Caress of Twilight--chapter 10

Business first: Free story on Smashwords. It's over here, It's an old-old OLD short, and I don't think you have to put any credit card 'fo or anything in to get it. You just would have to sign up for an account. 

SO.  NOW do we get a plot?

Do bears shit in toilets?

I WALKED AROUND THE COUCH TO GREET THE GODDESS. KITTO followed me, and I had to make him stay by the couch. Left to his own devices, he’d have stayed glued to my side like an overly devoted puppy.

Yep. Because abuse creates very strong attachments with the abuser. Not kidding. It's the survival mechanism abuse victims develop because keeping the bad guys happy means you don't get hurt today (maybe). It's also why abusers are so hard to leave. When your entire life is making them happy, and leaving makes them very unhappy, it's very hard to go through with it. Yeah, that attachment? It's not devotion, IMHO, it's the same instinct that makes rape victims choose not to fight sometimes, the instinct that says "If I go with this part, maybe I'll live long enough to get away."

So this adoration Kitto has? Not okay. Dear fucking God is it not okay.

Merry shakes Maeve's hand. Maeve doesn't shake hands well. We absolutely needed a whole paragraph devoted to this.

Merry asks if Maeve hired the other PIs as body guards, something we found out last chapter. Maeve shrugs.

Merry asks again. Maeve gets nervious. Merry asks a third time.

The thing about porn plot? there is porn to fill in the holes. There is no plot, and there is no porn, and I'm having a lot of trouble taking Merry's "I'm going to be insultingly rude" threat seriously when all she's doing is repeating a question she already has the answer to.This "do you think I'm that scary" conversation takes up most of the chapter. So basically this is Merry's version of "Anita is a badass". Given that all she's done in this book so far is pet a child-simulation? Yeah, I don't buy it.

And then Merry, Sexual Savior of us all, says "You don't have to hide yourself from us" and just like that, Maeve Reed drops her glamour.  She's all pretty and golden, and...oh for fuck's sake.

There was a wide outer edge of rich deep blue like a bright sapphire, then a much thinner ring of melted copper, and an equally thin circle of liquid gold around the dark point of her pupil. But what set her eyes apart even among the sidhe was that the gold and copper trailed out across her iris like streaks of color in a good piece of lapis lazuli, so that metallic glints shone out from that ring of faultless deep blue.

 Her eyes were like a stormy blue sky shattered by colored lightning.

The Sparkledog eyes strike again. Also? This is a prime example of why describing things too much is bad. That last sentence dangling all on its lonesome? That's perfect for a non-human character's eyes when they've got the power level Maeve is implied to have. It gets the feeling across, it gives you a very clear image, and it is short and sweet. The bad part is it gets lost in the detail-by-detail byplay of things nobody is EVER going to notice.

We don't like a lot of detail in our eyes. I used to work hard to try to get the faultless photographic realism of eyes in my artwork, but the best eyes I ever painted were random blobs of color I did in a hurry. Eyes are important, but the fact that there's liquid and they're shiny are far more important than color. This is a TON of information that we don't need at all.

Merry kisses Maeve on the hand and tells her she has the most beautiful eyes. Maeve begins to cry. She kisses Merry on the lips, mutters something about how she thought the men were the dangerous ones--I guess she didn't get the memo on being in a story with a Mary Sue--and then runs out of the room.

End of chapter. 

...At least she's not running off to rescue a poor helpless victim-man from a boyfriend/gay people. Which is like saying at least we're not having boiling oil poured over our heads but hey, whatever.