The house seemed pleasant enough. Importantly, it was within Cherie's budget. She'd been looking for a place on her own for a while, a two-bedroom where she could dedicate one room to painting and forget the awkwardness of her roommate's unrequited love, and although it was in a poorer area beset with the often thick humidity that surrounded the lagoon, it ticked both of those key criteria and was otherwise comfortable. Her only doubt was over a slight musty smell lingering in the rooms. She figured it was just part of the deal in a particularly humid area and signed the lease anyway.
John helped her move. She felt guilty to ask him, but she knew he'd do it and not expect anything in return, despite what he obviously hoped for. It was written in all his actions that warm Sunday as they conveyed boxes to and from her car: the exaggerated way he would move out of her way if they happened to be walking the same path, the lame one-liners he attempted, his downward gaze when they didn't land. She wondered if he might finally say something as they parted. True to form, he just gave her a tight hug on her doorstep and went on his way. As she watched him slope off to the bus stop, his floppy, unkempt hair obscuring his face, she was confident she wouldn't see him again unless by chance. Then she walked back into the house and set about making the house her own.
Cherie decided the end room would be her studio, hoping the sliver of water visible through trees from the window would spur her on to paint a series she'd planned some time ago abstractly representing the moisture of and around humans. The idea had occurred one evening when she looked at the beach houses on the edge of a pleasant city bay and considered how temporary they all were in the face of the water below them, which was already infiltrating them through the air and ground and would ultimately inundate them decades or centuries from now. That led to thoughts of our own moisture, the corrosive carnality of it, at the same time as its fundamental importance to our existence. The sketches sat wedged in a heap towards the back of her folder of ideas. Unlike so many other sketches, for projects that seemed trite or uninspired almost immediately, the moisture series never got thrown away. It had that rare quality of appealing to something deep inside her, something she couldn't articulate. She simply had to work it out on the canvas.
She set up her easel so she could face the window while she painted. She had intended to store various art supplies in the closet of the end room - paint-spattered clothing, mixing boards, brushes etc - but when she opened the door, she noticed a patch of thin pink mold covering large sections of the back and side walls. Damn, she thought. Why didn't I check that during the viewing? She resolved to get some good mold cleaner the following weekend; in the meantime, she piled her supplies in a corner of the room and taped the moisture sketches to the wall, then returned to her bedroom to make up her futon and hang a couple of pieces on the wall.
As she worked, she noticed her heart rate had increased. A faint lightheadedness settled comfortably over her, not enough to make her actually dizzy, but enough to magically tint a mundane task. It's the heat, she told herself, as beads of sweat formed under her arms and in her cleavage; the heat and all the heavy lifting. She went to the kitchen and drank a large glass of water from the tap. It left a slightly musky aftertaste, reminiscent of the odor she'd noticed when she first entered the property. Then she went to bed.
Over the course of the week, that same lightheadedness would come and go a few times a day. Cherie found she was able to push through it at the office by staying at her desk and focusing on whatever piece of work was in front of her. During her evenings at home, however, especially as she sketched out concepts and painted, it was harder to ignore. She would sweat noticeably, even while seated, and her throat would become parched. Water helped in the short term, but after a few trips between the kitchen and the end room, she would invariably have to fix herself a sandwich - something simple and quick - and take herself off to bed to wind down and sleep.
Still, the moisture project was progressing well. Thinking about it so much had stimulated vivid dreams about sweat spreading across goose-pimpled skin, a rising tide overwhelming a populated coastline, a wetland heaving and sighing like great lungs of the Earth. She kept a sketchbook by the bed to capture these images immediately upon waking and committed them to canvas when she came home from work. An odd tingling sensation began to arise in the pit of her stomach when she was in the studio; she interpreted it as a bodily response to the most genuine artistic inspiration she'd ever felt.
That Saturday, Cherie invited her friends Sid and Karina to help warm her new home. She spent the afternoon preparing a creamy garlic pasta with roast vegetable salad and pesto-crusted haloumi. The tingling rose again while she was cooking, becoming so strong at one moment that she had to sit down, her elbow against the table and her palm against her head, and breathe deeply until it subsided. She felt filled with an intensity of some kind, something indescribable. It might still have been that sense of creative satisfaction but surely this was a greater physiological conversion than even Monet or O'Keeffe could have felt. Sparks flew from the centre of her body to the tips of her fingers and toes.
They arrived about six with a bottle of wine. Holding herself together, but still aware of the growing sensation coursing through her body, Cherie showed them around - even the end room, contravening her usual policy of not displaying works in progress to anyone. Karina was impressed, and Sid nodded politely. After the grand tour was over, they all settled down to the meal at the table.
Talk flowed easily, as it usually did with Sid and Karina. She'd always felt comfortable around them, able to share some of her more private thoughts with confidence they wouldn't be shared. Their presence took her out of herself a little.
The nice bottle of wine they'd brought ran out quickly, but given the heat they all agreed to switch to water rather than open a cheap bottle from the cupboard, so Cherie filled a pitcher with water from the tap and placed it in the table. Her guests were very complimentary about the food. They seemed to mean it, too, singling out individual flavours and textures for praise. She felt proud as she watched Sid wipe cream sauce from the rim of his plate with his finger and place it in his mouth, then wash it down with water from his glass.
A sudden curiosity seized her. What does Sid's penis look like? She'd never seen a brown one, and from a giggly, drunken conversation she'd once had with Karina, she understood his to be impressive. But did it curve upwards when erect? Did it favour one side? If it were inside her, would it be thick enough to stimulate her clitoris as it drove in and out? When he got up to go to the bathroom, she had to fight the urge to follow him and engineer some way of seeing it. She didn't just want to see it, either; she wanted to hold it, taste it, feel it. It was as though Sid, who she'd known for years without ever feeling particularly attracted to, was suddenly defined by his concealed appendage. Had he ever thought about her this way, she wondered? Would be secretly like to draw her top up over her breasts and kiss the hollow between them? Has he wondered how it feel for his abs to bump against her soft belly as the tip of his penis reached into the back of her vagina? Trying to remain calm, and embarrassed by this rare attack of lust, Cherie waited until he returned to the table and went to the bathroom herself.
It helped to pass urine; to feel something in that part of her other than the urge to be filled. Then she noticed a stain on her underwear. A translucent discharge, faintly pink, was at the center of a large wet patch on the fabric. Surely not a period, only a couple of weeks since the last? Resisting the temptation to rub her vagina and gain some quick relief, Cherie washed up and took a minute in the bedroom to change her underwear.
