What No One Teaches
Garth x Female Reader The Testaments
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Agnes’s room smelled of cold candle wax and clean paper.
Daughter of Commander Mackenzie, one of the highest families in Gilead and one of the most closely watched every minute spent in this room, decorated mostly in shades of violet, felt both precious and dangerous. Agnes had grown up in a house where rules were enforced with the rigor of true believers, not just obedient ones. She had learned to hold her body straight, her thoughts straight, and her voice soft since childhood.
And tonight, she had waited until the footsteps of the household faded down the hallway, and she had closed the door, and she had looked at both of you, Daisy and you, with something resolute in her eyes.
“I have questions,” she had said.
The three of you were sitting in her room. Agnes on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest, a strand of hair loose from her coif that she hadn’t put back in place, a small, rare sign of looseness. Daisy on the desk chair, turned toward you, arms crossed in that relaxed way she had when she felt relatively safe. You on the edge of the mattress, lying on your back, hands folded over your stomach, eyes fixed on that violet ceiling.
And outside in the hallway, three meters from the white wooden door, a Guardian on evening duty.
Garth. Your Garth. For five years. Five years before Gilead, five years in Toronto and in your apartment that smelled like coffee, rain, and him. Five years building something ordinary and precious that you had put on hold for a mission that was supposed to last eighteen months and was now in its nineteenth.
He was three meters away. The door was wood. You didn’t know exactly what could be heard from the other side, and that uncertainty was going to shape the entire conversation in a way you couldn’t yet anticipate.
“Questions about what?” Daisy had asked.
Agnes took a breath.
“About men,” she had said. “About what happens between a man and a woman. Not what the Aunts teach. Not duty, not the Ceremony, not metaphors about vessels and seeds.” She lifted her chin slightly. “Reality. What it feels like. What it can feel like.”
Silence.
“What it can feel like,” you had repeated slowly, your thoughts drifting toward the person three meters away.
“Pleasure,” Agnes had said, the word coming out with deliberate clarity, as if she had rehearsed it beforehand, as if she had decided she had the right to say it out loud in her own room. “The Aunts say that bodily pleasure is a distraction from the pleasure of God. But there are things I read before, in books I shouldn’t have had, and I want to know if it’s true.”
She looked at both of you with that direct honesty that belonged to her.
“You lived before Gilead. You knew things. Tell me.”
Daisy spoke first. She had that ability to step into difficult conversations without apologizing for it, a quiet frankness without drama. She said honest things about someone she had loved two years before everything changed. She said physical pleasure existed, that it was real, that the books weren’t entirely wrong. She said it depended a lot on the person in front of you, on trust, on the time you gave each other. She said it carefully, with the precision of someone giving true information without fully exposing herself. Agnes listened with absolute focus. And then she looked at you.
Your problem was simple and insurmountable. You hadn’t lived the things you could tell Agnes tonight in some distant past. You were still living them, suspended, yes, frozen in the logistics of a nineteen-month infiltration, but alive. Garth was three meters away. The same Garth who knew every detail of what you were about to talk about, who had lived it with you, who still carried it in his memory. You were going to talk about him without naming him. Three meters from a wooden door. And your cheeks already knew, because the heat was rising before you had even said a word.
“Lina,” Agnes had said softly. “You’re blushing already.” “I know,” you had said.
Daisy lowered her gaze to her hands, a perfectly contained smile slipping out at the edges anyway.
“There was someone,” Agnes deduced. “Someone you still carry.”
“Someone from before Gilead,” you had said carefully. “Someone I knew before becoming a Pearl.”
That was technically, impeccably true. You had known Garth before Gilead. The fact that he was in the hallway three meters away was not information Agnes needed.
“And you remember enough to blush like that.” “Yes.” “Then you’re the one I want to hear.”
You took a long, silent breath. You looked at the door once, twice, then brought your eyes back to the ceiling.
And you began.
“Physical pleasure,” you said quietly, “is real. It’s not a promise or a theory. It’s something the body produces and feels in a completely concrete way. And what the Aunts don’t say, what they deliberately omit, is that for a woman, this pleasure can be just as intense as for a man. Sometimes more, depending on the people.”
Agnes didn’t move.
“Where does it start?” she asked.
“It often starts before touch,” you said, your voice low and steady even though your cheeks burned. “In the mind first. Anticipation. Knowing that someone you desire is there, close, that they’re going to put their hands on you. That moment before, it prepares everything else. The body responds before you’ve even decided anything.”
Garth had a way of approaching slowly. Never rushed. Never as if what came next was guaranteed. He moved into your space with a kind of silent permission he asked for at every step, not with words, but with the way he waited for your response before continuing. And that slowness, that deliberation, created something in your chest and your stomach before his hand even touched your skin. You had known very early with him that anticipation was a full part of everything, not just a prelude to rush through.
“And touch?” Agnes said. “What is it like?”
Your throat tightened slightly.
“Touch is a language,” you said. “A good touch says things. It says I’m paying attention. It says I want to know what you like. It says you matter. And the body responds differently to that than to a touch that just says I’m taking.”
“How does it respond?”
“Warmth first. Something that gathers where the hands are and spreads outward. And if the hands move slowly, if the person really takes their time, if they linger where they see you react, that warmth builds. It builds and spreads and becomes something harder to ignore.”
Agnes swallowed discreetly.
“Harder to ignore how?”
“There are places Garth knew by heart. Not because he memorized them coldly like a list, but because he paid attention, from the beginning, from the very first time, to everything that showed on your face and in your breathing when his hands moved. He learned through observation, through attention, through constantly returning to you rather than himself. The nape of your neck. The small of your back. The inside of your wrist, unexpectedly, which had surprised you the first time, just his lips there and something that went straight through you. He knew. He remembered. He returned to them. Deliberately.”
“Harder to ignore because it takes up space in your awareness,” you said. “Little by little, everything else disappears. You don’t think about tomorrow, or yesterday, or what you have to do. You’re just there. In that moment. In a body feeling something very specific.”
“The Aunts call that a distraction,” Agnes said, a dry edge in her voice.
“The Aunts benefit from women staying divided,” Daisy said calmly.
Silence. Agnes nodded slowly.
“And… orgasms?” she said, the word coming out with the same deliberate clarity as pleasure earlier. “The books talked about them. I didn’t know if it was real or exaggerated.”
Your left cheek burned. Your right cheek too. Outside, in the hallway, a sound, imperceptible, or maybe imagined. But no. You knew Garth’s silence. You knew the difference between someone not listening and someone listening very closely. This was the second.
You closed your eyes for a fraction of a second. You opened them again.
“It’s real,” you said.
“It’s real and it’s…” You searched for your words carefully. “It’s a rise. It builds gradually, in waves, each one stronger than the last. And if the person with you is really paying attention, if they read what’s happening in your breathing, in your hands, in the way you move, they can guide that rise. Slow it down. Speed it up. Bring it exactly where they want.”
“Guide it,” Agnes repeated.
“Yes.” Your voice was low, warmer despite you. “A man who knows what he’s doing, who really knows, not technically but attentively, sees when you’re close. Before you’ve fully realized it yourself. And he chooses. He can take you there directly, or he can pull back just before, let you fall slightly, and start again. And each time it builds, it’s stronger than before.”
A dense silence settled in the room. Daisy looked at her hands, her expression caught somewhere between memory and something more complicated. Agnes didn’t move. And you were flushed to your ears, your hand flat against your thigh, and beneath your palm you could feel your own warmth.
Garth always did both. Some nights he brought you there directly, with that gentle, focused efficiency that said I know exactly what you want and I’m going to give it to you. And other nights, the nights when he decided to take his time, when there was something playful in his eyes when he looked at you, he pulled back. Just before. And he waited until you complained or looked at him a certain way, and then he started again. Those nights, you ended up saying his name in a voice you didn’t entirely recognize as your own. He seemed extremely satisfied by that every time, which should have been annoying and wasn’t.
“And when it happens,” Agnes said very softly, “the orgasm, what is it like?”
You took a breath.
“It’s a loss of control,” you said honestly. “Temporary and total. Everything gathers into one point and then releases, and for those few seconds you don’t have access to conscious thought. You’re just in it. Just sensation. And afterward, there’s something very soft. Something heavy and warm and calm. Like the rest of the world has been muted.”
Agnes placed a hand lightly over her chest, unconsciously.
“And it’s possible more than once?” she asked.
Daisy made a sound that was clearly a laugh disguised as a throat clearing. You looked at the far wall.
“Yes,” you said. “It’s possible more than once.”
Daisy picked up the thread, and you were grateful. She spoke about her first love with measured honesty, what it was like to be with someone learning you, making mistakes and correcting them, taking their time. She said pleasure between two people was something learned together, that the first time was rarely what you imagined, but the times after could become something entirely different.
Agnes absorbed it all with her usual focus. Then she looked at you again.
“Yours,” she said. “Him. What was he like with you?”
Your throat tightened. What was he like with you. Five years of answers. Five years of mornings and nights and ordinary and extraordinary moments. Five years of someone learning the way you slept, the way you thought, the way you made a specific sound at a specific moment when his hand rested in a specific place.
“Attentive,” you said softly. “In a way that surprises you, because you don’t really expect it. You think you know what it means, and then someone truly is, and you realize your definition was too narrow.”
“How?”
“He watched my face,” you said. “All the time. Not intrusively, present. As if what was happening on my face mattered as much as anything else. As if my pleasure mattered just as much as his.”
“The Aunts say it doesn’t,” Agnes said quietly.
“The Aunts lie,” you said simply.
He had said once, you remembered it precisely because you had stored it away immediately, that watching you was his favorite place in the world. Not the most spectacular. His favorite. Watching you at that exact moment. You had buried your face in his neck because you didn’t know what to do with something that honest, said so directly. He had laughed softly into your hair.
“Does it matter,” Agnes asked slowly, “to be in love? Does it change the physical sensation, or is it separate?”
Daisy and you exchanged a look.
“It’s not required,” Daisy said honestly. “Physical pleasure exists independently of feelings.”
“But,” she added after a pause, “when both are there, when you truly love the person and trust them completely, it’s different. Not necessarily more intense physically. But more complete. Because you have no defenses. No layer of restraint. You’re entirely present in that moment with that person.”
Agnes looked at you. You nodded.
“Yes,” you said. “When you love someone truly, deeply, for a long time, there’s an absence of distance. Even physically. As if the skin itself becomes more permeable.”
Your voice broke slightly on the last word. Just a little.
Outside. A sound. Not a step, not a movement. A breath, slightly altered, subtly held back, the kind of breath you take when something affects you and you try not to let it show.
You closed your eyes for three seconds. You opened them again. Agnes hadn’t heard anything. Daisy, maybe, her gaze flickered briefly toward the door, then back to Agnes.
“I’m afraid,” Agnes said very quietly. “That it will be with someone I don’t matter to. That it will be like the Aunts describe. A procedure.”
“That fear is valid,” you said honestly. “Gilead is built for exactly that. Unions without choice, without desire, without mutual attention.” You chose your next words carefully. “But fear doesn’t erase the other possibility. Elsewhere, with someone chosen, with time and trust, everything I described exists. It truly exists.”
“You still believe in that,” Agnes said. “Despite Gilead. You believe in it.”
You smiled despite yourself, something small, real, faintly painful.
“Yes,” you said. “I still believe in it.”
Because he’s three meters away. You didn’t say that either.
Paula, her stepmother, knocked on the door thirty minutes later, curfew, back to the dormitories. Daisy and you stood, straightened your clothes, put your obedient Pearl faces back on with the ease of people who had been doing it for a long time.
Agnes took your hand for a second.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the truth.”
“Keep it to yourself,” you said softly.
She nodded.
In the hallway. Garth stood with his back against the wall, three meters to the left of the door, hands behind his back, gaze straight ahead. Impeccable uniform. Perfect posture. The Guardian Gilead had made, or believed it had made. Daisy passed in front of him without looking up, a quiet good night murmured in your direction before disappearing down the hall. Paula turned the corner to the right. The hallway emptied. Three seconds. Maybe four.
You slowed. Not stopped, slowed, just enough to be at his level a few seconds longer than necessary. His gaze stayed forward. Professional. Garth the Guardian. Except, you would never have noticed it anywhere else, the faint color at the back of his neck. Just under the collar of his uniform, where fabric met skin. A contained flush, the only visible sign of what the other side of that wooden door had done to someone who had been listening for forty minutes.
You kept walking. His voice came, very low, inaudible beyond a meter, lips barely moving.
“More permeable…”
He repeated your word. Your last word. The one your voice had broken on. He had kept it, and now he gave it back to you in this empty hallway, like a ghost.
You stopped. Just for a second, turned toward the wall as if adjusting something on your sleeve, a normal gesture, nothing unusual, a Pearl fixing her clothing in a corridor.
And in a voice even lower than his, eyes on the wall.
“Five years, and you still have things to learn about discreet listening.”
A beat. And from three meters behind you, something that wasn’t quite a sound, just the absence of a sound he held back, the echo of a laugh he wasn’t allowed to let out, and that still existed between you in the empty hallway.
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This is my first one, please be kind.:)
