Iris and the Secret Library

  1.

  Iris was a mess.

  She sat on an uncomfortable chair in a tiny cubicle on the third floor of the massive library building. There were books all around her, some opened to a specific passage, some bristling with sticky notes out of the edges. Her head was down, her cheek on the keyboard of her decrepit laptop. A light trail of saliva dripped onto the space bar.

  She was a small woman, in height and size generally. She always thought that was why people tended to ignore her, but to be honest, her personality wasn’t doing herself any favors if she ever wanted to be noticed.

  She was the type of girl who would forget about prom and instead stay home to read and play video games. She was that type of girl, because that was exactly what she had done. Not that she had a date or anything, but she did have a vague idea that she should go to the prom. That would have been the right thing to do somehow. That also would have required a dress, and a hair style, and, well, it was simply low enough on her list of priorities that she completely forgot about it.

  But college was going to be different. She was going to be her own woman, she was going to explore all the possibilities that a single life could offer.

  That didn’t work out so hot. Aside from one freshman mixer, where she met up with a random guy with a sketchy beard and a guitar – the less said about that the better – she was even more of a nerd hermit in college than she was in high school.

  But in terms of becoming her own woman, the real drama came when she finally did take a stand. Halfway through her sophomore year, Iris discovered her true love: Chinese stories. She had read some of them when she was young, but to be honest, she didn’t really understand most of them, and she really only read them to make her parents happy. But at college, she fell into a deep rabbit hole of Chinese novels. At first, they were just a distraction from her pre-med life, which was busy and monotonous. But soon she was transported. Stories of fox spirits and zombies and mad emperors and Daoist mystics, to say nothing of kungfu warriors and sweet and sassy ingénue girls who were secretly the daughters of grand masters, they all captured her completely.

  This gradually led her to see that her pre-med life was not what she wanted at all. And for the first time, she tried to do something that her parents wouldn’t approve of. She took literature classes, not just in Chinese, but English, and even French, which she had been forced to learn in high school, alongside her piano and cram school classes. She gradually stopped taking her advanced biology and anatomy classes until one day her advisor told her that getting that pre-med degree was impossible unless she wanted to stay another two years.

  “But,” her advisor said kindly, “You could get a comparative literature degree without too much trouble and graduate on time.”

  Iris remembered that conversation clearly because, even though she could count up credits as well as anyone, she had never really thought about disobeying her parents, because that’s what this would be. She was a planned child, designed and prepped for the medical profession, and then perhaps an incredibly lucrative job in the medical services industry. She had never really thought about going against that plan. It didn’t even seem like an option that she might have.

  She knew that, and she knew how much her parents had put into their plans for her. But she had no idea, no way of knowing how explosive their reaction would be when she told them she had changed majors.

  It might have been okay if she had gone into engineering, or law, those were options they had considered early on, before they saw Iris’s aptitude scores. But literature? That was just as if she had slapped them in the face and called them horrible parents. The extended family would not be able to contain their pity and derision. The neighbors would never look at them the same way again.

  But even that inevitable conversation with her parents, with its yelling and tears, couldn’t prepare her for the letter that arrived the following week. Her father wrote aggressively on beautiful heavy stock paper, in Chinese, to tell her that her only option would be to get back into the pre-med major, even if it took another year or even two. But if she refused, if she insisted on being an unfilial daughter, then they would have no choice but to cut her off. The line she remembered most clearly was like a hammer blow:

  “There cannot be such a thing as an unfilial daughter. You are either filial, or you are no daughter of ours.”

  She cried for days. For the first time in her life, she skipped class. She tried to put together a reply, tried to find the words that would convince her parents that she was her own woman now. But the words that came were weak and brittle. Then she tried to build a plan to get back into pre-med, but she felt that she herself became weak and brittle.

  So, in the end, she started going back to her classes – her literature classes. And she found that the books helped to heal her wounds, at least in part. The weak sickly heroine of that novel showed her how to be healthy. The madman who was convinced everyone around him was a cannibal showed her how to find her own truth. Luckily, she was on a full scholarship, so when her credit cards were cancelled, she was still able to carry on, but in a much poorer fashion. To be honest, that didn’t change her life much.

  That was years ago now. She had only been in contact with her parents a couple of times since then. She invited them to her graduation, but they didn’t come. They ordered her to attend the funeral of her bitter hateful great aunt, but she didn’t go.

  After graduation, in her mind, there was no other choice for her but to go to graduate school. She felt like she had only opened up this part of her soul and she couldn’t set that aside. She applied to several programs, but was only accepted into one. It was her secret dream school. She had been in contact with a professor there, an old great woman, who wrote the most severe and brilliant books. That professor had personally chosen Iris to be her one graduate student accepted that year, for a full scholarship, which no other student would receive.

  Iris was delighted. She accepted immediately and perhaps without considering things as completely as she might have. She flew to the school with the highest of expectations.

  Graduate school stripped her of those expectations fairly quickly. She had hoped to make friends, brilliant friends with whom she could discuss arcane philosophy and theory over heavy, impossibly black coffee. She found that the graduate students were wary, paranoid, and jealous of anything that could be seen as favoritism. And Iris was the golden child, the one student. And she didn’t even really like coffee.

  But the classes were mind-blowing, and her advisor was as incredible as she had dreamed. She was exactingly strict, vicious and unsparing when going over her work, but constructive, and even kind, after her own fashion.

  At the end of her second semester, everything started to fall apart. Her advising professor died suddenly, and Iris’s entire identity at school sloughed off. She was no longer the golden child. She was no longer protected by her advisor. And most importantly, it turned out that her scholarship was tied directly to her advisor. Now that she was no longer there, neither was the money.

  She had funding to finish the year, and after a good deal of fighting, she won a position over the summer, teaching remedial English for incoming students who couldn’t write at the college level.

  But her temporary advisor, with a cruel expression that made her suspect he might be pleased to see the end of her and her advisor, told her not to get her hopes up. There were no part time positions for the coming fall, and frankly, her work didn’t fit with any of the remaining professors. So even if they did have space for another student, and no one did, there was no one in the faculty who could advise her.

  Unless she could find a school that would take her as a t
ransfer student, or if she could find a fully funded fellowship somewhere outside of the school, there was no option. She would have to leave graduate school.

  So here she sat in her little cubicle in the library. She had been rewriting applications for funding for the past couple of days, but in her heart, she knew there wasn’t much hope.

  She didn’t know what would happen once the summer was over. Maybe her parents would see this as a youthful phase. Maybe they would take her back and help her get back into school, even if it meant she would have to go back and take undergraduate pre-med classes. But that would require going back to them, admitting that she was wrong, admitting that her value was only as a tool whose use was decided by them. No, she couldn’t do that.

  Her phone beeped, rousing her out of a hazy dream in which she was at a beach bonfire party, drinking and dancing with all sorts of people. She had the strangest feeling of comfort and warmth.

  The phone beeped again, and she lifted her head, wiping the drool from her chin.

  There was a new notification from a website that posted grants for graduate school. She listlessly clicked on the message and read the description.

  Manuscript Assistant

  The Bright Hall Academy is seeking a Manuscript Assistant for a full year term. The Assistant will catalogue and organize the Academy’s collection of rare erotic manuscripts. The successful applicant will be fluent in English, Chinese, and preferably one European language. Room and board will be provided as well as a monthly stipend.

  Then there was a listing of the details, starting dates, and other requirements, letters of recommendation and statements of purpose and all the rest. There was also a description of the Academy and its location.

  Iris was more than a little confused. This didn’t read like any of the other grants. It read more like a job advertisement for a librarian. And there really wasn’t much detail at all. A full year appointment just or organize a collection? The collection must be massive. Or, as she started to believe, the people running the show didn’t know what they were doing.

  Still, this might stave off the inevitable end of her independence, and she fit the criteria, if they weren’t too demanding on that European language.

  It was only when she started writing the application that she really noticed that one word, ‘erotic.’ Erotic manuscripts? But even then, she didn’t really think too much about it except how to fit it into her statement. She had written applications for a wild spread of topics, and since she had just started grad school, she wasn’t really pigeonholed yet.

  She also didn’t really think too much about what it would mean to be reading erotic books for a year. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a sexual being. She figured that she was just about as horny as the next woman, maybe more, and as she had to buy cheap, she had worn out several loudly buzzing toys in the quiet of her little studio apartment. The main problem was that actual sex, as far as she defined it, needed another person there. And she just wasn’t good at ‘other people.’ Aside from that guitar guy at the freshman mixer, and a couple other random unwise encounters, she might as well have technically been a virgin.

  But as for something to help her along the way, well, she watched porn regularly enough, but for some reason had never really stumbled into reading for the purpose. Her mind wandered over that gap in her education as she absentmindedly edited the application.

  But after she hit send, she realized that it was already nearly three in the morning, and she had to teach her remedial English class in just a few hours. She was going to be even more of a mess than usual. Go home and sleep in a real bed or head back to the common office and get more but worse sleep on the couch? Couch it was.

  And she was a mess in class, but the material got taught, and by the end of the week she had a stack of papers to go through. As usual, some were actually pretty good, but some would take a good deal of effort in commenting, and even in deciphering.

  That Saturday night, after she finished half of the stack, she poured herself a tall glass of the finest box wine that could be found for the spare change she had in her purse, and settled down for a nice evening of masturbation. She took off her sweatpants, crawled into bed, and propped up her laptop, and then with a healthy swig of the wine, she started to open up her go-to video playlist.

  Maybe she was in a bit of a rut. I mean, did other people have a playlist they always went back to? She looked over the titles. “OMFG Caught the Babysitter!” That one had the cutest tiny girl in it. The girl was about the same size as Iris, and she liked to imagine herself being caught by that big tall musclebound hunk. “Sweet lebsians strap-on fuck.” Iris’s eyes twitched every time she saw the typo in the title, but it was a good scene. She never really thought of herself as a lesbian, or even bisexual. But the girls in that video were just incredible and so sensual. The pale one had too many tattoos, but they just looked so hot together, and the way they slid against each other made her wonder how such smooth skin would feel against her own. And the strap-on thing was actually kind of cool, too. She liked watching the dark-skinned girl towering over the other girl, her boobs bouncing with each thrust.

  Iris scanned the rest of the list and felt turned on, but also a little bored. She knew those scenes by heart. Maybe she needed to look for something new. The wild raunchy sex was great, and she loved it, but maybe she could get something with a little story.

  Then she remembered that application. Erotic Stories. Why not? There was nothing more pervy than the internet. Surely there had to be a site for erotic stories.

  She wasn’t quite prepared for the wealth of options. She pulled herself up to a sitting position with her back against the head of the bed and brought the laptop up to sit on a pillow on her lap. There were classy sites, and sites for specific kinks, and then there were some really sketchy ones that she was sure would put something fatal on her system. She actually heard herself make a ‘oooo’ sound as she scrolled through one site that seemed to be better maintained than the rest.

  Something was happening in her mind, too. She was already a bit worked up going through all her videos, but now the reader part of her brain kicked into gear. Her lust and her geekiness came together, and her body responded. Powerfully.

  She clicked on a story that had been ranked highly and dove in. It was a parody of a story about witches and wizards who go to a far-off school. Iris had enjoyed the original book, and since she had a good feeling of the characters and setting already, her mind dove deep into the story.

  It wasn’t that well-written, and some of it was just absurd, but Iris was completely hooked. A chapter in and she threw the laptop to the bed and flopped to her side, scrolling as she read. With the one hand on the laptop, the other started moving around her body. Ordinarily, she was fairly practical. She knew exactly how her body worked, and she would aim toward that. Maybe a little bit of teasing would be good to sync with the video, but generally practical.

  But here, she was genuinely caught up in the absurd story, and each erotic scene brought her higher and closer to release, but she wanted to keep reading, so she would pull back, frustrating herself in her need, just to get to the next scene. She almost laughed at herself for causing herself such torment.

  The young smart-aleck witch was struggling with her desires, and even though Iris could see how things were going to play out, the tension was real. Just like Iris, she had been taught that anything sexual was dirty and secret. A young woman wasn’t supposed to enjoy sex, or even think about it. Iris knew it was all stupidity, but early training is hard to deprogram. In any case, she empathized with the witch.

  With only one hand free, Iris had to be strategic. Her bra was thrown to the corner of the room long ago, giving her hand free access to her breasts. She was a bit self-conscious of them because they weren’t massive like so many other girls on campus, but also because she had rather large nipples that poked out aggressively. This was a problem in summer when she wanted to wear a light sh
irt or maybe skip the bra, but it was absolutely wonderful right then. There was plenty to rub on and twist.

  And as the young witch accidentally drank that one potion while locked in the closet with one of her closest friends, Iris found herself pinching and pulling at her nipple so hard that it should have been painful. It was anything but. She felt the sharp sensation jab into her, like it was setting a fire in her belly. This was something much more powerful than video porn had even been.

  She was actually having a hard time reading now, and she was surprised to find herself breathing heavy and making little grunting noises. She shifted to squeezing her whole breast so that she could get through the scene, but that was pushing her hard, too. Moving to the other breast was just as good, and just as bad.

  Then with awful suddenness, the scene ended. The door to the closet fell open and the witch and her friend tumbled out. She fell on top of him, and, after having groped each other for a good long time, the witch felt his cock pressing into her wet panties.

  But then she ran off! Iris moaned in frustration. She was on her way there, but the story just pulled the orgasm out from under her. She flung her arm back against the pillows and moaned again. But now there was no stopping her.

  The next scene was fairly tame, and Iris read it with a mad speed, what passed for a plot barely registering in her conscious mind. By the time she got to the next critical scene, her panties were soaked and hooked around one ankle. She had flipped onto her stomach and she was running her hand up and down her naked thigh, up to her butt and back down. It was a trick to try to keep her cool. If she allowed her hand to go where she needed it most, she wasn’t sure that she would be able to keep control.

  The scene was fairly simple. The witch was trapped again, this time in the shower room for some reason, and this time with two of her girlfriends. They were cursed by some book or something, Iris frankly wasn’t following with total clarity. But she did savor the description. The blonde girl stroking the witch’s back while the red-headed girl kissed her gently. The witch struggled, never having kissed a girl before, but then she gave in to her lust.