Free Holly and Her Naughty eReader by Julianne Spencer Page A

hard.
    “Renez…” I snorted from inside
Edward’s body. “Renez..” I coughed from fits of hysterical laughter. “Are you
seriously thinking of naming that baby…Renez…Oh my God, Bella. You’re a riot!
Renesmee! Have you ever heard something so fucking stupid in your life!
HAHAHAHA!”
    Having thoroughly angered Bella,
I decided to get out of the book. I returned to my own body, finding myself on
the bed in the hotel room with absolutely no idea what time or even what day it
was.
    “I’ve got to take a break from
this thing,” I said. “I’m losing track of my life, I’m forgetting to eat and to
shower, and….and I’m talking to myself.”
    I put down the Kindle and set
out to rejoin the real world for a little while. A shower, a change of clothes,
some makeup, and I headed out. There was an Applebee’s across the parking lot
from my hotel. I walked there and got a table for one.
    I don’t know what I was
expecting to happen at Applebee’s—I was only trying to get out of my hotel
room—but as soon as I stepped inside, the smell of meat made me a wee bit
crazy. When the waiter came to take my drink order, I told him I wanted, “A
water and a big hamburger cooked as rare as your chef is willing to make it.”
    This was not a normal meal order
for me. I’m not a full-on vegetarian, but I did read Diet For a New America and thought it was pretty compelling. I can
go many months between hamburgers, and never once in my life have I asked for
it to be rare, much less ‘rare as the chef is willing to make it.’
    When the burger came, I pulled
the meat out of the bun, cut off a slice with my fork, and stuffed it in my
mouth. It was so….disappointing. Some part of my brain had expected this meat
to be the filling, juicy, bloody treat I needed, but when I bit into it, my body was like, “Eh. It’s a
hamburger.”
    And then it occurred to me that
the craving for fresh meat was something I’d been carrying around with me all
day long. When I was in Harry Potter ,
I saw a possum in the woods and wanted to roast it with some fiendfyre so I could
gnaw on it. When I was in Gone Girl I
nervously ate cold cuts out of the refrigerator. When I was in Atlas Shrugged I remember improvising a
crazy long off-the-cuff speech that included the line, “John Galt is the man
who loves meat.”
    That love of meat began with my
stint as Blair the Werewolf. It hung around with me all day and was morphed
when I became Edward the vampire, who wanted that meat to be bloody. Could it
be that, as I was inhabiting these characters, I was adopting some of their
traits?
    I thought about a lecture I gave
to my twelfth graders at the end of last year.
    “When you read a novel, you aren’t a passive observer.” I told
them. “You are a full partner in the
telling of the story. The novels we’re reading in this class are more than a
collection of scribbles on a page. They are an invitation for you to join hands
with the author and build an entire universe in your mind where reader and
character become one, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come out of the experience
with a different outlook than you took in.”
      Was that what was happening here? Had I come
out of these Kindle books a different person thanI was when I went in? Were the
characters from inside the books sharing space in my head, just as I had shared
space in theirs?
    I looked down at the undercooked
hamburger and pushed it away. Strange how quickly the craving had left me as
soon as I’d tried to satisfy it. When I bit into the hamburger, it was like my
body reminded my brain I was Holly, not Blair, not Edward, and I was no longer
interested in bloody meat.
    But as quickly as that craving
disappeared, a new craving took its place, and I could tell that this one would
not be so easily dismissed. I wanted to go back to the hotel room, get back in
the Kindle, and read His Golden Shackles .
    I wanted to spend more time
submitting to Christoph Green.
    The craving was