Sometimes, while meditating on these things in solitude, I’ve got up in a sudden terror, and put on my bonnet to go see how all was at the farm.
This was a problem. The narrator of this chapter was Nelly, one of the servants at Wuthering Heights. I most definitely didn’t want to be Nelly, sitting from afar and watching the star-crossed lovers quarrel. Telling myself I’d have to figure something out, I kept reading.
The nearer I got to the house the more agitated I grew; and on catching sight of it I trembled in every limb.
Now I was there, on the moors of Northern England, looking at a stone mansion built in the 16th century, thrilled beyond belief to be seeing this iconic house in person.
I was inside Nelly’s body, but I could see Catherine feeding pigeons in the courtyard. She was so pretty. Young, innocent, with long, dark hair and a heavy dress--I stared at her with a fierce intensity, my mind so desperately wanting to be in her body rather than Nelly’s.
And it was done. In a bit of magic as simple as imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, I became Catherine. I was in her body, “feeding some pigeons in the court.”
What an amazing moment. I had found a new feature of my hallucination. Before, I had only been able to live as the point of view character of the novel. Now, by my own choice, I was a different player in the story.
As I knew he would (I’ve read this book many times), Heathcliff approached me, and our conversation quickly devolved into a passionate shouting match.
“I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally - infernally!” Heathcliff cried. “Do you hear? And if you flatter yourself that I don't perceive it, you are a fool; and if you think I can be consoled by sweet words, you are an idiot!”
“I’ve treated you infernally?” I said, feeling a swell of sadness inside me. “How have I treated you infernally?”
“You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement,” Heathcliff said, undressing me with his eyes as he spoke. “Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.”
It was a marvelous fight, one where your passions grew so hot you wanted to rip each other’s clothes off. Alas, the story did not put us together, and soon enough, my husband Edgar arrived and threw Heathcliff out. Then Edgar confronted me.
“Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me?” Edgar demanded.
In response, as Catherine had done every time I read the novel, I ran to my room and locked the door.
Now it was time to feel the beautiful agony of my sadness. I let it grow and blossom inside me, knowing that, for Catherine, there was no greater injustice than the way she and Heathcliff were being kept apart. It made her sick with depression, and she was supposed to remain in her room for days.
But by nightfall, I was already weary of it. It’s one thing to read a few sentences about a woman consumed by a sadness so great she falls ill. It’s another thing to be that woman, and spend hours in her body, wallowing in your own thoughts. Seeing things from Catherine’s point of view, I felt foolish just sitting there. Why not just go get what I want?
As I took it all in, the light of a single candle glowing in the dark, cold stone walls all around, the moors of England outside, Heathcliff across the way, I wondered if I had it in me to change the story. It was a curious feeling. I knew full well what I was supposed to do. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine never recovers from this episode. What starts as a fit of anger on her part devolves into actual sickness that ultimately kills her. As her sickness reaches its climax, she and Heathcliff have another confrontation, admit their love, and she dies in his arms.
What a raw deal.
As Catherine, I felt a part of me wanting to play that role. I heard Emily Bronte’s words in my mind, guiding my actions, taking me where the author wanted the story to go.
But I wasn’t Catherine. I was Holly, and Holly wanted Catherine to get lucky. So when the house went quiet, I put on my riding boots, grabbed a candle, and snuck out.
I would have loved to explore the entire home. At the moment, I was in Thrushcross Grange, one of two houses on the moor in the story. Both houses have held a fascination for me for years. I’ve always loved watching the various movie attempts at Wuthering Heights, not only to see how the actors handle Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, but also to take a look at the houses. The story is set in the late 18th century, but the homes were built in 1500. Giant estates of stone, one step removed from medieval. They were like castles for the landed gentry, and, as Catherine Linton, I was the lady of the house and had full access to the place.
But tonight wasn’t a night for sight-seeing. Grabbing my coat, and placing the candle gently on the landing, I went downstairs and out the front door.
There was a cold mist on the moors, glowing in the light of the moon. All around it was quiet. I took in a deep breath of clean air. I was living in a world before the industrial revolution, and let me tell you, the air was the crispest, freshest air I’ve ever had the pleasure of breathing.
I walked behind the house and to the stables, pulling out a beautiful brown horse and leading it gently into the night. At this point, even though I was writing my own story, I allowed my character’s natural instincts to take over. I didn’t know the first thing about riding a horse, but Catherine did. In the book, she is touring the moors on horseback by herself at age six. She is someone who grew up with horses all her life and has no trouble handling them.
I put a saddle on the creature, mounted its back, and was off, letting Catherine’s thoughts guide me across the moor and to Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff was staying.
I found him sleeping alone in a spare bedroom.
I’ve always had a literary crush on Heathcliff. Perhaps that was why this vision of him was, without question, the most gorgeous man I have ever seen. His hair was long and dark. His skin was a deep shade of bronze. His nose was sharp. His chin was broad. Even in a deep slumber, he had a look of incredible strength to him.
I awoke him with a kiss to the lips.
“Sweet Mother of Mercy,” he said as he jumped up.
“Shhhh…” I said, placing my finger over his lips. “It’s me. It’s Catherine.”
Then I kissed him again, harder this time, using my tongue to invite him to kiss me back.
He pulled away, but only long enough to look at me and whisper, “Is this a dream? If it be, then let me not wake up.”
Now I climbed onto the bed, putting the full weight of my body on his as we kissed. He gave himself fully to his desire, a desire that had been nurtured since childhood when Father brought him home from Liverpool, a gypsy orphan on the verge of starvation. As he wrapped his arms around me, as we rolled back into the bed and he kissed my neck, I felt years of passion coming to a head.
Oh Heathcliff, how I’ve loved you since I first saw you, I thought, giving myself over to my character, allowing all the memories to come flooding forward as he ripped open my gown and grabbed my nipple with his teeth.
“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, s
he 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.”
Holly and Her Naughty eReader Page 5