On the threshold

The last block of her journey passed rather uneventfully, aside from the numerous wolf-whistles, catcalls, and kvetchings of admirers and detractors of her fashion sense. Donna basked in the attention, smiling brightly and making sure to put that extra touch of pep in her step, to keep everything fluttering and jiggling just so.

Less than ten minutes after her "incident," Donna found herself in front of the public library. The library was one of the oldest buildings in town, a historic two-story stone structure, built almost a century prior. Having begun as a meeting hall, then expanded by a wealthy family when it was converted to a library, it was actually four stories tall, with high ceilings and massive bookshelves that required ladders to reach the tops of them. A basement below housed many of the rarer tomes the library held, as well as their old microfische catalog. Such a building would not have been out of place somewhere like Hogwarts.

Donna grasped the ornate handle of the door, and with a slight heave, and a step backwards, pulled its heavy bulk open. Unfortunately (or perhaps not!) for Donna, that step backwards, plus her needing to lean slightly into the door to keep it open as she passed it, caused the inner strap on her right flip-flop to come free of the sole again. Her heel twisted sideways, off the rubber sole, and her knee buckled, causing her right side to graze against the ornate dragon's head at the top of the interior push bar. She heard a pair of faint snaps, and felt her entire dress shift sideways, exposing her nipples, as she caught herself on the push bar.

This time, though, there was no one to directly witness her incident, and thus she merely bent over, straight-legged, giving a quick flash of her damp mound to anyone who happened to be walking by behind her, and snatched her again-busted flip-flop off her foot and the floor. She then stepped through the door, letting it shut behind her, and quickly fixed her dress. No sense in giving the old battle-axe of a librarian a reason to toss her out before her fun began!

As she fixed her dress, she noticed the source of those snaps. The two lower strips beneath her right arm had caught against the dragon's head motif and snapped. The lowest one, just below her breast, had been shorn off where it met the front strap. It left a ragged half-inch deep indent into the strap where it had come loose, reaching almost to the base of the second strip, and now dangled from the back strap of her dress. The second strip, about halfway between the bottom of her breast and her nipple, had been cleaved roughly in half, the shorn ends dangling from their respective straps.

A slight flush tinged Donna's cheeks as she assessed the damage. While this hadn't been part of the plan, it did open up some intriguing possibilities. No one could fault her for losing her clothing to accidents, could they? Maybe this wasn't...no, she needed the book, she was at the library, and she was going to get it!

She took a moment to fix her flip-flop again, noting that the inner plug hole was definitely more stretched than it had been earlier, and that the center plug had almost come free, too, stretching its hole a bit more. She could tell it was going to come apart more frequently as time went on. With another faint grin, she dropped the battered flip-flop to the floor again, and slid her foot gingerly into it.

As she started into the library, her mind turned to the damaged strips on the side of her dress again. The lower one was irreparable, and worse, she hadn't brought scissors with her, so she had no way to safely remove it. It would just have to dangle, for now. The other strip she could tie back together, but that would also shorten it, and pull everything a bit more to her right side. She couldn't tie it together without removing the dress, either.