Olfactory.
“Your olfactory bulb runs from your nose to the core of your brain.”
Leila—Dr. Kadafy, Kelly’s therapist—touched the tip of her nose with a neatly manicured fingertip.
Kelly watched it trace a line up to the doctor’s forehead and back to a pair of entrancing amber eyes, which were inexplicably—given the dry scientific subject matter here—intense.
There was something hypnotic about the gesture and the way it caused her own eyes to cross for a moment.
“It is, in effect, networked directly with your amygdala, the area of your brain responsible for processing emotion, as well as your hippocampus, the part of your brain linked to memory and cognition. That is why, neuroscientists will tell you, Kells, the mind learns to associate certain smells with particular emotions and specific memories.”
Kelly Smigle had been fixated on smells for weeks now. Not any one particular smell, she told herself. It was more that she had embarked on another mental quest—an analytical investigation into how smells triggered specific emotional or sensual reactions.
Could a smell change your mind? Could a smell so affect her brain as to change her likes and dislikes?
Her interests?
Her personality?
Although one particular trigger was new, “mental quests” were not.
As long as she could remember, Kelly had gone on exploratory forays down informational rabbit holes every few weeks of her life.
When hula hoops had a revival, for example, it occurred to Kelly that centrifugal force alone could not fully explain how these cheap plastic rings stayed suspended over the hips—sometimes seemingly indefinitely. So she’d wound up spending a week in a seminar at the Science Museum boning up on orbital dynamics.
When sourdough bread was a thing, Kelly had joined in on the baking fad—but also read up obsessively for a month about the history of dough fermentation dating back as far as early Egypt. There were existing cultures in the baking community 200 years old—how cool was that!?
In fairly quick succession, she had studied, most recently, the physiological evolution of female anatomy (strange how sexuality had become so central to life itself!), Soviet persuasion techniques (amazing how far they went in changing personalities!), the possibility that aliens existed in the galaxy (or even right here on earth!), and DNA mapping (gene editing advanced far beyond anything the public imagined!)
She dove into each subject with the intensity, as she put it in her own mind, of a late life bride making wedding preparations.
But Kelly had never considered her tendency to be entranced by different things an issue in and of itself before now. To live fully, passionately, was a noble life objective! Except she was beginning to worry that the way each arbitrary new interest—and especially this latest one—and/or her endless questioning about the way things worked, always turned into an all-consuming fascination, eating up her spare time, becoming the focus of her existence.
Sometimes for weeks at a time, to the exclusion of everything else.
Of course the irony was that this worry, that she was too easily infatuated, turned into a fan of any passing vogue, was itself—another trip down a rabbit hole.
“Is there something wrong with me?” Kelly asked. “I avoided the whole Qanon schtick—I mean I saw the obvious inconsistencies and I am not just plain dumb or excessively gullible. Am I? But it feels like—maybe I have a weak brain.”
The neatly-coiffed psychiatrist across the room from her brushed aside Kelly’s misgivings with a grin so brilliantly white and flawless it belonged, Kelly thought, in a toothpaste commercial.
“It’s harmless! You are enthusiastic! So?! Live passionately! Some idea or issue mesmerizes your cerebral cortex for a while …“ Leila made neat little air quotes with her fingers, and then leaned so close that Kelly could not help but see down her blouse. Then the therapist swirled her fingers in front of her patient’s eyes in a way that illustrated her meaning embarrassingly intrusively. “Maybe this happens more when you are not being challenged at work. Things are quiet and you do not have enough to think about. You wind up hyper-engaged. But there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a good thing! Really! You’ve learned a lot over the years, making you, just in the time I have known you, a more cosmopolitan and interesting person.”
“But at some point, like tiring of a favorite dish eaten too often, I disengage—and then the whole idea of whatever I was working on becomes just sort of ‘meh.’ And if it was really ‘meh’ to begin with, haven’t I wasted a whole bunch of time? Like a big piece of my life?”
“Disengaging leaves you free to glom onto something new. Keeping things fresh—keeps you fresh! That’s a positive, don’t you think?”
“But I wind up not even caring about hula hoops, say—and what if I do not move on?”
Leila laughed musically. “So, Kells, let me get this straight. You are telling me you are concerned that you are wasting your time but also—running in almost the exact opposite direction—vaguely wishing that the fascination would not end, that you would stay in love with your latest passion—what?—maybe forever?”
“Yes. Maybe. Well sort of. It occurs to me that maybe this bizarre tendency to get easily captivated explains why I have never been married and move from job to job.”
Kelly had already decided not to bring up the other question bothering her. She was not quite ready and trusting enough to discuss her doubts about her sexual orientation and over-the-top sexual feelings with Leila, friends though they had become.
Not yet.
“Kelly Kelly Kelly!” Leila put her hand on Kelly’s bare knee, where Kelly looked at it for several long uncomfortable seconds.
Why would she even think about it moving further up her thigh? “Something IS wrong with you, Smigle!” she told herself.
“I would tell you if I thought you had a problem. Job mobility is a fact of our modern economy, particularly for someone like you in high tech design simulation, a cutting-edge specialty. So why worry? You make good money … You have all sorts of benefits, including access to me. It’s all good! You’re a good girl, a very good girl, lovely and lovable!”
A good girl. Something about that phrasing…Kelly tried to look away from Leila’s eyes, but it was difficult. Those translucent iris’s—it felt like being stuck in honey.
“I feel like there should be more—more to life, I mean.”
“And you’ll find it! You will learn what makes you happy. You are what? 28 now? Oh my goodness, so ancient! Almost ready for Medicare, huh?!” Leila laughed. “What you’re describing is just a very common characteristic of the human mind, or psyche. We are gregarious creatures also shaped by evolution—survival of the fittest—to be intensely concerned with our own self-preservation. A certain amount of internal conflict and inconsistency is normal. Indeed, when I see that intrinsic ambivalence illustrated so sumptuously in someone as charming as you, Kelly, I just have to celebrate it! We are mixed-up, strange, complicated creatures, and sex makes us even more paradoxical. More power to us all!”
“Sex?” For a moment Kelly was not sure how the conversation had gotten … there. Had Leila peered into her mind to find the secrets she was hiding?
“Our contradictory impulses—to protect and preserve the self at all costs, while also giving ourselves—and learning to enjoy giving ourselves—to other creatures for the purposes of procreation, basic perpetuation of the species—are most acutely expressed in our sexual impulses. Weird but true. That is how we humans are, just like cats have tails and bears have fur.”
“Well, sticking to the hard psychology (cat tails?! bears?!)—you’re saying my having a funny, easily-tangled up mind,” Kelly remarked dryly, sardonically, “makes me cute?”
“Yes! I mean, mmmm… yeah—maybe so.” The doctor shrugged with a grin more predatorial than reassuring. “It’s not your only charm by a long shot! But it IS a part of it! You have some sense of your own attractiveness; no self-deception there, and within reasonable parameters, healthy. Enjoy it, if you can!”
The therapist spoke so warmly and convincingly, so authoritatively and firmly, accompanying her words with a seemingly unconscious up and down scoping of her patient’s body, that Kelly wondered if Leila was about to hit on her.
Or had the doctor already hit on her and she, Kelly, just missed it?
Kelly decided she’d better get out of Leila’s office before she started to focus on the therapist’s oh-so-smooth, toned thighs and the fact that the skirt the board-certified psychiatrist had worn to today’s session was shorter than the micro skirt Kelly’s teenage niece sported the previous Saturday when Kelly’s sister had gone through the roof very publicly over what she labeled “inappropriate and self-demeaning sartorial choices…”
And in terms of changing dynamics, was Leila’s clothing always this unprofessional? When had that started to change?
Was it around the same time that Kelly had started to notice that other women were interested in her—and that she in some way seemed to welcome it?
Something was definitely going on and it seemed associated with her—Kelly’s—sense of smell.
If Kelly was honest with herself, there was one particular smell that had kicked off this latest episode of mental questing and early-mid-life crisis.
Kelly had first noticed a cloying, pungent odor when she filled in during sabbatical for a friend and co-worker, Renee Viandatorn. Because all the lucky sabbaticaller’s (read: vacationer’s) papers, files and electronics were at her—Renee’s—desk, Kelly, had moved for a few weeks to a new (for her) location in the tenth floor office suites.
Her new temporary space, Renee’s home base, was right beside Marianne Baker’s office, a choice spot by the western windows.
Great views—but also right where the door to the assistant general manager’s office opened.
Because in ordinary times she only stopped by quickly to pick up Renee for lunch or after-work drinks, Kelly had never really thought about the location in that way. She had certainly never registered the smell before.
Her first day in her new cubicle, Kelly had twice lifted her collar to sniff under her blouse, thinking she might not have showered carefully enough that morning. Maybe she had worked up a sweat hurrying in from the parking lot?
Or maybe she was having some sort of hormonal disturbance.
Whatever the cause, there was something decidedly different, or new, in her personal space. In her ambient bouquet…
It was like when you work out over lunch break and do not have time to clean up properly afterwards and the perfume vial in your top desk drawer is empty. In the afternoon meeting everyone starts inching their chairs away …
Kelly even tried out a home pregnancy test before bedtime one night, thinking that, as easily as she got distracted, maybe she had missed something just that basic. (It had been two months since she had seen her sometime boyfriend. That, too, was new and strange; she was not sure why she seemed to be losing interest….)
The third day, Kelly knew something was off, and it was not her.
She was sitting tapping a pencil against her teeth, refiguring the math for a projection algorithm, when the regional manager, the boss’s boss—two steps above even Marianne Baker—emerged from an unusual hour-long meeting in Baker’s office—unusual, since under standard company protocol, for anything more than a brief consult, the junior official went to the senior executive’s office.
Wallis Schembley was, in fact, one of the co-founders. Top of the pyramid. Just having Schembley anywhere near her, made Kelly paranoid. Schembley could fire everyone in the management suite on a whim, if she chose.
But when the nearby office door swung open, and Schembley breezed past, Kelly noticed this curious odor again, stronger than ever. It was, she thought now, a warm, earthy redolence not quite—but almost, almost—suggesting … sex?!
What carried on the swirl of air from the opened door in Schembly’s passage was pungent enough that Kelly might have thought that some sort of consensual assignation had occurred behind Marianne Baker’s closed door, except that Schembley was 77.
A healthy, dignified-looking woman for her age, Schembly was nevertheless not a credible candidate for an afternoon tryst.
Marianne Baker, on the other hand, was a very different matter. It was hard for Kelly to think of Marianne Baker and not think of sex.
Eye-catching to begin with, the assistant general manager had evolved lately. She was looking somehow less distant, less official, and rather more human, now, at least to Kelly.
Not that Kelly was into women, again, please note.
But for some reason she was more cognizant of how Marianne Baker’s bosom jutted subtly upward under her dress blouses, or how, when she looked at Kelly, which she did increasingly and quite naturally as they each became more accustomed to each other’s daily proximity and greeted each other more familiarly—her lips curled sensuously—more than before.
Candidly, if one even thought about these sorts of things—Marianne Baker had always had plump full lips just designed, it might appear, to cushion very comfortably their own impact against, well … other lips.
But these days those lips looked to Kelly as tender as an open wound, or—well—parts down below the waist.
Kelly looked quickly away from her own reflection in the darkening window. Her face felt red, whether it showed or not.
Marianne Baker was hot and always had been. But recently she looked as ripe as summer plum. And more to the point, Kelly had never had either thought—at least so specifically—before. She was quite certain of that. She had never been attracted to any woman, not even Leila, her therapist friend, like this before.
So Kelly was not entirely sure the change that was occurring involved Marianne Baker alone, or her, Kelly Smigel, herself, as well.
Kelly recognized that she, Kelly Smigel, had at some point grown into a trim, attractive woman. As an adult, men tended to dote on her. Women, too, at times. But Kelly’s adolescence, including her sexual development, had been difficult, Kelly having been raised in a conservative Christian household and having played any number of tomboyish sports as a teen.
Now, Kelly had several gay friends, including Renee, the coworker for whom she was happily subbing, a true BFF. But she had never imagined herself anything but het, and if both Leila and Marianne Baker were beginning to look different to her, maybe, despite the smell not being hers, that is not emanating from herself, some of the change that was occurring was occurring to her, Kelly, and maybe that change was associated with the smell.
The question again was, could a smell do that? Could a rich, pungent aroma cause her to look at Marianne Baker and her therapist differently?
During her study of the evolution of female anatomy, Kelly had learned about pheromones. Pheromones were powerful chemicals absorbed through the olfactory and designed by nature to influence the behavior of members of the same species as the emitter. They triggered “a social response” according to Wikipedia. More viscerally that meant there were smells that made you want to fuck.
Yup. That word. That activity. That was the gist of it, if you got down to practical, empirical terminology.
And what about the whole concept of aromatherapy?
Maybe Kelly would have to study that next.
To reassure herself that it was not about her, or pheromones, and just plain try to figure out what was going on, Kelly began researching Marianne Baker. It was like a classic Kelly Smigel rabbit hole diverging off a Kelly Smigel rabbit hole, sure—but she needed answers about her new obsession, and an explanation for the engaging smell.
Because, Kelly had also noticed uncomfortably that she was beginning to look forward to the fragrance.
How creepy was that?!
At some point she had begun to find the earthy aroma in her office area not just pleasing, or palatable, but pleasurable.
Intensely so.
In a physical way.
When she smelled the smell, particularly if Marianne Baker was around, she got wet.
At night, by herself, sometimes Kelly found herself trying to recall the smell, with her fingers reaching down to touch her cleft and—it got wilder from there.
Go figure.
Which was exactly what Kelly did. Was doing.
Kelly discovered that “Baker,” the assistant manager’s middle-American sounding surname, was from her father’s side of the family. On her mother’s side, Marianne Baker had Southeast Asian and Lithuanian blood, among other things. (Amazing what one little slightly illegal hack—hacking was instinctive to a coder and engineer at Kelly’s level—of the Ancesterist web site could turn up!)
Marianne Baker had grown up in Switzerland and a mountainous part of Brazil. She was involved in some charitable causes—kudos to the assistant manager—involving women’s and immigration issues, mostly. All very commendable. Marianne Baker had few hobbies, but like Kelly, was concerned with nutrition and organic foods, and while she was not into active sports in the way Kelly was, practiced several forms of yoga, which, with an affinity for spiritual meditation, helped explain her graceful walk and maybe, to some extent, her dewy glow.
Of course, Kelly questioned whether she was getting in too deep again. It occurred to her she was becoming so obsessed with Marianne Baker as to be distracted from her work. When she smelled the smell, not only did she picture her first sexual affair, and an early crush, she sometimes pictured Marianne Baker … doing things.
To her.
Lascivious things.
To her complete shock, Kelly had woken one night from a dream in which Marianne Baker was holding her down and pressing her panty-covered pussy down onto Kelly’s face. When Marianne Baker, in Kelly’s dream, hooked one finger into the perineal curve of the silk, and pulled it aside, so that her wet pussy squished down firmly on Kelly’s lips and chin and face—Kelly had orgasmed.
“My fascination with Marianne Baker is platonic,” she told herself. “I am only exploring how smells trigger certain images in the brain.” The particular images triggered, though—were often irrelevant to the scientific subject matter of the research.
Kelly avoided thinking of Leila, her lissome, voluptuous counselor, this way at all.
One day when Marianne Baker left for lunch and an afternoon meeting, Kelly slipped into her office and snooped. She had thought when she first caught “the Marianne Baker fragrance” that Marianne Baker might be harboring an over-watered plant in her office.
Maybe the elegant businesswoman was not, like Kelly, raised on a farm, and had flooded a philodendron?
Wouldn’t that smell just like what she had been smelling? Kelly also guessed that Marianne Baker might have one of those strange exotics, not so much a Venus Flytrap; more like the Sumatran titanium, which Kelly had read about during another ‘mental quest’—that was the plant that produced the legendarily odorous corpse flower.
Kelly opened a drawer. There were pictures. She was trying to understand what they showed—a jungle trip, maybe—when she heard a door opening, and jumped. She pictured Marianne Baker finding her there and knew she would die of embarrassment alone even before she was fired. She scooted out of Marianne Baker’s office then as if on greased castors.
But the office snooping turned up nothing. So, against her best instincts and the urgings of her better angels, Kelly began to spy actively on Marianne Baker herself. Kelly had noticed she detected the rich loamy aroma strongest when Marianne Baker came back to her office late afternoons. So she ate a small lunch at her desk and then followed when Marianne Baker left just before noon one day.
The idea of being caught spying mortified Kelly as much as the idea of being caught snooping. Either one would be so humiliating. But more than that, she would never forgive herself if she upset Marianne Baker, of whom she was beginning to feel oddly protective. After running frantically down the stairs while Marianne Baker rode the elevator down to the lobby, Kelly was innocently reading a newspaper in the general waiting lounge by the bar when Marianne Baker was due to head out the front doors.
But Baker never showed. At least Kelly did not see her leave.
Two days later Kelly tried again. She watched the numbers descend before leaving her floor and realized Marianne Baker had gone down to the lowest basement, B3, instead of the cafeteria, the coffee shop, or out to the pedestrian mall like everyone else.
But when she, Kelly got to B3 herself, she found only access doors to closets, a large storage area, a noisy utility room, an equipment garage, a second furnace room, and—a winding set of stairs back up to the lobby.
A normal basement, in other words. It was even unexpectedly clean, almost spotless.
“You have established that we have excellent janitorial service, Smigel,” Kelly said to herself. “As a detective, you’re pathetic.”
But then—Kelly realized she was smelling the smell, that smell, the Marianne Baker smell, right here on B3. It was mild—and mixed with the smell of new concrete and dust, but definitely present.
She poked around, opening a cupboard, a closet, another cupboard.
Behind a door that looked like it could lead to a secret underground lab or government facility she found—a broom, a Swiffer and several amazingly large stacks of—toilet paper. Cartons of the old-fashioned brownish bathroom paper towels—
Eventually the smell seemed to dissipate.
Or maybe, Kelly thought, it was just that she was getting used to it.
After a few more minutes of scaring herself, traipsing down darkened corridors, she rode the elevator back to the tenth floor and went back to work.
At her desk the next day, Kelly sniffed for the smell, but could not pick it up—and realized she was disappointed.
“So you’re addicted to Marianne Baker’s smell, now—her perfume, Smigel!?” Kelly asked herself.
But it wasn’t perfume. It was definitely not a … commercial smell, or anything mass-produced. Kelly was sure of that, although she was not sure exactly how she was so sure.
But she could tell it was working on her—like pheromones—to attract her to Marianne Baker.
It occurred to Kelly that associating a strong smell with Marianne Baker personally might be racist. Wasn’t that what most people would assume if you told them someone smelled physically? That idea did not help. It just added to her overall discomfort. Kelly’s Christian upbringing had taught her that to think unkindly of anyone was wrong and widening horizons and education in college and grad school had alerted her to the fact that humans instinctively feared change and differences. Something to do with ancient survival instincts—anything strange representing danger, back in the jungle. But when applied to modern humans wasn’t it wrong and unfair to think they “smelled?”
Kelly’s best friends were Black and Latino. In her adult life the people she seemed to relate to and get along with least were WASPs like herself.
At least the white males.
Nadine Alba, one of the most repressed and unlikeable people in the company from Kelly’s standpoint, claimed Germans, among whom she had lived for four “long hard years” in the military, smelled—something to do, Nadine contended, with water in that part of Bavaria, but personal hygiene, too. Nadine was racist, mean and arrogant—obviously—and Kelly wanted nothing to do with Nadine.
And what if aliens landed from space and the first thing anyone noticed was a distinct smell—a distinct possibility, given different environs of origin? Would that be alienist?
See the kinds of rabbit holes her mind ran down? The absurdities that popped up into her own head!
Besides—a more reasonable explanation was diet. In Seoul, the kim chee in the clay pots on every balcony seemed sometimes to flavor every breath when you walked through the shopping malls. Kelly had spent a semester in a small apartment near Itaewon during graduate school—an educational exchange.
As part ethnic Lithuanian, maybe Marianne Baker smelled in part of a favorite food?
Was Kelly becoming randy from inhaling nothing more unusual or titillating than, say, Lithuanian cepelinai? Or a fragrant borscht?
Some aphrodisiac!
To be exhaustive, hobbies, too, were a possibility—a childhood best friend of Kelly’s had been from an equestrian family. Mornings when her friend mucked her stables, no shower could entirely eliminate the horsey smell when she sat down by Kelly in class. For a time, Kelly was nostalgic, and wondered if she’d had an unacknowledged crush on her red-haired friend.
And then, in reading up on smells and triggers associated with olfactory systems, Kelly learned that odor perception depended on the nose’s “recognition by contact of diffused particles.” In other words, whatever the source—smells were identified by the dissolving of molecules on the olfactory epithelium, a mucous membrane.
Diffused particles were absorbed in your body.
The implication was obvious. Like cocaine, which could be ingested so, to very potent effect, any smell could act like a drug!
The thought that she might, in some very visceral, chemical way be getting addicted to—what?—to Marianne Baker really shook Kelly.
“I do not have a crush on Marianne Baker. I am not even into women!?” she reminded herself one last time.
But Kelly was self-aware enough to know that even having to debate the proposition rendered it suspect.
It began to seem all the more urgent to Kelly to be able to put all her questions to bed.
She needed answers.
Before she went crazy.
Kelly redoubled her efforts to track where Marianne Baker went.
Kelly had to see where Marianne Baker might be picking up the smell.
The next day, a Thursday, Kelly followed Marianne Baker to the basement again. Kelly was not able to get down to B3 in time to see where Marianne Baker might have gone, but she definitely smelled the smell there in the darkened concrete hallways—so this time she waited.
She brought her laptop so she could work and not waste the time, and, hearing a noise, was just able to close the top in time to keep the light from the screen from exposing her hiding spot behind a large machine that looked to Kelly, with no experience on commercial building basement contents, like a hockey Zamboni.
A hockey Zamboni. What am I getting into, here, Kelly wondered.
She was not able to see which door Marianne Baker had come out of, but she was close enough in her hiding place to see Marianne Baker clearly as the manager waited for the elevator back up to 10.
And she smelled Marianne Baker. Ummmmm. Despite competing odors of oil and old machinery, the earthy Marianne Baker smell was stronger here and now than ever before. In fact, Kelly was feeling a bit dizzy and seriously worried that she might faint.
What scared her most about that was—what scared her. She realized she was not so worried about passing out—in some way it sounded almost delicious, like falling asleep on a rare weekend nap when you are very tired, or dozing on an airplane—as that it might expose her.
And then she would never learn Marianne Baker’s secret.
That seemed unbearable. Why? Kelly was not sure. It was becoming a compulsion.
In the light of the elevator ell, Kelly could see that Marianne Baker was buttoning her blouse, as though she had just gotten dressed.
When finished with the buttons that sealed in those luscious breasts, the hot corporate official squinted into the reflective steel of the highly polished elevator doors, and touched up her makeup.
The reflection gave Kelly a clear view of Marianne Baker’s front. It looked damp, the fabric of her blouse so soaked as to allow her braless breasts, with small round aereolae poking through, to reveal themselves. And they were not just damp but gorgeous.
Marianne Baker’s long, lush auburn hair was also … dripping.
Had there been a spa in the basement, Kelly would have assumed Marianne Baker had just taken a dip in a hot tub. Her skin had that kind of ruddy bloom to it...
But it was a very utilitarian, if huge, basement.
No spas, no gyms, no Turkish Baths or wine cellars.
Just a whole lot of gray. Gray masonry. Gray-painted doors and storage. Gray concrete, plumbing.
Had Marianne Baker stepped through a portal from another dimension?
Kelly dreamed of Marianne Baker.
In tonight’s dream, Kelly was at her desk at work. Everything was familiar: a regular workday. But then she noticed: her flat screen showed not her usual projection models or spread sheets. No, swirls of rich colors. Turquoise and green. Like the view down into sandy depths from a boat on the ocean’s surface.
In the tropics?
A floral smell here? Maybe tulip trees, or jacaranda?
The colors went round and round and so distracted Kelly that she did not notice that—
Marianne Baker was suddenly there.
Very close.
Close enough to smell.
Dream Kelly looked around and then up, and there She was, looking down at her with green eyes.
Marianne Baker’s pupils were large, as if she took in more light than anyone else, saw more than anyone else.
Marianne Baker’s look was so hungry, so predatory, that Kelly shivered.
But not in fear.
Or not just fear.
Kelly smelled the Marianne Baker smell so intensely, it was making her high.
She felt good, very good.
There was a buzzing in her body and Kelly felt a need to touch herself.
But of course she could not just start frigging her pussy right in the office. Even in a dream.
Could she?
Perhaps—if she was sure she was dreaming, she could … get away with it.
That thought tortured her, both in the dream and in later recalling it.
Her head felt emptied of all thought.
In the dream, Marianne Baker was wearing an olive-colored business suit.
Or—no...
Not olive and not a suit, really.
It was a lighter, organic green, and the texture—the texture looked like leaves or some sort of thin, greenish lizard skin. Or some new space age material made to allow osmosis.
Was Marianne Baker wearing a sheath of cellulose, like a plant?
Kelly realized she was leaning close, trying to figure this out and that Marianne Baker was leaning back and saying, “Yes. Yes. Feel it.”
“Feel it?” Feel what.
Before Kelly could come up with a reply, even in her head, she felt the green texture against her cheek.
She could feel, taste and smell that green color.
It felt green.
The sensation was out of this world.
And Marianne Baker wrapped Kelly up in her arms like an organic envelope closing until Kelly’s face was pressed firmly against that shapely bosom.
“Marianne Baker’s breasts,” Kelly thought. Unimaginable.
They were lovely, shapely breasts and the smell emanating from them was overwhelming.
Hers. Marianne Baker’s.
Marianne Baker reached a hand around and pulled at the suit right next Kelly’s cheek and, in the dream, it tore. It tore open like a fresh green leaf separating at the seam, and then Marianne Baker’s breast was right there, right there, touching Kelly’s face, and it was not really green, but not quite a normal skin color either. It was more like the inside of an avocado, and just that tender. That delectable.
And Kelly was burning up and thrusting her whole hand into her pussy.
And Marianne Baker used manicured fingers to place her nipple—Marianne Baker’s nipple, the nipple of the breast of this incredible woman—in Kelly’s lips and pushed, both with the hand in Kelly’s hair and the one gripping her breast, and Kelly felt a sudden rush of warmth.
But then in a dream way, the milk from Marianne Baker’s breasts was going not just in Kelly’s mouth but all over her body, spilling wildly, and it was like sinking into a warm surf or a hot tub and just as Kelly woke up, Marianne Baker was moaning, orgasming from Kelly sucking her breast and the warm viscous liquid in which they were immersed.
As she woke, Kelly realized she was close to orgasm in real life. She reached down to her nether regions and found her panties sopping wet.
And she smelled like sex.
And sex, her sex, smelled like Marianne Baker.
She moaned, just with the realization.
Which also meant that some of the moisture from down there was getting up into her nose and throat just as if Marianne Baker had, in actuality, stuck her fingers in her own pussy and then pushed them in her mouth.
That thought was almost unbearable. So hot as to be overwhelming.
Kelly found the dream not just hot, but also terribly disturbing.
This was not who she was and while she had nothing against lesbians, absolutely not, Kelly was quite sure she had never been inclined that way. Had she?
But then she merely touched herself again, and she came shaking, shuddering, convulsing, her whole body utterly consumed.
This was a change and, yes, change frightened her.
This change terrified her because the only possible cause seemed to be an olfactory stimulus.
In dentist offices, they could knock you out with a sweet-smelling gas. The one time Kelly had surgery, she recalled a strawberry fragrance in her maks just before the anesthesiologist told her to count back from 100 and she lost consciousness. It seemed quite possible that the Marianne Baker smell was doing something that fundamental to her, Kelly Smigel now.
But what was it doing?
And was it addictive, too?! Whenever Kelly stopped smelling the Marianne Baker smell, she grew restless and uncomfortable until she next got another whiff. She imagined smelling Marianne Baker’s body, between those perfect breasts, and lower down, under her skirt.
And then maybe she would feel a need to lick every inch of Marianne Baker’s skin—that tender joining between those long legs.
Kelly shook herself. What was happening to her?
She discussed her dreams with Leila on Saturday.
Normally their appointments were scheduled during the week. But Kelly Smigel and Leila Kyrgiz were friendly outside the counseling office. They shared mutual friends and occasionally stopped by each other’s apartments to say hi.
“A smell is making you act differently—that is what is bothering you? The Marianne Baker Smell? That’s why you were researching smells? Not because it triggered memories? And you gave it a name? Because you think it is somehow related to your boss’s boss?”
Leila had appeared at Kelly’s front door that sunny afternoon in another tight skirt. Her top, a diaphanous leopard print sleeveless, set off her long sleek legs.
Kelly was preoccupied again—was she going to notice all women’s legs now—and she was not sure that was not what Leila had intended.
“Well it’s no big deal, as you said before. I mean I work primarily as an independent contractor and so I am not in the direct line of command in that sense, and so—”
“Kells! Hold on. THAT is a complete digression, an intentional diversion. This is getting weird, seriously weird.”
Kelly had been thinking the same thing just then, but at least partly for another reason...
Leila gave her a serious, probing look. “You say that in the basement she looked like she had just come out of a steam room—”
“Or a hot tub, maybe.”
They were on the porch in the sun, and Kelly realized she was not just talking about the smell, but smelling it here too.
Had she brought it with her—to Leila?
Was it contagious like a virus?
You had to wonder—was that the reason Leila was changing?
“Describe the smell for me.” Asking this, Leila’s eyes had a haunted look.
“Is that the same look I get,” Kelly wondered, “when I think about Marianne Baker and her smell? Have I brought Leila along with me down this rabbit hole?”
“And how does it affect you?” the therapist added, musingly.
She looked down at herself as if seeing her clothes for the first time.
After two solid nights of repetitive dreams, Kelly straggled into work on Monday ten minutes late. She tried not even to look at Marianne Baker when the glamorous assistant CEO arrived in a flurry of activity. As on any normal morning, Marianne Baker’s admin assistant matched her stride for stride as she strode over from the elevator banks, slipping her messages from a clipboard and apprising her boss of schedule revisions in a hoarse whisper. An intern was there at her elbow to hand Marianne Baker coffee and a favorite pastry. The OG was calling and the merger law team was pacing in the floor lobby, powerful lawyers with their own staffers attending them—all waiting on Marianne Baker.
She was so important, and not just to Kelly, so powerful. What if something was happening to Marianne Baker?
It was all the more ominous given who she was. But also more erotic. What sort of power could have that influence?
Kelly kept her head down and worked slowly on the new projections for the Pasternak growth models. She did her best to pretend she was not even there at all.
Then she smelled the smell again, stronger than ever.
Did no one else smell it? Kelly had read that people smelled things differently and there were even some smells that only certain people could detect, small percentages of the public... violets. To some people cilantro was just soapy-tasing and smelling.
Then there was phantosmia—smell hallucinations. That was a thing. Anosmia, the loss of smell, from, say, a viral infection. So many things could affect how chemicals reached into your olfactory system.
Pregnancy! Pregnancies notoriously heightened sensitivity to the point of disgust, possibly even provoking morning sickness.
Smells!
Could a smell be biologically targeted at specific people? Quite plausibly. But then—who would do that? What would do that? Was she, Kelly, especially susceptible somehow?
Maybe even an intended target?
“You look exhausted! Are you alright!?”
Kelly jumped.
It was Marianne Baker.
Marianne Baker touched Kelly’s shoulder with a hand that seemed to carry an electrical current and at the moment of contact, make her wet; Kelly looked into the senior executive’s eyes with those oversized captivating center-pools of black, seemingly enlarged specifically to look into dark places.
Like the dark confusion inside Kelly’s mind.
Mindreading...
“I worry about you, sweetie,” the beguiling executive’s soft, almost dreamy, voice cooed.
“Sweetie,” Kelly repeated, without thinking at all.
“Yes.” Marianne Baker squatted down so she was level with, or even looking up slightly into, Kelly’s face. The way an experienced kindergarten teacher gets the attention of her little charges. “I’m sorry. Was that rude or presumptuous? I feel as though we have gotten to know each other since we are so close these days—physically.” The way Marianne Baker said ‘physically’ made Kelly’s mouth water.
“What am I, a five-year-old?!” Kelly objected—but only silently, in her head. She did not say anything aloud and she suspected she was looking into Marianne Baker eyes the way a puppy looks at—its master. Physically close was ... nice.
“You are not regressing, Smigel; you’re acting like you are in love,” she said harshly to herself. “Get a grip.”
But Marianne Baker was still speaking. “I don’t mean to overstep. But I do want you to feel good.”
The manager’s expression was so sincere and kind, despite her odd phrasing, that Kelly felt like apologizing for presuming—anything.
Or just for not falling down onto her knees and showing Marianne Baker how much she … admired her.
And the way Marianne Baker said ‘good’ was like a lick on Kelly’s clit. Was that intentional? What did Marianne Baker mean by “good?” How good?
Kelly’s rational mind kept working at the questions even as her heart made her feel almost worshipful.
Kelly pulled herself together. She was a graduate level engineering expert, a rated scientist, who made over $200k a year. She had not gotten where she was by being a wallflower or a pushover.
“No, that’s fine. Thank you; that’s very nice. And I do feel like I am getting to know you better,” Kelly responded briskly, speaking quickly to avoid sinking into those luminous eyes.
The green iris. Depthless black pools. “I’ve just been having a little trouble sleeping,” she commented drily
Marianne Baker’s expression was completely appropriate for an exchange between professionals who had just reestablished proper boundaries. But her voice was a little too soothing.
“Bad dreams? Maybe disturbing dreams?”
For want of anything else to say, Kelly nodded. But what Marianne Baker said next sounded like it came right out of one of Kelly’s sweaty fantasies.
“That’s good. Because I know you have been smelling a smell you do not understand, and—you may be curious about it. And about me. And what it may do to me…and...” She paused. Marianne Baker’s eyes seemed to flash.
“And will do to you.”
Kelly found she could slide on the bannisters in the east stair well. They were long and straight, without any unevenness or bumps. She wore cross trainers she brought for days when she wanted to go to the gym, and left her heels under her—or Renee V’s, technically—desk. Then she just bent her knees and sat side saddle—it made her feel like a wayward child, and also, like every damn thing these days, horny. The smooth contact to her ass. “Caramba, you really are regressing, Smigel,” she thought.
But the sliding allowed her to make it to the furnace room and be hidden behind a bulkhead when Marianne Baker stepped off the elevator on B3 the next day.
The lovely manager looked … flushed, as she emerged into the light.
“She looks damp already,” Kelly noted to herself. And then, self-awareness suddenly intruding, “Speak for yourself, Smigel!”
Maybe it was anticipatory, like a Pavlovian response, a Pavlovian pre-feeding drool.
On both their parts.
Or was the smell triggering them both?
In any case, Marianne Baker was already damp in the face. She looked breathless and overheated, excited. Sexy. Jeez, yes, hot.
The exact same way Kelly was feeling.
Was she somehow synched or linked psychologically with Marianne Baker now? Through the smell? An olfactory link?
Craziness.
It was hard to tell, since the poor basement lighting adumbrated around her waist—but Marianne Baker looked like she had one hand in her crotch, palpating her—yeah.
“Same here,” Kelly thought, very aware how weird this was.
But it felt so seductively good to give in and react this way. She felt oddly as though in obeying the impulse to touch herself, she was obeying the same commands as Marianne Baker.
Marianne Baker, who was number 4 in the whole company!
Marianne Baker stopped suddenly, still, and seemed to listen, and for a moment, Kelly had the weird feeling that Marianne Baker knew she was there, could feel her proximity.
Was she, Kelly, found out? Caught?
And why didn’t that worry her?
In fact, it felt weirdly … right. Kelly had to catch herself before she stepped out and confessed her presence.
Because the smell was so strong it made her feel out of control in some weird way.
Because her body felt like it was not hers to operate.
Because she felt compelled to open up to Marianne Baker.
Because Marianne Baker was everything to her now.
Somehow the young systems engineer restrained herself and when Marianne Baker walked briskly past her hiding place and crossed the utility area to a door by the stairs, followed as quietly as she could—close enough to see Marianne Baker step into an adjoining doorway, pause a moment, again, as if to check for spies just like her, like slutty Kelly Smigel—before stepping inside.
Kelly had not noticed the door before. Or had she assumed it was another utility closet. Could a smell make you ignore—a specific thing?
It was another creepy thought, like imagining herself robotized, or mesmerized. But those thoughts too—all of them—made Kelly gasp with pleasure. This whole slow chase, this pursuit, was like seduction, or being led into a trap.
But if the rewards were that pleasurable, anyone would obey, she thought.
Obey.
Obedience.
Mmmmmmmm. Unh.
In the face of such pleasure, she did not mind being lured into a trap.
A trap?
Kelly walked around the utility room. Whatever was behind the door, it seemed likely that if she followed, she would be seen the moment she stepped through, and she was not quite so out of touch with reality as to believe that anything more than a ridiculous crush was at work here. She considered waiting, yawned for some reason, walked the perimeter of the largest storage room, running her fingertips along the wall.
Soaking her panties with the urgency, the need to follow, the need to obey, submit.
The smell was too strong. She was drawn to the door as if with bungee cords attached to her heart and—her nethers.
She had to find the source of the Marianne Baker smell...or go nuts.
Kelly found herself on the other side of the door almost without volition.
She looked down.
A staircase much wider and open than she would have guessed gauged against the narrow staircase that went up to the lobby. High tech and steely, it looked like something NASA might design. To ascend to the Mars rocket.
The normal-sized steel door just closed behind her gave no clue as to the size of the space here inside. It was a little, Kelly reflected, like the satchels in Harry Potter in which almost anything fit, whole other worlds … maybe some weird magic was at work.
But as an engineer, a scientist, Kelly could not really believe in magic. What were the alternatives, though?
Kelly hurried down into an open area with a greenish ambience, just in time to catch a glimpse of Marianne Baker leaving through a wide archway another flight below to the right.
Another level?
What was all this?
Kelly sprinted to try to catch up, but instinctively stayed low and on her toes. She noticed a low rumble around them, as if a slow earthquake were taking place somewhere below them. Or a space ship were taking off somewhere behind one of the cavern walls.
There was something else, too—a hum, as if an HVAC servicing the whole building from this point had just turned on.
In fact, if Kelly had not previously noticed an addition on the back side of the building and additional facilities on the roof, she might have thought that was exactly what was going on down here. HVAC. A good, simple engineering explanation.
But the air was humid and sticky, and the sound, like the smell, seemed more about something growing—or moving.
She listened more closely, and—
The smell! Despite her fear and and anxiety, it was wonderful! Just plain enchanting!
Breathing deeply and eagerly, Kelly crossed a hard rocky floor the color of dirty key lime pie and found another arched aperture into another room.
Where she stopped. Gulped. Stepped quickly back behind the abutment.
Several people—humans, she thought, yes people—were sitting—positioned—randomly here and there on what looked like cavern stalagmites.
Surprised to find anyone—people—down there at all, it took Kelly a moment to notice also that they were naked, or almost naked. Some had small bikini bottoms or little lacey panties. The women. There was only one man, and he was fully naked, fiddly parts dangling out to the side. But none were Marianne Baker. It looked like a Turkish Bathhouse, without the baths, but without her quarry, Kelly did not tarry. She crossed the doorway as fast as she could, relieved that no one seemed to pay her any attention as she rushed through another arch.
The next room had a cave-like ceiling sloping down to a—well it appeared to be a water channel.
Yes, yes, there was water was there, flowing along the side ... where several giant flower pods were arranged like arboreal decoratives along a scenic riverfront.
It was some sort of strange underground garden!
Maybe they were growing weird jungle plants. Which required this special controlled environment.
A science project, cutting edge. Marianne Baker had a degree, Kelly recalled, from MIT…
Maybe they were developing new medicines…?
Yes. It seemed logical. Occam’s Razor rational.
So Marianne Baker was just a botanist. Maybe on a very advanced or secret level.
But nothing weird at all.
The smell was like what a medical laboratory necrotic tech might pick up—a formaldehyde odor, say.
For a blink or two, Kelly was relieved, but a little disappointed. Mundane explanations were like a return to normalcy. Comforting, comfortable but maybe a little boring.
Or no—Kelly was still walking closer …
For a full minute or more, as Kelly moved on into this latest room, and crossed the open floor space, it was as if her mind was not equipped to wrap itself around what her eyes were telling her. But this had nothing to do with Occam’s Razor.
In fact, this room looked as completely unrelated to a normal urban office building as the craters on the moon. It had an alien feel, as if not constructed by the kind of workers or companies that had built the office building towering above it, although Kelly could not say exactly why she thought this. It was almost impossible to gauge distances in the light that seemed to flicker around her as if from a biological source, like a sparkle of fireflies.
Kelly stumbled.
The smell was so heady and strong! She was a little drunk. She was worried she would be overcome but somehow very happy at the same time. Like a retirement celebration.
And then realizing that indeed, none of her mundane explanations worked, she was abruptly terrified. She was facing something new. The unknown.
Terrified and hot. Her pussy was melting.
“I’ve found the source of the smell, the Marianne Baker smell,” she thought, although she was still not sure exactly where in the room the smell was coming from. “It is here...somewhere.”
The shy engineer was not sure if it was the lighting or the odd perspective or the smell, which was working on her like a drug, but she understood now that she could not tell how large the pods were—
—until she realized that, standing next to one of the pods, with the pod coming up almost to her shoulder, was Marianne Baker.
The pods were as big as a person.
No plants on earth had pods that large, did they?
There was no one else here in this room which was good because, Marianne Baker was—Kelly gasped—stripping.
Taking her business suit right off.
Her Chanel jacket, bespoke wool slacks … expensive designer clothes were dropping neatly onto a rising block of bench-shaped stone that looked designed specifically for that convenience.
It was like Kellys dream, her fantasy.
A wet dream—
Marianne Baker was beautiful, and as she slid her panties—Kelly was closing, but she could see they were moist by the way they clung to her skin as Marianne Baker peeled them free—she put her other hand up on the rim of the pod for balance.
And Angels in Heaven, Marianne Baker was beautiful.
Mouthwateringly attractive.
Marianne Baker was gorgeous in every way, Kelly’s mind and heart and soul told her. She was a senior corporate manager in her early forties…but her body was that of a bikini model. Her skin was flawless and tight. She looked youthful, ripe, nubile.
Kelly could not look away, not even for a moment. There was something—she felt like a teenage boy who had just spotted his favorite Playboy Playmate in the flesh.
A million years of evolution had conditioned the human minds to lust over the way Marianne Baker’s hips swelled graciously from flat abs and a tiny waist, the perfect parabola of that oh-so-tight ass, the way her thighs reached downward at an unimaginably elegant angle, that inflectionless neck, those soft, plump lips.
“She’s just a woman, a colleague,” Kelly’s better angels reminded her. But Kelly’s primitive animal brain was so taken in by the Goddess-like apparition before her, Marianne Baker’s physical perfection, it could have been a religious experience … Kelly’s mind buckled and for a moment she could not think at all.
She was salivating.
She was shaking.
Marianne Baker. And that smell, like a powerful aphrodisiac. A hypnotic, a mind-numbing narcotic…
Kelly hurried closer, wondering if she should stop whatever was happening.
What was her plan?
Why was she here, really?
She felt like she owed Marianne Baker something—maybe as a colleague. Or just a sister woman at risk. Maybe just for her kindness, for her beauty.
Really the woman’s beauty made Kelly feel like kneeling down in gratitude. But that’s the smell, Kelly thought, confusedly. Not her. Not me. Not my real thoughts.
What was happening was somehow exhausting and exciting at the same time—and Kelly knew she needed to protect her new friend…
… or was it that she wanted to join in??
But then, Marianne Baker kicked her leg up like a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, pure poetry in motion, so elegant and svelte, and hopped over the side of the—of the—no INTO the pod.
The pod.
Kelly gasped. She had once run to the roof of her apartment building too late to save a 17-year-old who had come out as gay the week before despite unmerciful bullying. She had not been able to walk near that part of the sidewalk below—the whole block, really—for years.
There seemed to be that kind of fatalism in Marianne Baker’s action.
But when Kelly involuntarily spoke, “No,” Marianne Baker turned, with just her head and shoulders showing, from inside the pod, and, seemingly completely unsurprised at seeing Kelly there, winked and blew her a kiss.
Gripping the sides of the pod, Marianne Baker settled backwards like relaxing into a cushiony bed, and shut the pod over her.
It was crazy, insane, horrible, unimaginable, and also somehow very very hot.
None of this made any sense.
Kelly stopped as Marianne Baker’s pod closed, and started to back away. Nothing in her entire lexicon of life experience had prepared her for this, or anything close.
She was shaking and waiting—waiting perhaps to see if the pod would open. Panting with fear and tension and—excitement. She was breathing in more of the smell, and it was making her feel uncontrolled, wetter, and somehow oddly submissive.
Marianne Baker had just closed herself inside a weird alien—pod? Was this even real? Had the smell rendered her unconscious and this was just a fever dream?
Kelly had to understand. She had to put this into context somehow. But she also felt that she had to ... give in. Submit. Accept it as what should be.
She had no question now that the smell she had been smelling increasingly over the past couple of weeks had been from the pod.
No wonder Marianne Baker smelled this way, if she spent any time in the pod. Her pod? The pods!? Much less daily visits! Marianne Baker carried the smell of the pods with her everywhere. That was resolved. But what happened in there, in the pod or pods? What did the pod do and where the hell did it come from?
Kelly looked around as if she might find an answer in the room.
She had the answer to the smell. But that answer just posed more questions.
She had no idea what all this meant.
No idea.
Did she believe in aliens? Was there something else happening? Who was Marianne Baker.
What the hell was going on?! Kelly felt helpless. Completely lost. Out of her depth, over her head, overmatched and terribly alone.
But she was also aware that he pussy was tender and swollen and her pants were soaked at the crotch.
There were other pods.
The next two to the left of Marianne Baker’s pod seemed not to be closed.
Kelly looked to her right. Six or seven other pods were sealed as tight as—Marianne Baker’s.
Were there people in them…too?
Should she—? Was one of them for her, Kelly Smigel?
Her stomach lurched—she could not tell if she was nauseous or experiencing such intense sexual urges she was on the verge of orgasm. This wa so fucked up and wrong, and yet—
She glanced to her left at a row of pods receding down the strange underground watercourse…
Should she look?
Kelly approached the next pod. It sat about a pod’s length from the pod in which Marianne Baker was going through whatever was happening to her (shudder; Kelly gasped with the surge of sexuality the concept carried with it.)
She tiptoed up to the rim of the new pod timidly, as though it was full of explosives liable to blow at any moment.
As she inched closer, Kelly felt a dripping down her thigh. Again. She was panting. But the sense of being completely outside the world she knew and understood—any reality she could recognize with her rational mind—was terrifying. Just terrifying.
But at the same time, hot. It felt so good, so right.
Was she being rewarded for her thoughts, for thinking about doing what some outside intelligence wanted? The idea was so wrong and so perverse as to be chilling. But even the recognition that this was what was occurring made her pussy throb. She was a slave to these impulses, completely helpless before the pleasure and submissive to this greater power...
She squeaked with the intensity of her realization. The realization—that this—her sexual excitement—was a means of making her want to do what she was doing, just as humans were designed biologically to love procreation—it made her edge almost to orgasm. She felt as though she could collapse at any moment into writhing ecstasy on the floor... If she just touched herself down where Marianne Baker had been shaved. Ooohhhh the image that came to mind! Shaved smooth! To imagine Marianne Baker stepping into the pod so submissively and obediently felt like biting into a perfect ripe peach, tart and tangy, juicy, such sensual pleasure in the sense of Marianne Baker’s ... smoothness.
In an engineering sense, Kelly’s professional mind reflected, it was simply logical to use the same systems designed for the ultimate evolutionary objective, perpetuation of the species, to subvert human behavior for a new purpose.
Engineers learned to use every tool available, and sexual impulse, the pleasure center reward system, including the leverage of the relevant body parts, were the perfect tools to make you what!? Do what?
Being able to see the way it worked on her, her programming objectively, at the same time as she found herself obeying without question just amped up the stimuli. The hotness. It was like watching your body betray your mind.
Kelly understood: she needed to do what Marianne Baker had just done.
She needed to climb into the pod, her pod, and—close it over herself. Very badly. The idea alone gave her a rush of pleasure almost stronger than any she had ever experienced.
She knew she was being manipulated sexually. Some force wanted her to climb into the pod, and it was making her hot, so hot, to think about doing just that.
The perversity of it all, the submission, the recognition that she was being manipulated like a toy, a robot made it even more exciting to her, not less. Being manipulated by the smell, changed. Like pheromones, so powerful—and she was just a human, a slave to the effects of the pheromones.
Did she want to be—to be—enslaved? To give in? To surrender all reason and become—whatever had been chosen for her?
And where had that idea come from?
Kelly could see the battled going on in her mind clearly, and it terrified her—it terrified her just to be near such an utterly inexplicable phenomenon. She was avoiding thinking about whether this was some highly advanced science—she imagined government experiments from the 60’s—Area 51, or … something else. Something new?
Something from—out of her world? Outside the world she knew?
Something alien?
In synch with her image of Kelly Smigel, the person she had been, had always been—still was?—stepping over the rim into the pod and sinking down into the green custard-like soup inside, she also had a vision of a star system and a sense of moving lights, lights suspended over a remote, mossy landscape, the lights moving across the space in unique units that were not stars but ... something else. Maybe something sentient.
Them?
She felt a powerful jolt of awe from her brain down her spine into her hips and pelvis. She felt as if her crotch was on fire.
“Who wants me to climb into a ...pod?” she said aloud. She had no idea. “This is getting beyond weird, Smigel. This is not you. Not me.”
She tried to picture some part or element of her normal, daily life to ground her, and wound up picturing, not family, but Leila. She was quite sure the smell was potent. as a drug. Was Leila already compromised somehow…? Was it her—Kelly’s—fault?
At the edge of the next pod, Kelly looked over the side, keeping her head turned half away, as if she could see and yet not see at the same time.
It seemed possible the contents could splash up at her. And if the smell she had been smelling, the Marianne Baker smell was potently psychoactive, what would the pod juice inside the ... pod do?
Inside the pod was ... yes, the yellow-green custard-like soup she had already imagined, somehow swirling with iridescence, and seemingly depthless, like a look into a telescope view of distant planet ——
Kelly had an inarticulable notion that this pod, whatever it was, all the pods—were not containers so much as doors somehow … into something different. Into change. For Marianne Baker—and for her. Into a new future, potentially.
Kelly decided she had to resist climbing into it—or through the portal it represented. The impulse was not her own, and she had no reason to trust it. So she had to fight it.
But it seemed to her obvious that if she gave in, she would be rewarded hugely. She would cum. Cum and cum. Whoever/whatever wanted her to submit had made it very attractive.
But she might not be Kelly Smigel anymore.
Kelly looked down to find her hand in her crotch. She was actively masturbating now because she wanted to do this so badly and—yes—become something other than Kelly Smigel. The idea was so hot.
Kelly lifted her leg, and for some reason lifted her hair off her neck as though going into the community swimming pool without a cap.
But: the wrongness. The craziness! How could this even be real?
How could she even imagine climbing in, sinking into a pod-like thing she had never seen before and she did not even understand?
But that was what made it so hot! The sense that her friend and therapist Leila would say this was crazy made it somehow more exciting and compelling, because in some way, in the way of the most depraved and hot sex, she would be giving in, giving herself to the pod, maybe to Them—
Enslaved. By sexual impulses, needs, sexual cravings amped up—enslavement seemed all the more delicious because of its counterintuitiveness, its danger, its—it was insane and so hot … thinking of how lovely Marianne Baker had looked stepping into the pod.
Who would not want … that? And the way Marianne Baker had been changed; Kelly was quite sure she had started out as a beauty. But now she was like a porn model, too.
If she, Kelly ever came out again, she would smell like Marianne Baker and be—the smell would come from her now.
That to seemed overwhelmingly exciting…
But some shy part of her dating all the way back to her girlhood flinched, and Kelly found herself running.
She was breathing hard, panting again, but for a new reason—sprinting with all her speed.
She was through the next room and to the large empty space, past the drowsy humans—humanoids?—and then on the stairs, stubbing her toe in the split steps, before she had a clear thought about what she was or was not doing.
She felt a cooling in her self and her consciousness, a loss, a deep and painful loss, as though someone she loved had died. But she was on the slotted steel stairs to the normal basement still woozy and hot and horny—mother of god she was horny, and some part of her mind was holding onto the desire to step into a pod, her pod—but she was escaping. She was sure she was a mess and wondered, as she burst out the door into B3, if she looked like Marianne Baker had looked when—
There was a women’s room in the lobby. Kelly ducked inside, trying not to see anyone, hoping no one was there or anywhere around—
She went straight into a stall and latched the door.
She sat down on the closed toilet seat, and began to masturbate, furiously, moaning and out of control, thinking of Marianne Baker, how hot she looked as, naked and utterly giving in, she slumped back into that strange goo... What else was the pod doing besides modifying her to look more sexually appealing? And why would it do that? To seduce others, like the engineer who sat right outside her office door, like Kelly? What else was it doing? What else would it do to her?
Her mind was burning and trying to work out what was happening.
The thought occurred to her—shouldn’t she report this to the police?
Something really weird was going on and it did not fit with the normal world and she doubted it was lawful. But the police seemed so inadequate to deal with something this wild and extreme.
It seemed far beyond even federal agencies with international budgets and the best brains… But regardless, what would she report and would they come look before they simply dragged her to the looney bin—?
Kelly climbed the stairs to the lobby and was surprised to find it already dark outside.
She drove home and went straight to bed, where she frigged herself to sleep.