“Then I guess I’ll just have to stay behind.”
Christoph smiled and shook his head.
“Oh, you are rash and headstrong and so full of spunk. That’s why I love you, Holly. And it’s why you love me too.”
“I don’t love you, Christoph. You aren’t real.”
With frightening speed, Christoph ran towards me until he was right in my face.
“Don’t tell me I’m not real!” he shouted.
I tried to back away from him but he wrapped his arms around me. Speaking more softly, he said, “It was all real when it happened, My Love. You were the one who made it real. You chose to believe in it. Remember this? Remember how real it was?”
Christoph gave a gentle wave with his hand and all the mess around us was pushed aside. We were back in his penthouse, back in the den of decadence. I was wearing big leather boots and a rubber bodice.
“Remember how real this felt, Holly?”
He pushed me onto the bed.
“No,” I said. “It’s not what I want.”
“Oh, but I think it is, and I am the reader.”
With those words, I felt a surge of attraction to the man. It was like my body remembered what amazing things he could do to me.
“Roll onto your front, Holly,” he whispered.
A command. It was so sexy. Yes, Master, I will do as you ask, came a voice inside my head. Try as I might, I couldn’t shut up that voice, and it continued talking.
You will roll over for him. You will let him work his magic on you. You will enjoy it.
I rolled over. Even as a part of me, a very small and shrinking part of me, desired to stand up and walk away, the rest of me waited eagerly for the ecstasy Christoph could bring.
“Let’s have a little fun, shall we?” he said.
He snapped his fingers, and I felt the tingling and pressure of two shiny silver balls. The Ben Wa balls had appeared from nowhere inside me. They were already working their magic.
“Shall we begin?” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was a command for me to speak. Christoph was telling me that we would proceed.
“Yes,” I said. It was like I was speaking against my own will.
He spanked me, and the Ben Wa balls vibrated in a magical, sensuous way inside me. The voice in my head reminded me that this was my favorite scene. The spanking scene. Last time I had allowed him to spank me twenty-one times, and each slap had brought me to higher and higher levels of anticipation.
“Two,” I whispered, when he spanked me again, and I knew it was over. Christoph had won. The part of me that knew and understood that this was wrong was buried too deep. I was just a character in his novel, and in this novel, I enjoyed the fun.
“Three…..four…..five….”
On and on we went, each slap making me yelp with pleasure. Part of the fun was what the magic Ben Wa balls did inside me. Part of it was the anticipation of what would happen when I begged him to stop.
At spank number 12 I let myself go entirely. For spanks 13, 14, and 15, I was completely gone.
“More, Holly,” he said. “Let’s see if we can make you come just by doing this.”
Yes, just this. It will be so….
So…..unfulfilling.
It was empty pleasure, devoid of connection. It was the fun escape I needed from time to time, but it wasn’t real.
16, 17, 18, 19, 20—he slapped me harder and harder each time, and even as the voice of the character he wanted me to be shouted out in pleasure, the real me knew it wasn’t right.
“Twenty-one,” Christoph said. “One more and you will have held out longer than ever before.”
“No!” I shouted.
A pause behind me. Then, in an angry voice, “What did you say?”
I rolled over. “I said no. I am not a character in your book.”
Christoph hesitated, confusion in his face, and in that hesitation I raised my leg with a swift jerk that would make Dolph McDougal proud, and nailed him in the side of the head with my giant leather boot.
I jumped out of the bed.
“I created you when I read you, Christoph Green!” I shouted. “This is my Kindle!”
In a flash of light the den of decadence disappeared, and we were back in the gateway, Max and the mirror and a thousand literary characters frozen in place.
I ran to Max and touched him on the shoulder.
“Wake up,” I commanded.
Max’s body came to life.
“Holly?” he said.
He raised his eyebrows at my outfit of leather, rubber, and lace.
“I’ll explain later,” I said. “Right now we have to get you out of here.”
“But the mirror,” he said. “I couldn’t catch it in time. It’s…it’s…”
The mirror was still frozen in place, ten yards ahead of him. I ran to it, yanked it out of the air, and pushed it up against the wall. As if by magic, it stayed in place.
“What’s gotten into you?” Max said. “Are you like, The One?”
“Just go, now!” I yelled. “You have to go through to switch places with him. When you come out on the other side look away from the Kindle immediately.”
“Right,” Max said. With the goofy run I remembered from high school, he charged at the mirror and dove in head first. The mirror swallowed him whole.
“No!” came a roar from behind me. It was Christoph, running full steam at the mirror. Outside, Max’s face was still gazing in at the Kindle.
“Come on, Max,” I said. “Look away. Look away!”
Christoph was steps away from the mirror now. Max was still staring. It was like he couldn’t pull his eyes away from the screen.
Christoph was charging like a bull. He was about to jump. I was too far away to stop him.
But I could break the mirror before he arrived.
As Blair the Werewolf had done on that first fateful visit, I reached down to my ‘nether regions.’ I retrieved the two Ben Wa balls Christoph had magically put there for our spanking session, and with a throw worthy of Lebron James (or even Alex English), I launched the steel spheres at the mirror. They hit the glass half a second before Christoph did, and when he arrived, the mirror was already shattered. He ran head first into the wall and went nowhere.
“No,” he muttered. “No, it’s not true.”
He stood up and looked at the mirror. He started gathering up the broken shards from the floor.
“This is not the end!” he yelled. “I will fix it. I will not be denied!”
Staggering away from the wall, Christoph came right at me, his face red with rage. I have no idea what he intended to do when he caught me. I got out of there before I could find out.
“Goodbye Christoph,” I said. “I’m done reading this story.”
I woke up in the luxury suite atop the Marriott in downtown Denver. Seated next to me, holding the Kindle, was Max.
“Is it you?” I said. “Is it really you?”
“I should be asking you the same thing,” he said.
He was right. We needed proof that we were really who we said we were, that no rogue characters had followed us out of the eReader.
“At Clarissa’s graduation party we danced together,” I said. “Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember, Holly.”
“What song did we dance to?”
“Faithfully,” said Max. “And by the end of the song we were squeezing each other so tight that Monty Cameron told us to get a room.”
Chapter 27
Max and I rode back to Albuquerque in his Explorer. I drove so Max could hold an icepack to his face.
“Sorry about that,” I told him. “Christoph wasn’t going to let me leave the room so I popped him one.”
“You popped him a good one judging by how much it smarts,” Max said. “What are you, some sort of black belt or something?”
“No, but I did have a good teacher once,” I said.
Back in Albuquerque, we found Vivian walking around
in a daze in her home.
“What are we going to do about the Kindle?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “So long as we leave it turned off, nobody ever will come out again.”
“Shouldn’t we destroy it or something?”
I shook my head, remembering the sadness I felt when I thought Vivian had run over the Kindle with her car.
“I don’t know if the people inside the Kindle are real or even close to real, and I don’t know what’s going to become of them now, but I can’t destroy their home. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
In the end, we took out a safe deposit box at the Bank of Albuquerque and left the Kindle there. The deposit box was in my name, and maybe some day I would take it out of there and do something else with it, like bury it in the back yard, but for now, having it locked up in someone else’s vault seemed like the safest thing to do.
Max agreed to pay for the box. He also paid for the therapy Vivian wanted as a result of our adventure. And my plane ticket home. He was able to pay for all this because, during his two days as Christoph Green, his net worth went from near-bankruptcy to millionaire many times over. Somehow, Christoph had managed to set up a Swiss bank account in Max’s name and wire two hundred and thirty million dollars into it from the fictional bank he owned in His Golden Shackles.
“How did he get money into the real world from a bank in a phony one?” Max asked me.
I shrugged my shoulders. “How did any of this happen?”
“What do you think I should do with it? Should I tell the IRS?”
“What could you possibly tell them?” I said. “I think you should enjoy your newfound wealth. It’s a nice little reward for all you’ve been through. And I’m certain the money is someplace safe where no one in the government can see it. Christoph wouldn’t have done it any other way.”
“Well, do you want some too?” Max asked. “Maybe you, me, and Vivian could split it.”
“Max, if Vivian has her way, you and she will be splitting all of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, forget it,” I said, deciding it wasn’t my place to tell Max that Vivian had mapped out the rest of his life for him, with kids and a house in the burbs and all the trimmings, and the fact that he was a millionaire now meant she was certain to never let him go.
“Holly, this is a lot of money,” Max said. “We could ask the bank in Switzerland to set up an account for you too.”
“No thank you,” I said. “That money will just remind me of what almost happened to you, and I think I’d like to forget it. I’d like to forget everything and go back to my normal life.”
And that’s just what I did. I went back to Dallas. I finished unraveling what was left of my life with Derek. I hung out with Angela and Natalie. I welcomed a new crop of 12th graders in the fall. I taught them to take their role as readers seriously.
“Have you ever thought about your responsibility as reader of the story?” I asked them on the first day of school.
No one said a word.
“Think of it this way,” I told them. “Where would those characters be without you?”
A few seconds of silence before a blonde girl raised her hand and said, “Nowhere.”
“That’s right,” I said. “The words on the page are nothing but ink. Lines and curves and dots organized in a most peculiar fashion. It’s not until you read them that they become something more. It is you who gives them life. The characters of a book are only alive when a reader makes them so.”
“What does that have to do with responsibility?” said a boy from the back row.
I smiled, realizing that boy’s desk, the one in the back corner, once belonged to a shirtless Taylor Lautner.
“Well,” I said, “imagine if your life was all in the head of some alien from a higher dimension. On days when the alien was tired or bored, your life became tired and boring. But on days when the alien gave his full attention to this vision in his mind, your life was the most fascinating one ever lived. Which would you prefer?”
“The fascinating one,” mumbled a few kids in unison.
“Precisely,” I said. “So please give the same courtesy to the characters you’re reading about. If you’re going to read something, then read it with gusto. Bring that world to life in your mind with all the vitality, nuance, and adventure you can. Those characters are counting on you to make their world an interesting place to live.”
On the last day of first semester, after I’d locked up my classroom and said goodbye to the other teachers, I got a text message on my phone. It was from Max.
I’m at the ice skating rink at the Galleria. Wanna come?
The text stopped me in my tracks, and I called him back.
“What do you mean you’re at the ice skating rink?” I said.
“I mean I’m in Dallas right now and I want you to meet me at the skating rink,” said Max.
“Max, is this some sort of joke, because, in spite of all that happened with us, to me that night--”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about that night,” Max said. “Come to the rink and I’ll tell you.”
Thirty minutes later, feeling anxious and a bit angry, I joined Max out on the ice at the bottom of the Galleria. We both were slow, apprehensive skaters who spent most of our time on the wall.
“I’ve never been ice skating before,” Max said. “Have you?”
“Once,” I said. “By myself. A long time ago.”
“Yeah, about that,” Max said. “I’ve had the same phone number for ten years. My provider was able to rescue some old texts for me.”
Max handed me his phone. It was cued up to a screen of text messages between me and him, all of them with dates ten years in the past. The first one came from me. It said, It was fun dancing with you tonight, but that’s all there is between us, okay?
“What is this?” I said. “I never sent this text.”
“Keep reading,” said Max.
The next text was his response. What do you mean?
Then, from me: I mean don’t go getting any ideas that we’re a couple or something. I was just having fun with you, but you’re hardly my type.
From Max: I guess not.
From Me: Please don’t call me. I only gave you my number because I felt sorry for you.
From Max: Fine.
And that was the end.
“Max, what the hell is this? I never sent any of these messages.”
“And I never sent a message asking you to meet me for ice skating,” said Max. “At least, ten years ago I didn’t. Tonight’s text was real.”
His words hit me so hard I lost my footing and fell right on my butt.
“Ow,” I said.
“Here, let me help you up,” said Max.
He gave me his hand and tried to pull me up, but he wasn’t steady enough on his skates and we both ended up on the floor, laughing. He got up to his knees and helped me do the same, then we used the wall to get back to our feet.
“Maybe we should just stand here for a minute,” Max said.
“Max, if you didn’t send me that text,” I began.
“And you didn’t send me those texts I just showed you,” he continued.
“Then….”
Once again I found myself unsteady on my feet. Fortunately, this time I was holding onto the wall and didn’t go anywhere.
“You weren’t in control of your phone for that whole night,” Max said.
“No! After you left there was an hour where I couldn’t find it!” I said. “I was panicked that we’d never talk again.”
“Who found your phone for you?” Max said.
“It was….” I shook my head as the memory came to me. “It was Vivian.”
“Last night she brewed up an exceptionally potent batch of her mojo,” Max said. “High as a kite, she came upstairs and confessed everything.”
“Confessed everything? You mean…Vivian sent those texts?”
; “After we said good night, you lost your phone when you and your friends were dancing at Clarissa’s house.”
“Yes. Bohemian Rhapsody!” I said. “Every party in high school had to have a Bohemian Rhapsody performance where you head banged just like in Wayne’s World, and during the head banging part, I lost my phone.”
“Vivian found it,” said Max. “But before she returned it to you, she used it to send the messages to me.”
“But why would she do that?”
“She said she was jealous and drunk,” said Max. “Apparently she had…” He cleared his throat. “Apparently she had a thing for me and got angry when she saw us dancing together at the party.”
“So she sent these texts to you,” I said, still trying to sort it out in my mind.
“And then she reprogrammed your contact file for me,” said Max. “She made it so that her own number would come up under my name.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “You mean, when I thought I was texting with you about a date at the ice skating rink--”
“You really were texting with Vivian. Last night she told me the thought of sending you all the way out to the Outpost only to get stood up seemed very funny to her at the time.”
“What a rotten thing to do!”
“Yes, it was,” said Max. “And she claims she felt guilty about it ever since.”
“If she was so guilty, she should have made it right.”
“I agree. But that’s not Vivian. She’s not the sort of person who would do that.”
I shook my head in disgust.
“And now that I know she’s not the sort of person who would do that, I know I don’t want to be with her,” Max said.
“You broke up with her? Oh, Max. She’s not going to take well to that. The night of the reunion she told me this big vision she had of you and her and how she wasn’t going to let you get away.”
“I gave her the money,” said Max.
“You what?”
“Funny how a couple hundred million dollars just thrown your way can complicate things,” said Max. “I never really knew what to do with it. I was always afraid to move too much of it out of the account because I thought it would draw the attention of the Feds or something.”
Holly and Her Naughty eReader Page 17