As the young woman nimbly mounted the steps of the church, the middle-aged priest smiled indulgently. She usually came here after work, as though called to shake off the dust of her day in the perpetual twilight of God's house. "Hello, Greta," the priest welcomed her. The answering smile on her delicate, mask-like face didn't reach the darkness of her eyes.

Greta could smell the intimate warmth of melting wax as she approached the altar. The statue of Mary with her child in her arms seemed to be looking impersonally at the small mortal woman whose childlike hand shook only slightly as she lit a candle to add to the row of brave little flames. 

On her knees, Greta could feel hot liquid gathering in her cunt. As tears of wax formed around the wick of her candle and flowed down its shaft, she pressed her thighs together. Through closed eyelids, she could still see the flickering light of the flames: so fragile yet so bright.

To the few others who had entered the church to find temporary escape from their private purgatories, the kneeling child-woman looked lost in prayer. Her long, smooth veil of chestnut hair added to the impression. Her mouth opened slightly, as though to receive the host. Her lips trembled as though affected by the taste of something unseen-- something too obscene to be acknowledged in this place. Most of her observers sensed something in her attitude which made them withdraw from a desire which was not theirs. All but one.

The frustration of this routine was part of its appeal. Greta knew that she must not let the ridiculous mask of piety slip from her Pagan body and soul. She had not even been raised to be a Christian. While longing to cup her own girlish breasts in sweaty hands, she forced herself to open her eyes and stand up. "Normal" was a role that she prided herself on playing well enough to protect the voluptuous need which had been growing inside her since she had left the Eden of childhood. 

Tom noted the rhythm of Greta's slim hips as they moved past him. She was leaving, and he was determined to follow the mystery she embodied. 

The big man was well aware of the fear he could inspire in certain people just by being large, male, bearded and tattooed. The apparent invisibility of his compassionate interest in those around him gave him a certain bitterness in adulthood that had not been there in his youth. He had never been a bully or a stalker, but if necessary, he was willing to play on others' fears to find out what he wanted to know. 

Greta was too distracted to notice that a strange man was tailing her at a discreet distance. She briskly walked the three blocks to her rooming house, seeking solitude. Like a woman of eons past, she wanted the hypnotic light and searing heat of fire in her own cave. 

Tom knew that his timing had to be perfect. Just as the woman's key had unlocked her door, he circled her waist from behind and covered her mouth with his other hand. "Don't scream," he warned, tasting her hair. "I won't hurt you." He forced her to step inside. He used his body to nudge the door closed as he tried to gauge her reaction.

"Aggh!" she yelled as soon as he pulled his hand from her mouth. She kicked him away as he set her free.

"I won't hurt you," he repeated patiently. "I just want to talk to you." This wasn't entirely true, but he felt that honesty could be sacrificed for a higher goal.

"What do you want?" she shrieked unreasonably as though to drive him away with sound. She looked around for any object which could be used as a weapon.

Tom held Greta's hands in an awkward effort to disarm her. "I know you go to the church every day," he explained. "I know you don't go there to pray. Not to any god that Father Cabrini knows about." 

Greta still seemed alarmed, but she was listening. 

"We could go somewhere else if you'd feel safer."

"Who are you?" Greta demanded.

"The Shadow," joked the big hairy man. Greta thought he would have looked more natural in a cabin in the woods. "The Watcher. Actually, I'm Thomas Apian. I'm an insurance investigator. I work in the building across the street from yours." 

"Why couldn't you have talked to me like a normal person?" she demanded. 

"Normal," he repeated sarcastically. "I'm not sure either of us know what that is, baby. I didn't want you to brush me off." He was betting on a hunch that his heat, his smell and his presence could arouse her enough to override her defenses. "I won't force you," he promised softly, letting her mind reach for all the consensual possibilities. "You want something, and it shows. You can talk to me." He was answered with a cunning smile. "You can tell me your name," he prompted. 

"Greta," she laughed. Her offer of one name was not an offer of friendship, but a denial of it; her family name would make an investigator's job too easy.

Tom stood close enough to her to smell her sweat and the sweet juice of her womanhood. "Greta," he repeated, regretting his unpriestly appearance in jeans and a T-shirt; it was his day off. He held her shoulders as though she were breakable. "Do you like priests, honey?" he ventured. 

Greta snorted with laughter, spitting at his chest. Her skin prickled with anticipation. She knew that the tang of woodsmoke in her nose must be imaginary, but it seemed as real as the smell of his body. 

"Thomas," she mused. "The light is too bright in here. Come into my bedroom." She turned in his arms, pulling him. Tom responded by picking her up and carrying her tightly against his chest to the door that clearly led to her inner sanctum. 

The smell of patchouli greeted his nose. The black velvet curtains were closed, and the light was so dim that at first Tom could see nothing unusual. As his eyes adjusted, he saw dozens of candles, in all sizes and colors, surrounding the bed on low tables, on a doily-covered dresser and in sconces on the walls. He recognized a textbook example of a fire hazard when he saw it, and it gave him a certain professional frisson. 

The woman felt as weightless and flexible as a rag doll, and her softness exhilarated her handler. "Light the blue ones," she advised him. "They're beeswax." He placed her on the bed and reached for a book of matches on the nightstand. Without releasing her, he struck a flame that lengthened as he lit two wicks.

"Ah," the woman sighed. She breathed deeply.

Tom wanted to illuminate the room as well as possible by such primitive means, the better to see the spider who had lured him to her web. He continued lighting short fat candles in small glasses, tall thin candles in metal and ceramic holders, candles in the form of fruit, Christmas trees, a wizard, Elvis Presley and the Statue of Liberty. 

Greta no longer felt surrounded by a city, but by the rough wooden walls of a cabin by a lake. It was the family home every summer, when Mama had cooked fresh-caught fish on an old wood-burning stove, and Papa had shown his son Greg how to paddle a canoe. It was Uncle Nick with his friendly beard who had told stories of famous and imaginary people to little Greta as they waited for the fish to bite their lures. He had done this even though the sun always burned him. Greta remembered Uncle Nick's strong features as clearest by candlelight.

The woman lay with legs spread, the curve of a breast slightly visible below the neckline of her little knit dress. She looked like a precocious teenager, fucked from within by an old consciousness. Thomas slid two hands under the dress and found stiff undergarments, like those he imagined his mother wearing. He tugged them roughly, testing for fastenings. 

In one smooth gesture, Greta pulled her dress over her head and threw it to the floor, barely missing the candles. The sight of a harshly-white bra and matching panties from an old ladies-wear catalogue, fitted to a young woman of fairy-tale daintiness, looked surrealistic in the dim light. The man felt mocked and challenged.

Wax hissed. Healthy white teeth showed under Tom's brown mustache. An antique vocabulary of sexual disapproval sprang into his mind: floozie, hussy, strumpet, slut. The woman looked at him as if to say: "Then what are you?"

He had her naked in a moment. Her skin glowed pearly in the flickering light as she lay waiting for inspection. He seized a tall blue candle in a brass holder and held it high over each of her strawberry nipples. Slowly, deliberately, he let a drop of hot wax fall on her upper chest. "Ooh!" she squealed. 

Uncle Nick always seemed to know when she couldn't sleep, when the thought of his strong arms and the fur on his face made it hard for her to lie still. The tingling between her legs was like a lured fish: the harder she squirmed, the more firmly she was hooked. She knew that this feeling would worry her parents, who would want to know. An uncle could always fill in for a father or even a mother.

The possibility of being discovered was exciting, but she knew that a child is not supposed to watch those who watch her. She learned to stay relaxed, eyes closed, in the light of his candle and his eyes. She waited patiently for the exploring touch that never came.

Tom dripped wax in a trail to her navel, and down to the edge of a dark-brown patch of hair. "Oh," she gasped after each burning kiss. He replaced the candle on a bedside table. Greta grabbed his wrist with her small hand. He laughed as he parted her bush with two fingers, spread her lips and entered her with two fingers of his other hand. One of his thick fingers easily reached the bottom of her surprisingly tight cunt. After some gentle exploration, he began to work up a steady rhythm which made her much wetter in seconds. 

"Hot, baby," he told her approvingly. He knew that she must want to know herself as she appeared to him. "This what you want?" he asked unnecessarily, tickling her slick inner walls.

She kept her eyes closed as her muscles clutched his fingers, pulling him into her. He was reminded of the innocent greed of baby calves. He pulled her nearest hand to a hard denim seam over a hard dick. In the uncertain light, he withdrew from her to pull his clothes off as quickly as possible. 

She stroked his hungry animal as though she thought she could soothe it back to sleep this way. "Are you on the Pill, Greta?"

"Yes," she answered proudly. She felt she had taken responsibility for the consequences of desire. She knew that the Pill was still too new for its long-term effects to be predicted, but she didn't really believe that human life would outlast the 1970s anyway. An apocalypse was surely coming - if not within a decade, then by the end of the millennium.

She watched him guiding his missile into its home port. She received him with a little shimmy and a push. He watched her face, like a closed flower, as he worked up momentum in her sweet young flesh.

Greta couldn't resist looking sideways at her audience of candles. As her excitement rose, she smiled as though the melting wax had whispered a secret message to her alone. Tom was reminded of Psyche, bride of the god Eros in ancient Greek mythology, whose curiosity drove her to look at her husband's forbidden face as he lay sleeping. Tom could never blame the curious chicks in all the old stories: Psyche, Pandora, Eve, Bluebeard's wives. But the sad consequences of curiosity had never seemed completely unfair to him either. 

Tom slid a finger between his heat and hers. He searched carefully for her clit, that sensitive trigger, and massaged it in circles. He was trying to orchestrate an orgasmic duet in order to be acknowledged as a savvy friend to Liberated Women. 

Greta's voice reached a sweet soprano note as Tom grunted his way to release. Both silently yelled the "Eureka!" of discovery and accomplishment.

The whole truth is elusive, however, and the past can be as inscrutable as the future. Tom was never to know that Greta had last seen the man he reminded her of-- Uncle Nick--  in a church, surrounded by candles brought by the relatives who had claimed his body after the car crash. At his funeral, the grieving sixteen-year-old learned for the first time that her adored uncle had never shared her blood. Her father had adopted the man called Nick in some mysterious masculine way during a life-or-death crisis in the World War which had changed the lives of a generation. 

Shadows danced on the walls of the bedroom where Tom and Greta lay together in their shared sweat. She felt as though a fat candle still filled her with heat and light.

The man sat upright, rubbed his face, and reached for his pants, which lay crumpled on the floor. He found his packet of cigarettes in a back pocket, and deftly pulled out two. Like a long-term lover, he struck a match and lit both, then he handed one to Greta. She took it gratefully and inhaled deeply.

Both temporary companions knew that tobacco was sacred in some traditional cultures. They watched its smoke mingling with the smoke from the candles. The flashes of bright red at the ends of their cigarettes looked like signals from two little taillights. No other conversation seemed necessary.

Too soon, the man's cigarette was smoked to the end, and he stubbed it out in a wide candle-holder. "I gotta go," he excused himself.

The girl felt abandoned, but the ache in her heart was familiar and expected. "Hey, phone me, willya?" she suggested. She blew smoke at the ceiling to keep it out of his eyes. 

"Maybe," he teased, stroking the dark silky hair that fell poignantly around her face. "Yeah. Sure." At the moment, he intended to keep his promise. "You stay there," he advised her as though staying in bed without clothes could protect her from any demons who might be lurking under it. "See ya later," he finished. 

Greta was never to know that Tom's time in his native country was running out. In a week, he would drive to Canada to save himself from being drafted into the current war. Within a month, he was to meet the woman who would bear his children and keep them warmly dressed through the long, cold winters. 

Greta decided that lighting another cigarette so soon after the last would ultimately dull her senses, and even make her shallow and Philistine. She noted the creak of her bedroom floor under the man's heavy footsteps in retreat. Before the door had closed behind him, she was gazing into the heart of a long candle-flame as though it held the answer to an old, indecent riddle.

Copyright © 2002 Jean Roberta. All Rights Reserved. May not be re-printed in any form without express written consent of the author. Do not copy or post.