Chemical [se]X (20 page)

She twisted her head away. “You told me not to swallow it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t follow my own advice. Sister Maris Stella failed to heed those words as well.” Agatha glanced down and saw that the cook had crawled to him. She undulated as if trying to writhe through the floor, unlacing his black boots to lick the pale skin of his feet. While Agatha hesitated, Brother Anselm transferred the chocolate on his thumb to his own lower lip, his tongue flicking out to taste it.

“Take the rest from me,” he urged Agatha, his voice thick. Looking at his sin-marked mouth, Agatha wasn’t sure what tempted her the most—the herb-laced chocolate, or the tip of Brother Anselm’s tongue, or the sounds made by Sister Maris Stella in her abandon on the floor. She felt uncertain of most things by now, but one clear thought remained. If she did fall, she didn’t want it to be by accident. If she tasted the forbidden chocolate, that would come as a choice she made herself, not because of the wild impulse to meet Brother Anselm’s hard but curving lips.

“I have to go,” she said. “I can’t stay in this place anymore. I can’t… I can’t be with you.” She meant to say that she couldn’t be with Brother Anselm and Sister Maris Stella sexually, but when she spoke the words she realized she meant even more. She couldn’t live in a community where her lineage made her suspect. She couldn’t spend her days among people who had hidden the truth of her parentage, then punished her for a legacy they’d never allowed her to know.

Agatha pulled out of the older man’s grip, casting about the chapel for direction. Brother Anselm’s Bible lay forgotten on the plain, dusty floor. She snatched it up and began to run, and she didn’t really stop moving until years had passed and she found herself many miles from anywhere she’d ever been before.

II. Answers Found In Pleasure

No matter how she tried, Agatha could never outrun her shame. Trying had become a ritual. Saturday nights, she walked alone to the convenience store run by her university and purchased the smallest box of herb-laced chocolate she could find. She’d never dared to go for Sister Maris Stella’s red-laced
Sin
line. Instead, she bought
Virgin
, its gold box understated, its lettering pure and white.

Despite her intentions and intellectual beliefs, Agatha had not escaped the word
virgin
in any sense. She had managed to lose neither her innocence nor her faith, and even before deliberately sinning, she still prayed to the Lady of Abstinence. Brother Anselm’s Bible sat in a place of honor beside the bed in her dorm room, well worn and never dusty.

Trying to make sense of her upbringing and lineage wearied her, and though she wished Saturday nights would be a respite, they never were. When Agatha returned to her room with the week’s box of chocolate—which promised “the tingle of indulgence without the loss of control”—her roommate was out as usual with her large-haired, ruddy boyfriend. Agatha had the space to herself, all the privacy she needed to yield to a little pleasure, and none of the restrictions of official belief. She told herself she was an atheist now, but still, as she tugged open the box’s ribbon, a prayer sprang to her lips.

Virgin
smelled sweeter and more familiar than Sister Maris Stella’s
Sin
. It was white chocolate, scented with the lavender of clean sheets and the honeyed florals of a young woman’s perfume. Still, when Agatha lifted a square of it to her nose, she could catch a whiff of that rotten, wild jungle smell.

She laid it on her tongue, trying not to think of Brother Anselm’s finger. The simple note of cocoa butter rang through her mouth, apparently innocent, asking nothing of her. Tonight, she wolfed the chocolate down without making a production of the eating, then tossed the box into the wastebasket beside her bed. She sat cross-legged, examining her body with the concentration of a skilled meditator, ready to mark the ways the chocolate made her feel different.

Agatha knew it couldn’t take effect immediately, but for the first few breaths, she always feared it wasn’t working. She waited through that, resisting the restless twitch of her left foot. She fought the urge to page through one of her textbooks on ethnography, anthropology, or Pano-Tacanan languages. She bit her tongue to hold back more involuntary prayers.

Agatha’s life since she had left her religious community had been devoted to understanding where she had come from, and that meant she’d spent countless hours reading about uncontacted tribes of Brazil and Peru. From the research she’d managed to do into the closely guarded secret of the origins of the herb-laced chocolate, she had determined she must have been stolen from somewhere near the Amazon rain forest. She’d spent just as much time poring over theological texts, trying to understand the mindset of the people who had taken her.

Saturday night wasn’t supposed to be about intellect, though. Agatha wanted answers about her past, but she also wanted to know who she had become, and that meant paying attention to her body and what it was doing here and now.

The first thing she noticed was increased sensitivity in her skin. Her breath tickled the hairs of her upper lip, and that bit of stimulation felt so good that Agatha couldn’t resist pressing her fingertip against the spot as if she could catch that sensation and hold it in. Her clothes felt silkier, the air of the room pleasantly cool. Her body became gradually warmer by contrast, the inside of her mouth humid. Her sex began, ever so slowly, to drip.

Agatha allowed herself to squirm, shifting her ass on the bed. Confused visions of Brother Anselm and Sister Maris Stella swam into her mind—half memories, half shameful fantasies. They were joined by fuzzy imaginings of Agatha’s roommate and her boyfriend, their bodies bare and fleshy but undefined, the sex they were certainly having both compelling and sketchily rendered.

She vividly recalled Sister Maris Stella’s questing, fisted hands, but Agatha had never dared to follow that example and touch herself. Saturday nights had become a battle of will against temptation, mental control against a stimulated body’s desire. Agatha didn’t know how to stop fighting and surrender.

In frustration, she jumped off the bed. Maybe she needed more than a tingle to be able to give in. Hands trembling, she let herself out of the dorm room and headed back toward the convenience store.

In the short time since she’d been out before, the mood on campus had changed. Alcohol sharpened the edges of conversations, and the possibility of sex seemed to buzz audibly wherever students stood in groups. Gold boxes had been discarded in and around trash cans everywhere, most of them decorated with red filigree, some with white, and a few with the distinctive gold-on-gold pattern of the most powerful formula of herb-laced chocolate available on the market. Agatha could feel the force of lust everywhere, whether restrained to a simmer or shamelessly exposed. It had soaked into the dewy footpaths along the edges of the quad, and the scent of it rose from bodies too bare for the chill of the oncoming night.

At the convenience store,
Sin
was sold out. She hovered her hand briefly over
Premium
, the all-gold package, but the tagline read, “For those who want a party that never ends.” Agatha didn’t have the stomach for that. She snagged two boxes of
Virgin
, and carried them to a smirking cashier.

“That one only contains traces, you know,” the multiply pierced boy informed Agatha. “It’s the seeds and stems of the chocolate world. Acme Confectionery and Drain Cleaner Company is selling you a bunch of cashed-out junk, trying to dress it up to look pretty.”

She shrugged, too embarrassed to make conversation about what she was trying to do. The boy narrowed his eyes, emphasizing wrinkles and furrows that betrayed his true age—quite a few years older than Agatha.

“If you need help with anything…”

“I don’t know about that,” Agatha said curtly. “I think I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Really?” The curl of his lips reminded her of Brother Anselm, surprisingly stern in his pale, metal-adorned face. “That’s your second batch of
Virgin
tonight. You look like you’re trying to find your way out of something… or into something.”

Agatha wanted to stare back boldly and without shame, but her religious training tipped her head into a bow and brought heat to her cheeks. “Never mind. I’ll just put this back.”

The cashier put a hand on her wrist. “Better yet, tell me what you want. My shift is over in half an hour. I’ll bring you what you need.”

His fingers were softer than she had expected, the touch tender with a humanity that too often seemed beyond Agatha’s reach. She met his eyes. They were light brown and warm, belying the toughness of the piercings along his eyebrows, nostrils, and lips. Her chest ached. “Look, I don’t know what I’m going to be able to…”

“Tell me.”

Agatha slipped her hand out from under his and touched the word on the top of the chocolate box. “That’s me,” she said. “Completely. I can’t relax enough for anything. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

He shook his head slightly. “What’s your room number? I’ll come by if you want me to. I won’t expect anything.”

Brother Anselm and Sister Maris Stella had proven themselves depraved and sinful. There was no way she should trust this boy. As they held each other’s eyes, though, Agatha’s shoulders relaxed. “305 Campbell,” she whispered, and fled the convenience store.

***

His name was Gerald. He brought her herbal tea, a bag of potato chips, and
three
boxes of
Virgin
chocolates. He’d changed out of his work clothes into a black and studded ensemble, but his hair still smelled of convenience store hot dogs. Agatha appreciated that mundane detail more than she wanted to admit.

Gerald dropped his offerings on her crowded desk, then lingered there, examining the spines of her books. “What’s Panoan?”

His idle tone didn’t make the question any less personal. Agatha cleared her throat and delivered an even, academic answer. “It’s a family of languages. Tribes in the Amazon rain forest speak a bunch of different dialects of it. Obviously, we don’t know the languages of the tribes that don’t maintain contact with the outside world, but in past encounters, people have managed basic communication if they’ve studied Pano-Tacanan roots.”

Gerald turned to face her. “Is that what the chocolates are about? I read on the Internet that they’re made with a natural aphrodisiac from some lost tribe—though the forum I was on thought aborigines from Australia.”

Agatha shrugged. Her face in the mirror matched pictures of Peruvian and Brazilian natives perfectly. She knew in her bones that she had come from the rain forest, not the plains of Africa, and not Australian scrub. There was no need to concern herself with what people on the Internet thought about anything.

Her visitor pulled out her desk chair and sat on it, crossing his legs. “Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

She shook her head. She wouldn’t have given him her room number if that was what she’d wanted. “I want you to feed me some of that chocolate.”

His eyebrow lifted, metal rings swaying. “Feed it to you?”

“Please. You were right, Gerald. I need your help. It doesn’t matter what my body wants, there’s too much in my head.”

He raised one corner of his mouth. “A buddy told me a long time ago that you should never use a drug—any kind of drug—if you can’t give it to yourself.”

“And you’ve always followed that advice?”

“I’ll confess to smoking a few bowls when I needed a friend to hold the lighter for me.”

“Because you needed more than you could take otherwise, right? Sometimes, you’ve got to outrun yourself.”

“Shit. I should have bought you the
Premium.
”

“No, I couldn’t handle that.”

“You might surprise yourself, baby.” Gerald picked up the gold boxes and came to sit on the bed beside Agatha. He patted his thigh. Her lungs clenched, but she forced them open so she could draw breath, then rested her head on his leg. She wanted to explain how little she had touched anyone in her life, but she also feared ruining their understanding by using too many words. Gerald stroked her hair for a while. His thigh heated the side of her cheek. Her ear started to go numb from being compressed between her head and his pants. Agatha worried that she might fall asleep and wake up yet again as the same person she had always been.

Finally, he lifted a piece of white chocolate out of the box. “Do you still want this?”

Agatha nodded.

“Tell me what you’re trying to do.”

“I told you not to expect anything,” she said. If she could achieve Sister Maris Stella’s abandon, she would have sucked Gerald off gladly. She wanted to know what the tickle of pubic hair against her lips would feel like. Agatha didn’t foresee herself reaching that state, though, and she didn’t want the night to end in an unpleasant scene.

“I’m not pressuring you. I’m getting information. Look, for one thing, if this stuff does get you going, I don’t want to let things go further than you’re comfortable with. Since you’re, you know…”

“A virgin.”

“Right.”

Agatha arched her head back and made another decision to trust him. “I want to have an orgasm. But I think…” She winced, afraid of hurting his feelings. “I think I want to give it to myself.”

Gerald didn’t seem upset. He peered at her face and ran the side of his hand along her jaw. “Do you want me to leave for that part?”

“Not necessarily. We’ll see how it goes.”

“I won’t expect anything, I promise.” As he finished the sentence, he brought the chocolate to her lips, using it to tease her mouth open. Agatha let it in, her tongue sneaking laps of Gerald’s finger along with the chocolate. He tasted metallic, like dirty coins, and that added a strange note to the supposedly innocent intentions of
Virgin
.

She closed her eyes and ate. He fed her steadily. Her body got warmer and warmer. She stretched toward him as if he were a sunbeam, her nose and nipples pointing at his face. The more her back curved, the more Agatha could feel the possibility of sinuous, sensual movement. She imagined twining around him like a snake around a tree branch.