But she couldn’t fall for him. She had to fight that, because Cole was wrong somehow. Somehow, deep down, he was broken and twisted and to declare herself for a man like that…
Of course, she wasn’t right either.
And sometimes, underneath all his wrongness, Cole seemed so sad and lost, just like a little boy who wanted to be loved.
No.
She shook her head fiercely. I will not love this man. I cannot love this man.
“You okay?” Cole asked.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Cole had said he loved her. In his sleep, in his raving delirium, he’d said it.
It didn’t count, though.
No, this wasn’t love. This wasn’t that kind of story.
They’d get Piper back, and then…
Then what?
Then she’d go on the run forever, trying to keep her daughter away from the SF trackers who were looking for her?
Then she and Cole and Piper could—?
No.
No, that could never happen.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As they made their way down the interstate, Dana started to recognize things. “Where are we going?” she asked Cole.
“I told you, we’re lying low.”
“We’re back in Pennsylvania,” she said. “It seems to me like you’re going back to the SF headquarters.” Home, she thought. Except it wasn’t home, not anymore. It had been destroyed.
“No,” he said. “Not there. But we’ll be close, I guess.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she said.
“Best idea I have.”
She guessed she was going to have to trust him. It wasn’t as if she had any ideas at all—good or bad. Eventually, he exited the interstate, and he drove through tree-lined streets and old, Victorian style houses. Then he turned the car, pulling into the entrance of a college campus.
“What are we doing?” said Dana.
“Lying low, like I said,” he said.
“At college?” She peered out the window at tall, brick buildings and well-kept sidewalks. Leafy trees looked down over students hurrying to and fro.
“I know someone that’ll help us.” He seemed to know his way around the campus, navigating his car through several parking lots that seemed like mazes to Dana.
“How do you know this person?” she said.
“I used to work here,” said Cole.
“Here?” Dana looked around. She remembered once having a thought that Cole looked like a college professor with his glasses. His glasses! That settled it, he did not need those things. He’d been driving without them, after all. Why the hell he’d ever worn those things was a myster—
“Yeah, here.” He smiled at her.
“Doing what?”
He pulled the car into a parking space marked ‘Visitors Only.’ He put the car in park and removed the keys. “Oh, I worked for the A/V department.”
“The what?”
“Audio/Visual? I, uh, set up projectors and televisions and things for various classes. Teachers are really stupid about that kind of stuff. They could never figure out how to plug in the DVD players.”
She was stunned. “I never pictured you doing that kind of work. I mean, you’re so… ‘yay, nature’ and everything, I didn’t think you’d be keen on audio/visual equipment.”
He laughed. It was probably the freest, easiest laugh she’d ever heard come out of him. He sounded genuinely happy. He caught her by the chin, and he kissed her.
The kiss stunned her too. It was breezy and soft, not a Cole kiss at all. There was no brooding, dark desire in it. No shame or wicked intensity. Just his lips and tongue on hers. Gentle. Good.
She sighed, keeping her eyes closed as he pulled away from her.
He stroked her cheek. “You think I’m ‘Yay, nature.’”
She raised her shoulders. “Well, I seem to remember being subjected to a very long diatribe about how nature restored balance and something about pine cones and forest fires. Mind you, the whole time, my arms were chained over my head, and I was kind of freaked out, so I might not have listened as closely as I could have.”
Cole drew back, rubbing his forehead.
She’d meant it to be funny, but she realized now it wasn’t.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “I’m sorry I did that to you.” He climbed out of the car.
She got out too, coming around to him.
He was leaning against the car. He was still rubbing his forehead.
She touched his shoulder. “Um, listen, I didn’t mean…”
He looked up at the sky. “Why do you still let me near you, Dana?”
She rubbed his shoulder. “I… I don’t know.”
He looked down at her. “I don’t deserve—”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.” She moved her hand away from his shoulder.
He scuffed his foot against the pavement.
She crossed her arms over her chest.
He swallowed. He looked up at her. He took a deep breath. He looked back at the ground. He let out the breath.
She chewed on her bottom lip.
Then his hand was on her cheek again, fingers feather soft.
She raised her gaze to his.
“I’ll never do anything like that to you again. You know that, right? I was… confused, and I…” His expression was fierce. “I am so sorry.”
“I know.” She swallowed. “Not all of it was bad anyway. And… if you hadn’t… If it hadn’t happened, I don’t know who I’d be.” He had taught her things about herself, about her wolf. Without Cole in her life, she would have remained closed-off and repressed.
He seemed to accept this. He bobbed his head, and then he took a deep breath. “Okay, well, come with me.”
“Let’s take the tranq guns,” said Dana. They’d stripped them from the SF trackers and taken the guns along with them. “Just in case something happens. I’d feel better if we were prepared.”
* * *
Dana and Cole slid into the back of a large lecture hall, the seating tiered like an auditorium. It was about half full of students, but they were scattered throughout the hall. At the bottom of the room, a woman stood at a podium. She had frizzy brown hair that went out from her head in all directions, and she wore a corduroy blazer over jeans. She probably would have looked mousy under other circumstances, but her face was alight with excitement as she spoke to her students, and her animation made her seem strong and in charge.
“So, we’ve just finished up the discussion on the roots of the romance novel in Jane Austen’s works, and we’re going to move on today to the second part of the discussion, which will deal with The Flame and the Flower extensively, just like I said last class meeting,” said the professor.
Dana liked her just by looking at her, and she wasn’t sure exactly why that was. The woman seemed to have a magnetism to her.
The professor continued. “Anyway, everyone should be caught up on that, right? Was that easier reading than the Austen?”
Cole pulled the both of them down into seats at the back.
There was a low mumble of affirmatives from the gathered students.
One guy in the front row raised his hand.
“Yes?” said the professor.
“I didn’t think any of it was easy reading,” the guy said.
The professor grinned at him. “Well, thank you for trying, Dave. I appreciate it.”
The guy grinned back.
Dana raised an eyebrow. That guy was sitting up front to flirt with the professor. She was at least ten years older than him, but the guy didn’t seem to care. She nudged Cole. “What is this class?”
He leaned close. “I don’t know, but I think it’s the romance novel one. It’s a Women’s Fiction/English Literature class. It’s Larissa’s most popular class.”
“Larissa?” said Dana. “Is that the person we’re here to see?”
“Yeah, we’ll talk to her after class,” said Cole.
The professor was talking again. “All right, so as we’ve seen, the Austen books are comedies of manners, and they’re rooted in comedy drama from Shakespeare on out. And so, they’re light, they’re sweet, and they’re like romantic comedy movies today. And that’s an important component of romance. But today we’re going to start talking about a darker trend in romance novels, and we’re going to tie that back into ancient literature, and we’re really going into the seedy underbelly of the romance novel.”
The class tittered.
Larissa smiled. “I know that you guys are thinking romance doesn’t have a seedy underbelly. In fact, when I was trying to get this course off the ground, one of the reasons that it was so tough was that I faced a lot of opposition from people—both men and women—who really didn’t feel there was any literary merit to romance novels in general, and they couldn’t see why I wanted to teach a class on it. Um, this is the argument that I made to convince them they were wrong, and this is the reason that you and every student for the past six years has the option of this elective.” She surveyed the class. “So, let’s talk a little bit at first about the kinds of criticisms that people make against romance novels. Who can tell me something that you’ve heard people say to criticize or denigrate romance novels?”
No one moved.
Larissa raised her eyebrows. “Dave? Haven’t you got anything to say about this?”
“Uh…” The student laughed a little. “Well, people say they’re smutty, I guess.”
“Absolutely,” said Larissa. “They’re all about sex, right? And they all use purple prose and awkward euphemisms, like ‘his turgid sword of passion.’”
Everyone in the class laughed.
“Anything else?” Larissa asked.
“They’re formulaic,” called out another student.
“Definitely, people say that,” said Larissa. “Formulaic. Other stuff?”
“That they’re fluff,” said someone.
“Right,” said Larissa, “but now that we’ve dissected both Jane Austen and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, we know there’s a lot more than fluff going on.” She looked over the class. “Anyone got anything else?”
“Unrealistic,” called out a student.
“Oh, definitely,” said Larissa. “Of course, all fiction is unrealistic, and all of it is criticized for that, but romance novels are often called unrealistic.” She paused. “There’s one other big thing that I want to bring out before we move into the lecture. This is a big thing amongst feminist critics when they discuss romance novels. Anyone?”
It was quiet.
And then a girl raised her hand.
“Yeah,” said Larissa.
“Oh, you mean they glorify rape, right?”
“Yes,” said Larissa, nodding. “Absolutely, that is what I was going for. And that’s going to form sort of the structure for our lesson today. In particular, that book you’ve got there, The Flame and the Flower, is considered an offender in the arena of the rape-leads-to-love trope in romance fiction.”
Dana scooted down in her chair. This lecture was starting to make her feel uncomfortable.
Larissa continued. “In our own no-means-no culture, the idea of sexual consent is very black and white. And in these romance novels, especially ones from the 1970s and 1980s, it’s definitely muddier. There are a lot of what is sometimes called forced-consent scenes. And if forced consent sounds like it’s not much different than rape to you, that may because, on the surface, it really isn’t. But there is a special sort of structure to a romance novel, and in that structure, we’re fairly certain that any man that the heroine has detailed sexual intercourse with is going to be the man that she falls in love with. So, there’s a certain safety in reading it, because there’s a promise that everything is going to turn out right in the end. And that’s because of the formulaic nature of the books, as has already been pointed out.
“So,” she continued, “I’m going to give a prevailing theory on all this rape/forced consent in romance novels, and then I’m going to go deeper underneath that theory, and we’ll just keep digging until we hit the seedy underbelly.”
More titters.
“All right, so one of our working theses for this class is that the romance story is an adventure story for women, with the relationship being the adventure, right? So, we’re looking at the romantic evolution of the relationship as following the same kind of structure as a quest or a swashbuckling fight against evil or whatever the stereotypical male equivalent might be. We’ve already established some of the signposts of the adventure, in that there has to be some sort of adventure to the hero. There’s no romance novel about the two kids who grew up together and were high school sweethearts and got married and had two kids and a dog, because that’s not an adventure. But thus far, we’ve only looked at interpersonal conflict, for instance Emma and Mr. Knightley not getting along or Andie and Ben being on opposite sides of a bet.
“Today,” she continued, “we want to examine the idea of the hero as an adventure in and of himself. One way to achieve this is to make the hero dangerous. And so, we’ve got a lot of romance novels with a dangerous hero. Sometimes he’s dangerous because of his job or his position. For instance, there are pirate romances and romances with men in motorcycle gangs. Sometimes he’s dangerous because of what he is. Maybe he’s a monster. There are romances where women fall in love with vampires, for instance.
“And so, our first point is simply going to be that romance novels function as an adventure, and that the adventure is more thrilling if the hero can’t decide whether he wants to bite you or bang you, if you’ll pardon my crudeness.”
The class laughed again.
“Second of all, in regards to these rape fantasies that permeate this kind of fiction, the prevailing theory is that rape fantasies are present because ‘nice girls’ don’t want to have sex, so the hero has to force her to give in to her carnal desires. In this way, it’s a safe way to experience sexual pleasure without having any responsibility. So, if you’ll remember the virgin/whore dichotomy, this allows the romance heroine to be both the virgin and the whore without compromising her principles. And the basic argument is that this is all psychological, but that when women were more repressed sexually in the 1970s and 1980s, that they needed the rape fantasy more. But now women are self-actualized in their sexual identities, and it’s not as prevalent.
“And it is true,” she continued, “that you definitely see a decline in rape fantasies in romance novels in the 1990s and later. So, it would seem to make sense as a theory, and there are definitely some elements of truth in it. But this is the part in which I’m going to start digging deeper.
“What’s interesting is that, with the recent self-publishing boom, we’re starting to see a lot more of these rape fantasies being published now, but they’re mostly self-published. If you look at the rise of Fifty Shades of Gray, that came out of fan fiction, it came from self-publishing, and then it became a huge hit. So, it begs the question, if this fantasy came from collective repression of women’s sexual desires, then why is it still so prevalent? In fact, it seems more likely that the decline in the rape fantasies in romance novels happened more because of publisher censorship than any decline in demand amongst readers.
“And that’s very interesting, because it raises other questions. Now, in general, fiction is all about wish-fulfillment. Men like watching Die Hard, because they like being able to pretend that they are able to kill bad guys and protect people. And romance novels are also wish-fulfillment, but even a woman with a self-professed rape fantasy doesn’t actually want to be raped. So, I think there’s something deeper going on here, and within the context of the narrative, I think that it’s more than individual women’s repressed sexuality. I’m going to argue that the rape fantasy in a romance novel is part of something ancient, something deep within human nature. I know that’s a big claim to make, but I’m going to do my best to back it up.
“So, we’re go
ing to turn to theepic of Gilgamesh, which you all should have read in your freshman lit classes. Since I know that most of you probably didn’t read anything in freshman lit, I’ll try to summarize for you.”
The class laughed again.
“In Gilgamesh, there’s a character named Enkidu, and he is a beast-man. He’s two-thirds animal and one-third man. He lives in the wild, and he’s completely uncivilized. But over the course of the narrative, Enkidu becomes civilized, and his introduction to civilization is that he has sex for seven days with a temple concubine. After he does this, he’s unable to run with the animals in the way that he has before. He’s lost strength, but he’s somehow more intelligent and more self-aware.
“In this case, then, the sexual act is a civilizing force on the beast-man. And I think that we see the same pattern in romance novels with dangerous men. So, it’s not so much that the heroine is repressing her sexuality as it is that she’s surrendering herself to the bestial hero in order to civilize him. Once the hero has become both sexually and romantically connected to the heroine, he chooses to settle down with her at the end of the novel, and they usually get married and make babies. We’ve talked about the happily-ever-after ending.
“Basically what we’re looking at here is an ancient story that’s playing out over and over again in romance novels. It’s very archetypal.
“However,” Larissa continued, “it’s also a story coming from a male perspective in Gilgamesh. After all, Enkidu does not settle down with the temple concubine, and, in fact, his civilization process continues afterward with drinking beer and eating bread and various other things. So we’re not seeing the exact same story as in a romance novel, because it’s a male perspective on sex. And the male perspective on sex in fiction is that it tends to be a step towards reaching a goal, but it’s not a goal within itself.
“In the romance novel, the ultimate goal is to reach happily-ever-after, to have a successful relationship. And we could look at heroines as manipulators, using sex as a tool to civilize their men. But that isn’t the case in romance novel, and it’s not the case in a rape fantasy, because the heroine has to give up power to the hero, and she’s usually hesitant about doing so—hence the fact it’s a forced seduction and not a fully consensual sexual incident.
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