Like a Horse Made of Air

When it Rains (You could Say it Pours)

Business picks up for her after that.

Tommy wasn't the only one on the street that evening and plenty of folks witnessed her settling Danny down. Which seems to somehow translate into people seeking her out. She finds she needs to explain what it is she sells less and less, even as what she sells expands wildly. Funnily enough, her best seller is her soothing mints.

She never charges Danny when he comes around and finds a surprisingly easy friendship with the big man and his wife Rosie. She teaches the woman the exercises she learned from Gram while keeping them stocked with simple remedies. Rosie in turn fills her in on the latest gossip while teaching her about her work as a seamstress. It's a companionship Wren hadn't known she needed and is very grateful for.

Especially considering all the things she's been struggling with lately. People are cruel, she's learning. She hasn't dared mention her contraceptives at the gathering places after hearing how readily they tore into other women for the least little thing. She knows they talk about her when she's not in ear shot, she's not stupid. And with her business so new she hesitates to push out where they might try to shut her down. It's so frustrating, how closed minded the gossipy hags are. If she didn't have even-keeled Rosie to lean on she probably would have died in a fit of rage by now.

As it is she's sorting through the Office, the last bit of chaos left, after a long day out dealing with said hags. The only thing left to do being the time-consuming reading and organizing that simply can't be rushed. Not unless she wants to have to redo her work when she inevitably finds something out of place. Truthfully, she isn't bothered as she enjoys reading in general. It's a bonus that everything in this room feels like a peak into her grandparents' lives. Nuances she's never known to wonder about create stories told in the edges of ink on paper. Too, while she might have passed her exams, it doesn't mean she's anywhere near done learning about her craft and her Gram has a plethora of books.

She finds another key and automatically checks it against the locked trunk under the red desk, jolting in surprise when this one actually turns.

Suddenly excited, she carefully grabs the handles and wiggles the whole thing out into the open. She grunts with the effort, the trunk heavier than she expects. Once it's free she manages to keep from flinging it open, barely, but holds her breath as the light reaches the contents within. She releases it all at once in surprise when she sees nothing but tightly packed books.

Why would Gram lock up books?

She looks around at three walls with floor to ceiling bookshelves, each heavy with tomes and journals, then back down at the trunk. Confused but curious, she teases out a book and flips it open to a random page. It takes far too long a beat before she manages to process the drawing sketched on the page and what it means before she drops it with shock. Cheeks hot and chest heaving, she tries to calm her sudden fluster. Cautiously, as if it might bite, she picks the book back up and flips through the pages. The pages are filled with sweeping, graphic drawings explained with painful detail by cramped blocks of tiny text.

The book in her hand goes to great length to explain exactly how one should go about pleasuring a partner—male or female—while engaged in various sexual acts.

"I'm holding a book my grandma kept," she whispers in horrified wonder, "about, Good Lord, can they even call that sex anymore?"

She gawps at a drawing that she can't quite wrap her head around or figure out how exactly it's supposed to be enjoyable.

Abandoning the first book she does a quick inventory of the other texts and finds the first is a good summary of the theme. It isn't even the most graphic of what she finds. One of them is an agonizingly frank and explicit manual on how to "properly clean and maintain a sensual body". Quite frankly she's half convinced that most of these books aren't legal.