Kidnapped by the Bad Boy - A Caleb Joseph story

Step 1: Bored

Looking out his bedroom window, Caleb is faced with yet another dull midwestern summer day.  He had hoped that going back to his childhood home would spark his video-making creativity since he hadn't posted to his youtube channel in two months, but it hadn't worked. He stared at the one-time butt-ugly orange walls and reminisced on his hit videos, such as "Reading the Worst Book of All Time" and "Reading a Bad Boy Book."

He wished for the thousandth time that he had even one single video idea. His business was crumbling under his feet and he was starting to get desperate since he was a money-hungry snake after all. If only Kitty Jones, author of Daddy Dom and the Bad Girl, wasn't suing him over the Quarantined with the Lumberjack video then he would make a video about one of her books. Maybe Beauty and the Lesbian Beast.

"Bad boys don't do it for me like they used to," Caleb sighed as he peered into his mirror.

He had curly brown hair, hazel eyes, and a collection of tattoos littering his skinny twig arms. He wore his favorite Lana Del Rey t-shirt. He fussed with his hairstyle and frowned. People told him he was pretty all the time—beautiful even—but he wasn't sure he saw what they saw. He considered himself average-looking plus he looked a little like Arthur the Aardvark. The light coming in from the window lit his features enough so that he would look halfway decent while he was filming. He rarely thought this, but he wished a photographer would take his picture at that moment as the outfit and the background and he may have produced a cool-looking photo.

After reassuring himself that he looked the same as he always did, Caleb returned to his desk and sipped his coffee. Normally his Coffee-mate creamer tasted good, but today it made him gag. Was it past its expiration date?

He wandered over to his white IKEA bookshelf and picked up Rescuing the Bad Boy by Jessica Lemmon. The copy was worn from aggressive page-flipping and dog-earing. Pink sticky notes hung out of the sides like a bouquet of wilted flowers. Gertie the dog stared at Caleb from the badly photoshopped cover next to Donovan Pate's ripped bod.

Caleb wished that someone would rescue him from his boredom, just like Sofie Martin had rescued Donovan from nothing in particular in the book.

That's when the mass-market paperback jumped out of his hands and snapped open. A bright light beamed out of the pages and a strong whirlwind whipped at Caleb's face. That was the last thing he saw before darkness stole his vision, leaving him blind.