Holly and Her Naughty eReader (10 page)

“If it is what you want us to
do, we will do it.”

“Of course it’s what I want you
to do! Let’s check in next week and see if you’ve gotten your head on straight
by then.”

He ended the call and stood from
his chair.

“Any other ideas you’d care to
share with me Miss Stone?” he said.

“No,” I said. “That one just
came to me because…well, because I listened to what you were talking about.”

“How much are we paying you?”

“You’re actually paying the temp
agency, Mr. Green.”

He held up his hand. “Please.
Call me Christoph.”

Wow. In the original version of
the novel, Annabelle has to call him Mr. Green until Chapter 12. I must have
really impressed him with my changes.

“And come with me to HR,” he
continued. “We’re going to pay the agency whatever is required to release you
from your contract so you can work for me. Is $50 an hour okay to start?”

“Sure,” I said, smiling at the
interesting twist this story had taken from my one little change.

In the original version of the
story, Annabelle and Christoph continued their flirtation for a week before
anything happened. But in this new version I initiated with my brilliant
business idea, Christoph and Annabelle ended up in the Den of Decadence that
very night.

He had me stand in front of his
full length mirror and undress myself.

“I want you to look at your
body,” he said. “I want you to appreciate your own beauty.”

Five minutes later he had me
strapped to the St. Andrew’s Cross at the back of the room and we were having a
grand old time. When we finished, he untied me and we collapsed onto the floor.

Lying next to me, rubbing my
bangs out of my face, he said, “I want to take you on a trip.”

A trip? Now we were very far
removed from the plot of the book.

“Okay,” I said. “Where shall we
go?”

“Somewhere far away,” Christoph
said. “We’ll leave tomorrow, and we’ll just keep going and going. I want to
leave this world behind. I want nothing to demand at my attention, so I can
give it all to you.”

Swoon.

I was looking at him now. Lying
there, gazing into my eyes, there was no denying it. I had fallen for a
character in a novel.

What was it that made Christoph
Green so attractive? Yes, he was a beautiful man, and yes, the things he did in
bed (and on the table, and in the sex sling, and on the St. Andrew’s Cross)
were mindblowing. But there was something more to him than that. There was so
much mystery behind those eyes. What was his real story?

I was pondering the enigma of
Christoph Green when a dangerous idea crossed my mind. Inside the Kindle, I had
the power to learn exactly what his real story was. All I had to do was look at
him….to think about being him….to want it bad enough…..

Chapter 10

The shift into Christoph’s body
was immediate and unsettling. It was much more intense than my last gender
bending switch. While Blair the Werewolf had been a strange mix of horniness
and penis jokes, Christoph was a big mess of angst, power, and horrible
memories.

Orphaned at a young age, picked
up by human traffickers, flown around the world, I saw Christoph’s entire
history in my memory, and it made me cringe.

I saw a blonde woman with bright
red lipstick pulling on the lapels of my jacket and bringing me in for a kiss.
She was forty or older. I was just a teenage boy who had been sold into her
possession.

Helga. Her name was Helga. She
was the wealthy widow of a mob boss. She called me “Komondor,” which was a type
of sheep dog, and used me as her sex slave. She trained me to protect her from
her enemies, which I did with great force. By the time I was eighteen, I had
murdered half the mob bosses of Eastern Europe.

Then I murdered her. I used a
kitchen knife to slit her throat, and as she fell to the floor, I told her,
“I’m emancipating myself. Today I declare my independence.”

I saw my own escape to Central
Asia. I saw a trek across Mongolia, first as a hitchhiker, then on foot, then
on a camel. I saw myself taken in by a local villager after I got lost. I
became part of his tribe. I saw a medicine man teaching me the basics of
sorcery.

I saw myself learning all the
village sorcerer had to teach me, then killing him and stealing his power. I
saw myself traveling the world to learn more about magic, and then, when I was
the most powerful wizard in the world, using my powers to build a vast business
empire that made me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

Being inside Christoph’s body
was like living in in a mix of urban fantasy and torture porn. Horrible
visions, one after the other, were just waiting to pop out and dominate my
memory, and every one of them had to be appeased with action or magic. As
Christoph, I wanted to dominate, I wanted to own, I wanted people to fear me, I
wanted the universe to bow to my every command, and all of these desires were
tied to heinous memories from my past.

I looked into Annabelle’s eyes
and felt a longing to escape all of this. I saw in her a strength and
intelligence that was….

That was otherworldly.

Horrified at the experience, I
begged the Kindle to let me go, and landed in my hotel room, my heart racing.

“What the fuck?” I whispered
between huge, heaving breaths.

Who creates a character like
that for the leading man?

Or maybe I should have asked:
how could I have been so attracted to such a monster?

But even as I asked the
question, even in the depths of my revulsion at who Christoph was and what he
had done, I still felt a longing for him. Now it was about more than sexual
desire. It was about sympathy too. Some motherly instinct to protect him and
save him from his demons had kicked in hard.

“Motherly?” I whispered,
realizing that word had been in my own thoughts. “Yuck!”

I set the Kindle down on the
nightstand and stepped away from it, wondering if my mixed up thoughts were
mine alone or if I had a piece of Annabelle in there with me.

Whatever it was, this was
starting to get a bit too weird for my taste. I walked over to the window, away
from the Kindle, and called Vivian.

“What’s up, Holly?” she said.

“It’s still happening,” I said.

“What? Your reading thing?”

“Yes, I’ve been living inside
books pretty much nonstop since the last time I talked to you.”

“And this is bothering you? I
thought you liked reading. You’re an English teacher.”

“I feel like I’m beginning to
lose touch with reality.”

Vivian sighed.

“This is about more than
reading, isn’t it?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Holly, you’ve never properly
dealt with the fact that you caught your fiancée in bed with another woman,”
Vivian said.

“Well, she wasn’t exactly a
woman,” I said. “More of a girl.”

“Yes, but it was awful, wasn’t
it?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And now, the memories of that
awful scene and the breakup that followed still in your mind, you came back to
your hometown, hoping to find some sort of peace and solace in a bit of
nostalgia, right?”

“I….don’t…what are you getting
at, Viv?”

“I’m telling you that these
visions you’re having are more than hallucinations, and I don’t think they have
anything to do with the mojo we smoked.”

“Yes, I know that now,” I said.
“That’s actually why I called. I was thinking maybe I could show you my Kindle,
see what you--”

“Holly, you’re in such desperate
need for escape that your brain is changing the books you read into some kind
of alternate reality.”

Vivan was speaking to me the way
a doctor speaks to a patient. It was a little annoying.

“Yes, an alternate
reality—that’s what’s happening--but I don’t know that I need an escape from
anything,” I said.

“Of course you need an escape.
Who wouldn’t need to escape from your life right now?”

Yikes, was my life really that
bad? Now I was starting to wonder.

“Vivian, I think there is more
going on here than--”

“Come see me. You need someone
to talk to, and it’s quiet here at the office.”

“Yes, good. That’s actually why
I was calling.”

“I’m downtown in the Chase
Building. Just park on the street. Nobody checks the meters this late in the
afternoon.”

“Some human contact might be
good,” I muttered. Was it possible that Vivian was right, and my breakup with
Derek had made me go bonkers?

“Call me when you’re in the
lobby. I’ll come get you.”

I hung up feeling like this was
a good choice. I’d spent all this time in my Kindle and didn’t really know what
was real and what was fake anymore. I considered leaving the Kindle behind and
having a talk to Vivian on her terms. She wanted to play guidance counselor for
me. Perhaps I should let her.There was no doubt in my mind now that the Kindle
was trouble. What I had seen inside Christoph’s head, what I had experienced in
his memories…

You can’t unlive moments like
that.

Even more unsettling was my
lingering attraction to him. Having seen all that baggage he carried around, I should
have run away screaming. But a part of me wanted to race back inside, to go to
him and provide him comfort.

“Jesus Christ, Holly,” I said.
“You even fall for the wrong guys in fiction. And you’re talking to yourself
again.”

I grabbed the Kindle, threw it
in my purse, and headed out the door.

Chapter 11

Black marble floors, a gurgling
fountain, high ceilings, huge oil paintings on the walls—who would have thought
that little Moongirl, the class mystic, would have ended up here?

As instructed, I called Vivian
from the lobby. She came down to find me staring at the list of names engraved
on a gold panel in the wall.

“Do you think your name will be
up here some day?” I asked her.

“Hell no,” she said. “The minute
I have enough money to get my name on the wall of some building downtown, I’m
retiring and moving the family to Acapulco.”

“But do you know any of these
folks?” I asked. “Do you work with them?”

Vivian gave me a weird look.

“What?” I said.

“You’re lonely, aren’t you, Holly?”

“Oh Good Lord,” I said. “Let’s
just go up to your office. I brought something I want you to look at.”

“What is it?” said Vivian.

I cracked open my purse so she
could see the Kindle hiding inside.

“Oh. I see,” she said.

It was clear from her voice that
Vivian was convinced I had lost it. And maybe she was right. Maybe the stress
of the breakup and the reunion combined with an already overactive imagination
and many tens of thousands of hours spent reading—maybe it all had melded
together and I was officially cracked. It was a possibility I had warmed up to
the minute Vivian suggested it on the phone.

Which was why I brought the
Kindle. This would be a good test. I was going to read a passage while she
watched me. If I fell all the way into the story world, I would have an
observer watch what happens to me while I’m there. And then I would hand the
Kindle to her and we’d see what happened.

Vivian worked for the law office
of Crackhow, Shoenberg, and Shinko, on the eleventh floor of the Chase tower
downtown. We stepped out of the elevator into a mostly quiet office space and
she led me through a maze of empty cubicles.

“Where is everybody?” I said.

“It’s six-thirty at night, Holly.
Everybody’s gone home.”

“Oh,” I said, realizing that I
hadn’t paid any attention to the time of day. Come to think of it, I didn’t
even know what day it was. I remembered waking up in my room at the Wyndam
once, maybe twice, since the reunion. But I also remembered waking up on the
grass of Lothloriath in the arms of Blair the Werewolf, and in the satin sheets
of Christoph Green’s bed. It was all a jumble. Reality and fantasy were mixing
together in my mind, and it wasn’t easy to tell them apart.

Vivian had a big office with a
window facing south. She had a steel bookcase on one wall holding rows of
hardback law volumes. On the other walls were prints of famous paintings by
Dali and Picasso. Walking inside, you’d never expect this was a woman who
smoked hallucinogenic herbs in her basement.

She closed the door behind me
and we sat together at a round table at the front of her office.

“Alright, spill it,” Vivian
said. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“What I’m feeling? Actually,
Viv, what I wanted to do was show you--”

“I know you want to show me your
Kindle and we can get to that, Sweetie, but I think we should talk about your
feelings first. You’ve been through a lot these past few weeks and I wonder if
you’ve ever had the chance to just take a break and consider what you’re
feeling.”

“My feelings are complicated,” I
said as I reached into my purse.

Vivian put her hand on mine
before I could lift out the Kindle. “Tell me why they’re complicated,” she
said.

I sighed, and decided to give
her the abbreviated version.

“On the one hand, I feel deceived
and misused, of course,” I said. “My fiancée was cheating on me. On the other
hand, though, I can see that we needed to break up, and I’m glad it happened
before the wedding.”

“You’re glad?” Vivian said. “Is
that really the right word for how you feel?”

“You know what I mean. Listen,
this Kindle--”

“Holly, this Kindle is perfectly
normal,” Vivian said, now reaching into my purse and retrieving it herself. As
I watched her hand pull it out I felt like I was watching someone run off with
my children.

Not that I had any children. Not
that I had a storybook life like my sister and Michelle and the rest of my
friends. Not that it was normal to feel so attached to a Kindle that you cringe
when someone else touches it.