Beautiful You (24 page)

Hearing this, Penny could understand why the president had killed herself. Maxwell planned to control the birthrate of the entire industrialized world.

“Overpopulation,” Penny said. “So that’s why you’ve placed a dog in the manger.”

He nodded with obvious pride. “You’re referring to the gatekeeper
function. Certain nanobots can deliver a pulse of scorching plasma energy. It was invented to destroy cancer cells, but I find it works equally as well on male erections.”

Wryly, Penny said, “You’ll be happy to know that it works equally as well on the fingers of Himalayan mystics.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “Ah, you sought out Baba Gray-Beard.” He smirked, asking, “How is the old girl?”

“She despises you!” Penny countered. Despite how he tried to hide it, she could see the news saddened Maxwell. To press her advantage she added, “The Baba loathes you for how you’ve stolen the sex secrets of the ancients and used them for your profit.”

Without speaking, Max wiggled a toggle on his control, and Penny felt a twinge of heady desire flutter through her.

She flinched but recovered her composure quickly. She narrowed her gaze. “Equipped with her guidance I might prove to be more of a challenge to master than your previous slaves.”

Max spied her clenching and unclenching her hands in rage. “You are no longer the weak child whom I tutored in the ways of pleasure.… I sense that under the Baba’s tutelage you’ve become something dangerous: a woman.” His eyes gleamed with something like admiration. “If you ever consider doing me harm, please know that to kill me would be to unleash consequences beyond your wildest imaginings!”

“After tomorrow,” Penny fumed, “the entire world will loathe you.” She sipped at her glass of champagne. “In the opening arguments of my patent-rights trial, I plan to expose your entire dirty scheme!”

Max fingered his controls.

Penny felt a shiver of pleasure tease her anus. A warning. She ignored it.

Max toyed with another button, and she felt her nipples begin to enlarge.

“Surely,” she taunted, “you can do better than that.”

“And I promise I will,” Maxwell swore. “If you attempt to expose me I will make you grovel and bark like a mad dog in heat on the courtroom floor. I will drive you insane with passion. And I will kill you.”

That night Penny built an altar to the tantric gods of long-ago. She made an offering of tea brewed from a fistful of soil brought back from the cave of Baba Gray-Beard. Using a cool compress of damp lichens, she blotted the feverish brow of her best friend and housemate. This night might be Penny’s last on earth, but even death would be better than living as a slave to Maxwell. She pictured the nanobots already massing for their attack in her brain and groin. She telephoned her father in Omaha. Her mother had not improved, but neither was her condition worse. She was heavily sedated and being force-fed through a stomach tube to keep her alive.

Only Tad seemed to believe her. In response to her call he raced to her town house, bringing the legal brief for the two of them to review. Over pizza in the kitchen she had explained about her trip to Nepal. She told him about the gatekeeper lurking within millions of women. That crippling pulse of malevolent penis-lancing plasma energy.

Penny explained everything. Now, only now could they fully and honestly consummate their romantic friendship. Drinking cups of the Baba’s sacred dirt tea, they sat at the kitchen table and discussed taking their relationship to that next level.

Tad looked at her, the cooling pizza forgotten between them. His expression was that of a confused, frightened little boy. His eyes round with terror. For months, he’d seen Brillstein limping around the office, obviously in prolonged agony. He swallowed
nervously. He didn’t seem eager to suffer a similar fate. “I thought you couldn’t have vaginal intercourse?”

As the Baba would tell her, Penny’s vagina wasn’t her only access to power. It no longer mattered whether she was pretty or ugly, thin or fat, young or old. She was already well schooled as a vastly accomplished sex witch. Hers were the skills passed down through a thousand generations of wily sex crafters. She wielded that amazing carnal magic in her hands and mouth. The knowledge was trained deep in Penny’s every muscle. Her well-educated rectum alone knew countless methods of giving pleasure.

Penny boasted about none of these natural talents to Tad. Instead, she merely nodded in the direction of the Sub-Zero refrigerator. “There’s a bottle of champagne chilling.” Her voice furred with erotic suggestion, she said, “Why don’t you pop the cork while I go upstairs and slip into something sexy?”

In her bedroom Penny retrieved the negligee of marabou feathers dyed dark purple. Many of the feathers were stiff with dried blood. Brillstein’s blood. But the purple perfectly camouflaged that gory evidence from the night she’d seduced and interrogated her evil boss. Donning the plumage, she slipped her feet into her tallest pair of Prada heels and surveyed the results in her dressing room mirror. The memory of the aged senior partner lodged within her, weeping in pain, it made her giggle. The sight of her own magnificent, hairless vulva prompted the bittersweet memory of mounting Alouette’s beautiful face in the restaurant toilet stall.

From downstairs, Tad called up, “Champagne’s ready.”

“Give me one more minute,” Penny called down. She rushed to Monique’s room. There, her roommate was sleeping soundly,
too exhausted to hear Penny collect a sticky armload of much-used Beautiful You products. These she quickly carried into her own bathroom and flung into the shower.

Tad called up, “You ready? I’m bringing the champagne.”

“I’m in my bedroom,” Penny hollered. She was hurriedly using the shower’s handheld attachment to rinse any accumulated residue of old lubricant and dried body fluids off of the various borrowed erotic tools. Now that she knew Max’s design secrets she could easily recognize how one product was a plastic version of a human clavicle. Another was clearly a rubberized-fiberglass copy of a scapula. Each of these she blotted dry with a hand towel and flung onto her bed. As Penny heard Tad’s footsteps mount the stairs, she had barely enough time to curl her eyelashes, wax her legs, and apply perfume behind her ears.

Doing so, she ransacked her memory for details about the male sexual anatomy. Max had taught her some. Baba Gray-Beard had taught her much more, but Penny had put none of this learning into practice. Her mind reeled with the effort to picture Tad’s inferior rectal nerve and his tunica vaginalis.

As a finishing touch Penny walked slowly in a wide circle, scenting the love chamber. The Baba had taught her well how to express the powerful pheromones that naturally accumulated in her Howard gland, and doing so effectively filled the romantic setting with an unmistakable hormonal aroma.

By now Tad was standing in the bedroom doorway, holding the bottle of champagne and two Baccarat flutes. A winning combination of excitement and vulnerability filled his eyes. With a fluttering of marabou feathers, she led him to the bed and quickly undressed him, covertly reviewing his general anatomy. A few gentle caresses located the puboprostatic ligament. Subtly exploring, her fingers teased their way gradually deeper and deeper into Tad’s rectum. She traced his inguinal canal to the bulbourethral glands and the ejaculatory duct. If
he objected to the liberties she was taking he didn’t say so. On the contrary, the virile, brash attorney squirmed with trepidation as he watched Penny combine the pink champagne with the premixed packet of Beautiful You proprietary secret ingredients. Under her touch his youthful flesh quivered with fear and anticipation.

Unknown to him, the blood of her thwarted, would-be lover still stained the mattress where they staged their lovemaking. Fortunately, Penny had thought to flip it over.

Penny savored his goose bumps. This was how Max had felt as he’d dictated her mounting ecstasy. This was power. Gone were the young blue blood’s wordy declarations of love. For him nothing existed beyond the erotic sensations he was feeling for the first time. He shuddered with ill-concealed passion as she invaded his frightened sphincter with the syringe’s nozzle and the doctored pink wine began to expand and invade his bloodstream. Penny was coaxing his body to a fulfillment which would strain the very framework of his reality.

If Penny herself felt aroused it was on an intellectual level. Tad’s groaning and squirming were proof she’d attained a mastery of human pleasure centers. She’d seen so many women acted upon. Grossly manipulated. It felt wonderful to see that she could have an equal effect on a man. Max was right about one thing: This wasn’t a battle of boys versus girls. This was about how insight into your own body gave you power over others. Penny had once been the groveling, drooling test subject. Tonight she became the master. She controlled.

Deftly, she compressed his seminiferous tubules in order to suppress spermatogenesis. Penny Harrigan was no longer the shivering slab of meat waiting to be acted upon. Despite her dyed-purple plumage, she was the peerless sex lamia. Her every caress monitored the young lawyer’s heartbeat and temperature. He gasped. His heart rate was 197 beats per minute. Tad’s
pelvic floor surrendered, and she expertly inserted a bright pink phallus chosen from Monique’s sizable hoard. Using product number 371, the Daisy Love Wand, she stirred and churned the intoxicating concoction in her boyfriend’s bowels. Such machinations quickly sent him into an erotically induced coma—his core temperature dropped below eighty degrees Fahrenheit, his pupils became fixed and dilated—and Penny was compelled to resuscitate him using her own breath. Just as Max had stimulated her to the brink of death, then brought her back to life, Penny resurrected Tad, telling him, “Do not die. Now that you know the joy that is possible for your body, cling to your paltry life.…”

This wasn’t sex the way Tad had always known sex. The way Sigma Chis knew sex. He didn’t ejaculate. Penny’s careful tantric touch had suppressed his spermatic artery. Instead of a full-out emission of hot seed, only a clear jewel of seminal fluid trembled on the tip of his exhausted, modestly sized erection. This droplet Penny gracefully collected with the tip of one finger and brought to her tongue. It had the usual fructose sweetness of seminal fluids produced by the Cowper’s glands, but beneath that lurked more subtle shadings of flavor.

As she had seen the Baba do, Penny sucked and licked every nuance from the sample. In it, she could read the schoolboy affection Tad was harboring for her. She could discern his dreams of their marrying and quickly raising a large, boisterous brood of children. In that single drop of glandular secretions she tasted a suburban ranch house, a pedigreed Irish setter, a seven-passenger minivan. He was as trapped by his small-scale, gender-specific dreams as she had been by hers. Hidden behind all those details was something more elusive. She smacked her lips, savoring the final hints. At last her taste buds recognized the key flavor component. It was shame.

Spent, Tad sprawled on the disheveled bed and returned her
gaze with dread. Even now her hands were tenderly applying a soothing ointment of mashed leeches to the raw, inflamed skin of his scrotum.

The truth of his fluid shocked Penny. But it was unmistakable. Smiling sheepishly at him, she said, “I know your darkest secret. There’s no need to hide any longer.” As she said the words, Tad closed his eyes, mortified.

She promised, “I won’t tell anyone … but you didn’t go to Yale, did you?”

Hearing that, the ambitious young attorney-at-law dissolved into tears.

Under oath, Penny would speak the truth for those who could not, for Alouette and Clarissa. She would speak for the ragged hordes lining Fifth Avenue. Entering the courtroom, she surveyed the proceedings and panicked. There were no women in the jury box. There were no women among the reporters or spectators in the gallery. Everyone present was male. To be the only woman was thrilling and intimidating. She froze in the doorway a moment too long, just time enough for every eye to find her. Every voice fell silent. She knew she looked breathtaking, her every muscle toned. She lifted a manicured hand and ran her fingers through her lustrous hair, turning her head slightly from side to side so that the long, thick strands bounced and caught the light. Every man was looking at her, and she was looking at no one.

She willed herself to take a step, and the eyes followed. Their hatred felt like a heated fog that swirled around her limbs until she arrived at the plaintiff’s table.

Brillstein limped heavily into the courtroom. Wounds like he had suffered were slow to heal in the elderly, and he was clearly still in agony. Wincing, he lowered himself slowly into his seat
near Penny, his red-rimmed eyes glowering at her. Only Tad separated the two of them. The firm had agreed that a younger man should question Penny when she was called to testify. The list of witnesses who might be called was short, because Tad planned to subpoena Maxwell’s notebooks.

Voices shouted in the hallway outside. Heads in the courtroom turned in the direction of the disturbance. Male voices were shouting, “Maxwell, did you still love Alouette?” A chorus of men was shouting, “How are you holding up in the wake of Clarissa’s self-assassination?” It was a near-repeat of the scene Penny had witnessed in the lobby of the BB&B building, when Alouette D’Ambrosia had stepped out of the elevator. Now dozens of journalists and bloggers were fighting for Max’s attention. They all held camera phones overhead to capture video of him as he entered the courtroom.

Penny couldn’t see him. Max was too closely protected within his scrum of blue-suited bodyguards. But she could see the tiny camera screens that depicted him from multiple angles. He wore a muted Ralph Lauren suit, appropriate for a wedding or a funeral. His pale hands were empty; there was no sign of the control box with which he could torment anyone implanted with the fiendish Beautiful You nanobots. A bemused smirk flitted across his pale lips.

For her part, Penny had worn a durable, stylish Jil Sander pantsuit. She couldn’t risk a skirt or dress. She had no interest in repeating the tragically fatal striptease that Alouette had been compelled to perform onstage at the Oscars. She had considered smuggling a gun in her Prada shoulder bag, à la President Hind, but it was too late to murder Max. Courtroom security would be too tight.