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.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I guess we all have our hangups.”
“With Rick it’s more than a hangup. I’ve told him he needs to talk to a doctor about it. You know we put Owen on Ritalin last year and it’s changed everything. I think it would work wonders for Rick.”
As Michelle went on about the shortcomings of her husband, I found myself sympathizing with the guy. I could relate to the feeling that everyone else was having more fun than you. I think it’s a common trait among bookworms. The real joy of reading is the release it gives for all those fantasies you have of what it might be like to be someone else. Were it not for my books, I have no doubt I’d be a career-hopping nomad who packed up her car every few months and went looking for the newest adventure. How could you not? There’s something hardwired into our brains from the hunter gatherer days that makes us need an escape, and for me, the need is only satisfied with a good book.
I resisted the urge to tell Michelle that her husband needed a Kindle rather than a prescription. This wasn’t my place to speak. As had been quite clear to me at the reunion, Michelle and I were no longer the sister-like best friends we had been in high school. Her life was here. My life….
Well, my life was nowhere at the moment, except in my eReader.
We finished our lunches, I played with Michelle’s kids, we packed up, I hugged everyone goodbye, we swore to do better about staying in touch, and we were off. On the way back to the hotel, I thought about the plight of Michelle’s husband. How cool would it be to live someone else’s life for a while? How awesome was it that my Kindle was letting me do so, over and over again?
When I got back to the room I brought up Mane of the Werewolf on the Kindle and started reading. Once again I was Sula Valkyrie, the beautiful badass who falls in love with Blair the Werewolf. And, for a time, it was fun. But I’d already been Sula. Wouldn’t it be fun to experience this story from someone else’s point of view? Wouldn’t it be fun to get a completely different look on life, one that I’d never have the chance to experience in the real world?
Remembering how in Wuthering Heights I ditched Nelly’s body and hopped into Catherine’s, I approached Blair, now in his lovely human form, but only a few hours from the next full moon, and I stared him down.
“Sula, my darling, why do you look at me so?” Blair said.
Because I want to be you, I thought.
And then I was. Like a movie camera swinging around a set, my vision shifted from Sula’s westward facing view to Blair’s taller, eastward vision. I was him. I was looking at the woman whose body I had just left. For half a second she stared at me with the intensity I had left for her, but then she looked away.
“I….I don’t know,” Sula said. “What was I saying? I felt for a moment that I was not myself.”
“Then who were you?” I said.
The words came from my mouth without any effort of my own to speak them. My voice was sultry. I was speaking in a seductive tone. It was simultaneously the most natural and strange way of speaking I had ever felt. The part of me that was Blair, the wolf man, spoke this way without thinking about it. Blair wanted Sula. He always wanted her. And when he spoke, his words conveyed this desire.
But Holly, who was sharing brain-space with Blair, had never spoken this way to anyone, and she almost let out a giggle of delight.
A gender switcheroo. I was in a man’s body. Tootsie in reverse. This was gonna be fun.
Right away I noticed some fundamental differences. My desire for Sula wasn’t wrought of love or tenderness, but more from a kind of aggression. I wanted to take her body and have it all for me before anyone else beat me to it. It was an odd sensation, like I was angry and wanted to punish her for not making love to me right this moment.
And I felt less in control of my actions. You know that joke we like to make about men thinking with their penises? Turns out there’s some truth to it. Not that my penis was talking to me in words, just that it was ready to rock and roll and I had no choice but to do its bidding. It reminded me of a short story I read once where a man was a slave to the whims of his own hand. In that story, the man’s hand wanted to kill, so he became a murderer.
In my story, as Blair the werewolf, it wasn’t my hand that was in charge. My whole body was slave now to the desires of ‘my nether regions.’ I grabbed Sula and kissed her hard, and my penis went to full attention. Holy smokes that thing is weird! It was like there was a dog down there that wanted to poke its head out and start sniffing at something. Something’s there. Want it now. Must have it. MUST HAVE IT!
Did you ever read that old email forward about the dog named Mypenis? I always thought that email was stupid, and I never understood why guys found it so funny.
Now I know. Imagining my penis as some voraciously sniffing hound dog, that email popped in my mind and I started giggling at how perfectly hilarious it was.
Mypenis ate my homework.
Mypenis likes it when people pet him.
Mypenis gets excited whenever the mailman comes.
Sorry I'm late. I was playing with Mypenis.
You’ll have to forgive me. At this point, not only was I a slave to the desires of that strange organ, but I also found it insanely amusing. As Blair, I had a new appreciation for a good penis joke. The thoughts were so simple. The jokes so elegant.
Penis is funny!
Sula is hot!
Pe
nis wants her!
Or should I say, Mypenis wants her?
I grabbed Sula by the back of the head, pressed our lips together, and pushed my tongue down her throat. Yeah, baby, you like that, I thought. I’m kissing you now and you like it, doncha? Yep. It’s real good. Uh-huh. Penis.
What happened over the next minute and twenty seconds gives me incredible respect for any guy who has ever brought a woman to climax, because I’m pretty sure what I did to Sula was about as stimulating to her as a quick ride on a mechanical bull. Pants off, skirt up, panties down, Mypenis inside, updown updown herewego, happy, happy, happy dog. It’s interesting that, for a guy, it’s all RIGHT THERE. Your wanker feels good while you’re doing it and great at the climax and you don’t want to make love you want to go up and down and up and down and maybe bark like a dog while you’re doing it.
SHA-ZING!!! That’s what climax feels like for a guy. You can’t help but make that stupid face they make, because it’s all….SHA-ZING! Your toes curl up and you grunt and it’s just so fucking awesome.
But when it’s over….fartknobs and joysticks you cannot get out of there fast enough. It’s like there’s some biological imperative to bolt, like nature’s telling you if you stick around she might make you change a diaper some day. She wanted to snuggle and cuddle and I was all BITCH PUH-LEEZ (bitch, get it? Cuz I’m….a werewolf…ha ha….PENIS!!).
I left Mane of the Werewolf feeling wiser about how the world works and much more forgiving of all the guys I’ve known who were less than stellar in bed. That hyper little doggie that men carry around between their legs is crazy. I don’t know how they get through the day with that thing.
Chapter 8
I spent the better part of the next day messing around in the Kindle.
I went into Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, jumped into Hermione’s character, and kissed everybody’s favorite boy wizard on the lips, just to see what would happen.
What happened is I felt immensely oogie, like I was kissing my brother, so I left.
Next I went into Mockingjay, jumped into Prim’s character, and kept her away from all exploding parachutes because, seriously, what Suzanne Collins did to Prim in that book kind of ruined the whole series.
I went into Gone Girl and…oh, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the book. Let’s just say I loved that novel and would have loved it a lot more with a different ending, so I crawled into Nick’s head and made him behave how I’d wanted him to when I read the book.
I went into The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis and corrected an offensive bit of that book where the author condemned Susan to hell because she liked to go shopping.
I went into Atlas Shrugged and lurked around inside John Galt’s body. Every time somebody asked “Who is John Galt?” I jumped out and shouted, “I am!”
I went into Breaking Dawn and experienced the bed breaking scene for myself. Good times.
After it was done, I jumped into Edward’s character for a change, and was inside his body when Bella spoke aloud her thoughts on the baby’s name.
“I want to name her…Renesmee,” Bella said.
Once again, I think we need to give credit to any guy who keeps it together and can act even halfway civilized in daily life. You all remember how accommodating Edward was to Bella when she wanted to go with this ridiculous name. Well, this time through, with me inside his brain, he was unable to be such a gentleman.
“I’m sorry, what?” I said from inside Edward’s body.
“Renesmee,” Bella said.
“Re-nez-may?”
“Renesmee.”
“Renezzzzmaaaay.”
“Yes, Renesmee.”
What happened next wasn’t entirely my fault. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it’s what Edward wanted to do. I know. I was right there in his mind. Edward the silent, stoic, supporter of his wife was on the outside. On the inside…well….it was a bit different. All I did was let his true thoughts come out.
“BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!”
“What?” Bella said. “What’s so funny?”
I was bent over at the waist, holding my stomach from laughing so hard.
“Renez…” I snorted from inside Edward’s body. “Renez..” I coughed from fits of hysterical laughter. “Are you seriously thinking of naming that baby…Renez…Oh my God, Bella. You’re a riot! Renesmee! Have you ever heard something so fucking stupid in your life! HAHAHAHA!”
Having thoroughly angered Bella, I decided to get out of the book. I returned to my own body, finding myself on the bed in the hotel room with absolutely no idea what time or even what day it was.
“I’ve got to take a break from this thing,” I said. “I’m losing track of my life, I’m forgetting to eat and to shower, and….and I’m talking to myself.”
I put down the Kindle and set out to rejoin the real world for a little while. A shower, a change of clothes, some makeup, and I headed out. There was an Applebee’s across the parking lot from my hotel. I walked there and got a table for one.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen at Applebee’s—I was only trying to get out of my hotel room—but as soon as I stepped inside, the smell of meat made me a wee bit crazy. When the waiter came to take my drink order, I told him I wanted, “A water and a big hamburger cooked as rare as your chef is willing to make it.”
This was not a normal meal order for me. I’m not a full-on vegetarian, but I did read Diet For a New America and thought it was pretty compelling. I can go many months between hamburgers, and never once in my life have I asked for it to be rare, much less ‘rare as the chef is willing to make it.’
When the burger came, I pulled the meat out of the bun, cut off a slice with my fork, and stuffed it in my mouth. It was so….disappointing. Some part of my brain had expected this meat to be the filling, juicy, bloody treat I needed, but when I bit into it, my body was like, “Eh. It’s a hamburger.”
And then it occurred to me that the craving for fresh meat was something I’d been carrying around with me all day long. When I was in Harry Potter, I saw a possum in the woods and wanted to roast it with some fiendfyre so I could gnaw on it. When I was in Gone Girl I nervously ate cold cuts out of the refrigerator. When I was in Atlas Shrugged I remember improvising a crazy long off-the-cuff speech that included the line, “John Galt is the man who loves meat.”
That love of meat began with my stint as Blair the Werewolf. It hung around with me all day and was morphed when I became Edward the vampire, who wanted that meat to be bloody. Could it be that, as I was inhabiting these characters, I was adopting some of their traits?
I thought about a lecture I gave to my twelfth graders at the end of last year.
“When you read a novel, you aren’t a passive observer.” I told them. “You are a full partner in the telling of the story. The novels we’re reading in this class are more than a collection of scribbles on a page. They are an invitation for you to join hands with the author and build an entire universe in your mind where reader and character become one, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come out of the experience with a different outlook than you took in.”
Was that what was happening here? Had I come out of these Kindle books a different person thanI was when I went in? Were the characters from inside the books sharing space in my head, just as I had shared space in theirs?
I looked down at the undercooked hamburger and pushed it away. Strange how quickly the craving had left me as soon as I’d tried to satisfy it. When I bit into the hamburger, it was like my body reminded my brain I was Holly, not Blair, not Edward, and I was no longer interested in bloody meat.
But as quickly as that craving disappeared, a new craving took its place, and I could tell that this one would not be so easily dismissed. I wanted to go back to the hotel room, get back in the Kindle, and read His Golden Shackles.
I wanted to spend more time submitting to Christoph Green.
The craving was strong and foreign, and I knew right aw
ay it wasn’t me. I was carrying all sorts of baggage around with me now, having gone in and out of so many books on my Kindle, but there was no book in which I spent more time than His Golden Shackles. Half the night I had been in there playing Annabelle Stone, the everygirl who discovers a passionate submissive inside her that is perfectly matchedto Christoph Green’s wizard dom. Like Catherine and Heathcliff, or Bella and Edward, Annabelle and Christoph were written to have a love that cannot be denied, and whatever part of Annabelle had parked herself in my brain was impatient to go back to the book and be with her lover.
Who was I to keep those two love birds apart?
Let me tell you about the first sex scene in His Golden Shackles. It begins with Christoph saying to Annabelle, “I want to make love to you. I want to be inside you now,” and she’s all, “Holy cow!” (there are lots of Holy Cow’s, Holy Moley’s, and Holy Shit’s in all of these 50 Shades of Grey knockoffs…but surprisingly few Holy Fuck’s considering that the writer is trying to convey a good fuck as a religious experience….but I digress…).
Anyway, after Christoph declares his intent to get inside Annabelle, it’s on like Donkey Kong With An Extra-Long Schlong. Christoph starts out with some nipple biting, moves on to some clitoris licking, does his first insertion in the missionary position (where they look at each other with “rabid intensity”), and then, right when she’s at the point where orgasm is about to arrive, they switch positions. This becomes a theme for the entire scene. Christoph brings Annabelle up to but not quite at climax, over and over again. Every time she’s about to get there, he switches positions and the buildup starts again. It’s a scene you could use in calculus class to teach the concept of limits. The limit of ecstasy as it approaches orgasm is….
And then when he finally allows Annabelle to get there, Christoph says, “Go baby,” and she has a “volcanic eruption of pleasure.” When it’s over, Christoph says, “Oh my sweet darling. Where shall I take you next?”
As fun as a scene like that is to read on the page, imagine living it in person. Imagine a dominant billionaire sex wizard ramping you up for an hour until your body explodes in a volcanic eruption of pleasure.
Holly and Her Naughty eReader Page 6
