The Virgin's Secret Marriage: Post 13

Chapter 9: The No-Longer Virgin’s Not-So-Secret Marriage

(Posts for the foreseeable future may be a bit brief and slapdash. Sincere apologies—it’s been a heck of a few months and the Commissioner is digging her way out of them.)

We left off with the Great Box Cliffhanger and it turns out that it actually was a cliffhanger, in that when Joe returns we discover that he did not, in fact, unpack his boxes. Instead, ::gasp!!:: they’ve been [dunh dunh dunh] stolen.

Joe is thinking all about the sex, and not about putting away the groceries or about unpacking, when he gets back to the house. But Emma wants to congratulate him for his hard work (apparently not with sex) which leads Joe discovering that all of his hockey memorabilia has been stolen, along with Emma’s jewelry box. And none of the hockey memorabilia was insured. And apparently everyone (?) knew that he owned it.

According to a neighbor that the sheriff (remember, Joe’s brother Mac) interviews, the thieves “used some sort of electronic device to open the garage door” to get in (114). Personally, I use some sort of electronic device to open my garage door every day. It’s called a garage door opener.

After Mac leaves, Joe vows to protect Emma, horrified that he’d left her home alone when the thieves might have been there—which is sort of stupid since they absolutely weren’t at the time.

Neither of them can sleep, so they decide to go to bed together, but not to have sex. There is, of course, some touching, and Emma “was glad he hadn’t shaved his chest” (116).

Does anyone else find that line really odd? I mean, not that Joe doesn’t shave his chest—I find that quite normal for the average guy. (There isn’t anything wrong with shaving one’s chest, either. I just don’t think that shaving one’s chest is so common that Emma would remark on Joe not doing so.)

They talk a bit about trying to find out where the thief or thieves might sell the hockey memorabilia since lots of it was super rare.

Anyone else think it’s just a coincidence that the day before Tiffany Lamour was in the house commenting on that same hockey stuff? No? Just me? Okay.

They agree to go to sleep, but then Emma starts touching Joe all over. Joe decides to pretend to be asleep as a tactic, but he has to drop that when she goes for his boxers. He tells her they can’t sleep together since she’s probably only wanting to because she’s had a shock. When she says he should be wanting to get in her pants (pajamas?) he says he’s just now developed “a selfless streak.”

“You’ve always been noble. That was in fact the problem. Had you not been noble you would not have refused to stay married to me when you found out who my dad was or that my parents would not approve of my even dating you, never mind becoming your wife!” (120).

Uh, what? Emma is suddenly rewriting history. That is not okay. Every time the story of their ‘marriage’ comes up, Emma has said that they got married, Joe found out who her parents were and immediately had their marriage annulled in order to save his career. And she has been bitter about that since the very first time she thought of him in this book. Suddenly that action is now cast as noble?

I love you, Calvin, but no.

“Instead, you would have taken my virginity that night and consummated our marriage, and used that fact as leverage to keep your spot on my father’s NHL team. But you didn’t, and because of that we both suffered” (120).

This description of what Joe didn’t do is such a far cry from Emma’s description of what he did do as putting her career ahead of her that it’s like it’s two different novels. What the hell?

Despite this not-very-compelling conversation, Joe still won’t sleep with her because he wants her to want him when she wants him, instead of as a reaction to being robbed. Emma gets angry about this and insists that they can have sex and still be friends. So they have sex.

Finally. Geez.

Sex, and Emma’s first orgasm, is apparently so magical that it makes Emma declare (albeit only to herself) that she loves Joe. Joe is more concerned with the fact that Emma was a virgin and hadn’t told him. She says it didn’t matter and that someone had to be her first. He asks the oh-so insightful question of, “Is that so?”

Emma didn’t want to feel like they were in the midst of a high-stakes play-off game, but that was exactly how she felt as they faced each other and he waited for a more detailed explanation of her actions. As if Joe was the star shooter, bearing down on her, and she was the goalie trying to defend the net (125).

I suppose that’s a moderately better use of hockey terminology than the penalty calling make-out scene. Marginally. Although I don’t know exactly why she feels she’s under fire, since his question was, I repeat, “Is that so?”

I mean, who could possibly resist such an inquisition?

Her internal response? So she had encouraged him to make love to her! All the way! So what? (125).

You know, just because she was a virgin doesn’t mean she has to act like a young teenager. “All the way”? Seriously? Did they “round the bases”, too?

Joe just says that now their marriage is consummated and he liked it and they’re going to have sex again. Fortunately the chapter ends before we end up seeing that. I’m grateful, because I feared it would be more hockey terminology.

I’d like to point out that the marriage is no longer secret and the heroine is no longer a virgin, so this book should be almost over now, right?

(Oh god. What if we started having hockey terminology sex, like with this book, mixed with anthropomorphized naughty bits, like in other books? … I think I just broke my brain.)

Offside: Post 15

Chapters 20: The Sex

Yes, she was alone in Logan Forest’s bed with a cat that had only one eye (328).

Billie wakes up to the one-eyed stare of Logan’s cat named Weird. Despite my love of animals, I hadn’t mentioned Weird before because he really seems just tossed into the story for decoration (he came with Logan’s house and he’s ugly and one-eyed.) A little later in this chapter, he will watch Billie and Logan have sex. Those are all the points the novel makes thus far about the cat.

Billie gets up, embarrassed by her drinking of the night before and goes to find Logan, but not before snooping through some of his things to get to know him. (she learns he reads, he keeps things clean, and his house is masculine.)

Because I’ve read more than my share of snarky (and thoughtful) critiques of Fifty Shades of Grey (although never the novel itself; you can see some of the critiques I read linked from this blog’s right-hand side), I know that Ana/Bella wakes up in Christian/Edward’s bed, too, after being blackout drunk. Only she finds that he’d undressed her (while she was unconscious) and slept beside her comatose body all night. So three cheers for Logan. He may not be a multimillionaire owner of a shady company, but at least he’s also not a creepy, abusive stalker! Huzzah! Also, before going to find Logan, Billie stops by the bathroom and uses Logan’s toothpaste and her fingers to clean her teeth—she does not use his toothbrush, unlike Ana/Bella does of Christian/Edward. Hurrah! Billie is not using someone’s dental instruments without permission and finding it erotic!

…I don’t think it’s good that FSoG has lowered my standards quite this far, and this without even reading/seeing it.

Billie then goes looking for Logan and finds him asleep, presumably naked, in a guest room. So she strips her own clothes and climbs into bed with him.

In seconds she stood only a few feet from the man she’d yearned for all of her life it seemed. She was vulnerable and, aware…

As naked as she hoped Logan was.

She’d never felt more alive than in this moment (332; comma error original)

I wrote a whoooooooole long digression about this moment and about “average” heroines and about how one thing this particular novel does right and does well, right here, is Billie taking this moment into her own hands. She’s not waiting around for Logan to introduce her to sex (although he did, unknowingly, take her virginity years before).  But it seemed excessive and a bit out of place, so if you want to read it, it’s at the bottom of this post, after where said post seems to end. Suffice it to say that I’m glad Billie didn’t just wait around with the one-eyed cat, hoping that Logan would come to her now that she’s awake and sober.

Of course, Billie’s control, where she starts running her fingers over his sleeping body, is a bit problematic since he’s asleep and thus cannot consent to her touch. Sigh. And her control is also very short lived, since he grabs her when he wakes up, and pulls her underneath him, “her arms pinned above her head, his legs and hips holding her prisoner” (332).

Sigh. I totally understand the appeal of a dominant hero (whether it’s dominant as in “alpha male” or dominant as in BDSM). Seriously, I get it. I’m just bored with the fact that it’s shorthand for sexy. It goes right back to heteronormative gender expectations. A man can’t control himself, particularly around The Right Woman for Him. Boooooorrrrrr-ing.

“I can’t hold back if we keep going, Billie,” he said gruffly.

She knew he was giving her an out and she loved him for that. How many men in this situation would even think of holding back? (336).

Really? He’s not giving her an out, he’s preemptively excusing himself for not stopping should she wish to as they move forward. Spoiler alert: she doesn’t wish to. But that’s not the point. What happens if once they get going (he hasn’t penetrated her at this point), she wants to stop? Does he get to say “Too bad, I warned you? I have to finish now?” No. No he does not. Because that would be rape. But instead she “loves him for” offering to not sleep with her.

Anyway, there’s sex (and as I’ve said before, sex scenes are sex scenes and thus not particularly interesting.  Except for this one I read once that was terrible and involved metaphors about sausage casings. I’ll have to find that for comparison purposes at some point.) And during the sex, Billie realizes how much she loves Logan. Like her “heart swelled” and “She loved him with every fiber of her being” (337).

Could some writer who is more talented than I come up with a new phrase to take the spot of “every fiber of her being”? Because it is so clichéd and yet I do understand the impulse to use the phrase.

Anyway, there’s sex. At least they use a condom. And! Billie’s on top, so that helps with my point above about men losing control are a romance novel trope about looooooove.

The connection she felt to Logan was soul shattering— it went beyond the physical and landed pretty much right smack in the middle of a bond she didn’t understand (343).

Am I just a cynic or does the fact that this realization comes right after she had an orgasm make it a bit suspect?

Post-coitus, they notice that the cat has been watching them the whole time and remark that he seems to be a voyeur, and then the chapter concludes with the agreement to give Weird a second “X-rated show to watch” (344).

I’m kind of impressed that it took the novel this long to get these two into bed (340-ish pages out of 520). And I’m also impressed that Billie doesn’t look at Logan’s penis and comment on how large it is, since that has been a running theme in most of these novels. Small mercies?

‘Til next time, here’s the digression I wrote and cut. Feel free to skip it as it has not much directly to say about Offside…

While the comments on this particular blog here are not particularly active (due in part to the cranky nature of blogger and part to the incredibly niche appeal of this blog, I suspect, and also my complete inability to understand how to use metadata and such), Cherry, who comments regularly (and thank you for that!) pointed out something about heroines in the comments recently. She pointed out that while it makes sense that readers want to put be able to put themselves into the heroine’s shoes, the very averageness of the heroine doesn’t make a great deal of sense for the hero – who is always suave and handsome and usually rich (or at least comfortable, like Logan), etc. – to fall for them.

I have to admit, I am often a sucker for the average-girl stories, to an extent. When I’m reading non-hockey romance novels (I love regency romances, I admit it), I like to look for the spinster ones, for example, because I don’t like when the heroine is the same age as my students (18-20) because that seems creepy and because I can’t relate. So relatability is a thing I understand, as is wish fulfillment.

But it seems to me that Ana of FSOG and her precursor, Bella from Twilight, go beyond that. Stephenie Meyer said that she created Bella as a blank slate that readers could just fill up with their own personality, which is why Bella had no personality and exactly one hobby (reading classic novels). At least she was writing for the age group that Bella represented, but of course as you know, the Twilight Saga also resonated with a number of other age groups. I don’t know what the original idea was for making Anastasia Steele, of FSoG, so young—she’s newly graduated from college, so about 20—other than that it was not, in fact, an original idea but Twilight AU fanfiction. But this youth was presumably necessary for the utter blankness of Ana’s character, too. She has exactly one hobby (reading classic novels) and zero sexual experience and she has to be complete initiated into sex by her novel’s hero. This is very, very common in romance novels, even in contemporary ones (although slightly less common than, say, in regencies, since in Regency England if you weren’t a virgin when you got married, you were Not a Nice Girl, etc.)

This is a very, very long winded way of saying that while I think there are some things that are very Not Good about his particular novel (back to Offside now), at least Billie has a personality, has a life (albeit that life is only hockey, but then again, I know a lot of hockey players, even ‘just’ beer league, for whom that statement is true), AND she’s not afraid to go after what she wants, sexually.