This is a bit farther into the tale. Arabella has put her back out unloading some paintings at a Sedona gallery for an exhibit. She has trouble going to sleep that night and has been whimpering with pain in a half-asleep state. She still cannot see Zeth or touch him but he now speaks aloud and she is beginning to trust him.
***
He touched her shoulder, urging her to roll over onto her stomach. Miraculously, that movement did not hurt. His voice a caress, he instructed her, “Relax. Stretch out and let me take the pain.”
She felt the bed shift, as if he knelt beside her, and then strong hands began to knead along her spine, starting at her shoulders and working downward to her buttocks. Last night, his touch had felt cool. Tonight, his hands brought warmth. Her blood seemed to rush to the surface, following the magnetic energy of his touch. Up and down, fingers digging in so firmly she should have sensed severe pressure or even pain, but it felt wonderful. Palms pressing and rolling, spreading heat and blessed comfort in their wake, he worked over her whole back.
Boneless lassitude slipped over her. She felt as if the mattress would engulf her body, but also as if she floated upon a cloud.
“You must be a magician, a worker of miracles. No chiropractor has ever brought me relief so quickly, so totally,” she murmured.
“Chi-ro-prac-tor? That is some kind of healer?”
She gathered her wits to try to explain. “A special kind of doctor–or healer–one trained with the methods of shifting the small bones in the spine to make them align correctly so no nerves are pinched, no muscles strained. After my accident, I went to one in San Francisco–to several actually–until I found one with a good touch. He helped me, but sometimes the pain comes back. I strained my back today, taking a painting out of my car.”
Somehow, he seemed to pull the matching images from her thoughts enough to understand. “Ah, I hate to sense your suffering. I am pleased to make you feel better.”
His hands slowed, now drifting gently up and down, soft strokes, soothing yet stirring. She knew she still wore her lawn nightdress, but the sensation was of flesh on flesh, warm and so very personal.
Did he bend forward? A whisper of air touched the back of her neck as he brushed the thick rope of her hair to one side. Then a pair of moist lips traced ever so lightly from her hairline to the ruffled edge of her nightdress’ scooped neckline, vertebrae by vertebrae, while the silky breeze of a breath alternately warmed and chilled her skin. The sensations were the most exquisite she had ever known.
“You smell and taste as sweet as your aura led me to expect,” he said, his voice as soft, as gentle as his touch.
His hands rested now on her sides, one on the left and one on the right, fingertips just short of the sides of her breasts. A shiver coursed over her body.
“You are not chilled, are you?”
“No. Oh, no. Were I any warmer, I’d probably catch fire!”
He laughed again. She loved his laugh. It held no jibing scorn or snide disdain, none of the snarky tone of so many laughs she’d heard in the past, but instead shared with her his pleasure, his amusement in an honest and contagious delight.
“Do you mean you enjoy my touch?”
“If I were a cat, I’d be purring! I want more and yet I’m content. How can this be? I don’t know, don’t understand.” She answered honestly, without taking time to censor or measure her words. He had rendered her so relaxed, so at ease.
“Ah, good. The fear has faded now, has it not? It is good to bring you ease and to gain your trust. For now, this is how I can repay the great favor you are doing for me, giving me life again after my long, long wait.”
“But I haven’t, not really, at least not yet. I wanted to paint a likeness of you, but I couldn’t. I was unable to decide how you should look.” It seemed suddenly important to confess this inability, so he knew she could not do all he wanted.
“It is too soon. You must learn me as I am learning you. Then, when the time is right, you will know how I should appear and you will create the picture from which I can take my face and form. I have waited through endless ages. I can wait a bit more. This is too important to be rushed.”
“But I want to, I truly do. Soon now.”
“All is not ready; all of the players have yet to assemble to reenact the drama of my error so I may set all right. I think before they do, you will be able to visualize me.”
She sighed and slowly turned over, needing to face him, even though she knew nothing tangible was there to see or even feel. “How can you have such faith in me? I often feel myself so lacking, so inadequate.”
“Do not! You have great powers, little one, much more than you know. You are lacking in nothing, adequate for all that comes and yet more. I would never misjudge such things. I chose you, from the very moment you came here. Perhaps I even brought you here with my wishing, my need.”
She started to reach, even knowing it to be useless. He caught and held her hand, gently caressing it while he restrained her. So enthralling was his touch that she hardly registered his words.
“No, not yet. For now, I can touch, but you cannot touch back. That will come soon. I think now you can sleep and you will wake tomorrow without pain. It is time for me to go.”
She sensed when he bent over her, felt the butterfly caress of his lips on her brow, a strong hand briefly cupping her cheek. His sudden absence left a chill, a void in the room. Silence and emptiness.
However, he had spoken true. She slipped into sleep as easily as an otter into a clear, icy pool and did not wake until dawn lit the sky beyond the skylight. When she awoke, once again she found difficulty in calling real all she remembered of the night.
By daylight, it all seemed ephemeral, phantasmagoric, the disjointed product of a fevered mind or one twisted with madness. Perhaps she had been foolish to come out here by herself, far from her circle of friends and associates, far even from any neighbors. Perhaps solitude was driving her mad. Had she been wrong to believe that here, in a new place without the constraints of familiar things, her muse would thrive and expand?
She’d grown so tired of producing the same scenes, over and over–seascapes and flowers, green hills and old trees, the pretty but soulless pictures everyone seemed to want. Yet when she returned to the well of her creativity, nothing else seemed to bubble forth. So she had moved… Here.
Now it was too late to go back. She had put all her savings into the move and this strange house. Surely, no one else would be foolish enough to buy it. There was only one way now to go–forward on the course she had chosen wherever it led her. Yet she could not quite silence the small, shrill cry of doubt and dismay in the back of her thoughts.
Resolutely, she put this confusion from her mind and proceeded about the day’s business with prosaic, ordered calm. She fixed and ate a proper breakfast, did her yoga and meditation for an hour, and only then climbed to her studio.
The scarlet-streaked canvas leaned drunkenly in one corner where she had tossed it in disgust. She took up the oblong, set it back on the easel and dropped onto her stool to study it. Perhaps the piece held something she could reclaim.
Half-closing her eyes, she unfocussed her gaze and saw the scarlet in a new pattern. Perhaps a flock of birds… Yes, tropical birds exploding from their roost in some rainforest perch. She had only to add green, a flash or two of blue and yellow… She uncapped her paints and daubed a bit of several colors onto a palette.
Working quickly, as if the vision were actual birds which might vanish in a flash of fiery feathers, she sketched in the trees, a few errant beams of sunlight falling down through the canopy, a glimpse of sky, and one small, plain brown bird watching the scene from its own perch, off to one side.
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