Erica Spindler - Shocking Pink

She was blindfolded.

With a black silk scarf.

One of the ones they had seen the other night, Andie realized, a lump lodging in her throat. Maybe the one she and Raven had touched, the one they had run through their fingers.

A funny sensation settled in the pit of her gut, queasy and uncertain. She looked at Raven and Julie. They met her eyes. The expression in theirs told her that they’d recognized the scarf, too. That they felt the same about it as she.

Moments passed. Andie didn’t breathe; the woman didn’t move. Then the music started, the same stuff they had heard twice before. With it, the woman began to sway, as if in time to the music, though her movements seemed halting to Andie. Almost uncertain. Or frightened. She brought her hands to the lapels of her jacket. Slowly, she slipped the garment off her shoulders. It dropped to the floor.

She tugged her blouse from under the skirt’s waistband, then moved her hands to the collar of her blouse, to the row of tiny buttons that ran from throat to hem. She struggled with them; Andie imagined that her fingers shook. One by one each button slipped through the hole; the delicate fabric parted.

She was stripping. Being forced to strip.

With the realization, Andie’s mouth turned to ash, her heart began to thrum. She wanted to jump up and shout—pound on the window to frighten the woman out of the trance she appeared to be in or to frighten away her captor. She told herself to look away or duck down.

She did none of those. Instead, she continued to stare, paralyzed by shock and disbelief as the woman removed one piece of clothing after another.

Stripped down to bra, panties and half slip, she stopped. In the feeble, flickering light of the one candle, shadows danced crazily on her pale skin.

The man stood and left the room, walking past her without even a glance. Andie held her breath. Run, she silently urged. Grab your clothes and go.

But the woman didn’t move. Not a muscle, it seemed to Andie.

What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she—

She wasn’t a prisoner. She wanted to be there.

Andie brought a hand to her mouth and dared a glance at Raven and Julie. Their faces reflected each of her own emotions—shock, disbelief, a kind of fascination mixed with revulsion. She gazed at them, afraid to speak, willing them to look at her. Hoping if their eyes met, they would all come to their senses and leave this place.

But they didn’t look her way, and Andie turned back to the window and the nearly naked woman, standing like a mannequin before it.

Moments passed, though it could have been minutes—even hours—for all Andie knew. She had lost all sense of time and reality. It seemed like aeons that the woman stood unmoving, half-naked and alone.

The man returned. Again, he strolled past the woman without looking at or touching her. As if she weren’t there, Andie thought. As if she didn’t matter enough even to glance at.

Andie struggled to see his face before he turned his back to them and sat down, but came up with only impressions: of dark hair and features, of strength and beauty. And of evil.

Rampant and blackhearted. Like the devil Julie’s dad was always warning about.

Andie decided she hated him. Fiercely. The emotion reached up and grabbed her by the throat until she felt both choked and exhilarated by it.

He lit a cigarette. The sudden, tiny flame illuminated his profile for a fraction of a second, then left it more inscrutable than before. Smoke curled, snakelike, through the light of the candle at his feet.

The woman moved. She eased the slip over her hips and down. It puddled on the floor at her feet, and she stepped out of it. Next, she brought her hands to the back-clasp of her bra; she struggled with it a moment, then with almost agonizing slowness, she took the garment off.

The panties, small and plain white, came next. She eased them off, then dropped her hands to her sides and stood completely still before the man, as if awaiting his instruction.

Heat washed over Andie; she began to sweat. She had never seen a naked woman before. Not like this, not just … there. She and her friends had changed clothes in the same fitting room, she had seen her mother when she had burst into the bathroom without knocking, but that had been … natural, kind of innocent.

But this was different. Unnatural. Anything but innocent.

All of it. The man and the woman. The music. Her and her friends spying on them this way.

Still, Andie didn’t look away. The woman was beautiful, pale and slim but with the kind of curves Andie dreamed of someday having. Cheeks burning, she moved her gaze over the woman, stopping with a sense of shock on the dark triangle of hair at the top of her thighs.

Suddenly, Andie became aware of the labored sound of her friend’s breathing, the pounding of her own heart, of Julie’s fingers wrapped around her forearm in a death grip.

The woman took a halting step toward the man, then another, seeming to feel her way in her darkness. When she reached him, she stopped, paused for a moment, then knelt at his feet.

She lowered her head to his lap.

For one dazed moment, Andie wondered what the woman was doing.

Then she knew.

This wasn’t happening, she told herself, sucking in a strangled breath. Not in Thistledown. Not in her own neighborhood.

But it was.

With a squeak of fear, she ducked down, grabbing her friends’ hands and dragging them with her. They stared at each other in shocked silence, then looked away, embarrassed and uncomfortable. Andie opened her mouth to whisper something to break the silence, but nothing came. It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t speak as that suddenly she didn’t want to.

The three ran. Away from the window and back to the abandoned tree house in the empty lot. Breathing hard, they scrambled up the makeshift ladder and onto the platform.

Several moments passed in complete silence except for the sound of their ragged breathing. Andie stubbed the toe of her sneaker against the platform floor, the need to speak nearly strangling her. But for the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to say to her friends.

Suddenly, Julie giggled. Self-conscious, she slapped a hand over her mouth. Still, she giggled again. Raven and Andie looked at her, and she shook her head. “I can’t help it. It was so …” Julie flushed. “You guys, she was … blowing him.”

Andie brought her hands to her face. “I can’t believe they … I mean, that? Here?”

“No joke.” Raven drew her knees to her chest. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was wild.”

Andie made a face. “And what was that blindfold all about?”

“They’re sex perverts,” Julie answered, looking at Andie. “I saw a book in the library about it. In the psychology section. It was called sexual—” she thought for a moment “—sexual deviation. I think that was it.”

Sexual deviation. Just as Andie couldn’t rid herself of the sensation of gooseflesh crawling up her arms, she couldn’t shake the image of the woman standing blindfolded and naked in the dark.

She looked at Raven, then Julie. “That woman, why does she do that for him?”

The other two looked blankly at her, then at each other. “I don’t know,” Raven answered, shrugging. “Because she likes it?”

“But how could she?” Andie continued, wishing she had seen the man’s face, wondering if, somehow, she would understand if she had. “It was so … awful. It seemed, I don’t know—” She searched for the right word. “Demeaning,” she said, finding it. “Like the woman was nothing and he was everything. Like she was a slave and he was her master.”