Holly and Her Naughty eReader (7 page)

“Catherine, why do we allow the
world to keep us apart?” he said as he tore off my clothes.

Because I’m a tragic hero
, I thought.
Because I’m the first great female anti-hero in all of literature.
Because Emily Bronte knew that she wouldn’t be allowed to publish a sex scene
that was as steamy as our relationship deserved, so she didn’t even try.

The smell of our unwashed bodies
awakened something carnal in me. We were two people abandoning the manners of
our Victorian author and living like animals. He pulled off his nightshirt,
threw it to the corner of the room, and pinned me to the bed with his naked
chest. He looked at me with a gaze so intense I squealed in delight, aware that
few characters in all of literature were crafted with enough passion to look at
a woman like that. In that look, Heathcliff and I knew that a lifetime of love,
a love that began when we were six years old and would continue long after my premature
death, a love that we never thought would be made real, could come out tonight.
In that look, we knew that our whole lives came down to this moment, to this
act.

He thrust himself inside me, and
I felt the excruciating pain and ecstasy of a
large
man with a violent passion. Now I knew the truth. Emily
Bronte was madly in love with this character, and she liked them exotic
and…ahem….girthy. There was something foreign, something animal, about the way
Heathcliff made love. He was a child of another culture, a gypsy orphan who
came to the author in her fantasies and allowed her some release from the
restrictive world where she spent her days.

Heathcliff went deep inside me,
breaking me open, harder and deeper with each thrust. His face was up against
mine, our eyes together. We were seeing things beyond the world we lived in. We
were making real the connection that so many millions of readers imagined for
Catherine and Heathcliff.

The build-up was rhythmic. I
sensed my body approaching an ecstasy worthy of Emily Bronte’s dark, erotic
work.

Whatever our souls are made of,
his and mine were the same, and when it happened, when he and I came together,
I saw heaven's glories shine.

Chapter 7

The next morning, after an
all-night adventure of hopping from one story to another, I went to Fred’s
Café, the old neighborhood hangout where Michelle and I had wasted many an
afternoon in high school. After I got a coffee and a bagel, I took a seat in
the corner and called Vivian.

“It was still happening all day
yesterday, even into last night,” I said. “It was like the most vivid
hallucination. I honestly couldn’t tell it apart from reality.”

“Pretty awesome, isn’t it?”
Vivian said. “I smoked myself into a stupor last night and pulled Outlander off
the shelf.”

“And?” I said.

“At first I was like, this
sucks. The words were blurry. My mind wasn’t focused. And trying to read was
just getting in the way of my high, but I soldiered on, and then it got really
cool.”

“How so?”

“It’s like you said, I guess.
I’m not totally sure. I was stoned out of my mind. I was reading the words and
my imagination was in overdrive. I really did lose myself in the story. It was
fun.”

I could tell by the way she was
talking that her experience was nothing like mine. If she had been inside the
books like I had, she wouldn’t be able to contain her excitement. What I was
doing with my Kindle was nothing like reading while high. It was like pure,
undeniable magic.

And that was making me wonder if
this wasn’t some after-effect of Vivian’s peyote-mescalin-mojo brew at all, but
a legitimate step into the supernatural. My Kindle had been turned on pretty
much all day yesterday, and still the battery was fully charged. I hadn’t
plugged it in once since I got to Albuquerque. I was afraid to. So long as it
was working I didn’t want to mess with it.

“Listen, I’ve got to get back to
work,” Vivian said. “How much longer are you in town?”

“I leave the day after
tomorrow,” I said, the words reminding me just how far off course I was on this
trip. I’d booked a few days in Albuquerque after the reunion thinking I’d want
to reconnect with lots of old friends.

But the only people I wanted to
connect with right now were the ones inside my Kindle.

“Call me tonight if you want to
smoke some more, or just hang out,” Vivian said.

“Will do,” I said, wondering if
I really would. The Kindle sounded a lot more interesting than another night in
Vivian’s basement. The Kindle was more interesting than anything else I could
be doing, really. As I sat in my booth at the bagel shop, I had my purse on the
seat right next to me, with the Kindle positioned where I could see it. I
didn’t want to take my eyes off it. I feared that somebody nearby might
recognize how wonderful it was and try to take it away.

Last night, after my little
rewrite of
Wuthering Heights
, I went
into a story called
His Golden Shackles
.
One of the hundreds of
50 Shades of Grey
knockoffs out there, this book was a free download that had been sitting on the
Kindle for months. I went in and played the role of Annabelle Stone, the pretty
young woman who takes a clerical job at Greenworld Enterprises, only to have
the billionaire CEO take a liking to her.

That CEO, a Robert Pattinson
look-alike named Christoph Green, had a terribly troubled past and was into
domination and bondage and all the other fun pastimes of the erotica section. A
cliché for our age, I know.

What made this book different
was that Christoph Green was a wizard. A billionaire CEO of a Manhattan company
who engaged in secret sorcery. Christoph used his magic to increase the size of
his fortune, to take out his enemies, and to make for better sex. That was why
the book was so fun. In other stories, the girl has sex and it’s fabulous, but
confined to the rules of reality. In this story, the orgasms were magical.

It was time to go back and see
Christoph again.

I grabbed my coffee and went
back to the Wyndam. I jumped onto the newly made bed (housekeeping had come
while I was out), I turned on the Kindle, and went back into
His Golden Shackles
, using the progress
bar to take me straight to chapter 6, the spanking scene.

Slap!

I was lying face-down on a
gurney in Christoph’s sex room. My wrists and ankles were strapped to railings
underneath. I wore a latex bodice, black rubber boots, and fishnet stockings.
My butt was completely bare so Christoph could hit it.

And hit it he did.

Smack!

It hurt so good. Before the
spanking began, he had expertly inserted a pair of magic Ben-Wa balls inside
me, which now bounced about and resonated with each spank, like a thousand
fingertips versed in the unique magic of the vagina. These balls knew right
where to touch and tickle.

Thwack! Pow! Ker-slap!

I might well have been in a
Batman comic for all the different sounds of contact his hand made with my ass.

Womp! Kack! Kerwallop!

Last time I was in the book I
made it to twenty before I cried out in agony and he mounted me from behind.
Somehow I knew that if I could hold out even longer, the ecstasy of that moment
when he took me would be even better.

“Twenty-one!” I screamed on the
final spank I could take, and then he was on me, and it was ever so yummy what
he did to my body.

This was where I left the book
on my last go-thru. I was tempted to step out and start all over again with the
spanking, see if I could get to twenty-two, but I decided I should make it to
the end before I started reliving all my favorite parts over and over.

“Nice work, My Love,” Christoph
said. His voice had just a hint of a European accent in it. The accent only
came out in the sex room. Otherwise, he sounded distinctly American.

He freed me from my bonds and
rubbed a soothing potion into my butt. Then, with movements so slow and
delicate they tickled me with their proximity, he removed my boots, my
stockings, and my bodice. He pulled the tie out of my hair and let my long,
soft locks fall over my shoulders.

“Come with me,” he whispered in
my ear.

I followed him across the room,
past the swing and the trampoline and to the hot tub. Like a gentleman helping
a lady out of a carriage, he took my hand and guided me up the stairs and into
the steaming water, where we lay back together against the cushioned wall, his
arms wrapped around my naked body.

I couldn’t decide if I liked the
explosive sex or the soothing, tender after-sex the best. It’s interesting how
that debate is the one that compels me as a reader now. Is it better to be
whipped, or caressed?

As I lay in Christoph’s arms,
the warm water lifting away any cares I had, my mind went clear, and I had a
realization about the sort of literature I was presently enjoying. A few years
back, an author would give us a love triangle, and we would declare which team
we were on, and it was fun and we made T-shirts and chatted on the Internet and
everybody re-read their favorite scenes where the girl had two boys making a
play at her.

E.L. James, who no doubt was
deep into her own teams as well (I’m thinking she was Team Edward, don’t you?),
took us back to a simpler time in our romance literature. With Christian Grey,
she returned us to a single uber-hot, royally fucked up love interest, and the
conflict isn’t about choosing one among many, it’s about rescuing the one you
chose from his own demons.

It’s a classic story. Boy meets
girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy’s own psychosis keeps them apart. Girl
fixes him and everyone lives happily ever after. E.L. James was able to revive
this old story with the addition of nipple clamps and vibrating butt plugs. And
when she did that, she unleashed a tsunami of 99 cent eBooks where all manner
of fucked up men with sex toys needed to be rescued.

Somewhere amdist the heaps of
latex and leather, there was bound to be a gem or two. I think I found one in
His Golden Shackles
. Christoph Green
might have been derivative of Christian Grey on the surface, but underneath, he
was a confused, angry, child, with complicated motivations for every action,
and an intense sorrow behind his eyes.

As he held me there in the hot
tub, with our naked bodies pressed together and our eyes closed, I wondered
what it would take to bring out the real Christoph. I wondered how many
sessions of magical ecstasy it would take in his Den of Decadence before he
would open himself up to me, and let me rescue him from his troubles.

Four magical sex sessions later,
I pulled myself free from the Kindle so I could attend a lunch date I had
planned with Michelle. We met at Hyder Park. Still afraid to take my eyes off
the Kindle, I brought it with me and kept it in my purse. Michelle brought a
picnic basket with fruit, chips, sodas, and sandwiches. She also brought her
two children, Veronica and Owen.

“How are you?” Michelle said in
a sing-song voice as she gave me a hug. “What have you been up to since the
reunion?”

Visiting faraway worlds, learning martial arts, and having the best sex
of my life
, I thought.

“I’ve just been catching up and
seeing the old haunts,” I said. “You know how it goes.”

“Oh, I bet that’s so much fun.
Do things seem different?”

“No, most everything is how I
remembered it,” I said.

“I’ve never been away for more
than a week,” Michelle said. “I’m jealous of you, getting to see it all again
with fresh eyes.”

We sat at a picnic table and ate
while the children played hide and seek in the park. I told Michelle about my
students, about Dallas, and about Derek.

“What an asshole,” she said. “To
think that someone would have a catch like you and just throw it away like
that. Men are such idiots.”

“It’s for the best,” I said.
“Looking back, I can see that things hadn’t been working with us for a while.”

“Still, a real man would have
fixed it or ended it,” said Michelle. “Oh well. At least you’re free now.”

There was a hint of bitterness
in Michelle’s voice.

“How about you?” I said. “We
didn’t get to talk much at the reunion. Tell me about your life.”

“My life is what you see here,”
Michelle said. “The kids are great. The husband is nice. He goes to work every
day. I only work weekends now. These two little people are how I spend my
time.”

I remembered how left out I felt
at the reunion when everyone at the table was talking about their kids, but
listening to Michelle now, I realized I wasn’t being fair. Those people didn’t
have much else they could talk about other than their kids. The kids were the
centers of their lives now. They weren’t trying to exclude me—they were just
speaking about what was on their minds.

“Veronica started gymnastics in
March,” Michelle said. “Veronica! Show Ms. Holly your tumble run!”

From across the park, little
Veronica beamed at the opportunity to show off, and broke into a sprint, which
turned into a series of cartwheels and rolls. When she was finished, Michelle
and I cheered for her.

“What about Owen?” I said.
“What’s his schtick?”

Michelle shook her head. “He
likes video games,” she said. “Everything else is like pulling teeth.”

“And Rick?”

“He’s doing alright, other than
his job,” Michelle said.

“What’s wrong with his job?”

“Nothing. It’s a good job. He’s
just restless. You could give my husband any job in the world and he’d be bored
with it in three months. He’s one of those grass is always greener types. When
we’re at a restaurant, he spends twenty minutes deliberating what he’s going to
have, and then as soon as it arrives, he wishes he’d chosen something else.
When we visit someplace for vacation, he wants to move there, no matter where
it is. If it’s a small town, he’s envious of the slow, simple life. If it’s a
big city, he thinks it’s better than home because there’s more opportunity.
He’s so fascinated by other people’s lives he never stops to think about his
own. It’s frustrating to me.”