It’s weird in English, not having Damen beside me, holding my hand, whispering in my ear, and acting as my off switch.

The first sentence of this new chapter could not be more telling.  Remember, when we last left off, Damen informed her that he was some immortal, magic-wielding something or other who also brought her back from the dead.  And apparently she needs no recovery period from that, she just jumps straight to talking about missing him in school.  Or, rather, the book thinks we need no time to process that.  Hell, I don’t know, maybe Ever went home and cried and looked shit up on the internet or whatever, but the book’s focus, what it thinks we want to see more of, is this.  Everything else is just set-dressing, this is what the book thinks is most important.

You know, it’s not like I’ve got nothing against romance stories, but maybe don’t set us up for something other than romance and then go “oh, you were interested in all that?  Fuck you, here’s more moping.”

Everyone’s so sad about Damen leaving, and the art teacher even gives her his art project, because sure why not.  She takes it and doesn’t look at it, a fact she informs us of several times, so I’m sure it’ll turn out to be something important later.  Oh, did I say important?  I mean mushy.  It’s hard to tell the difference in this book.

Because saying good-bye to Damen, my gorgeous, creepy, quite possibly evil, immortal boyfriend, was harder than I’ll ever admit.

I…is there really anything I have to say?

A week later, Miles and Haven take her to some…cross between a Santa’s Village and a Renn Faire?  …actually, that sounds kind of awesome, can we please cross those two things?  Ever wanders around for a while, complaining about how the crowd is making it really hard on her psychic sense and she’s getting migraines.  Weird, I don’t recall this being a thing before she started endlessly thinking about Damen instead of her powers.  Was it normal for her to react to crowds with pain?  Because if so, Miles and Haven are pretty shitty friends for dragging her out into a crowd.  Also…this is just so weird.  It comes out of the blue, but because this book has been 100% Damen so far, I don’t know what to blame for that.  Did we just not get a chance to see this before, or is it a continuity error?

And you can go on about migraines all you want, but if she’s still tra-la-la-ing around with no appreciable change in her actions, then it’s not a real consequence. 

Impediment to desired action = consequence.  Complaining while doing things anyway = annoying.

She tries to barter with a booth attendant for a bag, but her head hurts too much so she overpays instead.  Then Ava shows up and is all like “we both read her mind and knew she’d go lower, what gives?”

Ever gets mad at Ava because she blames the other woman for Riley leaving.  (Wait, Riley left?  I know we haven’t seen her for a while, but we also haven’t been to Ever’s house for a while, so I thought she was just going unmentioned.)  Ava once again says she can help with the sensory overload, and Ever once again tells her to fuck off with a PG rating.  Still no clue why she’s doing that; she randomly decided to hate this woman from the beginning no matter how helpful and nice Ava tries to be.

Later over lunch, Haven gets a call from Drina and actually acts happy to talk to her.  While she’s distracted by friendly chatting, Miles and Ever get together behind her back to talk about how Haven/Drina is just so very creepy.  They keep claiming that Haven is way too into this chick, but I still don’t see it.  Then again, the fact that we’ve barely spend any time with Haven doesn’t help.  All we know about her is that she’s open to changing fashion trends if she wants to shock people, so the fact that she’s changing her fashion trends to mimic Drina isn’t exactly worrisome.

Haven returns to the conversation, all excited because Drina invited her to a party at some point in the future.  She won’t tell the other two any more details, but Ever psychically gets the date December 21st, because sure why not.  Making the main character figure out stuff is for other books.

Ever gets upset, because when has she ever not been upset with talk of Drina, and Haven gets worried thinking she’s still sick.  So she starts talking about her ‘flu’ again and all the weird dreams she had while on a fever.  She says in one she dreamed Damen was saving her from evil forces.  I’m not sure why this is considered important, since we did get to see what he did.  It’s not like there’s a mystery involved here, even though the book is treating it like a mystery.

Book, honey, you do realize that only Ever forgot about that night, right?  We still remember it.