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The Plain Girl: Chapter 3 - Lost in the Woods
Date: 10/19/2014, Categories: Love Stories, Author: xreynolds, Rating: 2, Source: LushStories
“I’m at the Library, feeling quite lost, but ‘Chin up!’ I told myself. If you aren’t lost, then you can’t be found. ;-)” Karla couldn’t imagine how to respond to an SMS like that – especially from Claire! ‘If she’s lost,’ she thought apprehensively, ‘what does that make me?’ Words that Martin had spoken to her just three days ago emerged from some place deep inside her. For an entire week she had been embedded in Dante’s Inferno, an unusual work that he had given her. On Tuesday evening, when she and Claire had visited him, he had elaborated on the beginning of this epic poem . She had never seen herself as a person likely to have her nose stuck in classical literature that was 500 hundred years old, but this work had an extraordinarily strong impact on her, and she couldn’t get her nose unstuck. It reminded her of the way she felt when she and Claire would stay up all night reading a book under the sheets with a flashlight. It transported her to a vivid, mysterious world. “As long as he wandered in circles,” Martin said, “he really didn’t need guidance. But when he desperately wanted to get out of the woods, Dante knew that he needed direction. He called out from his loneliness and desperation. Dante needed help from someone who knew the situation he was in, what he was going through; someone who, having done it already himself, could lead him out.” “Karla,” he said with such tender concern, “If someone is satisfied with life in the woods, they will never have any interest ...