KISS THE DEAD, CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Feb. 26th, 2014 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sporking_ratSid passed away on Sunday night. I knew it was coming and spent the entire day together with him and Ratsputin. I was petting him when he went, and Ratsputin was beside him. It wasn't at all unexpected, they're all almost three. Ratsputin is still pretty perky, but he's on his way out too.
Sid was short for his full name, Darth Sidius, so named by my sister because when he was little he liked to hide in pillowcases with just his nose poking out out, making him look like a Sith lord under a hood. He was a gift to my sister from her then-boyfriend, and we got Ratsputin to go with him, and while they remained lifelong friends, they couldn't live together. They were buddies and loved hanging out in neutral territory, but if they'd had to share a cage they'd have killed each other. Go figure, huh? Sid preferred my sister over me (vice versa with Ratsputin) and was so lazy that when I gave him a try in the rat ball, he just pooped in it and went to sleep. However, he could be feisty when called for it, as evident by the story I relayed last spork about him biting me because he thought I was a cat. He was also the prime suspect when we had a pregnancy scare with Miss Blatz, the little devil. He went peacefully, and his last meal was yogurt and avocado.
KISS THE DEAD, CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Claudia waits outside the showers and keeps an eye on both the entrance and exit, which causes Anita to go on a ramble about how the original design for the showers had been a single door to serve as both entrance and exit but she'd vetoed that because it meant you could be trapped in there, and the bodyguards all voted with her because she's so smart and sensible. Considering that vampires and therians were working and living at the Circus before she even came, I'm kinda confused on why showers are only being built now, especially since you'd have shifting on the premises with all the goop and whatnot. Even more confusing is Anita's next ramble about how there are restrooms for both men and women and "we actually had enough women living down here that it wasn't as silly as when we'd first had it put in. It was nice not to be the only girl." Besides the absurdity of Anita claiming she's ever happy being anything BUT the only girl, I must point out that, again, there were girls here before Anita: Nikolaos, Theresa, Rashida, Yasmeen, and Marguerite. Liv and Gretchen probably reside/resided here too. Of course, almost all those women died in the book they appear in, but they were still there prior to that, most likely for years and years, and while vamps might not need restrooms, therians like Rashida and human servants like Marguerite would. Granted Nikolaos did not control the vast population of shifters that JC now does under Anita, so there likely weren't as many milling around the place, so I could buy that there were originally fewer toilets and they were probably gender-neutral. But that's just a matter of numbers period, not numbers of women; she's talking as if it were the sausage-fest before that she wishes was now.
"When we were in the locker area, Nicky reminded me of another reason it was nice to be a girl. He took me in his arms and kissed me." He then asks her if it hurt, she says no, "he grinned, a fierce baring of teeth", kisses her harder, and it hurts, and she says it hurts. He says "I wanted to taste the blood in your mouth, before the sex helps you heal." Before you judge Nicky for this, remember that he can only want what Anita does and do what she wants him to. Anita says he's not a sadist, and I sorta facepalm because liking blood for whatever reason doesn't have anything to do with sadism necessarily, and Nicky explains that "No, but I'm a lycanthropes. I enjoy the taste of blood and meat, and right now your mouth will taste like both." No, you're a leonanthrope, and I don't see how her mouth would taste like meat. Anita says some shapeshifters would lose control during something like that, again showing that LKH forgot what she said in The Lunatic Cafe about shapeshifters and lycanthropes being different things. She tries to figure out if this "was just a kink that he'd always enjoyed, but it had just never come up before" I guess she never gets her period "or was it a test of how much I trusted him?" As if Nicky has any capacity to test Anita.
"He was my Bride, so he could feel what I was feeling, but Brides were different from any other metaphysical tie that I had. I couldn't feel his emotions; it was all about his feeling mine, and catering to me. It meant he was, in some ways, a mystery to me." So she acknowledges his entire existence is based around catering to her but the revelation she gets from that is OOH HE'S MYSTERIOUS. "I realized I was a little spoiled that I could just peek, or share emotions with almost everyone else. I used to hate the intrusive psychic connection; now I counted on it." That would be something interesting to explore, actually, but at the moment the main plot (or what I think the plot was supposed to be, anyway) has seriously been dropped long enough and this should all be skipped or at the very least moved. Nicky asks if she trusts him, and Anita goes "Ah, the trust tests" in her head as if that's something we're all suppose to know about and have experienced. Anita responds that she thought being her Bride meant he couldn't cause her pain, or that at least it bothered him when he did. Because you'd need to be mentally enslaved to someone in order to be bothered you'd caused them pain, I guess. Nicky explains what I was thinking--that it's what Anita likes, so he can do it, and he adds that "and I'll enjoy the blood, meat, and sex." Anita = meat to him, master or not. I'd be disgusted if I weren't so pleased to see he still has that much of himself left.
Apparently Anita thinks this is just normal because "Yeah, the whole prey-predator-chase thing gets confused with sex for most shapeshifters." HOW DO YOU CONFUSED SEX WITH FOOD?! Sadly, AB is not the only UF series I've seen where this idea is implemented, and seriously, what do these authors think, that wolves and cougars and such in the wild just sometimes have a brain fart and start humping the deer they brought down instead of killing it?! Or that they start eating their mates during coitus?! Not unless they're a black widow/praying mantis/etc.! If you see sex in terms of "prey-predator" then it means that YOU have issues, it has squat to do with having an inner beast or turning into one, because animals don't think like that all. Nicky agrees though, saying that "If we weren't kinky before the change, we are after." and Anita smiles that "Can't argue that." I hate so hard how LKH tries to seriously make it that all therians have to be kinky sex-obsessed exhibitionists because they're therians omg. I hate it so much. He asks if he can kiss her "the way I want" and she says they should take off their weapons first, he asks why, she says because once they get going they may just plain forget the weapons are there "and I don't want you tearing the custom-made holsters off me just so you can get my clothes off." Wow, that remark actually sounded sensible! Although I don't think you could ever be so into it that you'd forget being covered in weapons, since they'd all be poking you during.
His grin gets wider, he says okay, there is a fat long paragraph about them taking off all their weapons, complete with Anita talking about what type Nicky is best at using. Nicky seems to notice that she's having one of her inner monologues again because he says "You're all serious and not thinking about sex. You're almost sad, what's wrong?" She realized that her author doesn't care shit about the plot. Anita exclaims on how finely attuned he is to her mood, he says he lives to make her happy. She says she's sorry he actually means that, and mentions her guns and knives to us. Nicky says he knows she's sorry about taking his free will and he appreciates that but that he would have killed her and her men if his old Rex had given the order. As I've said many a time now, who Nicky was does not make what Anita did to him okay, and I also don't believe for a second she's actually sorry for it because she never even thinks about finding a way to fix it. Anita looks at his face and yammers to us about it's totally expressionless, mentions he's handsome, then says she doesn't think that his blank-face is something he had to work at like JC did because "sociopaths don't have to show emotion" I don't know if having a flat affect is a feature of sociopaths, but I've read psychopaths do, I think? sometimes? "They do it most of the time because they've learned to ape what "normal" people show them, but they never really understand the emotions they act like they have; they are the ultimate actors. It's how they blend in" It sounds less like Anita is describing and Nicky and more like she is describing herself. We've all joked about how LKH/Anita comes off like an alien who is trying to mimic human behavior and interactions in her writing but has no real understanding of how they actually worked, but that sounds chillingly close to her description of sociopaths here, except she frames sociopaths as actually being successful at it. It's extra unnerving when one considers her astounding self-centeredness both as Anita and on her blogs, Reddit answers, etc.
Anita says that sociopaths actually either never had feelings to begin with or their feelings were abused out of them, and Nicky was the latter case, which is how he lost his eye, and wonders if he'd had emotions once and maybe understands them better because of that, and wow this would actually be interesting to explore but it all gets thrown away in a few pages for sex, surprise surprise. Anita tells Nicky "That's one of the reasons I rolled you so completely, Nicky. Sociopaths don't help anybody but themselves." AKA she fucking admits that she did it on purpose. Nicky says Anita is ruthless as he is but that it makes her feel bad and he doesn't have this problem. Anita responds with "Because you're a sociopath." OH GOD WE GET IT ALREADY! Nicky notes she's using the past tense, as if that's changed, and says he's still a sociopath but he just can't act on it now because she doesn't want him to and it would make her feel bad and he can't stand to make her feel bad. Anita asks if that makes her his version of Jiminy Cricket. Anita, no, you are not a conscience, you are a leash and a slavemaster. Nicky says that "Nathaniel showed me that movie so I'd understand what the hell you meant by that, so yeah, you're my Jiminy Cricket."
1) Nathaniel knew in advance that Anita was going to use that metaphor?
2) Because there is no way a big bad sociopath would ever watch that movie ever in his life and also it's not like it's become a part of pop-culture he could still pick up on at some point without ever having seen it
3) Okay, is anyone creeped out that Nathaniel just has kids movies around he likes to show the other harem guys?
Anita asks if he still doesn't have any desire to be good even though she makes him be good anyway, he shrugs, and Anita goes on a small tangent to us when he doesn't lock the door of his weapons locker about how no one here touches anyone elses' weapons because people died over it. JC really does need to run a tighter ship. He slowly takes off his shirt and Anita talks about his naked upper body a lot, then his "yellow, yellow hair that was his natural color" In a fic by Subtle_shades, a fabulous commenter here, there's a bit about how Asher refers to himself as a blond and Anita is all "No, Asher, you're not blond, your hair is golden!" as if he just insulted himself. And now that I think about it...Anita only ever does talk about his hair as golden, and now Nicky has"yellow" hair instead of blond too. I used to say her blond-hate only applied to women, but now I wonder if she can only admit she likes blond men if she claims they're some word other than blond. God, she is so weird. She goes on about how his hair looks like that of "someone who went to anime conventions, or dance clubs and raves" and how she had been surprised to find out that Nicky can indeed dance and how he could have been a great dancer at Guilty Pleasures and how "the women would have loved the packaging, and he could be charming as hell when he had to pretend" and how he doesn't have the temperament for stripping to be a static job for him but "he probably could have danced there for a weekend just to prove he could do it." So, about that woman bit...the patrons at GP do seem to be only-female, don't they? Now, I don't go to strip clubs, not my cup of tea and there aren't a lot that cater to my personal preference for big studly butch women, but I always got the impression that, while a substantial percentage of the audience in a male strip club might be women, the majority is generally gay men. Am I wrong on that, or is LKH?
Nicky says she was just thinking "everything I wanted you to think and feel for a second, and now you've gone all serious. What are you thinking?" Well, you tell me bro, you're apparently a mind-reader now. Anita has basically the same response ("What am I feeling?") and he says she's feeling suspicious, as if she doesn't trust him. Anita says she trusts him because "my vampire head games make it so that you are utterly trustworthy to me, but if I hadn't mind-fucked you, would have killed me" GOD IF ONLY "and now you love me. We've been lovers for almost two years, but I'm not sure you feel anything for me." He doesn't. Not really. Anything he feels is the result of your feelings and desires. That's been made pretty fucking clear. I feel like LKH decided "oh, this would be dramatic!" and didn't bother to think about how actually this issue has already been entirely covered. Of course, because Nicky is wired to feel what she wants him to, he tells her that she's wrong and puts his hand on the side of her face, slides his fingers into her hair, and he's feverishly warm so she can tell his beast is stirring. Anita asks what she's wrong about, Nicky tells her that he always wants to touch her and feels "bad" and "cold" and "lost" if she's away "like the sun is missing from the sky" and Anita accurately replies that "That's the mind-fuck talking." and Nicky says he knows that. Wow, this is written as being sexy, with lips hovering above lips and such, but it's really sad. Look, mind-control is a kink, it has a niche, why can't LKH just write her stuff for that audience instead as a plainly-meant-for-fantasy deal?
Anita asks if that bothers him and "breathed the words into his mouth" and his kisses her as he says he wants to kiss her more than he's ever wanted to do anything and to fuck her more than he's ever wanted to do anything or, of course, anyone. She says he's addicted to her, he says "I'm your mind-fucked bitch" and this sounds like bedroom talk to me, like lines two people would have in a kink scenario they wrote out beforehand, except that it's real and he really is and that takes the sexy out of it, especially since, again, this is is NOT supposed to be a kink-universe novel where this sort of thing is just part of immersing yourself in the fantasy of said kink-universe. Nicky says no and asks if it bothers Anita that the smell of her blood excites him and he wants to lick it off her mouth. All my AB OC therians are making 'ick' faces now, fyi. I srsly don't mind a character having a blood kink and I don't mean to judge that, what I find icky is the presentation that THEY ALL DO/MUST. Especially since I don't think it was a thing until now? We've seen therians get excited by blood, like in The Lunatic Cafe, but that was overtly presented as a 'food' thing (before food and sex were entirely one in the same thanks to the ardeur) so I'd think to most therians the idea of being turned-on by blood would be like getting turned-on by your sandwich. Aw yeeeah baby, those thick slices with some good tomato and over-roasted turkey slathered in mayo, cut those crusts off right now don't tease me~
Anita says no in a soft shiver, and Nicky says how he wants to "trap you in my arms" and kiss her "so deep, and so hard, that you can't tell me to stop" Okay, between Micah and Asher and this, that is three times kiss-gagging has come up, it is definitely LKH's new thing. God, why can't she just write kink novels? It's clearly what she wants to be doing. It was good enough for Anne Rice, lady! Anita shivers again and "it wasn't from fear, or mostly not fear" adding that there's always "that edge when playing with shapeshifters" but that she enjoys said edge. CUZ SHE'S EDGEY! And then, because she is edgey, she says "Yay!" No, really: "I breathed the words into his mouth, against the warmth of his mouth, "Yay!"
This is really hilarious. I mean, I'm glad to see she's so enthusiastic about sex for once (even if she's RAPING NICKY BECAUSE HE CAN'T ACTUALLY CONSENT), but IT'S JUST SO FUNNY
Nicky asks if that's a yes and puts his hand on the back of her neck and oh his hand is so big and she says yes and kisses him and he tightens his hand against her neck and "kissed me so deep and so hard that I couldn't say anything, not even no." The 'couldn't say anything' bit makes it sound like she's in the habit of trying to talk while smooch, the 'not even no' bit gives it an uncomfy rapey feel, like she were going to say 'no' but now can't. "His arm was like muscled steel at my back" Dude, is she suddenly doing Colossus from the X-Men? Run, Piotr, run! "trapping my upper body against him, my arms at my sides, so much more trapped than Asher had managed." Yeah, Asher, step up your game! Seriously, LKH just write bodice-rippers already. They'd still be crap but at least it would be more honest. She thinks about how she didn't hurt Asher cuz she chose not to, but with the way Nicky is holding her she just plain can't hurt him. He kisses her and licks his tongue over the wound inside her mouth and the pain is sharp, which she says she normally doesn't like, but when she's about to try to protest he stops tonguing the wound and just kisses her and she kisses him back even though it's hard for her to move her head because of how tight he's holding and "he was in control even of that part. He touched the deepest wound and I taste fresh blood." Nicky kind of growls, stands up, lifts her off the ground and she's so safe but so trapped in his arms and she can't tell if she likes it or is scared and she doesn't feel bad about it and....you know, this kinda appeals to me. I'm not into the blood part, that's just me, but I like the whole big strong arms you're safe yet trapped in and all. That's up my alley. I still probably wouldn't read a bodice-ripper if LKH did one, but I think she would (much as she might hate this) appeal to a pretty wide audience with a lot of the things she seems to like. Aside from the covert vore, her kinks don't seem that niche at all. Sorry, LKH, you're just not that edgy and special AND THAT'S OKAY!
Nicky makes a "low, purring growl" into her mouth and it vibrates down her body "until it found that deep, deep center of me" and she sees her lioness stirring within herself and "padding through tall shadowy trees" and infodumps on how of course the trees and all aren't real it's what just she mentally sees for "reference for the sensation of a lion moving inside my human body" and the lioness is "gliding toward the growling heat that Nicky offered" and instead of seeing this as sexual, my first thought is that it's a cat so it's looking for a warm lap and is going to make Anita just curl up and sleep on him. And then it makes her get "fever-hot" too like him and that just does not sound sexy, it sounds uncomfortable. Fevers aren't fun! He draws back from the kiss and she sees that "his blue eye had drowned to lion amber" and he makes "a growl that should never have come from human lips" except that therians exist in this universe and so it does ALL THE TIME and Anita "growled softly back" and Nicky roars like she's never heard any werelion do and sets her on her feet. Then rips open her jeans right through the zipper and most of the cloth around it, turns her around roughly, bends her over the bench, rips her jeans open again from the back "tearing them down to my thighs" and rips off her thong in one pull. Okay, this was kind of hot up until the thong bit, that sounds so uncomfy. "Did it hurt, or did it feel good?" and she thinks about "rough and pain" turning to "sex and pleasure" in her head and how "I loved the sensation of him ripping my clothes away; the force of it, the eagerness of it, tightened things low in my body." I'm glad you're enjoying it! Hey, now that you've learned to admit you like sex, maybe next we can work on using grown-up words for our no-no bathing-suit-area bits?
Nicky puts his hands on her hips and says he loves her ass. Anita thinks how some of her men whisper sweet nothings or even poetry in bed to her and how she loves them for that but loves Nicky for "other things". Ugh, you don't love him Anita, at least not anymore than, say, an ordinary woman loves her dildo and what it can do for her. He keeps one hand on her hip while his other runs over her ass "and finally slid a finger inside me." Did he just put a finger in her ass? I'm hoping so, just for a change of pace. She mentions being tight, and he says she's wet...so, um, it's probably her cunt then. I'm gonna pretend it's her asshole as long as I can just because that's different at least. UNTIL YOU SAY OTHERWISE, LKH! YOU'LL HAVE TO USE ACTUAL WORDS FOR IT IT TOO! He pushes two of his fingers in and out of her and "it felt good, very good, but it wasn't going to hit the mark" and he somehow knows this automatically because he says the angle's wrong and she agrees so he tells her to lie on the bench on her back...because Anita is such a passive sex object she can't even tell the dude the angle is gonna get her off, he has to just know because of his mind-tie to her or whatever it is that tipped him off, and tell her what to do about it. She says the bench is too narrow to have sex on, he says just do it and she thinks about how she enjoys that he is "less flowery" than the other guys but also wonders "just how blunt he would have been if I hadn't mindfucked him from the beginning."
If I recall right about before he was enslaved, he was terrified when his cohorts put him with Anita to feed her ardeur. Granted, he knew what she might do to him, so he probably wasn't acting like he normally would with a woman, but still, he hardly seemed to the potential-rapist she seems to be hinting he might be without her oh-so-saintly enslavement holding him back for the greater good and all. Anita does stand up for herself and "gave him the look the idea deserved" and says "Not with my jeans around my thighs" so Nicky jerks her jeans off and over her boots so hard it makes her fall down and he has to catch her, which I guess is putting her in her place for being uppity or whatever. She just laughs about how she wouldn't have thought one could take pants off over the big police/military boots she has on. He licks one of her cheeks in "a long, slow taste of tongue" Um, no, he's tasting your cheek, you're not tasting his tongue. Then he bites her cheek and she says that's "too much teeth, too soon", he licks her again and says she'll like it later, she's like yeah but not yet, he tells her again to lie on her back on the bench, she says it's a really narrow bench, repeats to us about how he has blond (yes, she uses the b-word!) hair and blue eyes and goes on AGAIN about that ~darkness~ that men get when sex is going down and how "it's not exactly possessive, but yet it is, but it is predatory, and it wasn't just because Nicky was a werelion. It wasn't a shapeshifter look, or a vampire look, it was a male look."
LKH has so many sex-issues.
Hey guys, wanna make yourself laugh but also induce nightmares for life?
Picture this supposed look in Jonboi's eyes during sexytiems
Anyway, she says the same thing she did earlier in the scene with Micah and Nathaniel about how maybe some women get that look but she's never seen it with herself and her woman (she doesn't refer to Yiyu by name) doesn't have "a look like this" and she stares at Nicky and he stares back "and let me see in his face what he wanted to do to me" and he tells her "Get on the bench, Anita" and "I didn't argue again."
WELL, THAT CHAPTER ENDED ON A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE NOTE
Sid was short for his full name, Darth Sidius, so named by my sister because when he was little he liked to hide in pillowcases with just his nose poking out out, making him look like a Sith lord under a hood. He was a gift to my sister from her then-boyfriend, and we got Ratsputin to go with him, and while they remained lifelong friends, they couldn't live together. They were buddies and loved hanging out in neutral territory, but if they'd had to share a cage they'd have killed each other. Go figure, huh? Sid preferred my sister over me (vice versa with Ratsputin) and was so lazy that when I gave him a try in the rat ball, he just pooped in it and went to sleep. However, he could be feisty when called for it, as evident by the story I relayed last spork about him biting me because he thought I was a cat. He was also the prime suspect when we had a pregnancy scare with Miss Blatz, the little devil. He went peacefully, and his last meal was yogurt and avocado.
KISS THE DEAD, CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Claudia waits outside the showers and keeps an eye on both the entrance and exit, which causes Anita to go on a ramble about how the original design for the showers had been a single door to serve as both entrance and exit but she'd vetoed that because it meant you could be trapped in there, and the bodyguards all voted with her because she's so smart and sensible. Considering that vampires and therians were working and living at the Circus before she even came, I'm kinda confused on why showers are only being built now, especially since you'd have shifting on the premises with all the goop and whatnot. Even more confusing is Anita's next ramble about how there are restrooms for both men and women and "we actually had enough women living down here that it wasn't as silly as when we'd first had it put in. It was nice not to be the only girl." Besides the absurdity of Anita claiming she's ever happy being anything BUT the only girl, I must point out that, again, there were girls here before Anita: Nikolaos, Theresa, Rashida, Yasmeen, and Marguerite. Liv and Gretchen probably reside/resided here too. Of course, almost all those women died in the book they appear in, but they were still there prior to that, most likely for years and years, and while vamps might not need restrooms, therians like Rashida and human servants like Marguerite would. Granted Nikolaos did not control the vast population of shifters that JC now does under Anita, so there likely weren't as many milling around the place, so I could buy that there were originally fewer toilets and they were probably gender-neutral. But that's just a matter of numbers period, not numbers of women; she's talking as if it were the sausage-fest before that she wishes was now.
"When we were in the locker area, Nicky reminded me of another reason it was nice to be a girl. He took me in his arms and kissed me." He then asks her if it hurt, she says no, "he grinned, a fierce baring of teeth", kisses her harder, and it hurts, and she says it hurts. He says "I wanted to taste the blood in your mouth, before the sex helps you heal." Before you judge Nicky for this, remember that he can only want what Anita does and do what she wants him to. Anita says he's not a sadist, and I sorta facepalm because liking blood for whatever reason doesn't have anything to do with sadism necessarily, and Nicky explains that "No, but I'm a lycanthropes. I enjoy the taste of blood and meat, and right now your mouth will taste like both." No, you're a leonanthrope, and I don't see how her mouth would taste like meat. Anita says some shapeshifters would lose control during something like that, again showing that LKH forgot what she said in The Lunatic Cafe about shapeshifters and lycanthropes being different things. She tries to figure out if this "was just a kink that he'd always enjoyed, but it had just never come up before" I guess she never gets her period "or was it a test of how much I trusted him?" As if Nicky has any capacity to test Anita.
"He was my Bride, so he could feel what I was feeling, but Brides were different from any other metaphysical tie that I had. I couldn't feel his emotions; it was all about his feeling mine, and catering to me. It meant he was, in some ways, a mystery to me." So she acknowledges his entire existence is based around catering to her but the revelation she gets from that is OOH HE'S MYSTERIOUS. "I realized I was a little spoiled that I could just peek, or share emotions with almost everyone else. I used to hate the intrusive psychic connection; now I counted on it." That would be something interesting to explore, actually, but at the moment the main plot (or what I think the plot was supposed to be, anyway) has seriously been dropped long enough and this should all be skipped or at the very least moved. Nicky asks if she trusts him, and Anita goes "Ah, the trust tests" in her head as if that's something we're all suppose to know about and have experienced. Anita responds that she thought being her Bride meant he couldn't cause her pain, or that at least it bothered him when he did. Because you'd need to be mentally enslaved to someone in order to be bothered you'd caused them pain, I guess. Nicky explains what I was thinking--that it's what Anita likes, so he can do it, and he adds that "and I'll enjoy the blood, meat, and sex." Anita = meat to him, master or not. I'd be disgusted if I weren't so pleased to see he still has that much of himself left.
Apparently Anita thinks this is just normal because "Yeah, the whole prey-predator-chase thing gets confused with sex for most shapeshifters." HOW DO YOU CONFUSED SEX WITH FOOD?! Sadly, AB is not the only UF series I've seen where this idea is implemented, and seriously, what do these authors think, that wolves and cougars and such in the wild just sometimes have a brain fart and start humping the deer they brought down instead of killing it?! Or that they start eating their mates during coitus?! Not unless they're a black widow/praying mantis/etc.! If you see sex in terms of "prey-predator" then it means that YOU have issues, it has squat to do with having an inner beast or turning into one, because animals don't think like that all. Nicky agrees though, saying that "If we weren't kinky before the change, we are after." and Anita smiles that "Can't argue that." I hate so hard how LKH tries to seriously make it that all therians have to be kinky sex-obsessed exhibitionists because they're therians omg. I hate it so much. He asks if he can kiss her "the way I want" and she says they should take off their weapons first, he asks why, she says because once they get going they may just plain forget the weapons are there "and I don't want you tearing the custom-made holsters off me just so you can get my clothes off." Wow, that remark actually sounded sensible! Although I don't think you could ever be so into it that you'd forget being covered in weapons, since they'd all be poking you during.
His grin gets wider, he says okay, there is a fat long paragraph about them taking off all their weapons, complete with Anita talking about what type Nicky is best at using. Nicky seems to notice that she's having one of her inner monologues again because he says "You're all serious and not thinking about sex. You're almost sad, what's wrong?" She realized that her author doesn't care shit about the plot. Anita exclaims on how finely attuned he is to her mood, he says he lives to make her happy. She says she's sorry he actually means that, and mentions her guns and knives to us. Nicky says he knows she's sorry about taking his free will and he appreciates that but that he would have killed her and her men if his old Rex had given the order. As I've said many a time now, who Nicky was does not make what Anita did to him okay, and I also don't believe for a second she's actually sorry for it because she never even thinks about finding a way to fix it. Anita looks at his face and yammers to us about it's totally expressionless, mentions he's handsome, then says she doesn't think that his blank-face is something he had to work at like JC did because "sociopaths don't have to show emotion" I don't know if having a flat affect is a feature of sociopaths, but I've read psychopaths do, I think? sometimes? "They do it most of the time because they've learned to ape what "normal" people show them, but they never really understand the emotions they act like they have; they are the ultimate actors. It's how they blend in" It sounds less like Anita is describing and Nicky and more like she is describing herself. We've all joked about how LKH/Anita comes off like an alien who is trying to mimic human behavior and interactions in her writing but has no real understanding of how they actually worked, but that sounds chillingly close to her description of sociopaths here, except she frames sociopaths as actually being successful at it. It's extra unnerving when one considers her astounding self-centeredness both as Anita and on her blogs, Reddit answers, etc.
Anita says that sociopaths actually either never had feelings to begin with or their feelings were abused out of them, and Nicky was the latter case, which is how he lost his eye, and wonders if he'd had emotions once and maybe understands them better because of that, and wow this would actually be interesting to explore but it all gets thrown away in a few pages for sex, surprise surprise. Anita tells Nicky "That's one of the reasons I rolled you so completely, Nicky. Sociopaths don't help anybody but themselves." AKA she fucking admits that she did it on purpose. Nicky says Anita is ruthless as he is but that it makes her feel bad and he doesn't have this problem. Anita responds with "Because you're a sociopath." OH GOD WE GET IT ALREADY! Nicky notes she's using the past tense, as if that's changed, and says he's still a sociopath but he just can't act on it now because she doesn't want him to and it would make her feel bad and he can't stand to make her feel bad. Anita asks if that makes her his version of Jiminy Cricket. Anita, no, you are not a conscience, you are a leash and a slavemaster. Nicky says that "Nathaniel showed me that movie so I'd understand what the hell you meant by that, so yeah, you're my Jiminy Cricket."
1) Nathaniel knew in advance that Anita was going to use that metaphor?
2) Because there is no way a big bad sociopath would ever watch that movie ever in his life and also it's not like it's become a part of pop-culture he could still pick up on at some point without ever having seen it
3) Okay, is anyone creeped out that Nathaniel just has kids movies around he likes to show the other harem guys?
Anita asks if he still doesn't have any desire to be good even though she makes him be good anyway, he shrugs, and Anita goes on a small tangent to us when he doesn't lock the door of his weapons locker about how no one here touches anyone elses' weapons because people died over it. JC really does need to run a tighter ship. He slowly takes off his shirt and Anita talks about his naked upper body a lot, then his "yellow, yellow hair that was his natural color" In a fic by Subtle_shades, a fabulous commenter here, there's a bit about how Asher refers to himself as a blond and Anita is all "No, Asher, you're not blond, your hair is golden!" as if he just insulted himself. And now that I think about it...Anita only ever does talk about his hair as golden, and now Nicky has"yellow" hair instead of blond too. I used to say her blond-hate only applied to women, but now I wonder if she can only admit she likes blond men if she claims they're some word other than blond. God, she is so weird. She goes on about how his hair looks like that of "someone who went to anime conventions, or dance clubs and raves" and how she had been surprised to find out that Nicky can indeed dance and how he could have been a great dancer at Guilty Pleasures and how "the women would have loved the packaging, and he could be charming as hell when he had to pretend" and how he doesn't have the temperament for stripping to be a static job for him but "he probably could have danced there for a weekend just to prove he could do it." So, about that woman bit...the patrons at GP do seem to be only-female, don't they? Now, I don't go to strip clubs, not my cup of tea and there aren't a lot that cater to my personal preference for big studly butch women, but I always got the impression that, while a substantial percentage of the audience in a male strip club might be women, the majority is generally gay men. Am I wrong on that, or is LKH?
Nicky says she was just thinking "everything I wanted you to think and feel for a second, and now you've gone all serious. What are you thinking?" Well, you tell me bro, you're apparently a mind-reader now. Anita has basically the same response ("What am I feeling?") and he says she's feeling suspicious, as if she doesn't trust him. Anita says she trusts him because "my vampire head games make it so that you are utterly trustworthy to me, but if I hadn't mind-fucked you, would have killed me" GOD IF ONLY "and now you love me. We've been lovers for almost two years, but I'm not sure you feel anything for me." He doesn't. Not really. Anything he feels is the result of your feelings and desires. That's been made pretty fucking clear. I feel like LKH decided "oh, this would be dramatic!" and didn't bother to think about how actually this issue has already been entirely covered. Of course, because Nicky is wired to feel what she wants him to, he tells her that she's wrong and puts his hand on the side of her face, slides his fingers into her hair, and he's feverishly warm so she can tell his beast is stirring. Anita asks what she's wrong about, Nicky tells her that he always wants to touch her and feels "bad" and "cold" and "lost" if she's away "like the sun is missing from the sky" and Anita accurately replies that "That's the mind-fuck talking." and Nicky says he knows that. Wow, this is written as being sexy, with lips hovering above lips and such, but it's really sad. Look, mind-control is a kink, it has a niche, why can't LKH just write her stuff for that audience instead as a plainly-meant-for-fantasy deal?
Anita asks if that bothers him and "breathed the words into his mouth" and his kisses her as he says he wants to kiss her more than he's ever wanted to do anything and to fuck her more than he's ever wanted to do anything or, of course, anyone. She says he's addicted to her, he says "I'm your mind-fucked bitch" and this sounds like bedroom talk to me, like lines two people would have in a kink scenario they wrote out beforehand, except that it's real and he really is and that takes the sexy out of it, especially since, again, this is is NOT supposed to be a kink-universe novel where this sort of thing is just part of immersing yourself in the fantasy of said kink-universe. Nicky says no and asks if it bothers Anita that the smell of her blood excites him and he wants to lick it off her mouth. All my AB OC therians are making 'ick' faces now, fyi. I srsly don't mind a character having a blood kink and I don't mean to judge that, what I find icky is the presentation that THEY ALL DO/MUST. Especially since I don't think it was a thing until now? We've seen therians get excited by blood, like in The Lunatic Cafe, but that was overtly presented as a 'food' thing (before food and sex were entirely one in the same thanks to the ardeur) so I'd think to most therians the idea of being turned-on by blood would be like getting turned-on by your sandwich. Aw yeeeah baby, those thick slices with some good tomato and over-roasted turkey slathered in mayo, cut those crusts off right now don't tease me~
Anita says no in a soft shiver, and Nicky says how he wants to "trap you in my arms" and kiss her "so deep, and so hard, that you can't tell me to stop" Okay, between Micah and Asher and this, that is three times kiss-gagging has come up, it is definitely LKH's new thing. God, why can't she just write kink novels? It's clearly what she wants to be doing. It was good enough for Anne Rice, lady! Anita shivers again and "it wasn't from fear, or mostly not fear" adding that there's always "that edge when playing with shapeshifters" but that she enjoys said edge. CUZ SHE'S EDGEY! And then, because she is edgey, she says "Yay!" No, really: "I breathed the words into his mouth, against the warmth of his mouth, "Yay!"
This is really hilarious. I mean, I'm glad to see she's so enthusiastic about sex for once (even if she's RAPING NICKY BECAUSE HE CAN'T ACTUALLY CONSENT), but IT'S JUST SO FUNNY
Nicky asks if that's a yes and puts his hand on the back of her neck and oh his hand is so big and she says yes and kisses him and he tightens his hand against her neck and "kissed me so deep and so hard that I couldn't say anything, not even no." The 'couldn't say anything' bit makes it sound like she's in the habit of trying to talk while smooch, the 'not even no' bit gives it an uncomfy rapey feel, like she were going to say 'no' but now can't. "His arm was like muscled steel at my back" Dude, is she suddenly doing Colossus from the X-Men? Run, Piotr, run! "trapping my upper body against him, my arms at my sides, so much more trapped than Asher had managed." Yeah, Asher, step up your game! Seriously, LKH just write bodice-rippers already. They'd still be crap but at least it would be more honest. She thinks about how she didn't hurt Asher cuz she chose not to, but with the way Nicky is holding her she just plain can't hurt him. He kisses her and licks his tongue over the wound inside her mouth and the pain is sharp, which she says she normally doesn't like, but when she's about to try to protest he stops tonguing the wound and just kisses her and she kisses him back even though it's hard for her to move her head because of how tight he's holding and "he was in control even of that part. He touched the deepest wound and I taste fresh blood." Nicky kind of growls, stands up, lifts her off the ground and she's so safe but so trapped in his arms and she can't tell if she likes it or is scared and she doesn't feel bad about it and....you know, this kinda appeals to me. I'm not into the blood part, that's just me, but I like the whole big strong arms you're safe yet trapped in and all. That's up my alley. I still probably wouldn't read a bodice-ripper if LKH did one, but I think she would (much as she might hate this) appeal to a pretty wide audience with a lot of the things she seems to like. Aside from the covert vore, her kinks don't seem that niche at all. Sorry, LKH, you're just not that edgy and special AND THAT'S OKAY!
Nicky makes a "low, purring growl" into her mouth and it vibrates down her body "until it found that deep, deep center of me" and she sees her lioness stirring within herself and "padding through tall shadowy trees" and infodumps on how of course the trees and all aren't real it's what just she mentally sees for "reference for the sensation of a lion moving inside my human body" and the lioness is "gliding toward the growling heat that Nicky offered" and instead of seeing this as sexual, my first thought is that it's a cat so it's looking for a warm lap and is going to make Anita just curl up and sleep on him. And then it makes her get "fever-hot" too like him and that just does not sound sexy, it sounds uncomfortable. Fevers aren't fun! He draws back from the kiss and she sees that "his blue eye had drowned to lion amber" and he makes "a growl that should never have come from human lips" except that therians exist in this universe and so it does ALL THE TIME and Anita "growled softly back" and Nicky roars like she's never heard any werelion do and sets her on her feet. Then rips open her jeans right through the zipper and most of the cloth around it, turns her around roughly, bends her over the bench, rips her jeans open again from the back "tearing them down to my thighs" and rips off her thong in one pull. Okay, this was kind of hot up until the thong bit, that sounds so uncomfy. "Did it hurt, or did it feel good?" and she thinks about "rough and pain" turning to "sex and pleasure" in her head and how "I loved the sensation of him ripping my clothes away; the force of it, the eagerness of it, tightened things low in my body." I'm glad you're enjoying it! Hey, now that you've learned to admit you like sex, maybe next we can work on using grown-up words for our no-no bathing-suit-area bits?
Nicky puts his hands on her hips and says he loves her ass. Anita thinks how some of her men whisper sweet nothings or even poetry in bed to her and how she loves them for that but loves Nicky for "other things". Ugh, you don't love him Anita, at least not anymore than, say, an ordinary woman loves her dildo and what it can do for her. He keeps one hand on her hip while his other runs over her ass "and finally slid a finger inside me." Did he just put a finger in her ass? I'm hoping so, just for a change of pace. She mentions being tight, and he says she's wet...so, um, it's probably her cunt then. I'm gonna pretend it's her asshole as long as I can just because that's different at least. UNTIL YOU SAY OTHERWISE, LKH! YOU'LL HAVE TO USE ACTUAL WORDS FOR IT IT TOO! He pushes two of his fingers in and out of her and "it felt good, very good, but it wasn't going to hit the mark" and he somehow knows this automatically because he says the angle's wrong and she agrees so he tells her to lie on the bench on her back...because Anita is such a passive sex object she can't even tell the dude the angle is gonna get her off, he has to just know because of his mind-tie to her or whatever it is that tipped him off, and tell her what to do about it. She says the bench is too narrow to have sex on, he says just do it and she thinks about how she enjoys that he is "less flowery" than the other guys but also wonders "just how blunt he would have been if I hadn't mindfucked him from the beginning."
If I recall right about before he was enslaved, he was terrified when his cohorts put him with Anita to feed her ardeur. Granted, he knew what she might do to him, so he probably wasn't acting like he normally would with a woman, but still, he hardly seemed to the potential-rapist she seems to be hinting he might be without her oh-so-saintly enslavement holding him back for the greater good and all. Anita does stand up for herself and "gave him the look the idea deserved" and says "Not with my jeans around my thighs" so Nicky jerks her jeans off and over her boots so hard it makes her fall down and he has to catch her, which I guess is putting her in her place for being uppity or whatever. She just laughs about how she wouldn't have thought one could take pants off over the big police/military boots she has on. He licks one of her cheeks in "a long, slow taste of tongue" Um, no, he's tasting your cheek, you're not tasting his tongue. Then he bites her cheek and she says that's "too much teeth, too soon", he licks her again and says she'll like it later, she's like yeah but not yet, he tells her again to lie on her back on the bench, she says it's a really narrow bench, repeats to us about how he has blond (yes, she uses the b-word!) hair and blue eyes and goes on AGAIN about that ~darkness~ that men get when sex is going down and how "it's not exactly possessive, but yet it is, but it is predatory, and it wasn't just because Nicky was a werelion. It wasn't a shapeshifter look, or a vampire look, it was a male look."
LKH has so many sex-issues.
Hey guys, wanna make yourself laugh but also induce nightmares for life?
Picture this supposed look in Jonboi's eyes during sexytiems
Anyway, she says the same thing she did earlier in the scene with Micah and Nathaniel about how maybe some women get that look but she's never seen it with herself and her woman (she doesn't refer to Yiyu by name) doesn't have "a look like this" and she stares at Nicky and he stares back "and let me see in his face what he wanted to do to me" and he tells her "Get on the bench, Anita" and "I didn't argue again."
WELL, THAT CHAPTER ENDED ON A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE NOTE
