Chemical [se]X (22 page)

His eyes widened as she stepped out of her panties. She’d thought she smelled strong before, but that was nothing compared to the monstrous arousal that rose up now. She felt twice as tall as ever, twice as round, millions of times more savage than Sister Maris Stella could ever have hoped for or feared. Agatha smelled of the dark earth of the fertile crescent, of riverheads and mulch and pungent leaves.

“Wait,” he said again, and she stopped, trembling on a precipice of rejection and desire. Was she an evil thing now? A cherished thing?

“Tell me to wait again, and I’ll run instead.”

“I know.” He met her eyes. Agatha realized she wasn’t losing her innocence—she was letting Gerald sacrifice his to her. Perhaps she had never had innocence at all. That would explain why she’d never been able to get rid of it, and why she felt such a ravenous need to take his.

He fumbled in his pants pocket, took out a condom, and sheathed his dick. Agatha would rather have felt his skin bare, but she understood now that claiming to protect her was his way of protecting himself. She stalked toward him on the bed. Sister Maris Stella’s voice ran wildly through her mind. “Little savage. Glutton. Little savage.”

She throbbed in a part of her that used to be private, then became a sex organ, then was crowned by a clit. She had been slowly reading and studying, putting together the sense of body that had been fogged out by her upbringing in her religious community. The chocolate, though—that was what had turned the juncture of her legs, at last, triumphantly, into a
cunt
. Agatha swiped a finger through her sticky
cunt
and tasted the fluid she found there. Cut grass and rotting leaves and river water. That couldn’t be what it really tasted like.

She crawled onto Gerald. She took him by the nipple rings and lined her cunt up with his cock.

“Agatha, it might hurt.”

“Good,” she told him. She was so, so wet—the dangerous sort of wet that can turn the smallest step into a slip and then a no-return trip down a mud-drenched slide.

“Agatha…”

“You’re not going to tell me to wait again, are you? I can’t do that any more. Last chance.”

Gerald grabbed her ass. He tugged. She slipped.

Falling through a head of shame and out the other side, Agatha found herself losing her balance on the bed, falling onto him. His cock pierced her easily, with finality. She cried out. It was both more and less than she had hoped it would be—more because it made the ache inside her even greater, and less because, rather than transfixing her, it made her want to move.

More instinct. Agatha’s hips rolled. She found the perfect angle, but it slipped away. She tightened her grip on his nipples and twisted. She wasn’t about to let him get away from her.

She remembered Sister Maris Stella trying to writhe her way through the floor. Agatha wanted into Gerald. She wanted to unwrap him like the chocolate, consume him, and find out what it did to her to hold him in her belly.

Guttural noises poured from her throat. This was fucking. This, at last, was sin. Gerald sounded as if he was sobbing, but each time she looked down in concern, he shook his head and tugged her hips again. “I’m fine,” he gasped. “Please. More.”

Agatha didn’t even remember how to hold back. Her body alive for what felt like the first time, she fucked him until sweat stung her eyes and made her lose her grip on the nipple rings and plastered her hair to the sides of her face and soaked the bed sheet for inches around him. She fucked him until he blasted a load into the condom, at which point she growled, got off him, sucked him hard again, then fucked him until actual tears came to his eyes. She had said she wanted to come, but an orgasm felt small and pointless beneath the flood of pent-up desire that the chocolate had unleashed.

She was no virgin. She wondered if this was the blood corruption Sister Maris Stella had talked about. She certainly felt demonic, pinning sacrificial Gerald beneath her, fucking and fucking, remorselessly seeking a release she wasn’t sure she believed in.

There was a sound at the door, but Agatha didn’t let it bother her. The doorknob turned, and Gerald stirred. She bent down and sank her teeth into his shoulder. It was an animal act, a primal way of signaling
don’t you fucking move
.

“Agatha?” The shocked voice behind her belonged to her roommate.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said the roommate’s ruddy, large-haired boyfriend.

Being seen made everything real. She arched up from Gerald’s body and found what she’d been looking for. She was clenching and squirming and cursing and writhing, putting on a show of ecstatic struggle. Energy pumped through her lower belly. Her thighs tensed around Gerald’s hips. Agatha’s cunt became a flooding river that no longer recognized borders or boundaries. She was ready to pour into the ocean, to overwhelm the entire world.

“What are you fucking waiting for?” Agatha demanded.

Beneath her, Gerald moaned desperately, finally surrendering as much as she wanted him to. He thrust into Agatha wildly. Agatha felt as if she could really breathe for the first time in her life. She pressed her chest forward as her roommate’s hands settled onto her nipples, and opened her mouth wide for a long, ruddy cock.

In a way that books could not have told her, she now understood. She was a savage. No religion could defeat the power of her blood.

III. Rain Forest Roots

As a parting gift, Gerald had given Agatha a gold box marked
Premium
, and a sheaf of printouts from his forum searches. “I don’t think I can follow you to where you’re going,” he had said.

“I know you can’t,” she’d replied. She had focused on his eyebrow rings rather than his eyes. She’d known by then that he loved her, and that she could not return the feeling. She’d realized by then that she couldn’t follow him either. He existed in a place that had always been denied to her. Gerald knew how to be simple, but Agatha was a creature of contradiction.

Now, her research was taking her home to her people, where she hoped to find a way to be simple and whole.

Agatha had traveled to Belem, a Brazilian city on the border of the Amazon rain forest, a multitude of people gathered for the sake of rubber trees. She wasn’t home yet, but she thought she could smell home amid the scents of tropical fruit and fresh fish. She wondered if these were the flavors enjoyed by the parents she had never known, or if the rain forest itself offered other feasts entirely. She recognized herself in everyone’s face, it seemed—missionary or native or tourist. She was all of them and none of them, and she was ready to find out, at last, what she really was.

In a dingy hostel, Agatha took out a book on uncontacted tribes, then set it aside in favor of Gerald’s carefully compiled notes. She could have sworn she felt his fingers through the paper, gentle in a way she couldn’t bear. She had needed him to be savage with her, to match her, to help her to become entirely herself at last.

Maybe he’d done his best. He had, after all, compiled obscure writings that pointed toward the secret of Acme Confectionery and Drain Cleaner Company’s success, papers published by the elusive Brent Reynolds, the man who had discovered the herb that powered the chocolates. Or, Agatha supposed, the
white
man who had discovered them—presumably, whatever tribe she came from had known about the herb for generations. By studying that information, Agatha had narrowed her search to a region of the Amazon near Belem. She had prepared as much as possible for this moment, had practiced survival techniques, and had memorized everything ever written about Panoan. Armed with Brother Anselm’s Bible and Gerald’s chocolates, she was ready to find her true home at last.

She missed Gerald more than she liked to admit, and beneath that was an older itch, the lingering scar caused by the loss of her religious community. Even lower was the ghostly breath of her lost parents, the sweetness of mother’s milk she wasn’t sure she had ever tasted. Agatha would set out for the forest in the morning, but tonight she wanted to be around people. She slipped out of the hostel and into the nightlife of a foreign city.

Wandering the streets, she found her way to the Bar do Parque, a collection of outdoor seats populated by locals, scruffy college-age tourists, and scruffier men eyeing up the prostitutes that lingered around the edges of the bar’s lit area. Agatha had done plenty of sexual things now, thanks to the chocolates, but the sight of the painted women still shocked her. Without the loss of inhibition the chocolate granted her, she would never have been able to stand on the street with her flesh exposed as those women did, leg muscles displayed by towering heels, hair coiffed into fuck-me waves. She admired the eyes of the women—sometimes bold, sometimes shy, but always honest.

Taking a seat, Agatha ordered a beer. She considered opening Gerald’s box, but much as she wished to relax, tonight didn’t seem like the time to abandon her good sense. A man with a charming smile made his way over to her, sitting down across from her with the confidence of a person seldom refused.

He greeted her in Portuguese, and Agatha was warmed by the compliment of belonging. She replied, and her fluency did not betray her. They bantered with each other as the heat eased from the night. She drank beer and fruit juice, and the man slowly moved closer.

When his hand landed on her thigh, she jerked to stiff attention. He crept back a few inches, as if she were a wild dog, requiring caution. Agatha wanted to react differently, to melt. Instead, her heart pounded. She thought of the chocolate, but still didn’t want to eat it. She was so close to the person she wanted to be, and yet so far. This had become the problem with Gerald, too—without the chocolate, all she could feel was the squirming shame she had learned in the community. Her inner ears filled with Sister Maris Stella’s shrewish voice, and her stomach coiled with the dark desires Brother Anselm had awakened. Gerald had wanted to love her, but she had only been able to fuck him drugged.

The attractive man withdrew and regrouped. He brought over another beer. Agatha could read the patience on his face. He was prepared to take his time with her, to work at her approval, then make another pass. She winced, feeling undeserving of that care.

“I have to go,” she whispered, and fled. It occurred to her that fleeing was the only thing she knew how to do. She needed great distances between herself and others—whether those distances were measured by miles, months, or quantity of herb consumed.

Perhaps it would be all right once she got into the rain forest, Agatha thought. Perhaps she had always been running to her home.

***

They called her by a name she couldn’t translate.

After wandering for several days in the rain forest, studying maps and Brent Reynolds’s papers, Agatha had given in and prayed to the Virgin. Only a few hours later, as if miracles were real, she had heard voices and glimpsed faces that were familiar from her mirror.

Attempts at conversation were confusing. Apparently, she looked like someone’s mother or sister or friend—she wasn’t sure of the meaning of that word either—enough that people accepted her story of returning home. They led her to a small village, not so much carved from the rain forest as embraced by it. Around its perimeter grew a plant whose smell she recognized—cut grass and rotting leaves. Desire stirred between her legs, a Pavlovian response to the only stimulus that had ever been able to unlock the restraints her upbringing had placed on her body.

They gave her a place to sit, served her salty fish, and tried to interest her in activities that required manual skills she didn’t possess. They tried to tell her stories, but she laughed nervously when she was supposed to cry. They tried to listen to what she had to say, but the Panoan language she had managed to learn gave her only the most rudimentary tools. She had the vocabulary of an idiot child.

Agatha tried to ask after Brent Reynolds, but all she could ascertain was that he was gone. She didn’t know if that meant he’d died, or if he’d simply decided, after some time among the tribe, to return home.

She wanted her blood to sing with recognition and her shoulders to relax. She wanted the rain forest to gleam with the familiarity of childhood nostalgia. She wanted to speak easily with these people who shared her family tree. But strange bugs bit her, and she kept wanting to pray with English words, and she couldn’t get comfortable sitting on the ground.

Night fell, and the woman next to Agatha tapped her on the shoulder, smiled, and beckoned her to an outdoor fire. The children had been put to bed. People chatted easily, sharing an intimacy Agatha recognized from her time at college. When people had slept together, understanding always seemed to linger. Even if an affair had ended, certain brands of touch and tones of voice remained that could recall what it had once meant to be inside each other.

Everyone here seemed to share that knowledge with everyone else. How had Brent Reynolds joined in so easily? How had he been comfortable abandoning his possessions? Agatha felt the weight of histories she could never know—a past that should have been her birthright.

People settled into place around the fire. Already, they twined together like jungle vines, linked by fingers or ankles or elbows. A few people kissed, gently, making noises in the backs of their throats like a symphony orchestra warming for an evening’s performance. The woman who had invited Agatha to the fire pointed at her chest. “Shidi,” she said, and Agatha gave her own name in reply. The woman explained what was about to happen, and Agatha furrowed her brow and did her best to make it out. Thanks to Brent Reynolds’s explanations of the rituals of uncontacted Brazilian tribes, she was able to sort out much of the context. Soon, the sacred
upash
would be passed around the circle, and the whole village would share in the pleasure it encouraged.

Agatha nodded, body buzzing with anticipation. She hoped this experience would erase the disappointment that had threatened ever since she’d found her people. She had never stopped to consider what would happen if she went home and felt no epiphany of connection.