Skip navigation! Last Updated June 25, , PM. If you haven't picked up Exciting Times already, this weekend may be the time to dive in. Things get more complicated from there. Through Ava's eyes, benefited by Dolan's sharp prose, the readers are given a window into a thoroughly modern perspective on age-old themes of love, class dynamics, and ambition.
He said I could stay until I did. In mid-October Typhoon Haima came, the last of the season. We were trapped indoors until the Hong Kong Observatory gave the all-clear. His sheets were very white. I once left a blot he called a wine stain, either euphemistically or because he could more readily picture me sipping Merlot than menstruating. His interest in making me come felt sinister at first, which revealed to me my assumption that if he wanted something it would probably harm me.
He liked when I bit him but you had to pick your moment and I sometimes thought: there are many things I will never become expert in and I chose this β which did not suggest to me that mine was an internal monologue one would select if one could.
I researched the science of biting , learned it would still hurt him later, and knew exactly how I felt about that information. Our wealth disparity was too wide to make me uncomfortable. It was a clownish level of difference that I could regard only with amusement. I tried to take heart from this. I liked imagining Julian had a wife back in England.
She is Catholic β in the English recusant aristocrat sense, not the Irish poverty sense β and will never grant him a divorce, and I cannot in any case usurp her as the woman who loved him before life and investment banking strangled him, creatively. I asked about the wine rack and he said it came with the flat. I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life. It would also provide an acceptable reason he did not want us to get too close.
