Chapter Two: Musing on Age and
Education. Also, sex.
It’s
a Harlequin Blaze, so there has to be sex scenes, and this chapter is the
first of those. After all, Brody and Hayden did leave the bar in order to go to Hayden’s
hotel for a “night cap” so it’s not exactly a surprise. And while there’s some
oral sex while Hayden stands against the wall and Brody… bends over? Behind
her? which leaves me questioning anatomy to some extent, there’s really not a
lot, overall, to say about this chapter.
(Which, given how much I wrote about the first chapter, is probably a
good thing.)
First,
let’s talk about getting to the hotel. They take Brody’s BMW SUV to the Ritz-Carlton
and Brody asks what Hayden does.
“I’m a junior professor at
Berkeley. I teach art history, and I’m also working towards a Ph.D.”
(22).
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no. There is absolutely ZERO chance that Berkley would hire
Hayden as a junior professor (presumably an assistant professor, the lowest rank
but tenure track) without her having her Ph.D. There is a very small chance
they would have hired her without her Ph.D. in
hand, meaning that she’d finished her coursework and passed her exams into
candidacy but hadn’t quite finished her dissertation. That’s pretty rare these
days because there are way more qualified Ph.D. students graduating each year
(dissertation finished) than there are job openings, but it’s still possible,
if Hayden had published multiple kickass articles as a student in very
prestigious academic journals, had a 4.0 (almost all grad students do), and a
lot of successful teaching experience. (This last is just as unlikely as the
first—most English and Math graduate students get a lot of teaching experience
because universities have hundreds of classes required for first-year students
in those fields. Art history? Not so much. She’d be lucky to have had a break-out
section and been allowed to guest lecture once a semester.) And IF she was
incredibly lucky enough to get a job as an assistant professor (at Berkeley!
Ha!) while still working on her dissertation, she’d have been expected to finish
it within one year. Chapter one specifies that Hayden went to Berkley three
years ago (10), so her dissertation ought to have been finished. In fact, since
it’s not at the end of three years, Berkeley would then not renew her contract.
(She can’t get tenure without having her Ph.D., even if the job is “tenure
track.”)
Without
a Ph.D., Hayden could still lecture at Berkeley (if they wanted her), as an
adjunct, although that seems unlikely in an art history department (as opposed
to, say, composition.) However, the narrative tells us that she accepted the
“full-time position” and adjuncts are not full-time (even if they’re teaching
multiple courses. Universities don’t want to pay benefits to adjuncts.)
Furthermore, most of the time (albeit not all the time), adjuncts aren’t referred
to as professors. And even if they are, it’s “adjunct professor”, not “junior
professor” because adjunct professors can’t get tenure (without switching to a
different job line) so there’s no “senior professor” to get to.
Lastly
(and then I’ll shut up about this, at least for now), the narrative does not
tell us where Hayden is getting her Ph.D. The assumption, then, is that the
author wants us to think she’s getting it from Berkeley as she’s also a
full-time junior professor. However, there’s multiple problems with this
scenario. First, that means she was hired without any doctoral level graduate
work. We can assume she has a masters degree in Art History (although to be
fair, some students get their masters in passing while working on a doctorate,
but that makes it even less likely for her to be hired at Berkeley—or anywhere
else except a community college) from …somewhere. Presumably one of the schools
in Chicago, since it seems when she left for California it was the first time
she’d left her father. If Hayden was accepted as a graduate student, she could
be teaching some classes, too, but certainly not the full-time that the
narrative insists. (And she wouldn’t be a junior professor, she’d be a Teaching
Assistant, or with a masters, a Teaching Associate). Second, even if she got
her Ph.D. from Berkeley, the school would then not hire her. Academic
institutions, particularly those involved in research work, hire from outside
their own students in order to get new ideas and research, not just have students
parroting what their professors at the same school taught them. (Also, because
it’s very difficult to go entirely from being someone’s student to being their
colleague.)
This
actually brings me to another question—how old is Hayden? The narrative hasn’t
explicitly said. Her mother died when she was a baby and then her father didn’t
remarry for 20 years of his coaching career. He did remarry 3 years before the
novel opens (to a woman 29 years his junior, so that’s awkward for them). So
Hayden is at least 23. Since Brody is 29, and these novels are pretty
traditional, she has to be less than 29. Assuming she graduated from college at
22, went straight into a masters program, she’d have graduated that at 24, then
moved to Berkeley immediately and now be 27 (as long as we ignore everything I
pointed out about Berkeley in no way hiring her as a professor unless there’s a
Berkeley Community College). That would make her quite young for a professor,
even a junior one, but that’s because it doesn’t require a Ph.D. apparently. If
her father had her when he was, say, 30, that would make him 57 now, and the
step-mother/soon-to-be-ex would be 28. The narrative hasn’t said that the
soon-to-be-ex is about the same age as Hayden, something that would be useful
in vilifying her (as the narrative has already explicitly done).
All
right, all right, you came here for the sex, not the diatribe on the state of
academia. But first, a quick note that when Brody is surprised at the fact that
not only are they at the Ritz-Carlton but they have the penthouse, Hayden
declines to explain that it’s her father’s and that he owns a hockey team.
Ostensibly she does this because when people have found out in the past, all
they wanted to talk about was hockey and then badgered her for tickets. “…just
once it would be nice if she were the
source of a man’s infatuation” (23 emphasis original). I have a hard time
buying this. Yeah, it could be annoying if the significant other knew ahead of
time and was only dating you for the tickets or whatever, but I have a hard
time believing it was a constant thing. And it can’t possibly matter in a
one-night stand situation where Hayden doesn’t care if Brody wants her
romantically, because, after all, one
night stand. In other words, she doesn’t tell him because the narrative
device—that these two are connected because she’s the daughter of his employer
but they can’t know that yet—demands it. But requiring that means that the
character has to make the choice not to tell Brody, and just lets him believe
“You must make good money at Berkeley” (23) and the reader believe that all men
who date Hayden are hockey-mad leeches.
Anyway,
they get to the penthouse and have sex in a hallway. (They’re heading for the
bed but Brody sees Hayden’s tattoo and somehow this makes him unable to wait.
See post #2 about loss of control. Speaking of tattoos, apparently Brody has a
“badass tribal tattoo” on his bicep (28). This book was published in 2009. Were
tribals honestly still considered “badass” that recently? He also has scars
(presumably from hockey, but we’re not told) that make Hayden find him even
more appealing because he’s “dangerous.”
I
don’t have much to say about the sex, as I mentioned, except for one point that
I think the author did well. First the narrative plays into the dominating,
alpha male hero trope when Brody tells Hayden to undress for him, and even
directs which article of clothing she should take off at any given time. Hayden
even thinks to herself that he’s commanding. The whole alpha male stereotype is
pretty standard for romance novels and not exactly surprising when the hero is
a professional athlete, either. (Most readers of romances, after all, are doing
it for escapism and there’s a desire for the controlling, dominant male. The
main character of Fifty Shades of Grey
is a stalking, abusive, jerk, but the series has outsold everything ever. One
of the series we’ll read later, the Dartmouth Cobras, seems to be entirely
about kinky, hockey-playing, dominant males, so it’s not like this book is
alone.) However! Hayden insists that Brody kiss her, and he complies, likewise
when she insists on a bed (although they don’t actually get there.) When the
chapter/scene switches to Brody’s point of view, he describes her as
“deliciously demanding.” I’m not sure that the author and the narrative 100%
convinces me that they’re equally demanding or in control, but I’m impressed
that it attempts to.
On
the other hand, after Brody gives her an orgasm (in the hallway), he gets up to
retrieve his condoms. Hayden doesn’t bother to get up from the floor, and she’s
described as follows.
[S]he looked ridiculously sexy
lying there on the floor beneath him. Sexy and trashy and so damn appealing his
cock twitched with impatience (29).
Wow,
the narrative lost me at trashy. Really? Now’s the time for the hero to make a
judgment call on the woman he’s sleeping with? What makes her trashy? The fact
that she’s about to have sex with the hero? Well, then, the hero’s trashy too,
no? Yes, apparently “trashy” is a
compliment here? I guess? But… no.
Trashy
or not, she gives him a blow job and then they have earth-shattering sex on the
carpet, and the chapter ends with the promise of more sex, this time in bed.
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