Cate: Ooooooh let’s have waffles!
Joe: They’re closed. See? Closed.
C: But…but…waffles…

(a few minutes later)

C: There’s people inside! Seated!
J: Ehhh…I don’t know. Waffles?
C: PARK THE CAR WE’RE HAVING A WAFFLE.

After the caffeine high wore off…well, I was still pretty gung-ho about all these kitchen projects. But then my weekend started to look busy, and we wanted to go to happy hour last night, and my infinitely reasonable boyfriend was like, “hey, maybe we shouldn’t be charging into projects willy-nilly? Maybe some planning is in order?” And I was like, “SIGHHHHH, fine,” so we decided just to focus on the initial project: new kitchen faucet.

"I suck! I'm the worst!" - kitchen faucet

Like everything in our apartment, the kitchen faucet was crappy and didn’t work. It leaked a constant, drippy little stream of hot water – which Josie loved, because the flow of hot water through the pipes made a nice warm spot on the bathroom floor – and it hung so low we could barely get a pot under it. Washing dishes was an adventure, let me tell you. Oh, and the little sprayer-thingy? Not connected! Just dangling there! A ridiculous, nonfunctioning ornament!

"Try to fill a pot! I DARE YOU!" - kitchen faucet

So off we went to Home Depot. But, eh, I didn’t like their selection. So off we went to Lowe’s. And we ended up spending a bit more than we’d initially thought we might, but whatever. We got everything we wanted and it isn’t a cheap piece of junk, so. We trotted off home to put in the new faucet.

And then…we put in the new faucet. Easy-peasy.

This was supposed to be a comparison of the two, but it turned into faucet porn.

Start to finish? Including clean-up? Less than an hour! And now we have a gorgeous new faucet – that doesn’t leak! sorry Josie! – and we can fit a pot under it and I helped! I did, I really did! I mean, Joe did 75% of it, but I helped too and I feel awesome.

"I love you! I'm made of sunshine and rainbows!" - new kitchen faucet

I definitely have the DIY, “what can I do next?” bug. Lucky me (I think?), there’s no shortage of things needing attention in this craphole we call home. Next up: painting the kitchen. Unless I drink a pot of coffee and get inspired to move to another room…

FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!

xoxo,
Queen Josie

(Josephine T. Cat – basil defender, window enthusiast)

Romance novel covers are an endless fascination of mine. Sometimes there’s just a lady, looking helpless or pouty or tousled. Sometimes there’s just a dude, looking swarthy and tough and menacing. Sometimes it’s a totally innocuous image and then you flip the page and – hey there! – sexytimes are unfolding. But sometimes, like with Chieftain – or maybe chiefTain or ChiefTain, it’s hard to tell from the font – the image is just…like…you know? I mean, WHAT is happening here? Is he unconscious? Has he been bludgeoned? The bulging muscles make him look very unrelaxed, like he’s waiting for something bad to happen.

…Which basically sums up this entire novel. Every page I turned was like, what kind of horror is going to pop up next? Look, I don’t think Nan Ryan is a racist person. I just think she probably did her research by watching Disney’s Pocahontas and prefers to rely on race-based stereotypes. But hey, let’s not let all those icky issues get in the way of a love story! It’s just fluff! It doesn’t have to be accurate! Haven’t white people suffered enough?

So the hero of the story is Shanaco, aka The Eagle, who is half white and half Comanche and 100% stud. Because of course. The book opens with Shanaco winning at cards (manly) and then romping with a prostitute (incredibly manly) and blowing her damn mind (SUPER MANLY 5000). And then he goes to see his grandpa and finds out that he has to lead their people to the reservation because they can’t live on the run anymore (sad) and then grandpa dies (really sad) so they go to the reservation (not that sad! Reservation living is awesome!). Which is where Maggie, the lady, lives and works. She teaches English to the people who have been rounded up and kicked off their land and robbed of their possessions and stuffed into cabins on the reservation – but no worries, they totally love her and they all totally understand that they need to learn English for their own good and there’s no hard feelings, not ever, no sir. That Maggie! What a lady! What an inspiration! She charms everyone she meets and there’s even a soldier at the fort who’s in love with her but she’s like, let’s just be friends!, and he’s like, yeah that works for me too!, and they continue hanging out forever and there’s never any tension or resentment. Also, Maggie doesn’t believe in gossiping, but when she finds out that one of the married soldiers is sleeping with the daughter of the general or whoever’s in charge, she’s all, OMG I can’t wait to go tell my friends about it! Which is not gossiping! Totally different!

Anyway, The Eagle and his people ride up and everyone is like oooooh who’s that handsome savage in the breechcloth, and The Eagle is like, ugh why does everyone think I’m such a bad dude, fuckin’ white people. Basically right away all the young men – including The Eagle – get locked up and Maggie’s all, THIS WILL NOT STAND!!!, and gets huffy by herself until the Indian Agent gets back from his business trip or whatever and then she tells him and he’s like, THIS WILL NOT STAND!!!, and actually does something about it. But, you guys, Maggie cares SO MUCH. It’s all she does, she just cares really really hard. By now of course she’s seen the majestic savage and is kind of hot for him. He’s just so savage. Savagely savage, you know? Just made for savaging. Savagetacular. Savagependous. Literally no one can think about or talk about or idly mention The Eagle without using the word “savage” or something that means the same thing. Including Maggie. Which is a) kind of gross and b) hilarious because later The Eagle muses to himself that he’s so glad Maggie doesn’t see him as a savage except that she DOES and she’s been saying it the whole time! I guess it’s different when Maggie says it. Because she cares, you guys. She cares so savagely.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maggie has to go put up curtains in The Eagle’s little cabin, because what is a cabin on a reservation without delicate curtains, AM I RIGHT OR WHAT?! But then he shows up and kisses her because that’s just the kind of thing that happens when you’re Maggie. And she’s like, eff off with your lips, and he’s like, if you don’t want to be smooched you shouldn’t be in my cabin, which I think we can all agree is a sound argument. Oh I should also mention that Maggie has this dog, this 200 pound wolfhound (which I hope is like a wolf-dog mix and not, like, a Borzoi) named Pistol who is totally devoted to her except when The Eagle is around because The Eagle’s an Indian and Indians can communicate with animals. Duhhhhhh! Whenever Pistol shows up I cringe because he’s stupid. But whatever. Anyway, there’s also this slutty girl who’s the daughter of the general (remember her? Sleeping with the married soldier?) and she is MEGA HOT for The Eagle because (and I swear I’m not making this up, it’s explicitly stated over and over and over) he’s so savage and dangerous and this makes all white women desperate to have bedroom adventures with him. ALL of them. So there’s a ball (of course there is, if there’s one thing every reservation was sure to have, it was a grand ball) and the slut makes her dad invite The Eagle and he shows up all dolled up and she’s like PLEASE LET’S GET NAKED and he’s like no thanks and she’s like TAKE ME NOW OH TAKE ME NOW YOU BROWN STUD and he’s like seriously get away from me yuck, and then Maggie and her completely platonic manfriend step in and rescue him. SHE CARES! But the slut doesn’t give up, because when you’re slutty you can only focus on one thing and that’s having sex, all the time. So she goes to The Eagle’s little cabin (with curtains!) to try to seduce him but, again, he’s not really interested so instead she decides to tell everyone that he raped her. As sluts are wont to do, am I right?

In between the dance and the rape accusation, Maggie and The Eagle have gotten to know each other, blah blah blah, they like each other, blah, you know, whatever. So when she hears about it, she’s like, there’s NO WAY that happened, that slut is just being awful, though she does assume that they did sleep together because The Eagle is a savage who has sex with white women. Obviously. Then The Eagle gets arrested and tossed in jail and they beat the crap out of him and tie him up to the flagpole and Maggie decides to go rescue him. So she takes her baseball bat and…WHY DOES SHE HAVE A BASEBALL BAT? Why? Why? Why? It doesn’t make any sense! Did they even have baseball in Oklahoma in the late 1870’s? I think we all recall the episode of History According to Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman when the baseball team came to town and everyone was like, buh…baseball? What is the baseball? And I refuse to believe that some little backwater fort had baseball AND BASEBALL BATS while the thriving metropolis of Colorado Springs had no damn idea. THERE’S NO WAY. Ugh. Anyway. Maggie takes her big stick and hits the guard and then has to hit another guard and then she and Pistol The Wonder Dog get The Eagle back to her little cabin and she immediately kicks Pistol outside in the snow so she can have naked time with The Eagle. I mean…nurse him back to health. And then have naked time. Anyway, it’s totally gross to be naked in front of your dog. Maggie cares about this issue!!!

So The Eagle is restored and no one suspects Maggie because she’s a sweet little white girl and also I’m sure the clubbing of two soldiers will have absolutely no adverse affect on the people who live on the reservation but that’s not important because I think we can all agree that there’s been plenty of violence on both sides – I mean, that’s what happens when you’re a total savage, right? – and besides now there’s nakedness happening. LOTS of nakedness. Social issues? What? Never mind them! NAKED ALL THE TIME. And also The Eagle starts to call her “baby,” which honestly is fine with me because I was really afraid that he would call her his little papoose or something like that and then I would have lit this book on fire with the force of my disgust. The Eagle and The Baby continue to hump like rabbits and then he’s feeling pretty good so they figure it’s time to escape and he’s like, I have property in New Mexico and I’m going to run away to there because no one knows where it is except for this one guy that I told but he’s cool! And she’s like, well I’m coming with you because I CARE, and he’s like, but what about all those savages who need you and only you to teach them English and prepare them for the realities of living in a white man’s world? (Reality 1: nonstop sex. Reality 2: sunshine and rainbows! LA LA LA!) And she’s like, I only CARE about being with you! Oh, I should also mention that meanwhile the soldiers who believed the slut’s story and put him in jail and beat him up had to go before the second-in-command (the general guy was out of town) who’s really sick and pretty much about to die but he left the hospital and came to the meeting to represent Authority (the Indian Agent was also out of town). And the second-in-command is basically like, do I smell poop are you just shitty at your jobs?, and proceeds to lecture them about how stupid they were to believe the slut and not take her to the doctor (for…a rape kit and DNA swabs, I guess?) and not alert the guy they should have alerted, and basically they had no evidence except of their stupidity, etc. So The Eagle is a fugitive and Maggie clubbed 2 guys with a stick but nobody at the fort really cares, but Maggie and The Eagle don’t know that because they’re busy getting dowwwwwwwn. And good news! Maggie TAMED The Eagle! She tamed him with her thighs and her blue eyes and her bosom and her whiteness. Mostly with her whiteness. Because she is white and The Eagle is not and what he needed to be tamed was a white woman who CARED. For his OWN GOOD. He’s a savage, remember? We can’t be having that shit in Amurrica. There’s just no room.

Then The Eagle and Maggie leave the reservation and head for New Mexico. They stay at a charming hotel and get married and have sex in the bathtub and buy fancy china for their house and dress up to have a nice dinner and then they get to The Eagle’s house and it’s been vandalized, which is sad, and also so much for being hidden and inaccessible. The Eagle is like, this is what life is going to be like if you stick with me, everyone will hate you and they’ll trash your shit and life will be really hard. And Maggie is like, well I’m white and I come from a rich family and I don’t know what you’re talking about so I’m in! And things are great for awhile, they play house and have sex, and then their old friend the Indian Agent shows up and he’s like, look The Eagle has been fully pardoned and that slutty girl got sent home to her whore mother and the bad soldiers have been kicked out and we need you to come back and convince all those savages to settle down and live like normal people, you know what I mean. So Maggie and The Eagle are like, hmmm well okay that’s a good argument – I mean, if The Eagle can be tamed then anybody can right??? They get back to the reservation just in time for Christmas by which I mean just in time for The Eagle to dress up like Santa Claus for all the kids. I am not even exaggerating this scene. Fucking Santa Claus. Literally, that’s what Maggie is doing: fucking Santa Claus (later, not in front of the kids, gross).

I know that this is what romance novels do – plunk down two sexy characters in some time period and flavor their lives with a teensy bit of hardship and a buttload of stereotypes – but it makes me feel skeezy here in a way that novels set in, say, Victorian England just don’t. Pay no attention to the decimation of every native culture! Indians talk funny! White folks are nice! Hey, did I mention they fuck on a rocking chair? That’s patriotic as shit! I think The Eagle agrees with me and that’s why on the cover he’s face-down on the bed with his head turned away. He’s like, “look, I know this is terrible but I have bills to pay and I can’t afford standards right now, so please just focus on the sex and check out my muscular shoulders and let’s forget this ever happened, all right? Sunshine and rainbows! LA LA LA!”

I will say this for Nan Ryan: Maggie never feels bad about wanting to bone The Eagle and he doesn’t strong-arm her into doing things she doesn’t want to do. So. It could have been worse?

This week to spice things up I thought I’d read a romance novel about a young, beautiful woman and the older, muscular, very handsome, extremely damaged man that she falls in love with. You know, something a little different. Some uncharted territory. Something to keep me guessing every step of the way, something exciting and new.

On the way to his house, Lazy of course is a mega-douche to Tempy and says all kinds of horrible things to her but despite that she insists on staying with him until the doctor arrives. And he’s like, I don’t need you to take care of me, and then she elbows him in his wound and he almost faints and she’s like, YES YOU CLEARLY DO, and I was all but standing up in my seat cheering. Hit him again, girl! Then the doctor comes and he’s drunk and he says pus is good for a wound and he offers to drain some blood but Lazy sends him away and Tempy of course knows better than that old coot so she cleans him up and saves his life, whatever. But she falls asleep in the chair (caring for a gremlin is SO tiring) and the next morning he sends her home and her brothers are all there (Winter and Asa and Concord – she also has another sister, Merit, but we haven’t met her) and they lecture her about her bad decisions, blah blah blah. But she goes out to meet Lazy again anyway and they meet the brother of his dead mistress at a whore house who said he found the body tied to the bed with a hood over her head and so he assumed that Lazy killed her because he knows what kind of stuff Lazy is in to. INTERESTING! So then Lazy wants to know about the other dudes who like that kind of thing and the madam directs them to a hallway full of peepholes and he makes Tempy look through the holes and describe to him what she sees, which is actually kind of extremely hot, until she starts to like it too much and she runs away. And then he catches up to her and they get attacked by brigands and this weird masked dude in a jester hat steps in and helps fight them off. Weird. And then he wants to take her to another party so he gives her a gorgeous dress and she tries to talk to someone that she thinks might give her money but he only wants to give her money in exchange for sex (as if!) so Lazy has to cut in and do some punching. You know, the usual. Oh, and we find out that he’s all brooding and dark and hates to be touched because his little sister died. When he was ten. Which, in the real world I would say, oh man that’s horrible I can definitely see how that would mess a person up forever – but in this book? In this book I think it’s totally stupid and I want him to build a bridge and get over it.

There’s also this side story about her sister Silence and her husband and he’s a captain of a ship but all his cargo gets stolen and he’s going to be sent to jail for it even though he didn’t have anything to do with it and it was actually this gang lord Mickey so Silly goes to see Mickey to beg on behalf of her husband and Mickey makes her stay the night and then leave his house with her dress all undone so everyone thinks they slept together even though they DIDN’T because Silly is not that kind of girl and Mickey returns the cargo but Silly’s husband is totally ashamed of her because MAYBE she had sex with some dude instead of letting him go die in prison (what a WHORE) and I don’t know what any of this has to do with anything except maybe Silly is going to ditch the asshole and get her own spin-off book. Then Tempy is SO upset about everything that’s happened to her sister than she goes to see Lazy (because he is TOTALLY the person I would reach out to if I needed a shoulder to cry on – a putrid, festering, douchey shoulder) and he holds her and they fall asleep and then they wake up and finally have sex. And it’s TOTALLY VANILLA, absolutely normal average sex, except he won’t take his clothes off, but come on. Is that a kink? Do we even care about that? And then she FREAKS OUT and runs away and he’s like, I hope she doesn’t think that we’re never going to do it again because we DEFINITELY ARE!

So she goes home from doin’ it with Lazy and everyone is like, where were YOU young lady?!, and she’s like, guys get off my back god. And then she goes back out with Lazy and his buddy to visit some other dudes with his “tastes” and they get some clues about the murderer, etc, etc, and then they part ways with the buddy and LAZY AND TEMPY TOTALLY HAVE RELATIONS IN HIS CARRIAGE…and, oh mama, let me tell you, it is a SCENE. I like a romance novelist who’s not afraid to say “cock.” Cock cock cock! Cock! Fluids! Everywhere! Whoever has to clean that thing out is gonna be pissssssssed. Then the next night or a few nights later (who can keep track of time with all the cocks flying around?!) they go out to search for the killer again and there’s been ANOTHER murder. So sad! And then they have to go back to her house and have sex some more because, you know, the sadness and all. (Spoiler alert: a cock appeared.) Then later she gets word that one of the babies is sick and maybe dying and she needs to be comforted (by a cock) so she rushes off to see Lazy and makes him tie her up and blindfold her and, ah, comfort her. But afterward he can’t resist berating her for working at the orphan’s home and she comes clean about cheating on her husband at the exact moment that he DIED (what a slut, right?) and then suddenly it’s all about HIS hurt feelings and blah blah blah, he feels so USED, blah blah blah (and his cock’s like, whatever man…your issue, not mine), and there’s a big to-do and she leaves to spend some time with a REAL baby and not a giant didn’t-have-feelings-until-he-needed-them-to-make-her-feel-shitty manbaby. Lazy goes out to look for clues alone, Tempy is sad, Silly is sad that no one believes she didn’t have sex with the gang lord, Tempy is sad some more but then decides to throw a big party and attract donors by showing them…I dunno, how run down and awful-looking the children’s home is? Then on the night of the party, one of the orphan girls disappears – no, IS KIDNAPPED – by the person who we basically knew was the murderer all along and Lazy and Tempy join forces again to try and find her and then the bad person lights the orphan home on fire and Lazy has to do a death-defying rescue mission to save the little orphan girl and also the cat and after he isn’t burned to a crisp they fall all over each other with declarations of LOVE and OH ISN’T IT WONDERFUL and OH LET’S GET MARRIED and OH YES LET’S DO and it’s all so magical and romantic and I may or may not have up-chucked at all the sentimentality getting tossed around. But luckily the cock comes back out to play and Tempy teaches Lazy that touching can be really nice and they touched each other happily ever after, on into the kinky bondage sunset.

At least, until Tempy realized that what she wanted from Lazy wasn’t touching – or rather, not touching exclusively. It starts with touching, and then it moves into restraints and blindfolds, and from there it eases into spanking, and then some domination play, and then finally she realized what she really wanted was to put a little saddle on Lazy ride him like a pony, really whip him into a lather and trot him around town. Lazy, you may imagine, tried to be all, come on babe can’t we just do the tying-up thing, can’t we just stick to the kink that I like, can’t we be all about me? But Tempy couldn’t. She couldn’t do it. So she packed up her leather boots, her push-up bustier, her whips and her handcuffs, and she set out to find a man – no, let’s be a honest, a group of men – who would be willing to fulfill her desires. And after a time she realized what she really wanted to do was be a small business owner so she set up Madame Tempy’s House of Pain-n-Cocks and began charging sad, lonely men to wear a little saddle and be ridden around town and she became ridiculously wealthy and lived on for many years, riding men about town, and flaunting her kink and desires. Lazy, meanwhile, found himself rather addicted to touching. He touched and touched and touched until he developed a nasty open sore and then he touched some more and then it grew putrid, as these things do, and without Tempy to care for him he quickly succumbed to infection. Or maybe he dried up into a wrinkled husk of a man. Who knows. Who cares. They say if you concentrate hard enough on a cold, quiet night you can still smell the rancid pus of Lazy’s soul and hear Madame Tempy’s throaty laugh and feel the cracking sting of her whip as it sails through the air…

I think everybody has a friend who or knows a woman who (or is the woman who) gets involved with really crappy men because she feels like she can “fix” their massive issues. It’s stupid in real life and it’s stupid in rom-com movies and it’s stupid in romance novels but of course it’s in like 110% of them, because hey why not, right? But here’s a novel that’s so damn SPECIAL and UNIQUE that it makes not only the hero a gigantic asshole in desperate need of fixing, but a heroine who is similarly assholish! It’s like an asshole match made in asshole heaven! Pretty much by p. 2 I stopped caring about either of them, though as the asshole-fest progressed I started to feel a little bad for the lady Violet (which, ps, is the name of my car – true story) because the earl was SUCH an assclown. Anyway…uh…enjoy?

The book starts with Violet hanging around at a ball with these other women – who she’s so ABOVE, of course – and they’re gossiping about this big hot dude and she’s like, ugh, how low class, because she’s so SPECIAL and she’s so UNIQUE and AWESOME, and she isn’t like one of THOSE ladies, she gets into TROUBLE because she’s such a ROGUE and men fall all over themselves to woo her and other women like to hang around her hoping that some of her awesomeness will dribble off onto them, only of course she guards that shit like holy water because SHE IS JUST TOO AWESOME TO SHARE. And the dude is big and hot and American and maybe a savage and totally OVER the Brit social scene but the KING just made him an earl because he promised to hunt down this awful pirate LE CHAT (me-OW!) and he’s only in town for a minute because he has men’s work to do, but meanwhile he’s bumming around with his sexy French buddy and thinking about his sexy mistress and all the sexyfuntimes he’s had at a brothel called – I shit you not – THE VELVET GLOVE. Grooooooooooooooosssssssssssssss. And then he and the stupid chick dance and the whole scene is “I know you are but what am I!” and her insisting, “I am NEVER banal!” while saying all kinds of completely banal things. I mean SPECIAL things. Special and AWESOME!!!!! And then it turns out that her brother looks like LE CHAT and she figures out that it’s her OTHER brother who maybe is LE CHAT…he’s been missing for a year and also LE CHAT’s ship has the same name as the woman who broke his heart. SO TRAGIC. The morning after the party, she sneaks off to the earl’s boat and pays one of his dudes to let her on and she shacks up in an empty cabin and then the earl hears about it so he goes to investigate and he’s like WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!, and she’s like I’M SPECIAL AND I TAKE RISKS!!!!, and he’s like you are not safe here and also you are stupid. But then she finally spills the beans about why she came on (because her brother is maybe LE CHAT? And she’s going to hunt him down? Or something? While being SPECIAL!!!!!) and he’s like, OK let’s play chess and if I win you get off at the next port and if you win you get to sleep in my room and then get off at the next port, and she agrees and she’s actually super good at chess (BECAUSE SHE’S SO SPECIAL) and she’s winning until she falls asleep (…specially?), so of course he has to pick her up and put her in his bed and she feels so SPECIAL in his arms and he feels that SPECIAL stirring in his SPECIAL place but he’s a SPECIAL kind of earl so he doesn’t do anything and then, oh yeah, she wins the chess game. More importantly: nobody’s kissed an earl yet. I want my money back.

So she wakes up on the boat and she’s all, omg I’m on a boat, and then the cute French guy brings her breakfast and then the earl comes and he and the French guy have this weird sort of charged conversation, like they spent a long sweaty night together and now they’re linked at the soul, and then the French guy leaves and the earl hangs out to make fun of her some more and she acts like a spoiled asshole and then he bets her that she can’t throw a dart at his map (not a euphemism) and give him 2 facts about wherever the dart lands. And she has this moment – I swear to god – where she thinks to herself that she’s REALLY smart but she doesn’t have to be smart at fancy parties so her smarts are rusty! And then she of course lands the dart exactly on the one place she knows anything about, because her brother went there and wrote a book, and when he finds out that she knows about the place because of her brother it somehow becomes a hollow victory for her? I don’t really get it. I guess you can only know things if you learn about them in a certain way and your brother’s book is not an earl-approved way. Whatever. They’re both assholes, who cares. Then she goes on a walk on deck with the French guy (while all the seamen gawk at her and fall all over themselves, but I know from reading romance novels that women on boats is BAD LUCK and TRUE seamen hate it, so this is yet one more way for the author to insist that the heroine IS SO SUPER DUPER SPECIAL, or maybe she just didn’t do enough research) and learns the earl’s whole sob-story background, boo hoo hoo who cares. Then they dock at Le Havre and they stay with this insufferable woman (because every other woman in the world besides our SUPER SPECIAL heroine is a whore and a bitch, AM I RIGHT?) who has clearly played hide the sausage with the earl and possibly with the French guy as well and also maybe with the heroine’s pirate brother. WHORE SLUT SKANK, ugh. Then this dirty little urchin child slips the heroine a note IN CODE, but not a cool code, one of those stupid pictograph codes where it’s like “R (picture of a sheep) (picture of a bee)+ing (picture of a safe)” to mean “are you being safe?” Get it? So of course she solves it, like, right away and it’s from her brother and he’s like, why the eff are you here?!, then he sends her another coded letter via the dirty urchin hiding under her bed (weird, bro) and spills all his plans to her via code. Then she sits down to dinner with the awful slut woman and everyone else and the woman is just being an awful slut the whole time so they have an argument in French where they call each other whores. STAY CLASSY, LADIES!!! She goes out into the garden for some fresh, non-slutty air and the earl wanders out and they have a conversation about love and I almost broke my jaw yawning and then…and then…! Nope, they still haven’t kissed yet.

After they don’t kiss – he touches her face with a flower, yawwwwwwn – they head back to the ship to follow her brother to Brest because of course she told the earl all about where he’s headed. NICE MOVE, SIS. The next morning, she starts working in the boat kitchen. Oh yeah – peeling potatoes! Which she doesn’t know how to do! So the earl has to SHOW her! And it’s all impossibly sexy, of course – yeah, take this knife, unnnnhhhh, like that, yeahh, oooh peel that tater girl, mmmm, yeahhhhhh. At first she’s all, this sucks and I hate the earl even if it is nice when he rubs up on my butt, but then later she’s all, I totally understand that he understood that I needed to be needed and he’s making me work in the galley for my own good because what an awesome dude. And then they make another agreement that if she can stand to work for 3 days she gets to sleep in his bed again (alone – her bed is uncomfortable and as a LADY she clearly deserves the more comfy bed). She does of course and then she goes to his room to sleep and she snoops around a little and she finds this g.d. flower that he touched her face with pressed in a book. A FLOWER PRESSED IN A BOOK. Jeez. Then he barges in and she hides but she can’t help talking out loud when faced with the awesome glory of his naked torso (humina humina humina), which leads to some extreme making out and since they’re, like, totally MEANT for each other it’s like sparks in their mouths which I think sounds crappy but they dig it…until he gets all weird and leaves, like an asshole. She can’t sleep that night so around dawnish she goes up on deck and finds him and they do some more making out and things, you know, progress from there and then she’s like NO WE CAN’T and he’s like TOUCH MY PEENER and she’s like OH GROSS and then he lectures her about how she can’t play games with HIM, no ma’am, because she won’t like what it FORCES him to do to her. This guy, what a romantic. I think I speak for all women when I say it’s my FAVORITE THING when a dude I’m about to have sex with threatens to use force if I don’t let him have his way! MY FAVORITE EVER!! Yuck. So they spend a few days avoiding each other and then they get to the next port but they’re too late, the pirate has already sunk a ship and they go talk to people, yawn, and she’s cooking up a theory, whatev, but mostly he’s just pissed off at her for giving him blue balls and she’s so horny she can hardly think straight but she thinks straight enough to not want to be touched by him, so good for her. And then they go to this bar to talk to another dude and the busty serving wench gives her another message from her brother, which the earl immediately figures out, and he’s like what else did he say what else what else what else anything you want to share with the class HMMMM? And she’s like, please stop talking to me you self involved asshole and NO you are NEVER putting your funstick in my vajesus so stop leering at my fucking tits!!!!!!

Then there’s a STORM! AT SEA! And she’s like, “I’m a COUNTRY GIRL, I know all about storms!” and I laughed so hard that my heart stopped beating for awhile. But after I was revived via CPR, I kept on reading to discover (SHOCK OF SHOCKS) that the earl ordered her below-decks and she ignored his order and almost died. HAHA! WOMEN! SO SILLY!!! Then he took her below and literally ripped her clothes off like a terrible ogre instead of just saying, look you’re going to freeze if you don’t get dried off, because men don’t do girly shit like communicate AM I RIGHT OR WHAT?! And then they fool around, blah blah blah. And then later there’s a PIRATE ATTACK! And he doesn’t have time to order her to stay below-decks, but it doesn’t matter because again she wanders up top and ends up shooting the pirate – which, of course, I totally believe because a) old-timey guns always aim true and were not hard to fire and b) SHE’S SO SPECIAL!!!!!! And then they “comfort” each other with sex. As one does, you know. And they have sex for days until all of their parts chafe off. And then he finds out where her brother the pirate is but he tries to hide it from her but of course he’s no good at that and she comes along and they JUST missed her bro but he left another message for her in a SPECIAL box which the earl can’t figure out – ugh puzzles are so GIRLY – so after he goes to bed she finds the message and goes off to warn her bro. And then the earl wakes up and she’s gone and she left a little note like sorry dude I got shit to DO and he’s real mad, of course. Then he runs into her brother the pirate and they have an awesome little chat about how SPECIAL and GREAT his sister is and the earl is all, OMG I LIKE TOTALLY LOVE HER, and the brother-pirate tells the earl that he put his sister on a boat back to England and the earl lets the brother-pirate go, because if the KING OF ENGLAND gave me a job to do I would definitely blow it off to go get laid OH YEAH. But it’s fine because he’s, like, a moral pirate with a good agenda and whatever, so good for him, yay piracy.

And then he shows up in England and presents himself to the butler, who regrets very much to inform him that the lady Violet was lost at sea on her way back home. The earl, of course, forgets to be a big manly man for a second and collapses to the floor, weeping and tearing out his hair, gnashing his teeth like a great wounded beast to the collective horror of the butler and the rest of the household who have gathered to watch, until finally they have to drive him from the property with pitchforks and lock the gates behind him. The lady, naturally, was never lost at sea – indeed, she was found at sea. She found herself at sea. She made a promise to herself never to live for a stupid, tantrum-throwing man baby again – be he father, brother or lover – and instead settled on a little tropical island, letting her hair grow long and tangled and her skin tanned to a deep brown by the sun, kissing only men she chose to kiss – none of them earls – and riding the O train with or without them, no less than any of us deserve. And even if the earl did, someday, find her little island and come looking for that pale, spoiled lady he’d lost, he’d never recognize that girl she used to be in the woman she’d become and eventually he would shed asshole tears for himself and his lost sexyfuntimes and she would watch him stomp away with something like smug satisfaction because she’d learned not to be such an asshole, something he would never ever learn, and she would live on and on without her secret ever being revealed, her and her lovers and the white sand of her safe, warm island.