A Novella MisTaken(16)

Trying to hide the depth of her embarrassment, she turned to the nearest bookshelf and found a random book to pretend to read while she recovered.

“Speaking of objectification…” Noah’s voice was challenging and startlingly close, coming just over her shoulder. Damn, the man stepped quietly. “I thought you didn’t read those.”

“What?” She looked at the book she was holding. A Woman’s Education. “Oh.” Of all the books she could have picked up she managed to choose the most humiliating one possible—an erotic romance. Really?

Except, she didn’t have to let this throw her. She was a big girl. She could pull up her big-girl panties and turn this around. “This is a romance? I hadn’t realized that’s what I’d picked up. The covers are so vague these days with equally vague author names to match, as if everyone who reads them is in hiding.” This one, written by N. Matthew, had a dark blue background with an ornate hand mirror. It told her nothing. How was anyone supposed to know what it was about?

Noah stepped to her side where she could see him and leaned an arm on the shelf. “The vague covers make them less obvious. Some people are embarrassed to read them in public otherwise.”

She shook her head and tsk’d. “So everyone really is in hiding. That’s terrible. They should be embarrassing. They’re a detriment to the women’s movement. Its ideas perpetuated by books like this that set us back to the fifties.”

He stared her down with disapproving eyes. “There you go with the judging again. Are you sure they’re detrimental?”

She hated the disappointment that sat within his words. But wasn’t it equally disappointing that he was challenging her on this in the first place? She shot back in kind. “Have you read them?”

“Have you?”

“Of course not!” The idea made her squeamish much like looking at a Hustler magazine. She wasn’t a prude, but the current trend in romance novels and typical pornography both fell into a category of culture that showed women as subordinate and mere receptacles for a man’s use.

“Then how do you know what they’re like?”

“I…” Seriously? Everyone knew what they were like. Right? Because that’s what she’d been told from her women’s studies professors in college. Because that’s what every article in her Feminine Perspective periodical said. Because there was many a discussion at Total Equality Now meetings about the very subject.

But all of those reasons were based on secondhand information, and she was smart enough to know that she shouldn’t simply adopt popular opinion without a bit of research.

Well, she had an opportunity to research now. She flipped the book open to the middle and scanned a page. “Here,” she said, pointing a finger at a paragraph that instantly caught her eye. “Listen to this:

I snake my arm around her waist and hug her to me, my pulsing cock pressing against her hip. “Can you feel that, chickadee? You do that to me. And because you are responsible, you’re going to take care of me now. On your knees.” I push her shoulder and she immediately drops to the ground. “Good girl,” I praise her. She’s a very good girl.

Unwittingly, Jaylene skimmed the next couple of paragraphs that proceeded to describe a very graphic, very male-dominated blow job then shut the book, replacing it on the shelf with a huff, and not entirely out of disgust. In fact, she didn’t really feel any disgust at all. Which was odd. Especially because what she did feel was turned on. Which maybe wasn’t quite that odd because Noah was still standing in very close proximity to her. Too close, maybe, considering how hot her blood was now running beneath her skin. She took a hopefully unnoticeable step away.

“So?” Noah asked.

“It was…” She swallowed, gathering her thoughts. Concentrate on it critically. Remove emotion. “You heard it. It was demeaning.”

She turned away from the shelf, away from his penetrating eyes—no, not penetrating, she did not want to think about penetration at the moment, especially not with Noah in the equation—and started walking back down the aisle, hoping that distancing herself from the object of discussion would also distance her from the discussion itself.

Noah followed after her. “Demeaning how?”

So the conversation was to continue then. She couldn’t entirely be upset about that. It was what she’d liked about Noah from the get-go. That he wasn’t afraid to debate a point, and God knew she loved a great debate.

This particular debate, though, bristled her, and she didn’t for the life of her know why. She felt strongly enough about her side of the argument. So what was it then?