Falling for a Younger Man: Rebecca Brooks' ABOVE ALL

It was stupid, of course, to go skinny-dipping at dawn in the Adirondacks when spring had barely come to the mountains. It was only the Friday morning kicking off Memorial Day weekend, the first day that Paper Lake Campground re-opened after the quiet winter months. But it thrilled her, as it would every morning until the fall. She stretched out the short swimming season as long as she possibly could. (Kindle Loc 40)


It was hard not to be charmed by the coincidence as I sat down to read Rebecca Brooks' contemporary romance, Above All, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the same day that the book itself opens. If I were of a superstitious turn, I might even have taken it as a sign that this book was destined to be the subject of a post-Memorial Day RNFF post. But it wasn't charm of superstition, but rather the thoughts and feelings inspired by Brooks' romance itself, that led me to want to write about its older woman protagonist, and the younger man with whom she finds herself unexpectedly falling in love.

Heroine Casey (Cassandra) Webb has spent the last year managing a campground in the Adirondacks, taking solace in nature in the wake of a breakup with her boyfriend of seven years. Though Casey's family keeps wondering "when was se going to get it together and leave 'that dump,' as her mother so graciously referred to Bonnet," the Adirondack town in which Casey had found herself after fleeing New York City, her Ph.D. program in Art History, and her less-than-supportive partner, to Casey Bonnet and the campground feel like home.

Opportunities for meeting men, though are pretty thin on the ground in small-town Bonnet. Thirty-four year-old Casey isn't looking for romance, but even she can't help checking out the cute buns on the attractive twenty-something guy who signs into the campground with his seven friends for a college reunion get-together. The language Brooks uses to describe the object of Casey's wandering eyes, chef-in-training Ben Mailer, is surprisingly different from the strong, in-charge alpha male so common in romance:

He was boyish, with straight dark hair long enough to stray into his eyes and a dimpled grin that carved two apostrophes into his cheeks and another int eh center of his chin when he smiled. He was tall and even under his black North Face fleece she could tell how lean and muscular he was. He had soft brown eyes and thin lips with a look like a puppy dog that had cultivated its sweet expression just to make you want to hug it. (Loc 174)

Intriguingly, Casey's attraction to twenty-six year-old Ben is not in spite of his boyishness, but because of it. And when it turns out that Ben is just as attracted to Casey (we're not told why, as the book is told largely from Casey's point of view, with only occasional forays into the povs of other, usually secondary, characters), the two must decide whether they will fan the sparks of their attraction, or stamp them out before they have a chance to flame.

Few readers have a problem with older man/younger woman storylines, but flip the sexes of the protagonists, and all sorts of squicky fears can arise, most focused around the potential for the hero's emasculation, and the heroine's guilt for bringing it about. An author can ignore such fears, or can attempt to mitigate them by constructing a hero with over-the-top masculinity.

Or, like Brooks, she can face them head-on.

Ben is far from the stereotypical über-confident, protective romance hero. He's not only younger than Casey, but he's far less self-assured. His idea of rebellion was to attend Vassar (significantly, a former all-women's college), rather than Yale ("where there are enough Mailer plaques to retile a mansion" [725]). He's studying Italian cooking at the Culinary Institute of America, rather than the baking that he truly loves, mainly to please his father. Casey is not only older than Ben, but she's close to his size, physically, strong enough to pin him down if she wishes. And Ben is far less experienced sexually than Casey is.

One of the best scenes in the book is of Casey and Ben's first lovemaking. Ben proves quite adept at oral sex, but not quite so skilled when it comes to intercourse:

He was pulsing rhythmically away, but that was precisely the problem. Whereas before she had felt passion, now his actions felt mechanical. Rote. The expected motions before a well-known finale everyone in the audience was waiting for so they could go home. Was this how they were going it these days? (1602)

Casey considers just lying back, letting him "drill for oil until he was done," but instead, she reasons "She'd had eight more years in the sack than he had.... Was all her experience for nothing? She would show him. She would guide him. She would—she was sure of it—utterly blow his mind" (1611). And in yet another welcome turnabout from traditional romance gender roles, so she proceeds to do.

Casey recognizes that Ben is both strong, physically and emotionally, but also that he's vulnerable, too, "holding back, afraid to voice his desires aloud. Wondering what if he failed, what if he was laughed at, what if he lost something important along the way" (1648). That Casey's description of Ben turns out to be just applicable to her, too, at least in regards to her professional life, suggests that loving another, whether younger or older, means not only encouraging them to reach for their dreams, but to grant them them time they need to grow ready to embrace them.


Photo credits:
Adirondack lake: Bear Lodge
Almond croissant: Gerard's European Bakery

Rebecca Brooks

Above All

Ellora's Cave, 2014

Exploring the Possibilities of the Zipless Fuck: Megan Hart's FLYING

Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying (1973) stands proudly beside Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) as one of the landmark texts of second-wave feminism. Radical in its frank portrayal of female desire, Fear of Flying depicts erotic poet Isadora Wing's picaresque quest to explore her own sexuality in language as forthright and four-lettered as anything penned by Philip Roth, Henry Miller, or D.H. Lawrence. Today's readers of erotic romance may find Isadora's self-absorption a bit narcissistic, and her fantasy of idealized no-strings-attached sex (the "zipless fuck") almost quaint in today's equal-opportunity hook-up world. But in the early 1970s, when Fear of Flying first made its way onto bookshelves and nightstands the world over, its unapologetic, taken-for-granted belief that women have sexual desires, and those desires are just as raunchy, complex, and contradictory as any man's, proved shocking not just to the average American reader, but to many in the (primarily male) literary establishment.

As I began to read erotic romance writer Megan Hart's latest, Flying, I couldn't help but think that it might have been written with Erica Jong's book, and the fantasy that her protagonist Isabelle Wing describes in that book's opening chapter, firmly in mind:

The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.
     For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well. I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion. (11)

In the opening chapter of Hart's Flying, we meet Stella, who seems to have achieved in actuality what Jong's Isadora could only fantasize about. In her twenties, Stella "had taught herself how to be sexy for a man," but now knows "it was so much better to be sexy for herself" (10). Stella's form of sexy is to dress in provocative clothes, fly to a random airport using the free tickets that were part of her divorce settlement from her airline CEO ex, tempt a suitable man in said airport's bar, and take him to a hotel room:

This is what she likes, what she craves. This is what she wants. Being wanted so much he'll do anything, finger her in a hotel doorway, maybe fuck her right there, not caring about anything but getting his cock inside her.... She wants to hold nothing back. Because this is what Stella really wants and craves and needs and seeks. This naked, somehow desperate connection of two people who don't even known each other's last names, but who each knows exactly how the other tastes. (21)

It's quite a shock when Chapter 2 opens with the word "Mom," and we discover that sexy Stella is a mother of a sixteen-year-old boy, a forty-something woman with a dull job, baskets full of laundry, and an ex-husband who shies away from all hints of responsibility beyond the monetary. Popular media warns incessantly about the college-aged girls being sucked into the faceless hook-up culture, but Hart shakes us out of our assumptions about who might want mindless sex, who can take pleasure from it, who has enough confidence to insist that "Her pleasure is hers. Not his." (107).

But there's more to the zipless fuck than pure anonymity. As Jong's Isadora imagines it,

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one. (14)

And neither, really, has Stella. The careful reader will begin to pick up on the clues Hart scatters through her opening scene, and through the other scenes of anonymous fucking in which Stella, never using her real name, engages during the first half of the novel, that what Stella has come to call "flying" is not quite as free of ulterior motives as a pure zipless fuck might promise. For the men whom Stella chooses are men, like her, who have secrets, men who will feel both titillation and guilt in the midst of their anonymous trysts, and for long after. Men mourning their divorces, or fearing their wives are about to leave them, or afraid that nothing they can do will ever really satisfy a woman. "He looks so broken, and there's not a lot sexier than a man who needs fixing... so long as when the morning comes you can say goodbye," Stella thinks when casing out another potential lover (95).

For Stella, flying is complicated, ambiguous, complex, both a coming alive and a killing off: a "coming out of the dark and into the light, if only for a little while" (56); an "agony" she both "loves and craves" (22); each lover's "scrutiny" the punishment she "deserves" (22). Though she "should feel pity" for these broken men she tempts, she's "unable to find any. Something's cold in her. And broken. But it's her own fault, she supposes, for picking men she knows are already damaged because it feels easier to justify breaking them" (108). Stella isn't good at opening up emotionally, nor is she any good at letting things go, an impossible combination for a person with trauma in her past, a trauma that is gradually revealed through Stella's "flights," her recollections of Craig, the man whose lack of knowledge about the tragedy she'd experienced makes him far more attractive to her than her husband, and her memories of how, eight years earlier, her marriage eventually came to an end.

Stella's story shifts mid-book, from dark erotica to—what? For the longest time, I wasn't sure if Hart was asking me to transition into an erotic romance, or a work of women's fiction. In Chicago, on the way home from a real business trip, dressed not as a sexy siren but in slim-cut jeans, a stretched-out oversized cardigan, and cotton granny pants, Stella meets Matthew, another divorced parent with as much baggage as Stella carries. Before she realizes it, she's telling him her name, sharing a drink, and, when bad weather cancels her flight, accepting his offer to leave the airport bar with him and spend the night at his place. The evening feels more like a date than a hook-up, and almost doesn't end with sex at all, Matthew awkward and unsure, it being his first post-divorce experience. But Stella is relieved when Matthew overcomes his reluctance, and the familiarity of "flying" one again takes hold: "Desire had become the one true constant in her life, the only feeling she could count on never to disappoint her. Desire required nothing from her. No investment. No responsibility. All desire wanted was to be sated. It was physical, and therefore could be killed" (138).

Yet after sating her desire, Stella finds herself answering the question that Matthew asks, the one none of her other hookups have bothered with: where did she get her scars? Sharing that answer proves a catalyst for Stella, a first hint that perhaps the cold inside her can begin to thaw. She begins to build a relationship with Matthew, traveling to Chicago every other week not only for fabulous sex, but for movies and outings and snuggles on the couch. But Matthew never offers to come to Pennsylvania to visit Stella, and seems embarrassed to introduce her to his children, or even mention the fact that he's dating again to his rather clingy ex-wife. And why does he like to hang out at the airport bar, anyways? Is Stella the only one whose relationship to "flying" is more complex than it seems?

Will Matthew turn out to be a temporary stepping-stone on the way to a healthier, happier Stella, now able to accept a more mature love from former crush Craig (women's fiction)? Will Stella return to "flying" after breaking up with Matthew, able to finally enjoy a truly zipless fuck without pain or guilt after working through some of her darker issues (erotica/erotic romance)? Or will Matthew prove himself worthy of Stella's love with a suitably grand and sexy gesture, one that will erase all the doubts his prior less-than-honest behavior have engendered (romance)?

Up to the very end, I wasn't sure which direction Hart would take. And I'm not entirely sure I'm satisfied with the choice she finally made.

But I'm also not sure how satisfied she wants me to be with it, either. Or perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part...


Would love to hear others' thoughts about Flying, especially about its ending.

Megan Hart, Flying

Harlequin/MIRA, 2014