Page 74 of This Vicious Hunger
Isit at the gate until nightfall. I’m not sure what I’m expecting to happen, but the thought that if somethingdoeshappen I’ll be here to see it comforts me. Olea disappears back into her tower—it is still hers, isn’t it? Nothing in this place is truly mine. For the first time since I arrived here I find myself wishing for my clothes, the ones I brought from Aurelio’s house; they are the last shred of proof that I ever had that other life, that I ever existed outside this place.
Who will remember me? Only Leo might care that I’m gone, and honestly I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t. I’ve treated him so badly I wouldn’t be surprised if he took my absence merely as a sign that I was done with him. This thought saddens me most of all. The legacy I hoped to build for myself is gone, and the garden is all that remains.
Not that it is all bad. I realise pretty quickly that this new life comes with several perks. I rarely get hungry, but when I do, even basic bread tastes like the best thing I have ever eaten. I pick the fruit off Olea’s trees with abandon, gorging myself on its sweet, pulpy flesh, spitting seeds and scratching pits into the earth. Iwake each day to the sun on my face, not a single ache from sleeping amongst the flowers, and know I could easily walk the length of the garden ten times over without tiring—not that I do. But I could.
I return to the tower only once over the next few days, in a fit of frustration at some godforsaken time in the early morning, when I thrash about the sitting room looking for a pair of scissors, candles, and a box of matches. Olea must hear me from the upstairs room, but she doesn’t come to see what I’m doing, and I don’t ask her for help. I can’t bear it.
I carry my haul back out to the gate and sit in the crumbly mud in the patch between weeds, still wild and rambling in Olea’s absence. I light the candle and hold my newly grown hair over its flame, shearing great swathes into the fire, where they sizzle and pop as normal hairs do.
“For Olea,” I say. “For me. For my life and hers. For whatever this is. I hold my Silence in grief.” I repeat several of my father’s prayers and sit for the rest of the night in Silence, watching the candle burn down. There is no breeze and the flame goes steady all the rest of the night and through most of the following day. It doesn’t bring me peace as it once would have, but there is some comfort in the old motions and I’m determined to try to lay the past to rest. At some point I fall asleep. My dreams are peaceful, and when I wake my hair is exactly as long as it was before, transformed while I slept.
“Well, fuck me,” I say, enjoying the harshness of the word on my tongue. There is some new freedom in this, too.
Olea isn’t surprised when I tell her about my hair. When I finally return from my garden vigil with my stubby candle, blunt scissors, and the box of matches, Olea is lounging on the chaisein the sitting room with a book in one hand. The other circles her abdomen lazily, tracing symbols of infinity across the soft white of her nightgown as she reads.
“So we’re stuck in time as well as in location.” Olea shrugs carelessly. “More fool me, I guess.”
“Do you understand what this means?” I ask. After our argument I don’t want to treat her as if she’s stupid. She’s right: She’s not stupid; we just have different priorities.
“That you’ll stop sitting by the gate like a little lost dog?” She wrinkles her nose endearingly, this time playing dumb. She’s forgiven me already, I realise. “Or… that you’re sorry you said such horrid things before?”
“Neither.” I roll my eyes playfully. “Well, no. Iamsorry. And I will stop sitting by the gate, waiting to feel strong enough to smash the lock. But, no, it means that our bodies are in some kind of stasis. So the antidotedoeswork. It restores us to our ‘natural’ state, which is a kind of healing itself. It’s just that the antidote, once in our bodies, thinks that our natural state isitsnatural state, which is, well, a mixture of poison plant and blood.”
“I don’t follow.” Olea drops her book to the floor carelessly. Her eyes are fixed on me, but she continues the lazy circling of her finger, round her belly button, up her sternum, across the tops of her breasts. She’s teasing me, I realise. She knows exactly what I’m trying to say but she wants to drag it out. I watch her fingers.
“The antidote needs the plant component to create the longevity and healing aspect,” I say, only half paying attention. It’s all fallen into place in my mind already. Now I am strong, I feel better than I have in years. I’m not lying about the padlock either: I’m almost certain, if I built up the strength, I could snap it with my bare hands eventually. “Plants are notoriously robust and cansurvive in some of the harshest environments, and they’re also self-healing. When you combine that with the toxicity, which forms a natural safety barrier between the plant and the rest of the world, you get a colloid with one main goal: protection.”
“So the antidote is protecting us,” Olea says, her voice husky. “Making our bodies… stronger. Faster. Healthier.”
“Making themperfect.”
Olea’s body really is perfect. Her nipples are soft peaks beneath the thin silk nightgown, her skin soft as perfumed oil. Her hair falls in coils over her shoulders, over the collarbones I once saw from my desk, and from the darkness of the gate. The sight of them then, and the sight of them now, awakens something inside me. Something primal. I clench my thighs hard.
“What I said before… about Leonardo…” Olea says.
“Shut up.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Enough,” I growl. I stride to her side, thrusting one hand against the back of the chaise so I can lean over her. My hair falls in a curtain around our faces and Olea looks up at me, that same lazy expression on her face even as the apology hangs between us. I banish it with a kiss, hungry and deep.
Her lips are soft and wet, parting immediately to draw me in. My tongue finds hers and the graze of her newly sharpened teeth on my lips is enough to make me ache so hard the agony is delicious. I kiss her until there is no breath left in my body, forcing myself to hold my hands on either side of her head and not move them lower.
“Fuck,” Olea breathes. Her eyes are hazy with pleasure, her cheeks flushed a soft pink. “Do you— Is it…” She stops. Licks her lips. She’s trembling. “Do you feel as if every part of you is singing?”
No. It is screaming—but not in fear. In pleasure. It is heat, it is light; it is static in every inch of my skin, almost too much for me to bear.
“Yes.”
“Iamsorry,” Olea confesses. “For all of it.”
“Olea,” I grind out. She tenses. “If you don’t stop apologising and kiss me again, I shall go entirely mad. Okay?”
She melts back into the chaise, one fist bunching in my nightgown, pulling me down so that my right knee lands between her legs. I push the nightgown up hungrily and Olea writhes as my knee touches the soft skin of her thighs. It is exactly as supple as I dreamt it would be. She grips my arm, guiding my body with ease until my leg presses against her softest part. It feels as natural as breathing.
There is no panic, no dutiful pretence like with Aurelio. In all my days and nights with my stolen books, my fingers curling tight inside myself, I never could have imagined this. The heat that grows between us, the frantic scrape of nails across my back as I grind my leg between Olea’s, feeling her wetness and the feral joy it unleashes deep within me. Olea grasps my breast, her other hand desperately clawing my nightdress up and over my head. I rip Olea’s gown like it is made from paper, the ragged tear of the material a symphony to my ears as I bite down on her neck. Her skin is slick with salt, bittersweet and tender against my tongue. She writhes in pleasure, wrapping her legs around my waist.
It is a frenzy. Fingers searching, tongues circling. I kiss my way down Olea’s neck, her chest, first one nipple and then the other. I taste the cool, creamy garden scent of her skin, feel the tickle of the coarse hair beneath her navel. I stare into Olea’s eyes as I dip lower, lower, and then dive between Olea’s legs and suckle at thetender skin there as if she is made of honey. And, oh, she tastes as sweet. The sound of her moans drives my own hand between my legs as she begs.Harder, she urges, though she doesn’t say it aloud. She doesn’t have to; our minds and our bodies might as well be one.More.
