The Bookstore

By WintermuteX
wintermutex.stories@gmail.com
https://www.asstr.org/~Wintermutex/ https://www.wintermutexstories.com/ https://www.wintermutexstories.org/

Content: Pedophilia, Young Girls, Softcore

The boy's gap-toothed grin widened as he rushed up to the table. His hair was a curly chestnut brown, his eyes an ambiguous shade of ruddy dark. He was the first in line. He had been standing just outside the door of the bookstore for an hour, clutching the big hardcover book tightly to his chest like a shield, watching us set up the table. When the staff finally unlocked the big double set of glass panes and pulled the heavy doors, he had practically bounded in.

"Here!" he squeaked, holding out the book with both hands. I mustered my best smile for him - no mean feat for a perpetually grumpy and morning-averse man like myself. The rest of the people waiting began to stroll into the bookstore in a rather more sedate manner. The line looked like it stretched a long way, meandering out of the shop and winding a sinuous path around the plaza fountain and out of sight.

"Please!" The boy shook the book frantically, his crazy grin stretched to the breaking point. "I love it so much! Please sign it Mr. Evans!"

"Of course. Of course." I tried to reassure him with another polite smile. "That's what I'm here for, after all. What's your name, young man?"

"Jake!" he spouted, practically hopping as he forced the staccato syllable out. "It's Jake!"

"To Jake," I murmured, my pen scratching the inside of the front cover. "Follow your dreams always - TE".

His eyes widened with glee as I finished and handed the book back to him. He loitered a moment, bouncing slightly on his feet while hugging the big hardback novel to his chest, and managed a garbled thank you before remembering that there were people in line behind him and dashing off. The enduring spirit of youth, I mused, watching him go for a moment before the next man in line stepped up to the table.

Since my first novel had exploded, topping the charts almost overnight, everything had seemed like a whirlwind. Tours and interviews and signings in bustling venues grew to overwhelm my time, leaving almost no time for my actual passion - writing. I preferred the quiet of my study and the lull of the tapping keys to this sort of engagement, but I knew it came with the territory. The short, fat man holding out the book to me from across the table was thankfully more reserved than the hyperactive boy, but his grin seemed no less genuine. His thinning hair and thick glasses gave him the authentically nerdy look of a perpetual Game Master, the kind you could likely find at any Dungeons and Dragons table. I took the book in hand, trying my best to return a winning smile.

"Loved it," he said. "Simply loved it. Every page. Every line. Uh…my name is Bob."

I nodded, turning my gaze down to the shiny book jacket of the huge tome. The art featured a majestic dragon, its scales a rippling hue, soaring through the sky with the whimsical figure of a scantily-clad small girl riding on its back. Ah yes. The Girl and the Dragon. My second novel. It had sold three times what my first one did, much to the shock of my editor, who had called me in a drunken haze the night after the New York Times had delivered their glowing review, slurring about how much money he was going to make from his commission.

"Once I picked it up, I couldn't stop reading," the man said, watching me scratch a brief message on the inside of the cover. "It's so romantic. I didn't even know I liked that. My brother makes fun of me for reading romance novels now."

"Ah, don't let him get you down," I said, offering the book back to him. "Don't be afraid to like what you like. Romance stories don't have to just be for women."

"Yeah. I think so too." He flipped the cover and took a brief look at my signature, his smile widening.

"It's kind of funny, but sometimes when reading I felt like I was Vexigos, slowing falling in love with Sheila."

I nodded. The ancient dragon in the story had indeed found his heart captured by the slim little 10-year-old human girl, much to his consternation. The tale of how they reconciled and even consummated their unlikely relationship had taken over 1000 pages to play out. My editor had demanded I trim it down and I had refused. Rightly, it seemed, given how well the novel had been appreciated by the readers.

The fat man turned to walk away, then paused for a moment, throwing a last glance back my way, his smile slipping to an uncertain frown.

"Do…do you think dragons are real?" he asked me hesitantly. I pondered my response for a moment, sensing the question wasn't meant to be taken particularly literally.

"Well Bob," I said, "you strike me as a man of particularly rich imagination, and I think in your imagination, everything beautiful is real. Fiction is a mirror, showing you the images of wonderful things that can live in your head. Don't be afraid to be like Vexigos and let your imagination soar."

He stared at me for a moment, his eyes beady behind the thick lenses of his glasses, before breaking into a wide grin again.

"Thanks," he said, then turned and walked away to make room for the next person.

The Young Girls erotic genre had exploded quickly in a phenomenon reminiscent of previous romantic hits like Twilight and Fifty Shades. Now there were YG sections in every bookstore. They were wildly popular, and not just with men and boys. Some authors had got into the game early, cementing their leads as the top bestsellers. I had been a small fry by comparison when my first novel came out, wondering if I could even make a living telling tales about the sexual escapades of preteen girls. Surely the puritans would come out of the woodwork, screaming and clutching their pearls about the corruption of youth. And indeed some had, but not many listened to them. Society seemed to largely be at a point where the acceptance of sexual activity with young girls was ready to be normalized, both in fiction and in practice.

Next up was a quintessential dad, balding, his appearance straight out of some cliched advertisment where the mom and dad and 2.5 kids are all laughing and enjoying whatever product is being featured that day. He held out the hardcover novel with a smile and I took it. I didn't even need to see the jacket - just based on the weight and the number of pages I knew which one it was - my third, longer even than the first two combined.

"For Arthur, please," he said. "And how on EARTH did you come up with the idea of Jennie defeating the evil sun wizard by giving him a blowjob to extract his magic seed? That was genius! Never saw it coming."

"Oh, you know…" I murmured. "It just uh…comes to me sometimes." I had been even more uncertain about how the far-eastern pseudo-adapation of Arabian Nights would fare in the market when I was finished writing it, but my concerns had proven unfounded. People had loved it. And little Jennie, the 11-year-old secret princess protagonist, had for a time been the heartthrob of readers everywhere.

It was almost routine now. Men and women, boys and girls, they marched up to the table one by one as the line wound like a sinuous snake into the store. Brief conversation, ask their name, sign inside with some well-wishes. I really wasn't cut out for this kind of thing. It was already exhausting me. But as I had found, the more success I had, the less time I had for the thing I really cared about - the writing. I was almost on autopilot, my subconscious already plotting the details for my next story as it was always relentlessly doing in every idle moment, when I realized that the next spot in line was taken up by a gaggle of four tittering schoolgirls.

"Hi Mr. Evans!" the front one spouted ebulliently. "Hi! I'm Alice, that's Shirley, Brenda, and Abby!" She pointed at her cohorts, each one giggling into their sleeve or lightly bouncing lightly on their feet with nervous energy. They looked about 10-12 in age, cute, dressed lightly in sheer crop tops and miniskirts. I let my eyes roam appreciatively over each one as they were introduced.

"We all came together!" She held out a quartet of stacked books for me to sign. "We're from the fan club!"

Oh shit. There's a fan club now? I murmured something vague as I signed inside each book in turn. When did that happen? My editor had probably told me at some point - and I hadn't listened. Head in the clouds all the time, that was me.

"Wonderful, wonderful," I murmured, wincing internally at my inept reply. I handed the books back one by one to each girl. "Thanks for coming. Glad you enjoyed the stories."

I was shocked back to the present when all four girls pulled up their shirts as one, exposing their barely-developed tits to me amongst a flurry of hysterical giggling.

"Sign us, please!" Alice spurted. She had a sharpie for me. "Please Mr. Evans. Just like how Master Azkaron branded his slave girls, right? Please!" Her grin stretched from ear to ear.

Unable to repress my own grin at the lovely set of prepubescent chests in front of me, I stood up and took the sharpie, drawing the sharp angles of the slave rune around the left breast of each girl, just as the cruel slave master had done for each of his harem girls in my book.

The girls giggled and chittered to each other like a pack of starlings when I was done. Alice bade me a farewell and shook my hand, and it was only when the four were walking away that I realized she had slipped me a tiny piece of paper with her number on it.

Sigh. It was almost too much attention. Not that I didn't love the chance to appreciate some fine preteen nipples, but I was the withdrawn sort, really. My editor had had to do more than a little persuading that getting out of my shell and doing events like this would be great PR. But I began to realize, as the next boy shyly handed me his hardcover book, that I hated the new fame, the crowds surrounding me, the dread of the long line of slavering fans stretching all the way out the doors, the interminable interviews and the numb slog through the gauntlets of banal questions - What inspired my books? How did I come up with my ideas? Was I going to write a sequel to this or that story? Maybe if they had asked me different questions during those interviews, interesting questions, something novel for a change. Then I would have been more interested. Maybe if there was more variation in these things, more difference between the long succession of grinning fans that still stretched out the door, I could bear it better.

Next up was a blonde woman - nothing unusual about that, as women seemed to like my stories as much as the men did. She was finely dressed, the curls of her hair bobbing slightly as she handed me a book with a somewhat steely expression.

"Glad you liked it," I mumbled. "Who should I make this out to?"

"Barbara." There was a cool disdain to her voice. My skin prickled under her piercing stare as I bent to sign the inside cover.

"I heard…bad things about your books," she said.

"Oh. I um…sorry to hear that." My inept reply sounded especially hollow in my ears.

"They told me they were wicked tales. The worst kind of filth." Her teeth were gritted. Her eyes murderous.

"Oh. Well uh, I don't know about that. It's just fantasy." I had been afraid of this sort of encounter since I started doing these things. Some people were staunch resistors of the radical changes that had swept society in the last 20 years. Clinging to the unnecessary morality of the past. I proffered the signed book with a lame smile, hoping she would just go away.

"They say you turn little girls into sluts!" she hissed.

"Well um, miss…uh, miss Barbara. I don't think so. Maybe I just make them a little more in tune with who they already are."

"I thought you were the devil…" Her menacing frown and staring eyes were dire omens, but all of the sudden she broke into a wide smile.

"Until I read one of your stories! Oh my god, I came 5 times that night! God, the things those horrible wolfrape things did to that girl!"

"Rapewolves…" I corrected lamely, but it was lost under her bubbling praise.

"Your stories are so amazing! And how artfully you describe it all! I had no idea that YG was so hot! All the little girl sluts you write about, I swear I can feel everything they feel, every time they're violated or raped by all the monsters in your world, or when they make love in your romantic stories and orgasm over and over. My god, it gets me so wet I can barely keep going!"

"Yes. Um. Well that's wonderful..." I looked around in a panic, finding nobody to save me from this onslaught.

"I IMMEDIATELY got the rest of your books, and they were amazing! My daughters caught me one time and then they started reading too, all three of them! They can't get enough of your stories now!"

"Glad to hear it." I managed to meet her gaze with a smile, amused by the thought of this mother and her three daughters all masturbating in tandem to my tales.

She took the book I had been holding out for so long, and clutched it to her chest, her eyes moist.

"I got my husband reading too and convinced him to try some of those things on me too," she said in a husky whisper. "Things were uh, cold for a while before, but now he can't get enough of me!"

"That's great!" I managed to muster some authentic degree of enthusiasm in my smile. Tim Evans, smut writer and relationship therapist. How amusing. I hoped nobody else in line would overshare this much. The people behind her looked impatient.

"Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you!" She was shaking slightly. "You saved my marriage and my girls are happier than ever."

"I'm so glad to hear it. Wish you all the best. Keep reading and I'll keep writing!" I gave a slight wave to signal the end of the encounter, and she finally nodded and turned away, the big book still clutched against her breasts.

Funny, I mused, as I kept signing and the line kept progressing. When I was a kid, stories about fucking little girls would have invoked rage and panic and possibly no small amount of violent assault against the author. Things had truly changed, and for the better. At least by the measure of certain government agencies tasked with measuring these sorts of things, violent crime and sexual assaults had dropped to almost nothing, and in all ways life satisfaction was through the roof. The normalization of child sex seemed to have taken the hard edge off of life for so many people. All the hogwash psychology about the dangers of sexual activity among the young was seen for the self-sustaining fearmongering that it was, and finally flushed down the toilet of public opinion. Both kids and adults seemed to be so much happier now.

I broke my reverie when confronted with a father/daughter pair. He was standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders, while she cradled a heavy book between her arms and dropped her gaze shyly.

"Hi." The father's smile had an invitingly warm quality. "Your book, The Last Father's Duty, got us together." He gently tapped his daughter's shoulders. "Go on sweetie, give it to him. He doesn't bite."

The little girl - no more than 12 surely, and obviously growing into a stark beauty that would probably turn heads her whole life, managed to look up and fix me with a hesitant grin. She was clearly deathly shy, but her father's touch on her shoulders seemed to embolden her enough to hold out the book.

"Here Mr. Evans. Please…make it out to Emily and Walter."

"Of course." I flipped the cover. "Walter…and…Emily. Forever." I circled the names with a flourished heart. My book about familial incest between a father and his daughter had been my shortest, but had evoked by far the largest amount of fan mail of all my tales, with an avalanche of both fathers and daughters writing to tell me how the budding of the romantic relationship between the pair had shaped their own involvement with each other.

"I never knew…" Walter began, still grinning as I handed the heavy book back to the tiny girl, "never knew she liked romance so much. Since she first began to read, apparently. She kept the books hidden from me, but then I found your book in her closet."

"It was in my underwear drawer," Emily sniffed, lips twisting into a quirky grin.

"Yes well uh, nevermind." Walter coughed as Emily sniggered. "I was little shocked, but once I started reading it, I was hooked too."

"Ah," I nodded. "So eventually you had the idea to get her in bed?"

"Oh, no!" Walter laughed, squeezing his daughter's shoulders. "She got ME in bed. My little girl was always too shy to ask for anything, now she asks every night!"

I shared in their cheerful laughter. "Happy to help!" I shook Walter's hand and waved goodbye to the demure Emily, watching them go with a certain feeling of levity. Ok. Maybe this wasn't so bad. Hearing about how people enjoyed the stories was nice, and hearing about how they helped them was even better.

It was after lunch before I could finally see the end of the line. Just a half-dozen more folks, waiting, holding my books, happy to receive a word and a brief message from my pen. Before I knew it, it was over. I looked around. The store employees were quietly going about their business, leaving me alone at the folding table. A smattering of customers browsed the aisles. Feeling grateful to no longer be the center of attention, I stood up and stretched.

Now this I liked. The quiet, murmuring bustle of a bookstore. The rustle of pages from readers in the seats, sampling authors like fine wines. It took me back to when I was a boy myself, often being left for hours by myself after school to browse the bookstores near my house. My passion for reading had flourished during those years, later transforming into the same yearning to write, to get down on paper some of the wild tales spinning in my head and pleading to be released. I picked an aisle at random, shuffling slowly, fingertips tracing the covers and dust jackets of the vivid assortment of books. Sci-fi. Fiction. Historical. Educational. All unique pleasures in their own way. I had buried myself in books through high school and all of college, amassing such an oversized collection that my shrew of a mother eventually forced me to sell most of them to make space. Now, my house in the country, built with the money from my first successful book sales, boasted over a dozen bookcases crammed to the brim with every kind of volume.

My wanderings took me to the corner of the store, into the final aisles, and I abruptly realized I was in the YG Erotica section. A bevy of familiar titles called out to me, bold letters stamped onto thick book bindings. I trailed slowly along, taking them all in. This was where it all started, the whole genre. Hawthorne. Marks. Deville. The early authors who pioneered the industry, their works still occupying prominent positions on the endcaps. Their work was daring, bold, a spit in the face of an old and misguided morality that society had barely begun to realize was fading away. Young girls in every sort of erotic situation imaginable, from romance to incest to rape. Readers could pick and choose according to their tastes from the feast of works that had emerged in those early years. Oh sure, some of the old guard protested their guttural rage. They held book-burning bonfires, burned a store or two as well. But eventually they were decried and forgotten, as the mainstream readership fell in love with the genre.

I came upon one of my own works, an early anthology, the familiar blue jacket gleaming with polished and faintly seductive art. I let my finger linger on the glossy surface. What right did my scribblings have to sit on these hallowed shelves? Surely I wasn't as good as those who had blazed the trail, I had told myself. Nobody would read my stories. But with enough encouragement from my friend, who eventually later became my editor, I decided to pursue my dream until it became a reality. I remembered how nervous I had been when I held the initial print of my first novel in my hands. It was a stupid story. Cumbersome. Boring. Unworthy of any reader's attention. I had told myself all those things, yet from the moment it hit the bookshelves it had taken off like a rocket. And now here I stood, with over a dozen published works lining the shelves.

My indulgent musing was interrupted by a small figure shuffling hesitantly down the aisle in my direction. A small girl, perhaps 8 years old, with a button nose and sleek dark hair that swayed sinuously around her shoulders. She was wearing an airy white dress of light fabric, almost sheer, which hugged her slender waist before flaring out into a wide skirt that barely covered her butt. It looked a size or two too small for her. Eyeing the books bemusedly, she traced a delicate finger along the binding of each one, mouthing the titles to herself silently. When one caught her eye, she pulled it out, gaped at the lewd cover, then opened the book uncertainly.

"That's a really good one," I remarked casually. The girl squeaked in surprise, thumping the book closed and holding it to her chest like a shield before looking up at me.

"Deville's a good author."

The girl nodded, wide-eyed and staring up at me like a deer in the headlights. Then she seemed to recover and gingerly slid the book back onto the shelf.

"Sorry I startled you," I added sheepishly. "My name's Tim. Were you looking for a book?"

"Yeah I…I guess so." She turned and bent slightly, taking a book with a glossy cover from the bottom shelf and giving the skirt of her dress a chance to ride up her pert little asscheeks. I stared unabashedly until she straightened up again.

"Is this a good one? What's it about?"

I pointed at the cover of the book, a remarkable watercolor which sported a very muscular horse in the center with a small, delicate girl by its side, her hand resting on his flank. The pair were looking off in the distance, with the girl dressed in what looked like shockingly revealing bridal garb and the horse's erect member dangling prominently beneath it.

"See the title there?"

The girl looked down at the book she was clutching.

"The Love of a Stallion," she murmured, tracing the letters with her finger. "It's a love story?"

She looked up at me, and the wide-eyed innocence of her stare made me grin.

"Yes. Between a girl and her talking horse. They start out as enemies though."

"Oh." She looked down at the cover again and swallowed. "Can a girl love a horse like that?"

I shrugged, my grin widening. "Anything's possible in a story."

"It sounds nice," she murmured, still gazing at the cover. "I guess I'll get it then."

I nodded. "Good choice. Is your mommy around to buy it for you?"

The little girl shook her head, eyes downcast again.

"Daddy?" I asked.

"No…no…" The girl shook her head again. "I'm from the girl's home down the street."

She was orphaned? How sad. She had a rather lost look about her, timid and vulnerable.

"Do you have money for the book?"

The girl nodded. I looked down at the bill clutched in her hand. A 5 dollar note. The book retailed for $35.99.

"A nice man gave me money to buy a book. But I think I don't have enough…" She looked on the verge of tears.

"Well," I said, thinking. "You know what? The girl in the story" - I tapped the cover - "she's an orphan just like you."

"Like me?" The girl held the book close to her face, peering at the girl on the glossy cover.

"Yes. Her parents died tragically. But, she's secretly a princess. She doesn't know it at the start though. Don't you think you look like her?"

The girl gazed at the cover for a moment, and then nodded. The illustration of the girl had the same lithe figure, the same silky dark hair and petite nose.

"I guess I do," she admitted.

"See? She's just like you. So maybe you're a princess too."

The girl giggled, holding the book up to her mouth to hide it. Her timid stance was faltering just slightly now.

"Tell you what," I said. "Why don't you just have this one? On the house."

"Oh?" The girl stared at me. "Isn't it expensive? Is it ok?"

"Oh, I think it's fine." I waved toward the front of the store. "In fact, I have hundreds of copies of that one in boxes just over there.

The girl seemed confused for a moment. She had flipped the book, reading the blurb on the back, until her eyes were drawn to the author's portrait in the corner. "Timothy Evans," she whispered, reading the name aloud. She looked at it, looked up at me, looked back at the photo, and back to me.

"Oh…Mr. Evans," she said, her whisper quavering slightly." You wrote it?"

"I sure did. Took a long time too. You can call me Tim though."

"Ok Mr. Tim. I'm Sally."

I took her hand and shook it.

"Another girl, she loaned me a book by you once. I only read a few chapters before she took it back. I was sad."

"That's unfortunate", I agreed. "But you can take this one. It's yours. You don't have to give it back to me or anyone."

Sally's face blossomed into one of those wide-mouthed expressions of unabashed delight that children wear so beautifully. "Thank you!" she squeaked. She looked down, considering the big book in her hands again, then opened it, leafing through the pages.

"It's so nice. I want to read it…but sometimes there are big words I don't know."

"I could read it to you," I suggested. "I did the audiobook too."

Sally looked up at me rapturously, eyes sparkling. "You would? Oh thank you so much Mr. Tim!"

"Of course," I laughed. Funny. As bad as I was at most social interactions, this little girl seemed so easy to talk to. She was my type too: quiet, demure, and bashful, with slender hips and a tight, squeezable butt. Her face reminded me of a girl I had pined over in grade school, but had never mustered the courage to ask out.

"How about we go back to my room and I'll read you the first chapter?"

"Sure! But aren't you busy?" she asked, looking over at the desk where I had been sitting.

"Not anymore." I waved my hand airily. "I'm pretty much done for the day. The staff can clean up."

"Ooooh!" Sally bounced up and down on her heels. "Maybe you can read me the second and third chapters too!"

"I'd love to!" I said. Sally giggled at the thought. Funny, I mused, putting my hand on her shoulder to guide her to the front of the store, I had been working so hard for the last year, writing and doing these events that I had barely taken the time to have a little fun myself. Maybe a fling was just what I needed.

I looked down at Sally, following behind her, admiring her short, flaring skirt with just a hint of panties showing. Young girl's fashions these days were trending sharply towards microskirts, bikini bottoms, and sheer tops with no bra. Girls liked that, and it was equally appreciated by the male half of the population as well. Slutty was in, in both clothing and behavior. I wondered if Sally had done the deed before or if her little 8-year-old cunny was still virgin. Well, my hotel room was just around the corner from the bookstore; I'd be finding out soon enough.

Sally was bouncing gleefully, book cradled against her chest, as I led her out. I gave one last glance at the odious table, sitting abandoned now that the long line of fans had got what they wanted and left. Well, the morning hadn't taken as long as I thought. Sally reached up and took my arm, letting me guide her along, fixing me with an appreciative stare.

You know, after the long book signings and the inane interviews, a nice diversion with a sweet little thing like Sally was just what I needed. She kept looking up at me, fingers clenched on my arm, her expression wavering between awe and happiness like she had found a new best friend. Her innocent grin was too adorable not to return in kind, the gleaming silk of her hair too lovely to not envision running my fingers through it, and her body too slender and ripe with the freshness of youth to keep from imagining my hands tracing every square inch of youthful flesh until I found the special parts that would make her squeak with delight. Then I'd make my move, there in the hotel room with her melting in my arms, and show her little 8-year-old body the pleasures of love.

Yes indeed, I thought. Maybe this book tour thing wouldn't be so bad after all.