Mental Asylum Orgasms: The Cure for the 'Hysterical Woman' (A Friends-to-Lovers Speculative Historical Erotic Romance) is OUT! Find it here. Enjoy this short excerpt from the first chapter!

Please only read this if you are 18+!

Blurb

An 7.4k word friends-to-lovers college erotic romance with time travel involved.

It's rumoured that the Victorian-era treatment for women with 'hysteria' was orgasms induced by doctors and medieval vibrators.

That is the research subject of one Caroline Walters' dissertation.

Rushing to finish her dissertation in the midnight hours of her campus library, her best friend Parker, who she's had a crush on, surprises her in more than one way that night…

It's a night of countless O's.

A best-friends-to-lovers speculative historical erotic time-travel short story (contemporary mixed with medieval Victorian-era).

Midnight in the Library

The candle flickered as a shadow moved past one of the many bookcases in the tomb-like library.

Caroline rubbed her eyes, feeling herself start to nod off. The research was interesting, but she’d been working on her dissertation for the last twenty-four hours straight. If she had to come up with even another sentence to put on the page, she thought she might puke from the mental effort.

A warm hand settled on her shoulder, startling her from her stupor. She jerked back to peer up into the mischievous eyes of her best friend, Parker.

“Burning the midnight oil again?” His eyes twinkled as he squatted beside her, handing her a latte. She grabbed it gratefully and gave him a quick one-armed hug, too tired to care how the side of her breasts pressed right into his face.

“You are a lifesaver,” she sang tiredly, gulping down half the caffeine-on-steroids in seconds. Placing the coffee on the study carrel and pushing her laptop away, she swung herself sideways so she could look more directly at Parker.

His dark hair blended into the darkness of the library. They were the only ones in this aisle, most of the other students already gone for the night.

But the library was open 24/7 during exam season, and Caroline had to hustle. Her dissertation was due in less than 24 hours, and she’d only ever mastered the art of procrastination.

Parker smiled wryly up at her, shaking his head. “How bad is it?”

Caroline sighed, burying her face in her hands. “I’ve still got another 10, 000 words to go, and only another 15 hours till I need to meet with my advisor. I can’t. I just can’t. I need to sleep. I think I’ll have to call it quits.”

“Nonsense,” Parker shushed her, grabbing her hand before she started dissolving into a panic attack. “You’ve got this. There’s no rush job the great Caroline Walters can’t bullshit at the last minute. Hasn’t happened your whole academic career; won’t happen now.”

The bullshitter in question laughed meekly, but groaned and slumped into her seat. “I feel drunk. That’s how delirious the lack of sleep is making me.”

“You just need to take a break for a bit. Take a power nap, then get right back on the horse.” Parker leaned forward, settling his propped-up arms on Caroline’s lap as he turned her laptop towards him and began scanning her progress so far. “I mean, I have to say, you have the most scintillating dissertation I have ever seen.”

Caroline chuckled, sleepily running a hand through Parker’s messy bed-hair. It looked like he’d just come from a nap in his dorm, the lucky bastard. She peered over his head to see which part of her dissertation he was on, and laughed.

“Yes, I’m arguing that the Victorian-era treatment of ‘insane’ women in mental asylums was to literally give her orgasms. There’s contestable research about whether this was factually accurate or merely speculative fiction, but I’ve come across some peer-reviewed stuff that doctors in the 1800s really thought that women’s orgasms could be fatal to their health.” Caroline rubbed her eyes again, wiping a stray tear away. She laughed tiredly.

“Imagine that. Men in positions of medical authority, thinking that women’s sexual pleasure was poisonous or toxic, would condemn the whole gender… How ludicrous.” She shook her head, the blonde curls on her head bouncing lightly with the movement, then stifled a yawn. She uncurled on her seat like a stretching cat, fully aware of how stiff her ass was from sitting in the same position for hours on end.

Parker turned back to look at her, his eyeline right at her bust. In the dark, Caroline missed the way his gaze roamed over her cleavage as she stretched, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he gently rubbed a palm over her bare knee.

“Yeah, men in that era had no idea what they were working with,” Parker joined in, chuckling. “Pretty pathetic if you ask me.”

“Well, no offense, but guys in this era still have no idea how to get a woman off,” Caroline shot back, making a half-hearted dig at Parker’s ego, which she was sure would be bruised on behalf of all mankind. “I’ve been with a dozen men at least all throughout uni, and not one of them has yet to figure out the clitoris.”

“Ooooh, talk sexy to me,” Parker teased, laughing as she shot him a mock-glare before dissolving into giggles herself. She bopped him on his nose playfully.

“Vulva. Labia majora. Labia minora. Anus.”

“Ooooh, now you’re talking dirty.”

“Urethra–”



“Ugh, bladder opening? Yeah, let’s stop there.”

Caroline began to giggle hysterically in her sleep-deprived state. “Ohh, gosh, I’m becoming as demented as these women I’m writing about.” She gestured blindly at her digital notes, rambling off some of the strange things she’d been researching lately.

“The doctors actually diagnosed all those poor women with a medical condition called ‘hysteria’ at the time, and thought the rest of the world was backwards unless they believed the same thing. ‘Hysteria’ was basically this scapegoat used to imprison all these women who exhibited ‘strange’ symptoms, like a case of the nerves, excessive yawning, women who had lost their appetite or their sex drive… It never occurred to those poor bastards that, oh, I don’t know, women just didn’t find their pudgy, gross husbands attractive?”

Caroline shook her head, feeling the familiar passion rise again as she thought about the way women and their sexual desires and pleasures were treated less than two hundred years ago. How women were still treated by the Puritans walking amongst them all. She waved her hands around animatedly, launching into yet another diatribe against oblivious men.

“Get this—the doctors may have been using medical vibrators on women to force them to orgasm. That was seen as the remedy for women’s hysteria—that if a woman’s orgasm lived within her for too long, that deteriorated her mind and caused her insanity. So, they had to ‘get the demon’ out of her, so to speak. And, being lazy bastards, they invented vibrators to make women come instead of using their own manual efforts.”

Caroline chuckled at Parker’s shocked face. “Yup, you learn something new every day. But, honestly, think about it, hypothetically (and assuming your psycho doctor was actually good-looking)—how great would it be to have a hot guy get you off every time they think they need to exorcize some demon within you? I mean, provided they actually take notes and practice the right skills. You don’t even need to do anything; you just lie there and let some dude do all the work. If only all my one-night-stands were that talented in bed. I actually wouldn’t mind taking a trip back into the past for a few hours, just to see if it was as good as I fantasize it is.”

Caroline caught the clenching of Parker’s jaw just before he could shake it off, and steamrolled forward, trying to make sure he hadn’t been offended by her joking rant.



“Don’t worry, bestie. I hear rave reviews about you from Bea whenever she talks about your guys’ sex life.” She winked at him, trying to ignore the little tug at her heartstrings as she thought about her best friend in bed with his girlfriend.

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