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.)
