"Your face is red," he said. "You look as though you have some kind of fever."
It felt as though she was in a fever, a most powerful one. Her head was light and her face was hot. But, she shook her head. "I'm fine, Mr. Rowe. I'll get back to work."
"Very well."
Mr. Rowe left her alone after their brief exchange. Determined to get through her day, Joan concentrated and focused on her work. Before she knew it, it was growing dark and Joan had finished her work. She quickly went home.
She meant to throw the book away, but she couldn't do it. It had a strong pull, a sort of morbid fascination had taken hold of her. So she went to bed, lit her candles and continued to read, unable to stop herself. The dark haired woman was now being taken to a port in Stormwraith where she was auctioned off to a lord and taken to one of Stormwraith's ancient castles. There, the noble healed the scars on her back with magic and begun instructing her in the ways of a Stormwraith house-slut. The book gave vivid, detailed descriptions of her training. She was taught how to please men, how to think and behave. Her old personality was gradually replaced with a submissive, obedient one. The book ended with her a happy and grateful fucktoy. Every description in the book, Joan was perfectly able to visualize. Every instruction and technique described was captured perfectly by her mind's eye. Joan clutched the book to herself tight and for the first time, touched herself.
~ o ~
After a week, Joan had read the little red book a few times. It was becoming an obsession with her. The worse was the deep sense of shame that she felt for spending her nights reading filth and fingering herself. She couldn't believe what she was doing. Every night she was touching herself like some possessed thing. At work, she could barely concentrate. All Joan wanted to do was go home and pleasure herself while thinking of submission. It was intolerable and her work was suffering for it. She seemed to notice the men around her more as well. Joan always felt their glances at her, wondering just what was under those modest dresses of hers. But now she felt their leering all the time, as if they knew what she was doing to herself in her apartment at night.
Mr. Rowe had always been the sort of man who touched a lot, though never inappropriately. Joan had always been indifferent to his touch on her shoulder, but now she felt a certain kind of excitement whenever he did. She would blush and feel her heart quicken just a little. He seemed to notice as well as his hand was becoming more familiar and Joan was alarmed by how much she liked that bold familiarity. It made her think of that pirate, taking the dark haired woman by force and turning her into an obedient sex slave. The fact that such thoughts would even enter into her educated head was shameful to her in the extreme. The worst of it was that the more shame she felt, the more pleasurable the thrill. Joan didn't just want to be touched, she wanted to groped and pawed. She wanted to be forcefully taken over the desk and have every man in the building to take his turn on her.
Joan managed to keep control of herself at work, but that control was slipping. That evening, instead of taking the trolley home, she returned to the bookshop where she purchased that awful book. Mr. Puddle was behind the counter and the shop was empty. It usually was. Joan went up to the counter with the intention of cursing the man who had sold her that corruptive filth. He was smiling at her as if nothing was wrong which only infuriated her all the more. Her jaw was clenched and her green eyes were determined when he asked her, "care to purchase another one?"
Joan was shocked by the question. She went to speak but her voice faltered. Suddenly, she was so confused and lost. She tried to shake the fog from her head but something in her longed for that shameful thrill. Defeated by her own moral weakness, Joan simply nodded with a look of naked shame on her face. She asked, "how much?"
"Forty coppers."
She didn't even argue. She paid the money and received another little red book with black lettering. "Sinful Things," this one read. Joan said nothing else to the smut peddler. She just turned and silently walked out of the little bookshop. Soon enough she was home. She lit the candles and drew the curtains. It was a cold night, so she put some coal in the furnace and read on the floor close by. "Sinful Things" put all sorts of things in her head.
Where before, her mind was a wild tempest thrashing about, "Sinful Things" had calmed it to a mild summer's storm. There was a calming effect to the prose. The cadence of the words was soothing like a gentle but strong whisper. "The Submission" was like a rape, violent and uncaring for the object of its savagery. "Sinful Things" was different, quieter and yet somehow more powerful in its ability to insert thoughts and images into Joan's mind.
There was no central story or narrative. It was a strange, disconnected book that was filled with nothing but one unrelated scene after another. The first two were of two young women in meadow. One watched the other masturbate and then they kissed, which proceeded into the two of them doing things that Joan never dreamed two women could do to each other. The scene's imagery was so vivid in Joan's mind that she could practically feel the breeze of the meadow on her face as the two women depraved themselves in the most sinful manner imaginable. The next scene was a woman on a stage in an auditorium filled with strange, nameless men. She stripped down naked before them and bent over a chair so that they all could get a good look at her pussy. It was at that scene that Joan started to masturbate. The next scene was a whore who sucked a man's cock. After that was a woman tied to a bed, gagged and blindfolded, who was fucked by a group of men, one after another. That was as far as Joan got. She came at that. The strange thing was, there was no description of the women in the three scenes after the lesbian encounter. Joan kept imagining herself on the stage, sucking the cock, and being fucked bound, gagged and blindfolded on the bed. Strangely, it almost felt real.
Joan laid on the floor panting, her big breasts heaving in the cold night. The book laid on the floor beside her. She stared at the ceiling, her head dizzy and spinning. She felt content, almost fulfilled, but there was a need for more, to go further. She was filled with lust, but a calm aching one that felt good and right. There was something happening to her, a force that was corrupting her. She thought about the bookshop and Mr. Puddle. She tried to remember the first time she went in and how she found it. Didn't Mr. Rowe recommend it to her?
