Chapter 18 begins with Merry staring at Doyle, who is still
seated upon her bed. He’s all black and black and black and lost in his dreamy
long black hair, blah blah blah. Merry walks closer to him until her legs hit
the edge of her bed.
My
legs pressed into the bed, but all I could feel was the thickness of his hair,
trapped between my body and the firmness of the bed. He turned his head, and I
felt the hair tug underneath me. I pressed in harder, trapping his hair.
There she goes again, randomly doing something weird and
painful to one of her guards for no good reason. Seriously, the more I dig into
these books, the more I realize how goddamn childish Merry acts.
Merry is staring into Doyle’s eyes so black that other
colors swim around in them (what?) and she falls over, so Doyle catches her. Merry
comes to seated in his lap, and she asks “Why?”
“I
am a power to be reckoned with, Meredith, and I want you to never forget that.
A king should have more to offer than seed.”
I slid my hands across his skin, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Are you
auditioning?” He smiled. “We all are, Meredith. Some of the others may forget
that in the rush of hot skin and sex, but you must never forget. You are
choosing a father for your children, a king for the court, and someone you will
be tied to forever.”
I thought Merry was supposed to have sex with any of the
guards Andais picks out, no matter what, and if any of them gets her pregnant,
well, whoops, guess she’s stuck! When you’re trying to get pregnant, and
sleeping with 5 dudes, it’s not exactly like going to the store and picking out
who you want to be the father. UNLESS MAYBE it works like that in faerie
hahahahaha that would be So. Convenient!
They begin discussing who of her men would make a good king.
Nicca (remember him? I bet you don’t!) is too much of a victim to be a good
king. Galen would be disastrous on the throne, for he is much to nice and
naïve. Rhys “is lovely in bed, but I can’t see him as a king.” Well, why can’t
you? Rhys is one of the only characters I actually like in this series, and
he’s always overlooked for no good reason. He used to be a death god, for
christsakes, and he’s always, always discounted as being “not as good” as Frost
or Doyle, even though everything about him makes him seem like he’d be just as
good, or even more powerful. Seriously, there’s never any reason given for why
Merry always passes Rhys up, other than she likes some other flavor of the day
better.
Doyle then starts kissing Merry, and says “There is Frost
and … me.” And at that, Merry shivers, writhing in his lap. This excites Doyle,
and he picks her up and THROWS HER ONTO THE BED. He then gets on his hands and
knees above her “like a mare with a colt, but there was nothing motherly about
the way he stared down at me.” Then why use that analogy? Why use something
that wouldn’t bring up mother/child imagery. I’m sure there’s other, better,
more sexual imagery you could conjure up there, LKH.
He’d
thrown all that hair over one shoulder so that his naked upper body was exposed
to the light. His skin gleamed like polished ebony. His breathing was deep and
rapid, making the nipple ring wink and shimmer above me.
I raised my hand to touch it, brushed my fingers over that bit of silver, and a
sound came out of Doyle, low in his body and growing, a growl like some great
beast, echoing through that slender, muscled body. He straddled my body, lips
curving back to flash white teeth, while that growl trickled out of his lips,
past his teeth like a warning.
It made my pulse race, but I wasn’t afraid yet. Not yet. He leaned down into my
face and snarled, “Run!” I just blinked at him, my pulse in my throat.
Run? Run? Really?!
Doyle throws his head back and basically howls at the moon,
which causes Merry to stop breathing and freeze in place. Apparently the howl
sounds the very same as some of the dark hounds of faerie/the wild hunt, called
the Gabriel Ratchets? I guess this is a real mythological thing, but still, LKH
tosses out random gaelic imagery like we’re supposed to know it. It feels very
off-putting when she does this.
Anyway, Doyle leans into Merry’s face again and snarls “Run”
at her, and Merry scrambles out from underneath his body, but since they’re
shut into her bedroom, and the king size bed takes up most of the room, she
really has no where to go. Doyle snarls again, “You… are… not… running” but
where the fuck is she supposed to go, Doyle? He launches himself off the bed at
Merry and Merry turns to run out the door. She slams against it, and Doyle
catches her, causing her to scream. He tears her away from the door and throws
her back on the bed…
This doesn’t even remotely sound like a fun time. Merry is
obviously terrified and screaming, they didn’t even discuss any sort of
fantasies or sexual desires beforehand, and Doyle becomes insanely violent and
scary. This… this reads way too close to a rape scene, and I do not like it.
Doyle throws Merry to the bed and pins her down with his
crotch, basically. She can feel his “firmness” through his jeans, grinding into
her underwear. At this moment, Rhys peeks his head into the bedroom to check on
Merry to make sure that Doyle isn’t doing anything she does not want him to be
doing. Thank god, someone is actually decent in these stories. This is why I
like Rhys. Doyle screams at Rhys to get out, but Rhys firmly tells him he will
not leave until he hears Merry say everything is okay.
Merry says she’s not sure if she likes what Doyle is doing.
The
feel of Doyle pressed tight and firm against me was exciting, even the promise
of violence was exciting, but only if it was the promise of it, a game. His
hands on my thighs were shaking, his entire body quivering with the effort not
to finish what he’d started. I touched his face gently. He startled as if I’d
hurt him, then turned, looked at me. The look in his eyes was barely human. It
was like looking into the eyes of a tiger, beautiful, neutral, hungry.
“Are we having fun here, Doyle, or are you going to eat me?” My voice was a
little steadier, firmer.
“This first time I would not trust myself to put my mouth to such tender
places.” It took me a second to realize that he had misunderstood me. “I don’t
mean eat me in the euphemistic sense, Doyle. I mean, am I food?” My voice
sounded utterly calm now, ordinary. Pinned to the bed by his body, his eyes
still animalistic and wild, and I sounded like I was in the office, talking
business. He blinked and I saw the confusion in his eyes. I realized that I was
asking him to think too deeply. He’d given himself over to a piece of himself
that he rarely let out. That part didn’t think like a person. He did something
with his legs that pressed him tighter against me. It made me cry out, but not
in pain. “Do you want this?” His voice was almost normal, breathy, but almost
normal. I searched his face, tried to read something there that would comfort
me. There was a glimpse of him in the eyes, a sliver of Doyle left behind. I
took a deep breath, and said, “Yes.”
Knowing that this is what Merry desires, Rhys shut the door
and leaves the two of them alone. Wait, no, that’s what would happen if this
book were at all logical! Instead, there’s like a half page of Rhys going “You
sure, Merry? You sure this is what you want?” and Doyle yelling “You heard her,
get out!” like two times before Merry does anything about it. Finally, after
Merry again says it’s okay, Rhys leaves, and then Doyle turns to Merry and asks
if she truly wants this, wants him.
COME ON.
HE ASKS HER LIKE TWICE, BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T EVER ANSWER DIRECTLY THE FIRST TIME SHE’S ASKED SOMETHING. Fuck this. These characters are
the worst.
So Merry finally tells Doyle that yes, she wants him, and
Doyle rips her clothes off immediately.
One
of his hands slid from my thigh to the side of my panties. The silk tore with a
wet sound like skin being cut.
Or maybe you’re just really wet, Merry? Really wet and
tight? So so tight? So wet and so tight?
My
body jerked as he stripped the silk away and pressed the rough material of his
jeans against my naked body. He ground himself against me until I cried out,
half in pleasure, half in pain. He scooted me onto the bed just enough so that
he could tear at his pants. The belt opened, the button, the zipper, everything
slid down until I saw him nude for the first time. He was long and thick, and
perfect. He slid a finger inside of me. It made me cry out, but that wasn’t why
he’d done it. When he found me wet and open, he pushed himself inside me, and
even wet, he had to work himself in. I was screaming underneath him before he’d
managed to get himself all inside me. He seemed to fill me up, every inch, and
I writhed underneath, just from the feel of him stiff and large inside me.
Like, every single sex scene LKH writes is just a carbon
copy of the previous. Each of her guards are so long and thick and perfect,
they’re just so perfect. And Merry is always so so wet and so tight that
whoever has to work themselves into her. And Merry has to writhe around like a
fucking worm on a hook.
So Doyle starts thrusting and Merry just loves to watch her
men slide in and out of her. It’s such a weird fucking fetish, and she mentions
this like constantly in all of her sex scenes. I really gotta start keeping a
tally of all the weird repetitious shit they do in these sex scenes. Because
they are all. the. same.
So they’re going at it, and their skins both begin glowing.
My
skin began to glow like I’d swallowed the moon, and his dark skin gleamed in
answer, filled with all the colors that had been in his eyes. It was as if he
were the still black water reflecting the glow of the moon, and I was the moon.
The bright dancing colors flowed under his skin, and the room brightened,
brightened, flickering as if we both burned with colored flame. We cast shadows
on the wall, the ceiling, as if we lay at the center of some great light, some
great flame, and we became that light, that fire, that heat. I sank into his
dark glow as he was swallowed by my white shine, and somewhere in all of that,
he brought me screaming, screaming, screaming, drowning in pleasure that was so
intense it was like pain. I heard him cry out, heard that bell-like howl, but
in that one moment I didn’t care. He could have ripped my throat out and I’d
have gone with a smile.
Nothing about that is even remotely sexy. It’s just a huge,
jumbly flow of repeated words and commas. The jarringness of the way it’s
written and punctuated completely takes me out of the scene. Not that I was
even remotely involved in it anyway, but it’s like when a word is repeated so
many times it loses meaning in that moment – that’s how these sex scenes feel
to me. I’ve read the same exact scene over and over and over, and it’s not even
interesting anymore. I analyze how poorly it is written instead of focusing on
the fact that these two perfect, gorgeous beings are fucking each other’s
brains out. Have you ever watched a porn and pointed out all the cheap Ikea
furniture? That’s what this is like.
They both come to and Merry realizes she’s covered in blood.
Not hers, mind, but another thing she does CONSTANTLY is drag her long gross
nails through her lovers skin. I believe she uses the phrase “rake my nails over
their back” a lot. You gotta be doing something really wrong to always draw
blood from your lovers when you orgasm.
Doyle sees the blood and asks if he hurt her. But Merry
instead does the “I should be asking you the same question ahurhurhur” and then
the chapter ends as they start laughing and laughing and laughing because they’re
both fucking stupid.
Labels: book review, Caress of Twilight
