceiling. They simply hovered over us, hanging from some unseen cord or wire. They glowed like stars and decorated Elle’s and my skin with tiny dots of light.

“Oh my God. Look. That’s us.” Still swinging, Elle pointed to the wall in front of us.

I directed my attention that way. “Oh. That is us.”

A small movie played on the wall’s surface. There must’ve been a projector somewhere behind us. Elle stood behind me, exploring my body with her gaze.
I see I’m not the only one
appreciating someone’s form.
From my peripheral, I noticed Elle covering her mouth as she blushed. To not further embarrass her, I focused back on the film before us. At that moment in the little film, I helped Elle up on the ladder and blatantly checked out her rear. I coughed in my hand to give myself something else to do besides cringe in horror. The whole time that strange humming filled the air.

“This is possibly the most interesting movie I’ve ever seen.” Hex strolled to the center.

His heels tapped on the floor.

On the wall, the rest of the earlier moments played out before us—Elle swinging, Hex entering, both of them pressuring me to jump on the swing, and then it clicked to darkness. The lights darkened. The humming vanished. The gallery’s regular lights turned on.

“That was awesome.” Elle slowed herself down, got off her swing, and climbed down the ladder. “Let’s go to the installation with those huge clear globes. I think we’re supposed to climb inside of them.”

“Al can go with you. I’m heading upstairs for the videos.” Hex twisted his hips as he sashayed out of the space with no regard for my opinion on the matter. I almost stopped him, but didn’t mind the fact that he left me with a beautiful woman to finish perusing the gallery with.

I’d planned on doing it by myself as fast as I could before the ribbon cutting part of the ceremony to open the doors for the first time. With Elle, I would take my time and enjoy the moment.

“If you don’t feel like escorting me in my gallery adventures, I perfectly understand.”

Elle held her hands on her hips and stared at the invisible path Hex had made when he’d abruptly left us to ourselves.

Does she not want to be alone with me or is she just giving me a polite excuse to get out
of babysitting her?

“I would love to escort you as long as you don’t mind being with an unintelligent art enthusiast.” I extended my hand to her. She took it. That same charge pushed through her flesh and warmed against mine. She moved her face out of my view. I couldn’t see her reaction. Did she feel the same thing I felt? What was this between us? Was it all my imagination or something more?

Grandma claimed each heart entered the world with the ability to connect to fifty others spread out all over the globe. It was our job to find the perfect matches by focusing on little clues that the gods gave us.

When Grandma met my grandpa a tropical storm had battered against the earth. She’d

been a young teenager by herself sunbathing on Guardalavaca Beach and then the storm came in.

Rain dotted the fine white sand. Ocean waves grew high until water flooded the area and rose to her knees. She struggled to gather her things, stuff her mother would punish her for losing—her father’s new radio, her great aunt’s ivory broach that she’d snuck out of her mother’s jewelry box and pinned on the front of her swim suit to appear grown and mature, and all the pesos she’d received from her summer job as a maid. All of it floated on the waters and she ran around frantically seizing them with her hair whipping across her face and sand hitting her skin.

Grandpa appeared out of nowhere and scared Grandma so much she fell back into the

water and landed on her behind. Later, Grandpa confessed to me he’d been following her for weeks due to spotting her at the beach once before. Regardless, he raced to her, captured all of her things, picked her up, and sprinted away with her and the items in his arms.

“The rain just stopped.” Grandma’s eyes always glittered when she said those words. “As soon as he lifted me up, the rain just ceased to exist. The clouds left. Blue skies came. The sun shone. The waters drifted back into the ocean. It all happened as if he controlled the weather.

And when I looked at this lovely man who’d saved me from not just the storm, but my mother’s tongue lashings, sparks flared between us. Real ones. And not just regular magic, either.

Something more. Something I could taste, feel, and smell but just not define. That was the gods’

ways of giving me a clue. I never left his arms after that.”

Elle released my hand and rubbed hers together as she bit her lip, signaling to me that she had to have experienced the same electric reaction I did.
Right?

“So what do you mean you’re an unintelligent art enthusiast?” Elle left the area and went to the entrance of the next installation’s area.

“Well, like this last installation. I have no idea what it was trying to say. Swinging is better when it is more than one person?”

“I think it was saying life is better, or maybe we all need someone else from time to time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Art isn’t about knowing what it means. It’s about coming to some consensus in your mind or maybe feeling something deeper or even being inspired. That’s at least what someone told me long ago.”

“That’s pretty much what Hex says, although I would still like to know what the artist intended.”

“Why?”

“I like answers to questions.”

“Do you usually get them?”

I studied the hand that had held hers. “Not as much as I would like.”

She blushed and looked at the installation in front of us. “Aren’t those globes pretty?”

‘Globes’ wasn’t a good word for them. Maybe ‘massive car-sized bubbles that hung

around twenty feet in the air’ was a better way to describe them. I had no idea what they were made of, perhaps plastic or glass, but they connected to each other by clear bubbled paths bridging between each one. I counted ten bubbles altogether. They appeared like some futuristic city of clear livable spheres. Steps with hand rails started at the ground and extended to the first opening.

“Let’s go.” She charged off to the nearest one, her ponytail bobbing with the movement.

“Be careful.”

“How about you come with me to make sure I’m careful.” She wagged her finger at me

in a
come hither
gesture. “You promised.”

“I did?”

“I think.” She climbed the steps. “I am exquisitely tipsy, after all. I can’t be expected to remember everything this evening.”

“Yes.” I smiled. “This is true.”

“And Hex assigned you as my official escort.”

“And that is also true.” I trailed behind her and hoped there were no more hidden cameras recording my sly observations of her behind. At the opening of the first globe, as Elle coined them, a sign read, “No shoes allowed.”

She slipped hers off and I followed suit. Stepping into the sphere was like walking into an inflated plastic bag. It seemed impossible, yet nothing ripped under our weight. We both wobbled a little with our first two steps. Elle fell into my arms, spreading her softness and luscious scent all over me. Energy burst through my chest. I gritted my teeth from the impact of her and the current of stimulation rocking my body.
What is this?
Not noticing the effect she was having on me, she laughed at her stumble and I was intoxicated by it and chuckled with her.

She shook her head. “Perhaps I shouldn’t drink before exploring installations like this one.”

“No. I’m sober and I’m having a hard time keeping my balance, too.”

A few more giggles fled those full lips and then she attempted to stand again. “Okay. I think I’ve got it.”

I captured her right before she slipped. “How about we hold hands so we can make sure neither one of us fall?”

“Okay. Maybe this is another one that requires people to work together.”

“Maybe.”

And so we traveled around those clear spheres together, hand in hand, slipping along the way and saving each other whenever we could. Each new bubble provided a new experience.

Some were hot, others cold. A few smelled odd like trash and garbage, while the rest emitted pleasant aromas—roses, strawberries, and baked bread. Noises sounded in each one—a baby cried in the first, a woman laughed in the second, many voices sung in a few, in the middle was a loud, seductive moaning, toward the end came silence. The textures of the spheres also changed.

A number of them held a hard surface, then rough or smooth, yet flimsy and yielding at our weight in others. And the shapes and sizes shifted back and forth. In the middle, we were forced to crawl through them but by the end, we rose together, stood, and walked away through the finish line where a sign proclaimed, “Isn’t life wonderful.”

Elle formed her lips into a huge smile that displayed her beautiful teeth. “It surely can be.”

Chapter 7

~Elle

We checked out only two more installations before Alvarez’s pretty assistant snatched him away from me and marched him toward the opening ceremony. And what a ceremony. I learned that whenever Hex involved himself in an event, big things happened.

Everyone stood outside the gallery. A big red ribbon and bow covered the front double doors. Police closed the streets in front for about five blocks east and west as the North Miami Senior High marching band stomped through the streets. Teens from all races performed like it was the biggest event of their life. Emerald green and vanilla white uniforms decorated them as they blew through their instruments, swinging them from side to side with the upbeat tune.

Thirty or so teenage girls dressed in pink leotards and white knee-length boots danced in front of the band as they made their way past the gallery. The girls held glittering fans in both hands and strutted to the beat in a rhythm I could never mimic.

The band rocked the streets. And just when the partying crowd of gallery-goers thought it was time to open the doors, then came the drag queens. Huge wigs sat on almost all of their heads. Flamboyant make-up adorned their faces. The song “It’s Raining Men” blasted in the background. They strutted through the streets in magnificent costumes. My favorite outfits were the band of drag queen butterflies with shimmering wings that fanned out behind their backs.

I checked Alvarez’s area to catch the expression on his face. He seemed so tight and wound up at times. I wondered if his brother’s gatherings ever loosened him up. Alvarez stood at least twenty feet away from me, by the ribboned door with the rest of the owners and near all of the press. Instead of spying Alvarez’s look of horror or excitement at the drag queen parade, I spotted him watching me.
Oh.
He averted his eyes when he noticed my own gaze on him.

Look away, Elle.

My heartbeat increased more than it should have. I may have flirted a little. I was single after all, and he was handsome and fun to be around, but nothing else could come out of it.

Alvarez avoided looking at me and I returned my view to the streets. The good thing about him was that he never brought up those awkward moments. The swing installation had caught us both drinking in each other’s physical forms, but once Hex left us alone Alvarez never mentioned it.

His silence signaled to me that although he enjoyed glancing at my behind, he wasn’t interested in anything more than a friendship.

Good. Me neither.

“I can’t believe Hex is still having this event,” a man whispered behind me to some other person I couldn’t see.

“Well, who knows if the rumors are really true,” the mystery person replied in a deep voice that could’ve only belonged to a man.

“Why would anybody create something as crazy as gossip about murder? I mean, it’s one thing to say that Hex is sleeping with some weird model or that he’s stolen art concepts from another artist, but why would someone make up the fact that a murder happened on his property?”