This chapter we skip straight to Austin.  Because…apparently Brooke did nothing else to look for her sister that she was just so concerned about?

In case anyone was curious, Brooke is still horny.  I know you guys were wondering about that.  I mean, she has so many other interests, after all.  But fear not, she still totally wants to boink.

but what I want from him is so far beyond sex now, I don’t even want to put a name to it.

…I think ‘sex’ still works.

Remy’s parents show up randomly for half a page and do nothing except beg to be let in to see their son, before Pete kicks them away.  He says that Remy doesn’t want to see them because they ‘abandoned’ him in a ‘psych ward’ when he was 13. 

On the other hand…

“We didn’t know what to do. He felt abandoned but he was too strong and nobody could control him, least of all me.”

The book has gone on and on (and on and on and on) about how strong Remy is, and we’ve also seen him go into a violent fit and been told this is a regular occurrence.  While I have no trouble believing that putting him in a “psych ward” could be a damaging and painful situation (depending on the facility), I also have no trouble believing that good people could make that decision out of desperation.

I have a little experience with this.  Fortunately (I guess you could call it that), the family member with anger issues is very slightly built but he still does damage when he attacks people.  And when I say ‘people’ I mean ‘his parents and family members and loved ones’ because that’s what “anger issues” means.  It doesn’t mean a proper response to a situation, it means hurting people when you otherwise wouldn’t mean to, because you’ve got issues.  This family member not only physically hurts the people he lives with, he also causes a ton of property damage.  His dad hasn’t bought new electronics in almost a decade because he doesn’t want to spend money on something that’s going to be broken.  Their house has holes in the wall in every room.  They tore up the carpet in his room and have painted a concrete floor because he did so much damage in there that putting in new carpet wasn’t considered worth it.  He’s been to the ER multiple times for hurting himself, always by accident, simply because that’s what happens when you’re in a blind rage around broken glass.  Mostly of the time his anger is just screaming and property destruction, but frankly, that’s bad enough.  He threatened suicide for the first time when he was ten years old, he can’t hold down a job, and kids half his age think it’s amusing to provoke him because, you know, they’re twelve and they don’t understand what’s really going on.   He was once arrested for threatening a minor who kept pranking him with an antique (non-functioning) gun, and the only reason he didn’t go to jail was because it was a nonfunctional weapon.  (And also because the minor’s parents knew the whole situation and wanted to drop it.)  I’m sometimes afraid to visit the guy, and I can physically overpower him if I need to.  His parents have been trying to get more intensive care for him for years, because the only thing they can manage is damage control, and that’s not actually helping anything.

If he had any bit of muscle to him, I don’t even want to think about how much worse things would be.

On the other side of that, full time mental institutions are not easy to get in to.  You can’t really just dump a person there, especially a minor.  Unless (I think) they get in legal trouble.  I’m fuzzy on that part; I’m more familiar with the roadblocks of mental health care than what happens when you actually get help.  But that just leads me to believe that, if Remy got full-time care, there’s only two options: he was bad enough that he had no other options, or his parents are also independently wealthy and put him in a really nice home where the only barrier to getting in is paying enough.  But in that case, he would have had really nice care.

“A psych ward? For what? Remy’s not crazy,”

…whut?

Pete does not actually answer her question and instead talks about how unfair it was that Remy’s parents “dumped” him.  As if he was just so totally fine and then they dropped him off at summer camp and never came back and that’s when all the trouble started.

“Remy has a short fuse. You light it, he blows up. His competition wanted him out. Picked on him out of the ring. He bit the bait. Was kicked out. End of story.”

And this is why people with self-control issues DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN MARTIAL SPORTS.

They just don’t.  Partially because it’s not actually appealing, partially because they don’t last past the initial stages.  You don’t get people like that taking karate or whatever because they don’t have the discipline to do the drills and participate safely in a class.  They don’t go to competitions because they’re not in classes.  They don’t get into boxing because you have to follow rules in boxing.  Enjoying fighting as a way to let loose and cause destruction is about the antithesis of martial sports, which are all about discipline and control.

They are, after all, SPORTS, not back-alley brawling.

I mean, there’s a range, so you’ll get people who can hold it together enough to participate and still have issues, and that could very well be where Remy is.  But there’s just such a disconnect in the way this book treats him, jumping around between “no, he’s tots got a lid on this” to “unbridled fucking destruction” that it’s hard to get a read on things.

I can’t help but admire what Remington has made with himself despite the rejection he faced when he was younger.

And what is with the fact that “rejection” is all they talk about from his time in a mental institution?  If it was a good place, did he not get treatment for his condition, maybe some techniques that work better than ‘sedatives’ and ‘sex with hookers’?  If it was a bad place, does he not have anything else as a hangup?

Brooke goes to talk to Remy only to find that he’s irrationally jealous because…Pete touched her while they were talking.  If that’s not a giant red warning sign, I don’t know what is.

Besides throwing glass bottles against a wall.

They have a fight over not having sex, because Remy still wants to go slow “for her.”  Strikes me as not really being “for her” when she’s literally begging to be fucked. 

This is a really short chapter, which is odd since most of the others have been at least three times as long.