I needed a break from Butterfly in a Glass Jar and was in the mood to work on this story. Thank you for all of those interested in my revival of this oldie. :) If you've never seen The Reader but would like to know a little bit about what it's about, I'll leave a short description at the end of this chapter. Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think! I love hearing from you all.

Part One: The Words

Chapter Six

That night, with no one looking for us, I let Rose fall asleep on my chest. There was something soothing about her warm cheek against my skin, listening to her rhythmic breathing after seeing her so distressed from her confession. I was relieved that she was able to rest at all.

Yet I couldn't fall asleep. My head was twirling with too many questions. What was her childhood like, if she didn't learn how to read? What happened in England to bring her here? Was there really a man, or was that just a cover up for something else, like her illiteracy?

No matter what the instigator was for bringing her overseas, I was grateful that our paths crossed when they did. I had been so miserable for so long, trapped in my family's expectations, searching for some direction in my tedious life. She lit a fuse, and just like that it wasn't only my art that took on meaning—my reason for living did, too.

After a restless night, the sun rose, like it always did, and announced that a new morning was starting. Rose had remained like a log the entire night, her head weighed down against my chest. The sunlight filtering through the windows disturbed her slumber, and I watched as she rolled onto her back and left me feeling cold without her presence pressing against me.

She rubbed her eyes—those ocean blue eyes ringed in emerald green—and squinted as a stream of light landed across her face. Groaning, she rolled onto her side facing me, away from the sun, and her grumpy reaction at waking up transformed into contented peace when she saw me. "Hey, you."

"Good morning," I said while shifting onto my side to look at her. Some filtered light reflected off my eyes, but I didn't care. "How did you sleep?"

"Surprisingly well…"

I kissed her forehead, lingering on her skin for that extra second necessary to savor that memory. How little did I know then how meaningful those small, fleeting moments would become when she was no longer there. "I'm happy to hear that. You deserved to rest."

She sighed again, her lungs still waking up from her tranquil slumber. "Jack…" My heart was boxing against my ribcage as I listened to her say my name. I could have laid beside her all day, but that desire became a silly dream when her face contorted in realization. "What time is it?"

I glanced down at my watch, which I had left on. "Almost nine. Why?"

The celestial-like moment was broken when Rose darted out of the bed. "Shit! Shit, shit, shit." She grabbed her clothes, still slightly damp from our impromptu swim, and began to change frantically as if she forgot I was there.

"What is it?" I asked, my voice unintentionally revealing my upset.

"I'm supposed to be running the breakfast service this morning. My mother is going to notice I wasn't in my bed last night… If she hasn't found out already." She finished hastily buttoning her dress, ignoring the top couple she couldn't reach, and turned to me, apologetic. "I'm so sorry, Jack. I wish I could stay…"

"It's okay," I said, not wanting to make her feel bad for what she had to do. "I'll see you later then?"

She smiled through her stress. "Yes, later. I'll be finished after dinner." I expected her to soar out of the room then, but was pleasantly surprised when she left me with not one, but two parting kisses—passionate, prolonged ones. I almost fell into those deep blue eyes, so close to mine, but just as quickly as her desire was placed on my lips, she was gone with a simple "Goodbye, Jack."

I laid in bed for at least ten minutes after that, if not longer, grazing my lip with my fingers while I reflected on the pure joy that was the last couple days. I wondered if this was actually happening, and a real woman was creating these floating-on-air feelings inside me; or if it was an angel that had visited my bedside that morning, and once I went downstairs, I would discover that Rose DeWitt Bukater had never existed at all.

Rose hurried into her bedroom, nabbing some fresh clothes and hurriedly changing before anyone noticed she was running late. She was struggling with a knot in her apron strings when a voice startled her: "Where were you last night?"

Spinning around, Rose was greeted by her mother standing in the doorway, arms crossed to contain her fury. "I lost track of time. Jack and I were just talking… I overslept."

Ruth raised an eyebrow. "And that explains why your bed is still made?" She sighed, crossing the room to force her embarrassed daughter to look her in the eye. "Rose. I'm not going to ask what happened to your clothes or what you were doing all night, but I will ask you to be careful. This relationship you have with Jack… It isn't appropriate. You know that, and I'm certain he knows that. Eventually, his parents are going to find out something more serious than a courteous friendship is at play here, and they will kick us out. We can't risk this job, not right now. We're just getting our footing in this country." Rose's gaze was turned down on her stocky shoes. "Do you understand?"

Rather than lie about her and Jack being nothing more than friends, Rose nodded her head. "Yes. I understand."

During breakfast, I knew something was wrong. Usually, Rose and I would play a game where we would flirtatiously catch each other's eyes without drawing any attention to us. Despite being out in the open, we felt so hidden, and it was exhilarating to stoke the fire without anyone's notice. Now, I tried to make eye contact with Rose, but she avoided me with a stone-cold expression every time she hovered over us.

At the end of the meal, while everyone was splitting off to go about their own schedule, I waited at the table, pretending that I was still finishing. I watched as Rose grabbed as many empty plates as she could and stormed into the kitchen. "Jack, don't forget to check the course catalog for the upcoming semester," my mother reminded me before heading out with my father to do whatever business they did during the day. Ah yes, the course catalog, for the law degree I didn't even want.

I waited for five minutes, my heart erupting when I saw the door swing open—but my excitement was immediately cut down when I saw it was Ruth. "Are you finished, Mr. Dawson?" she asked, reserved, while collecting the remaining plates, and I nodded so she could clear the one in front of me.

To be honest—and I was embarrassed to admit it—I sulked in my room most of that day. I couldn't bring myself to find her and bother her while she was doing her job; I wasn't that jealous partner who demanded an answer at every suspicion, anyway. I figured her mother had said something to her, but despite acknowledging that likely case scenario, I was still hurt. She'd confided in me her deepest secret, yet one confrontation was enough to shut her down? If my parents confronted me about her, I would defend her until my throat was raw. But who was I to judge her reasonings? There was still so much I didn't know about her. All I could do was wait until after dinner to see if she would meet me.

After spending the entire afternoon ignoring what my parents requested that I do and instead focusing on my drawings, dinner approached and I remained sullen when Rose didn't appear during the service. Again, I figured she was directed to other job duties, like helping in the kitchen or cleaning the bedrooms while they were certifiably unoccupied, but I couldn't explain it—my heart just hurt. Poking at my dinner, and directing most of my energy to my thoughts, I wondered if this was how first love, true love, was supposed to feel. Your entire body and soul simply ached when you weren't with your other half, and it was like spending a stint in Hell until they were back in the picture again.

My mother picked up on my obvious melancholy. "Oh, Jack, what is it now? Do you not like the roast tonight?"

If I had been a rebellious son at any point in my short nineteen years on this planet, I easily could have yelled back, "No, I hate what you and Father are making me do with my life. Have you ever considered that I have my own interests?" But clearly I wasn't that son, and never was that son; otherwise I would have used all of that rebel energy to not be pressured into going to college to begin with. "Just tired," I said, putting an abrupt end to that conversation.

After that lackluster meal, I waited in my room while holding in all my restless energy. To occupy my fidgety fingers, I focused on adding more details to the drawings I had been diligent with that day, but the back of my mind was busy wondering when she was going to show up.

An hour and a half past dinner, a knock at my door moved my feet before I could consciously think about what I was going to say. Was she upset with me, with her mother—with herself? My question wasn't immediately answered by the worry lines etched in her forehead and her stiff lip.

I fell back on familiar territory. "Are you okay?" I asked softly. She walked past me as I shut the door for privacy.

"My mother caught me this morning," she said while collapsing on the edge of my bed. I knew it. "She wants me to be careful around you… Ideally, not around you at all."

I sat next to her, my hand falling on top of hers; she didn't pull away. "What did you say?"

She barked out a single terse laugh, shaking her head as if she was humiliated with herself. "Nothing. I didn't say anything." She massaged the creases tugging on her face, closing her eyes to try to relax. "I'm sorry about today, Jack. I just wasn't in the right mind to play around."

"I understand, Rose. We can be more careful from now on…" My mind drifted and lingered on my worst suspicions. "If that's what you still want…to be with me."

All of my tense muscles relaxed when she looked up at me, a weak smile on her face from an exhausting day, and her eyes glittering under the lamp light. "Of course I want to be with you." She grazed the back of my hand with her thumb. "Right now, though… I need a break from thinking. Can we just do something fun tonight?"

I couldn't hold back my growing smile. She wants to spend time with me. She still wants to be with me. "Like what?"

She fell back onto the bed, stretching her arms out to relieve the achiness stored there from her long day's work. "I don't know. Anything… You can draw me again."

For a moment, I was enticed by her suggestion, but then my eye caught a stack of books collecting dust on my desk—and another idea popped into my head instead. "Is there a book you've ever wanted to read, Rose?"

She peeked at me, unmoving from her lazy position. "I haven't read anything, of course. But in terms of stories I've heard… Not a lot, besides fairytales. I would want to read everything and anything."

I flashed her a cheeky smile. "I have an idea. Do you still have that copy of Pride and Prejudice?" She nodded her head. "How would you feel if I read it to you?"

I sat propped up in the bed while she relaxed her head on my shoulder, her eyes dozing off as all focus went to the words I was reading. By chapter three, I became more comfortable in the tone and voices I had created, and her hand had crept up my torso and landed on the rise and fall of my chest. By chapter six, she was gripping onto my shirt, crinkling the fabric.

"...He listened to her with perfect indifference, while she chose to entertain herself in this manner, and as his composure convinced her that all was safe, her wit flowed long." I paused at the end of the chapter, and her head flew off my shoulder.

"Why did you stop?" Despite the late time, her enthusiasm was overflowing.

After all she had done to entertain my fantasies yesterday, I was warmed that I could provide her a similar gift. I didn't want to stop either, but the thrill of the evening wasn't dampened by its need to end. "It's getting late…"

Rose pushed a couple of loose curls behind her ear, appearing startled and a bit panicky. "I know what I said earlier, but I don't want to go now…" Her cheeks blushed as she turned away from me. "These past couple days have been the best of my life."

My everlasting smile widened. "Mine too." My voice was hushed, and I didn't push her to go.

She twirled one of the curls that kept falling in front of her face around her finger, more so out of anxiety than seduction. "Can we at least talk for a little while? There's still so much I don't know about you…"

"I can say the same." We stared into each other's eyes, no longer fearful of the night ending. Her life… There was so much I wanted to know. Ideally, I'd want to know everything about her: every event, every relationship, every memory that shaped her into the wonderful woman sitting in front of me. May as well start at the beginning. "Rose, I hope this isn't too forward… But can I ask you what your childhood was like?"

She seemed a bit surprised at my question, as if she was expecting something more current. "No, that isn't too forward at all." We shifted ourselves so that we were facing each other, sitting cross-legged on the bed. She then took a deep breath. "I guess I can start with what I was told, then go into what I remember…"

When Rose was born that barren, snowy day in 1895, her father was already dead. Not that he mattered much anyway. Ruth had abandoned a modest, comfortable upbringing to be with this man who she thought would change her world for the better. Instead, he was a drunk who couldn't hold a job even though they were dirt poor, and he ended up passing out in an alleyway during the coldest night of the winter and dying of exposure. At least, that's what Ruth told her. Five days later, Rose was born, and Ruth had someone else to focus on other than her dead husband, someone who trusted her without question.

Ruth worked multiple jobs while shuffling Rose around to various friends to watch over her. One of the earliest memories Rose could recall was when her mother squatted down to her level and told her, with much sorrow in her expression, "I'm sorry, dear girl. We can't afford to send you to school. But I'll try to teach you as much as I know. I promise you that."

Years passed, and Ruth wasn't able to find the time to teach Rose much of anything, especially the tedious job of teaching literacy. Most of Rose's knowledge came from what she would hear from her mother's friends and on the streets, only occasionally listening in on an elaborate story, something made just to entertain.

By the time Rose was eight, she and Ruth entered the domestic business. Rose recalled how Ruth had fumbled with her hair, trying to braid the tangled mess, while repeating how vitally important it was for Rose to remember her manners. "We cannot ruin this opportunity. It took me years to find the right connections for us to move out of this place. Do you understand me?" She was given a new dress—how Ruth obtained it, she never asked—rather than another ragged hand-me-down, and they set off with their one bag of possessions to an elaborate mansion on the outskirts of London.

Rose had no idea such enormous houses existed; she was used to sharing a single, dingy room with her mother. They were welcomed warmly, and that's when Rose realized that she wasn't tagging along to be another mouth to feed—she was expected to help with the chores, too.

They worked in that home for years, until the head of the household passed away and some of the staff had to be let go. Despite Ruth's reliable work, they were put out, but Ruth was hopeful they would find something new because at least now they had the experience.

Rose was on the verge of turning sixteen when they were hired at one of the older properties nearby. A baron, his wife and his son were the only occupants of the gigantic, castle-like manor. When Rose first shook hands with Caledon Hockley, only son of Baron Nathan Hockley, a warning shiver shot up her spine.

For weeks she couldn't pinpoint what it was about Cal that made her uncomfortable. Maybe it was the way he smiled, baring some of his teeth; or the way he addressed her as "miss" instead of by her first name, as if he was trying to charm her by making her feel like a lady.

Regardless, Rose worked there for a year and a half without problem, and even ended up making friends with some of the other maids that worked there who were only slightly older than herself. They could have still been there, too, if it wasn't for that day Cal finally broke loose, and Rose…

"I'm not ready to talk about it," Rose whispered as her eyes brimmed with tears. "The point is, I got through my entire life with no one knowing that I never had a formal education. Somehow, despite our background, we passed in this new society. I started working at a very young age… That's mostly it. My childhood was uneventful."

Uneventful? If that was considered uneventful, then my childhood was nonexistent. "You don't have to say anything you're not comfortable with, Rose," I told her, though now that I had a name for this man—Cal—I wondered what he had done, what had hurt her so badly that she had to flee her home. "Thank you for sharing that with me."

She nodded her head, wiping at her eyes before plastering a smile on her face. "Okay, your turn."

"My turn?" I chuckled to hide my mortification at everything I was going to spill that night. "I have to warn you, this story is going to be so boring and so dry, it's going to put you to sleep." Her angelic laughter bounced around the room. "Now that we have that out of the way… I was born in the dead of winter—you know, that time of year when everyone is begging for it to stop being winter?—and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you I never cried. I know, right? Even at the start of my life I was worried about bothering people… Anyway, I was raised by my nanny, Gretchen, who would bake me these amazing apple pies—in fact, she taught me how to make them. Yeah, there's a secret no one knows… I started piano lessons at four, and let me tell you what a disaster that was…"

The Reader is a German novel published in 1995, with an English film adaptation starring Kate Winslet released in 2008. Kate's performance in this film won her her first Oscar after five previous nominations. The R rating is something I strongly advise you listen to if you are under 18, and the description below hints to why: it deals with a lot of mature, controversial themes.

The story takes place in three sections of time in post-WWII Germany, in the viewpoint of Michael Berg. In the first section, Michael is 15 and starts an affair with older woman Hanna Schmitz (played by Kate Winslet in the movie) after she helps him home from school when he gets ill. Their relationship is strongly based in sex, with some building intimacy when Hanna asks Michael to read stories out loud to her. One day, Hanna disappears without a trace, leaving Michael heartbroken.

The second section takes place when Michael is in law school. While attending a court trial for class, he recognizes one of the defendants as Hanna. She and multiple other women are on trial for war crimes committed during the war, specifically as guards in the concentration camps. One incident involves a burning church, where over three hundred women were killed when Hanna and the other guards would not let them out. The two survivors of the church fire indict all of the women on trial, but Hanna ends up with a more serious charge: she is accused by the other guards of writing up the incident report that essentially puts her in charge. When Hanna tries to defend herself, saying that all of them agreed to write the report together, the judge asks for a handwriting sample. Rather than provide one, Hanna confesses to writing the report and is sentenced to life in jail. (During this time, it is also mentioned that Hanna was offered a promotion at her old factory job, but took a job as a guard instead; she does not admit that the reason she did that was because the promotion would require her to read and write.) Watching this, Michael finally realizes that Hanna is illiterate, but is conflicted over whether to say something; worried about defending a war criminal who participated in genocide (even though he still has feelings for her), and noting it's not his secret to share, Michael decides to keep quiet.

The third section takes place when Michael is much older, after a failed marriage and a young daughter. He starts to send Hanna tapes of him reading some of the stories they used to enjoy together, and Hanna checks out the books in the prison library and tries to follow along. Slowly, she learns how to read and write from the books and tapes. Eventually, Michael decides to visit Hanna and ask her if she's learned anything from her time behind bars, to which she replies, "It doesn't matter what I feel and it doesn't matter what I think. The dead are still dead."

Obviously, this story deals with a lot of heavy topics involving illiteracy, morality, complicity and genocide. The author wrote it with the intention of expressing the struggle many Germans faced post-WWII (specifically the young people growing up post-war) with recognizing the atrocities their country had committed with the camps. The sexual relationship between Hanna and Michael at the beginning can be very uncomfortable to read and watch as well.

With writing this, I have no intention to create such a controversial story. But I am basing it off of the main structure of the movie: three sections, in three separate time periods, first focusing on building a relationship, then a trial, and finally a conclusion or aftermath of some sort. And I'm using the basis of illiteracy, of course. I hope this makes sense given some of the material, and again, I strongly caution watching this film because of its heavy topics.