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Susannah Indigo 8101 E. Belleview, #185 Denver, CO 80237 (303) 779-8046 Email: creek44@cris.com SOMETHING IN THE WIND I longed for a field of lavender candles, brightly lit and illuminating all the truths from here to the top of Shadow Mountain. This is what I answered each night when Lindsay would ask me what I really needed to make things better between us. "Not sex. Candles," I would say while continuously braiding and unbraiding my long blonde hair, considering the words "fuck you" but incapable of saying them out loud. Lavender candles, not just plain purple. Every shape and size, arranged from one end to the other over the meadow just beyond Copper Creek Canyon." She laughed the first few times; later on she only smiled indulgently at me. The candle-vision appeared to me one night while I was stretched out for hours in the hot bubble bath reading a week-old newspaper. I bathed that way every night after lighting the dozen candles on the glass shelf over the tub. I could see the image of her on me through the flickering light, could feel her hands owning my body, could see her high small breasts and the narrow hips that I worshipped, could remember every single time she had ever entered me and changed my perception of sex. It was probably too much heat the first night I saw the candles in the field, but my vision was clear: thousands of lavender candles lit up above the wildflowers and all of the answers I needed were mine. "Cassandra," Lindsay said, using my full name to try and get my attention, "That's a lovely dream. But you know it's not possible." That was the problem with Lindsay. No imagination. That, and an enormous talent to camouflage her truths. "Everything's possible," I said from the depths of my bubbles. Lindsay sat naked alongside the tub and told me how sexy I was in the candlelight, stroking my bare shoulder just like she used to before I stopped believing in her. I simply closed my eyes and never looked at her. "You're pretty as a Picasso rose," she said to me. She liked me to dress in pink to contrast with her black leather. I hate pink. I was her little girl and I behaved for her. I was also supposed to be her soulmate. I let her hands explore my body under the water, let it all begin over and over again, always expecting to feel something. Her hard fingers caressed my large breasts and pinched my nipples and I moved under her hands but felt nothing. She could explore me inside and out and all I could see were candles and the very thin line wavering between love and hate. I gave it all up to Lindsay when she asked me to so long ago -- my love, my life, my blind devotion, my body -- only to discover very late one night that she was giving it all up to Dalton Braverman, the man she car-pooled with to work every day. He told me everything when I quizzed him; he had been driving her for a very long time. "Cassie, we don't need men. A woman can give you everything a man can but our cocks stay hard all night long," Lindsay had told me our first night together in the Hotel Boulderado. Apparently she changed her mind and forgot to tell me. "Everything's possible," I repeated after I thought she was done with my body for the night. I wasn't clear on much, but I'd learned that anything was in fact possible in life, whether you wanted it to be or not. Lindsay always liked to be a mind-fuck, but she was supposed to be the hot kind of mind-fuck, the kind that turns a woman inside out and keeps her wet and wanting day and night, not an ordinary player of macho games. She just liked my cock , I think, Dalton her secret lover told me as though I could understand, and she liked to be able to control a man. I gave her a new pair of long, sexy gloves almost every time we got together, Cassie. Didnt you ever see the gloves? You live with her, how could you not notice them? Red leather, black lace, silver satin - there were dozens. Every scene started with her ordering me to put the gloves on her. There is an order to things, my slave, shed say, and then I would kiss her fingertips and let her start down my body with anything that pleased her -- clothespins, clamps, riding crops, the whip. She liked to have me stick my tongue out so that she could put two clothespins on the tip to quiet me, an exquisite gag, a big strong man made almost silent for her own use. She would tie me to the pillar in the middle of my loft while she teased me and used me and sometimes she would ride me for hours. She gave me a safeword if I wanted to stop and the word was . . . well, your name. Cassandra. I never used it . . . I stopped listening. I went home, found all the gloves hidden in her old guitar case and burned them for kindling one night in the fireplace while Lindsay sat and watched and told me he was just a guy and none of it meant anything to her at all. * There was something in the wind the day Lindsay and I set off for Copper Creek Canyon. A promise, a beginning. Or perhaps I mistook the warning whisper of the soft breeze for the sound of hope. She parked the Jeep near the foot of the canyon and we climbed up one of our favorite trails. Lindsay was strong and powerful and in control, as always; I felt fragile like a dying rose at the first autumn chill. The sky was a clear crystal-blue that day; we even saw an eagle in flight. We stood at the edge of the canyon for a long time. Lindsay knew I had stood there by myself the night I ran away and contemplated the value of continuing to live this life. She didn't say a word while we stood there. Not even "I'm sorry." I suppose we'd had enough high-drama between us to last for a while longer. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me and kissed me, the kind of kisses I used to need, but all I could see were her bare wrists and the image of a man kissing her gloves while I longed for her touch at home. Lindsay unpacked the lunches she had brought for us and we ate sitting on a rock near the stream. She fed me bites of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich from her own hands as though I was a child. "Cassie, you have to eat," she said sternly. She was not my father and didn't need to pretend she was. That game was gone forever. But you can go for a long time in life without much food or sleep. The creativity and the visions are superior that way, and the details of ordinary human betrayal tend to blur in the process. The tent was secure before dark, giving Lindsay plenty of time to light the candles for me. One hundred perfect tiny lavender candles. I knew she was humoring me, or maybe she was laughing silently at my naivet like all those innocent lonely nights. Fuck you, Lindsay fuck you. You never even said you were sorry. Or if you did I couldn't hear it. Fuck you. There is an order to things and this is not it. But I almost felt touched watching her arrange the candles around the campfire and lighting them one by one. The vision became clear. She wrapped me in the soft patchwork quilt I made for her by hand all those long nights when she was busy "taking classes," and she held me close by the fire. We watched lavender and light flicker across the field beyond us. It was breathtaking, but somehow I never got warm that night no matter how tightly she held me. I felt her tongue explore between my legs for the last time deep in the night and my clit responded with passion but I cried but I stayed cold. It is so damn hard to find heat when ice has settled in around your heart. It occurred to me that my vision was better at home, alone, without her. I slept through the sunrise and let Lindsay pack things up. Hiking out, I could tell that she thought things were going to be better now that she had shared my candle dream. I don't know exactly what happened on that ledge, the ledge named Devil's Drop because it is not much more than two feet wide and 500 feet down to the bottom of the canyon. We had hiked carefully across it on so many trips before. Sometimes things happen in a moment that can take a lifetime to explain. I do know that when she went over the edge I still couldn't feel anything. I thought I was in a dream. In my dream there was nothing but a field of lavender candles, and peace.o q u * K I m v w $ $ 6CJ CJ$ 5CJ$ CJ 5 G V n o p r s t u f 0 p K I E F Q d 5 G V n o p r s t u f 0 p K I E F Q R 9 S Q m v ! # $ $ $ $ $ *Q R 9 S Q m v ! # $ $ $ $ $ 0d d P / =!"#$% [ 4 @ 4 N o r m a l CJ OJ QJ kHmH <