The Book Lover Ch 02

"I can't believe he's gone," Jessie Murray said between sobs as she sat on the floor of her apartment.

"I know," Tom said as he wrapped his arms around her and held her close.

She laid her head against his chest and sobbed. Gramps was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it. It hurt so bad. Perhaps even more than when her dad had died on 9/11.

"That's it," Tom said soothingly. "Let it out, it's okay to grieve his loss."

In that moment, she felt as though she would never be able to do anything but grieve his loss.

Gramps had saved her. There were no two ways about it.

She had a troubled childhood, and when she had been expelled from school, her parents had to either homeschool her, or put her in a private school somewhere. Private school would have been an easy choice, since both her parents worked, and they certainly had the money to afford a private school, but in truth they were afraid that sending her back to school would just get her expelled yet again.

Looking back, Jessie was surprised that she had no memories of what she had done that had caused her to be expelled in the first place. Her family never spoke of it. Gramps never talked to her about it. She could only remember her life

after

she had gone to live with him.

He had suggested a change of scenery might be in order. He was retired and looking for things to do anyway. If she moved in with him, he could homeschool her. Perhaps a little time away from her peers would allow her to refocus and learn how to avoid the troubles she had been in. So, she had moved in with him, and he had rescued her and changed her life. And now, he was gone.

She looked around the apartment. It was packed with plastic storage bins. They were everywhere, filling nearly every empty space in the apartment in stacks four high, reminding her of the glue that bonded her to her grandfather for the years she spent at his house.

"He loved these books," she said with a sigh.

"And he knew that you loved them as much as him," Tom agreed.

He had taught her to love books. Every day in his home was spent either reading books or discussing what they had taught her. He taught her to devour them, searching for meaning, applying everything she read to her own life and circumstances, looking for ways that her newly acquired knowledge could make her a better person. It instilled in her an insatiable desire to learn. When she left his house and enrolled in school again, she was transformed. She studied hard and applied herself to everything she did with a laser like focus.

She was the valedictorian of her graduating class, having never received any grade other than an A from that point on. It was a far cry from the 5th grader who had been in and out of multiple schools, and who was almost constantly in some kind of trouble. She went on to graduate summa cum laude from Columbia and to get a masters degree in architecture. It was no lie to say that Gramps and his books had completely changed the course of her life.

No one else in the family shared his obsession with these books, which, she was sure, was why he had chosen to give them all to her.

"How many can I keep?" She asked her boyfriend as he continued to comfort her while they sat together on the floor of their modest one bedroom apartment.

He shrugged, looking around. The bins took up almost the entire apartment.

"I will make you a bookshelf when we get a bigger apartment," he said. "As tall as we can make fit. You can fill it with books at that point. In this place, however ..." he shrugged again. "Why don't you go through a few bins and pick out a dozen or two that remind you of him. We can always go back to the storage place and get more, or swap some out later."

He stood and helped her up and pulled her into a big hug, then gave her a tender kiss on the lips.

"I am so sorry," he whispered to her. "James was an amazing man. We will all miss him."

He made his way to the kitchen. "Care for a beer?" He asked.

"Yes please," she replied. She pulled the top bin off the stack and set it on the floor closest to her and opened it up. The first book she saw was

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

. She almost broke down right there. She had loved that book. It had taught her that the stereotypes that are so ingrained in our society are often wrong, and that we have been trained to accept them even when all evidence teaches us that we shouldn't.

"Don't forget we're meeting your family for dinner tonight," Tom said as he handed her the cold beer from the fridge.

Shit!

She

had

forgotten. The last week had been so crazy she had entirely forgotten what day it was. It was her 25th birthday. She and Tom were supposed to be in Paris. They had saved up for a long time to afford that trip. She got the vibe from Tom that he may have been thinking about proposing to her on the trip, perhaps even on her birthday. Maybe that's what he would have been doing right then if Gramps hadn't hadn't had a massive heart attack two days before they were scheduled to leave.

The airline was very understanding and gave them credit for another trip in the future. They had postponed the trip. The week had instead been filled with preparing for and attending his funeral. It had ended with them sitting in a law office in Manhattan listening to an overweight lawyer read James Stringer's last will and testament.

Gramps had chosen to sell nearly everything at an estate auction, with the proceeds being donated to charity. He had made sure to teach his kids the value of hard work and a good education. None of his kids had any need for his money, so he wanted everything to go to charity. He had always said he didn't want his children and grandchildren fighting over his stuff when he died. He carefully picked items to give to each of his children and grandchildren that he felt they would remember him by, which is how Jessie ended up with his large collection of books. Most of them had little monetary value, but they had represented her connection to him, and had been the objects that had rescued her from her troubled past.

No one seemed to care that she had received all the books, since they had never much cared for them when he was alive. She hoped no one knew about the collection he kept separate from all the others. Those books contained a few books that were quite rare and which she suspected were pretty valuable. She never imagined trying to sell any of his collection, but if the family knew there was money to be had, they might have been more interested in the collection.

"What time do we need to be there?" She asked Tom about the dinner plans.

"6:30," he replied.

That gave her more than six hours to go through the bins a little before she had to start getting ready.

"Okay," she said. "Mind if I spend that time looking through some books?"

"I fully expect you to," he replied. "Want me to help, or stay out of your hair?"

"I already know how much help you would be," she said with a smile, "which is exactly none. I also know you want to be watching the game."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he replied. "I'd be great help."

"Yeah right," Jessie replied. "Just go watch your game. I think I need time alone with the books anyway."

He gave her a hug and a kiss and then went to the living room and turned on the game. She turned back to the bin and pulled out Huck Finn and opened it to see the pages with notes scribbled in them.

Gramps had a lot of books that he would never have let her write in. But the old paperback copies of books were a totally different story. He

made

her write in those. He wanted to read her thoughts and impressions so they could discuss them.

She vividly remembered the discussions she had with gramps about the books that he would assign her to read. She had always been puzzled by how clear her memories were of her time with Gramps, considering that she had literally no memory at all of the events that led up to her being sent to live with him.

She held the copy of Huck Finn in her hands and once again the tears flowed freely and uncontrollably. She remembered the words of her grandfather after 9/11. She had been living with him at that point. Her dad had been in the south tower. He had never come home to them. The pain had been unbearable, much as it was when she learned Gramps had passed.

'It's OK to cry,' he would tell her, and they cried a lot together, 'but then you need to get to doing something. You have to remember the man he was and do your best to become the person he would have wanted you to be.'

As usual, he had books for everything. They read books that helped her deal with her grief and helped her decide that she needed to become the type of person that would have made her dad proud. She knew that Gramps would expect the same thing of her now that he had passed. Her mom had remarried in 2005, but Jessie never got along her stepfather, and so Gramps had become the main father figure in her life. His passing had crushed her and she didn't know how she could recover, but knew the answer would be found in the books. She could almost hear Gramps urging her to find her solace by looking in the best books.

She spent the next couple of hours digging through some of the bins, laughing and crying as she would pull out a book that she remembered reading and discussing with Gramps. They would spend hours going over the reports he would make her write, defending her positions and backing them up with passages from the books. He had taught her to think, and she had never gone back to what she was before.

She had only gone through a small fraction of the bins and already had several large stacks of books set aside that she wanted to keep. She knew that if she examined all the books she would end up wanting to keep many more than they had room for in their apartment, so she decided she would just randomly pick fifteen books and then prepare the bins to go off to storage.

She picked those books out of the large stack she had collected over the last couple of hours of reminiscing, and put the rest back into the bins. It was as she was stacking the last bin in the very back of the dining area that she felt it.

She stood on her tiptoes to put the bin on top of the stack, and this brought her bare feet close to the bottom bin on the stack, and she was so startled that she nearly knocked over the entire stack of bins. The bottom bin was radiating an intense amount of heat. It felt hot enough that if she had kept her feet close to it for any length of time they would have been burned.

How was that possible?

She squatted down by the bin and put her hands out, almost as if she were trying to warm them by a fire, and sure enough, she could feel intense heat radiating from the bin. She couldn't imagine that the plastic bin could handle that much heat without actually melting. Tentatively she reached out her hand and placed it on the side of the bin, expecting it to be almost too hot to touch. It wasn't. Instead she felt the heat radiate up through her hand and practically envelope her entire body. Yet the contact point in her hand didn't feel any warmer than the rest of her. It was a feeling like climbing into bed on a cold winter's night after preheating it with an electric blanket. The warmth permeated every part of her, enveloping her in a most pleasant, comfortable feeling of safety and security. For that moment, she forgot completely about her grief and simply enjoyed the warmth that enveloped her.

She wasn't exactly sure how long she just stayed there, squatting beside the bin, her hands pressed to its side as she revelled in the feeling of the heat filling her body with relaxing comfort. She even noticed a very pleasurable feeling of warmth radiating out from between her legs. This heat felt more like the heat of desire, and it startled her while at the same time filling her with an intense longing she could never remember feeling before.

So this is what sexual desire felt like?

She instantly wondered how she could feel that from simply touching a plastic bin, when she had never before felt it, even when making love with the man she loved and adored.

She felt a warmth and, surprisingly, a wetness beginning to develop between her legs as she used her hands as a conduit for the heat emanating from the bin. She luxuriated in the feelings coursing through her for what seemed like a very long time, but in reality was no more than a minute. Then she nearly knocked over the entire stack of bins as she raced to free that bottom bin, practically tearing the lid off of it to find out what was making it do this to her.

In contrast to the radiating warmth she felt from the outside of the bin, the books inside all felt cold and sterile. She began almost frantically removing the books from the bin, not even being careful to stack them neatly outside, worrying that nothing inside the bin would hold any explanation for what she felt when she touched it. She began to wonder what could be different about this generic plastic bin when suddenly she noticed it. On the bottom row of books, in the front right corner of the bin there was a small book wrapped in newspaper. The air above the book seemed to be shimmering ever so slightly. She reached over and touched the paper-wrapped spine. She gasped as she felt an intense heat radiating, this time from directly between her legs, and spreading up through her nipples, which instantly hardened.

Fuck!

Never had she felt anything like that before.

The heat continued up to her face which became hot and flushed. Her mouth fell open and she heard a little moan escape her lips.

How could this be happening to her?

All these years with Tom, a man she loved deeply and whom she knew loved her, and she had never felt anything like this. Not even when he touched and even licked her in her most private places. How could she suddenly be mad with lust because of a book wrapped in newspaper, buried in a bin full of books from Gramps' library?

What the hell was going on?

She realized something else in that moment. Suddenly she understood all of her friends, with their constant discussion of boys and sex. If this was what sexual desire felt like, she suddenly knew why people seemed so obsessed with it. It was a delicious feeling and she wanted to satisfy the urges swelling within her more than anything she could remember.

She looked more closely at this odd little book.

She knew what the newspaper wrapping meant. Gramps had a good friend named Eli who had owned a small bookstore since the 60s. It was geared towards collectors, and he specialized in limited editions, and extremely rare books. Whenever he sold a rare book, particularly one that was in a fragile condition, he would always wrap it in a page from the New York Times that was delivered to his shop every day. This had to be a rare, or at least fragile, book that Gramps had bought from Eli.

She carefully extracted the book from the corner of the bin and held it in her hands. She felt a thrumming taking place down inside her now very wet panties. She almost staggered into the dining area and sat down at the table and rested the book in front of her. She was glad that Tom was engrossed in the game that was on television and didn't see the way she was walking since she had no idea how she could explain what was happening to her.

She carefully began to unwrap the newspaper from the book, making sure to avoid touching the book itself until she could assess its condition. She noticed it was the front page from the Times and it felt very odd to her as she saw the headline that read

Nixon Resigns

.

Had she not been thoroughly distracted by an overwhelming feeling of lust, she would have realized that the 41 year old headline looked bizarrely out of place on a sheet of newsprint that looked as though it had come from that day's newspaper.

The book seemed exceptionally odd to her. The cover was leather, but was made from a skin she didn't recognize in any way and was devoid of any of the texturing so common in leather materials used in book binding. There were no marks anywhere on the cover of the book. The material somehow looked simultaneously ancient and brand new. Ancient because it looked to have been made without any modern tools of any sort, but brand new because it showed absolutely no signs of wear or aging.

She reached out and touched the book and then gasped rather loudly. The cover of the book felt impossibly warm to her. As she touched it, she could see the image in her head of her hand stroking a long, thick, uncut penis.

Cock!

The thought burst into her mind. This was a cock, both longer and thicker than what she was used to. She felt an incredible desire well within her as she found herself stroking this incredible cock.

She pulled her had away, and just as suddenly, the cock was once again a ancient leather bound book sitting on the kitchen table.

"You OK?" Tom asked from across the room, responding to her gasp, as he watched the game.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just a little paper cut," she lied.

He showed no signs of wanting to investigate further for which she was extremely grateful.

She carefully opened the cover of the book and looked inside.

The pages of the book were unlike any she had ever seen. They were not made of paper, but of some kind of vellum, a skin of some sort, stretched considerably thinner than the skin that had been used for the cover. There was nothing resembling a cover page in the book, the first page of the book appeared to be full of characters.

She was not a linguist, but had spent a lot of time with Gramps in Eli's bookstore looking at exceptionally rare books and studying various types of text. This text reminded her of the Sanskrit she had seen, and appeared to have been very carefully and meticulously written into the skin that had been converted into its pages. The consistency of the lettering spoke of someone dipping a writing implement into some sort of ink as she could see thicker spots and other letters that were nearly invisible.

As she concentrated on the characters, she saw them begin to move, writhing about with the same pleasure she was in that moment feeling inside her own body. She reached down and touched the page, her fingers exploring one of the words in the book.

And she found herself transported to some other location. She was lying on her back on the cold, hard ground, and she was naked. As she looked up she could see nothing but the navel of another woman who was kneeling over her face. Directly over her mouth was the woman's vagina.

Pussy!

Once again she found herself replacing the technical terms she always used to describe such body parts with the slang more commonly used by others.

Cunt!

It was a word she could never remember using, but this was a

cunt

, and it was wet and her tongue was buried inside of it.

She could also feel a hot wet tongue between her own legs, probing her depths just as she was doing to the woman above her.

She was filled with an ecstasy she had never before experienced. She moved her hand on the page, filled with a desire to stroke the characters which had seemingly come to life before her, and once again she was transported, this time she could feel cold, hard stone pressing into her bare back. Above her was a man, pressing down onto her.

And

into

her.

She had never before felt so full. She instantly knew this was the cock she had felt before in her hand, both longer and thicker than Tom.

She knew, in that instant, what sex was all about. It had never felt anything like this before. Her whole body tingled with the ecstasy of the moment. She felt herself building towards something she had never before experienced, pleasure that had, to that point in her life, never been available to her.