This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warnings: Stalkery controlling behaviour (the narrative). Gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck’ (me).

 

Chapter Twenty-Four: Possession

Is it just me or does that title not bode well?

We’ve timejumped forward; this chapter starts with Travis going round and round in his head over what turns out to be a decision on whether to go to the Valentine’s Day party (pros: Abby will be there, cons: he’ll potentially have to watch her dancing with someone else/meeting her future husband). Shep and America are back together, though it took them five weeks after the break-up at the end of the previous chapter, and have been busy with makeup sex.

America never missed a moment to let me know she hated my guts

Well, at least she got there eventually, though it would have been a lot more constructive if she could have worked that out back when she was urging Abby to get together with him.

And, wait a moment here, sounds like we skipped over another event:

I had talked Abby into leaving her date with Parker to come with me to a fight. Of course I wanted her there, but I made the mistake of admitting it was also that I had primarily asked her so I could win a pissing contest. I wanted Parker to know he had no hold on her. Abby felt I’d taken advantage of her feelings for me, and she was right.

So it sounds like we had another whole scene in ‘Beautiful’ which has just been skipped over and retrospectively summarised in ‘Walking’. On the one hand, not even bothering to write important scenes in your own book is really shoddy writing, but on the other hand it’s a fair guess that if McGuire had written the scene then that would have been substantially more shoddy writing for me to wade through. I’ll take it as a win.

All of those things were enough to feel guilty about, but the fact that Abby had been attacked in a place where I’d taken her made it nearly impossible to look anyone in the eye. Adding to all of that our close call with the law totaled up to me being a gigantic fuckup.

….okaaay, what? Just how much did McGuire leave out here? I’m going to have to go and at least skim through this scene in ‘Beautiful’.

OK. Back. I’m going to have a shot at summarising the left-out parts of ‘Beautiful’ as I read through them, so, braced for WTFery:

• The weekend before Valentine’s Day, Abby and America are dancing at the Red and keep feeling men dancing behind them who then disappear, which turns out to be because Trav and Shep are dragging away any men who try dancing with them. Which they’re apparently accomplishing without starting any fights or any yells of ‘WTF do you think you’re doing?’, since all Abby’s aware of each time is that someone is dancing up against her just behind her and then he isn’t. This is, apparently, something the boys don’t see any problem at all with doing; when Abby finally notices what’s happening and confronts them, the boys are described as ‘smiling’ and ‘proud’ of what they’re doing. America doesn’t notice what’s going on, so she and Shep get back together at this point.
• Abby then accepts an offer from Parker to go out for pizza and a film together as ‘just friends’, having apparently forgotten how he was previously spreading rumours and slut-shaming her when she was with Travis, which does not sound like a great basis for friendship.
• Travis and Shep then turn up at the pizza place, to Parker’s alarm. The waitress spends ages hanging hopefully round their table and getting ignored, because we haven’t been reminded in a while of how irresistible Trav is to women and how inferior all other women are to Abby.
• Travis gets a call and gets up to head out to a fight. Good job he hadn’t ordered his food yet, or he’d have had to leave it. It really makes no sense that Adam gives him so little warning (we’re told it’s 45 minutes, in which Travis has to include journey time). He stops by Abby’s table and says he wants Abby there, and then changes this to saying he needs her there, implying that he’s worried because the other guy has been training.
• Abby apparently makes up her mind to go with him ‘the second he asks’, and, when Parker protests, she tells him that she’s going because Travis is her ‘best friend’. So, never mind America, who has been her best friend whom she’s known lifelong; apparently the ex-boyfriend she hasn’t spoken to for almost three months except for a couple of arguments is now her best friend. (BTW, I would feel sorry for Parker right now, but as per above he’s a dick as well so I don’t.)
• Abby leaves with Travis and holds hands with him on the way out and in the taxi, because that’s not really giving mixed messages at all.
• They get to the place where the fight is being held and it’s dangerously crowded. Adam (the guy who arranges the fights) wants to be sure Travis is going to fight properly as there’s so much money on this, but Travis is being a cocky little shit about the whole thing as usual. So much for him being worried, I guess.
• The fight starts and it’s pretty vicious, and not going all Travis’s way. Abby turns aside for a moment and, as it’s so crowded, she gets shuffled off to the side away from Shepley and against a wall, where Ethan (the guy who tried to chat her up several chapters ago and who Travis implied had a history of sexual assault) starts trying to chat her up again and grabs her and mauls her when she tries to get away.
• Travis sees what’s going on and tries to get to her to help, but one of the others keeps shoving him back into the ring to fight. Abby gets Ethan off her temporarily by kneeing him in the groin, and Shep manages to get to Abby and gets her out.
• Travis runs out to find her, sees the guy who kept pushing him back into the ring, and beats him up. Then Shep yells to alert him that Ethan’s going past (yeah, well done, Shep, clearly what this situation needs right now is even more violence/s) and Trav beats him up as well. Oh, and this included ramming Ethan’s face into his car headlight, shattering the headlight.
• Police arrive and block the exit. The gruesome foursome get out of there PDQ and Shep manages to find another exit and drive them back to the apartment.
• Travis lifts Abby out of the back seat and carries her into the apartment, funnily enough without her feeling any apparent need to point out that WTF, she isn’t a swooning Victorian maiden and can actually walk here. Toto’s all excited to see her but Trav shifts him out of the room (gently, at least).
• Trav is really upset and apologetic about what happened to Abby. He tells her to stay over as the residential hall is ‘crawling with cops’ (why? It’s not where the fight was).
• Trav promptly goes to take a shower and all four of them drink quite a bit of alcohol, because some things apparently never change.
• Abby’s sympathetic with Trav until he confesses to her that he only tried to get her to the game to prove a point to Parker. After that, she’s PO’d. She throws a glass at him, throws him out of the room (she’s sleeping on the bed, he’s going to sleep on the sofa), and cries her eyes out, with America coming in to hold her.
• Abby and America go back to the dorm the next morning. Abby miserably reflects on how shitty the whole situation is.

Following which, we see Abby with Finch at the party, so that seems to be us caught up. Well, that was a wild ride. (counts back) Almost two chapters worth of significant stuff just left out and summarised in a couple of paragraphs, so, way to avoid writing your own fricking book, McGuire. But, again, at least it did make it somewhat quicker for me to get through, so at least for once I’m benefiting from McGuire’s crappy writing skill.

Anyway… back to ‘Walking’. Shep is about to head off with America, and Trav apologises to him again for screwing up. Trav drinks ‘the last of the whiskey’, considers going out to get more, and has a rare moment of self-honesty in realising that no amount of whiskey is actually going to help him decide whether to go to the frat party or not. So… he goes to get more whiskey on his way to the frat party anyway, and drinks a half-pint of that before going in because he’s ‘finding courage in the bottom of a bottle’. Thank you once again, McGuire, for this excellent role-modelling for the youth of today.

Travis looks for Abby and eventually finds her dancing with Finch. In case it isn’t clear, Finch is The Gay Best Friend and Travis appears to be fully aware of that, so hopefully no tragic misunderstandings here. Trav walks over to them and asks Finch if he can cut in. Neither boy seems interested in asking Abby whether this is OK, despite Finch being well aware of the situation. Great.

Abby, for unclear reasons, does go along with dancing with Trav, though apparently resists his attempts to pull her closer. Trav tells her she looks beautiful and that he didn’t really mean what he’d said before about asking her to the fight to prove a point to Parker. Excuse me, McGuire, but just a few pages back Trav was describing himself as having ‘admitted’ this to Abby, so that certainly sounds like it was actually true. So I guess he’s now lying to her. Maybe this is one of the bits for which McGuire’s reason for omitting it from this book was because she was trying to gloss over just how bad Travis sounded in it.

Abby says that she wishes she did hate him because it would make everything a lot easier, which is true enough.

A cautious, small smile spread across my lips. “So what pisses you off more? What I did to make you wanna hate me? Or knowing that you can’t?”

This further attempt at point-scoring is enough for Abby, who turns and legs it out of there.

Trying to speak to her at all seemed futile, now. Every interaction just added to the growing snowball of clusterfucks that was our relationship.

Well, sounds like you should learn something from that…

I walked up the stairs and made a beeline for the keg,

…yeah, that wasn’t actually the lesson I had in mind.

cursing my greediness and the empty bottle of whiskey lying somewhere in Sig Tau’s front lawn.

So he’s a litterbug as well? I mean, not that I’m even surprised by this point…

Trav spends the next hour drinking beer. I’m going to guess that this won’t have any apparent physical effect on him. He then looks over to try to catch Abby’s eye and instead sees that she and Finch are just getting ready to leave. Just as Abby’s walking out, the song that she and Travis danced to at her birthday party comes on. I assumed this was going to be one of those soppy romance ‘fall back into each other’s arms thinking about the memories, all is magically forgiven’ moments, but I had, as so often, managed to utterly underestimate Maguire’s awfulness level, because here’s what actually happens:

One of the frat boys asks her to dance and without thinking about it Trav darts over to her and also asks her to dance. (Well, at least that was a relief; I thought Trav was going to punch him.) Abby refuses, gets narky, and dances with the first guy instead. (Huh. Another relief.) Apparently this is as much functional stuff as Maguire can sustain, however, because…

Trav then jumps on a chair, shouts out a semi-coherent toast to ‘douche bags’ and ‘girls that break your heart’, and, despite Shep trying to stop him, pushes his way over to where Abby’s dancing with the other boy (Brad), says he’s cutting in, and threatens Brad with having his throat ripped out if he doesn’t back off and go along with this. Okaaaaay, so apparently we’re back in scary stalker territory. Abby tells Trav that the way she feels about him ‘very closely resembles hate’ and refuses to dance. Good for her. She goes and grabs someone else to dance with. Another guy dances up behind her and starts grinding into her, and Trav decides he needs to rescue her, so he grabs her and throws her over his shoulder ready to drag her off back to his cave apartment like one of those bad stereotypes from the Neolithic.

Trav carries Abby upstairs (past America, who flat-out laughs at her when she calls out for help, so fuck you, America, so much for the protective friend), and outside, where the designated driver is handily waiting at the wheel of his car. Wait, is he a hired chauffeur or something? Wouldn’t he be inside at the party? Travis threatens Donnie into driving both of them back to Trav’s apartment, then physically restrains Abby when she tries to get out of the car. Yes, this is a thing that the love interest is fucking well doing in this fucking book which we all fucking know is going to fucking end with this fuckbag fucking getting back together with her and with that fucking well being presented as a happy fucking ending.

Abby bites Trav in an unsuccessful attempt to get away, to which he tells her ‘”Do your worst, Pidge, I’m tired of your shit.”‘

“My shit? Let me out of this fucking car!”

I pulled her wrists close to my face. “I love you, dammit! We’re not going anywhere until you sober up and we figure this out!”

Jesus H. Freaking Christ, Travis, she has broken up with you and you are fucking assaulting and restraining her and the only thing you need to figure out right now is how to stop being one of the later chapters in a book analysing the typical sequence of ways that abusive partners escalate their behaviour until it reaches murder. Fuck you with a cactus.

Abby, having apparently realised that she has no chance of successfully fighting back physically against Trav and that her best bet is to at least not make him angrier, stops trying to fight and waits it out till they get to the apartment. When they get there, she tries asking Donnie to take her home, but Trav drags her out, slings her over his shoulder again, and marches upstairs with her.

Abby tries telling him she’s going to call his dad and Travis laughs and tells her her dad would pat him on the back for this. Classic abuser behaviour of making the abused person feel everyone’s on the abuser’s side. He drags her struggling into the apartment and throws her down on the bed to ‘sleep it off’, and when she tries yelling at him that she doesn’t ‘belong to’ him any more, he gets all up in her face and screams back that he belongs to her.

And, to everyone else thinking ‘Fuck, this is going to be presented as a successful way of winning her over, isn’t it?’  …yes. Sadly, you were right.

Abby reached out, but instead of slapping my face, she grabbed each of my cheeks and slammed her mouth into mine.

…and they rip each other’s clothes off and she drags him on top of her. Of course.

By the way, if you want to know how foolishly optimistic I can be, I actually did hold out hopes that maybe this would be another time where she’d tell him to get stuffed and maybe it would be another chapter before they got back together and so at least the book would only show them getting together in spite of Travis’s behaviour, not because of it. But, no. Maguire has to show Travis being the kind of controlling stalkery ex who’s one step away from getting zip ties and show that as being what induces Abby to get back with him. Fuck. This. Shit. With. A. Fucking. Cactus.

Trav does then hold off for a minute on having sex because he realises Abby’s drunk, and does say that he’s ‘been an ass’ and that he ‘never wanted Abby to wonder if he’d taken advantage of this moment’, and so I dared to hope maybe we’d get a sliver of decent appropriate behaviour showing through the rest of this shitshow, but, nope; what he actually does at this point is tell her to say that she belongs to him and she’ll take him back. So, no, Travis is actually not trying at all to make sure that he’s not taking advantage of the drunk woman he just fucking dragged back to his apartment; he’s trying to take even more advantage of her to make sure that she promises to stay with him.

And, yes, of course, Abby promises him that she’s his and she’s going to stay with him and love him forever… because that’s such a wonderful idea to promise to the teenager who not only has enough red flags to open a flag store but whom you have only known for a few months. This isn’t romance or love, this is limerence hitting your dopamine centres.

Anyway, there are still almost four pages left in this senseforesaken chapter but I can sum them up fairly quickly: Trav wakes up convinced that Abby’s going to be angry with him for last night and leave him again, Abby doesn’t have the sense to do any such thing and convinces him she wants to stay, it turns out Abby’s desperately wanted to get back with him since Thanksgiving but thought he didn’t want her, blah-de-blah, apparently everything’s sunshine and roses now, chapter ends.

Oooookaaaaay. Since all I seem to be doing with this clusterfuck of a chapter is swearing non-stop, I figure it’s worth putting in at least a bit of thought as to why people think this sort of stuff is so amazingly romantic.

To recap: We have a man who threatens other people with violence, drags his ex out of a party (humiliating her in the process), and forces her to come back to his apartment when he doesn’t want to. This is all on top of his immaturity, his anger control issues, his problem drinking, his lack of relationship experience, his toxic possessiveness, the fact that the reason his ex split up with him was due to his insistence on disregarding her opinion on a major issue that deeply mattered to her, and his stalker-type behaviour since then. This is our romantic hero. Numerous people actually like this book and agree that the above plot is wonderfully romantic. Why?

The only reason I can see is that the book portrays a male love interest who really, really wants to be with the female love interest, and this is what’s seen as romantic. He loves Abby so much he’s willing to fight for her! He’s not willing to listen to her opinion when it counts, leave her alone for her own sake, or avoid the stalker-type behaviour, but he’s willing to fight for her! And he’s somewhat changed at least some things about his behaviour for her! Doesn’t that prove it’s a great romance? So… I suppose people get so focused on the way Travis is proving how much he wants Abby that they dont see any need to think about whether he’s a person worth being with himself.

All this is then also presented within a bizarre sort of competitive framework in which multiple other women are denigrated and criticised in order to frame Abby as soooo much better than all the Other Girls, the one good-quality women amongst all the designated trash, the virgin among all the whores. So I guess if you already believe life is that sort of constant competition with others, then it must be reassuring to read about a protagonist who’s winning it.

And it’s just so damn sad and frustrating. People learn that ‘big dramatic gesture to prove he really wants you’ is the important thing rather than ‘look at who this person shows themselves to be in day-to-day life’. Women get taught to think in terms of ‘I’m better than all these whores’ rather than seeing the other women around them as people who can be potential friendships, supports, or, at a bare minimum, just people living their lives who don’t need this kind of hate or dismissal.

I did check out ‘Beautiful’ to see what McGuire would give us as the in-story explanation for why Abby thought it was worth getting back with Travis. But, nope, we don’t get one. No explanations, no justification. Abby wants to get back with Travis, so she does. The fact that she had good reasons for leaving him is just ignored, to the point where Abby flat-out blames herself for not getting back with him sooner. ‘I had made us both suffer, and I had no excuse’ Abby thinks, because every fucking time I think McGuire has got the bar as low as it can get she manages to push it a little further into the earth’s core.

Anyway, chapter’s done, and there is at least not too much left in the book. So I’ll post this now and keep pushing on through and get done with the whole thing.

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four: Forget

Another surprise: at the beginning of this chapter, Travis is actually trying something helpful. He’s realised he’s got to keep himself from constantly calling Abby, and he’s recognised there’s a huge chance of him giving in to temptation, so he’s managing this by avoiding having his phone with him. Initially he leaves it in his car. Shepley objects because what if Travis’s dad wanted to get in touch with him (uh, Shep, you’re Jim’s nephew; I’m sure he could send a message via you in case of emergency) so Travis leaves his phone on the TV so that he’s not constantly reaching for it. Good for you, Travis!

And another: This bit is actually reasonably well-written. Did Maguire take a writing class part way through and then just not bother to go back and rewrite the earlier bits? Anyway, we’ve time-jumped forwards to what we find out is New Year’s Eve. We learn that Trenton keeps phoning Travis in what Trav describes as ‘some sort of Maddox suicide watch’ which is well-meant but a) irritating for both Trav and Shep and b) really not helping with the whole ‘stay away from the phone’ thing, and that Travis is trying to take his mind off things by doing as many of the illegal fights as Adam will arrange, which isn’t very many because it’s winter break and there aren’t enough people around to want to watch them.

Trent tells Trav he’s being ‘a huge pussy’ for not doing more to get over it, because apparently we’d gone a bit too long without having some sort of misogynistic/toxic masculinity moment. Oh, well, my few minutes of not hating this book were quite nice while they lasted.

Anyway, Trent thinks Trav ought to come out with him for New Year’s Eve, so when Trav keeps refusing Trent tells him that if Trav isn’t showered, dressed, and ready to go out by the time Trent turns up Trent will phone everyone up and tell them that Trav’s having a party at his place with beer kegs and hookers. That’s… actually kind of ingenious in a ‘yes, but next time use your powers for good and not for evil’ kind of way. Anyway, it works and Trav gets ready, but not before taking a few minutes to gaze longingly at the engagement ring he bought for Abby back when they were still together. You know, when these teenagers dated for… I was going to say a couple of months but it isn’t even that, since it was well into autumn when they got together and still before Thanksgiving when they broke up. During which less-than-two-month period Trav bought her an engagement ring. Because, apparently, it ‘made sense to keep it just in case the perfect moment happened to arise’. No, Trav, it makes sense not to assume you’re going to get to the proposal stage with a relationship that just started weeks ago. Sigh.

Trent arrives and the three of them (Shepley included) head out to the Red. Apparently Trent has got ‘a friend coming’ and Trav seems to understand immediately who he means by that… (scans ahead) oh, wait, it wasn’t that Trav had someone specific in mind, it was that Trent’s trying to set Trav up with someone. The ‘someone’ in question turns out to be a divorced woman called Carissa who apparently used to babysit for Trav, which doesn’t sound like a great setup for getting together. Though she was in the same school year as Tyler and Taylor, so it must have been a teenager babysitting for a slightly younger child rather than a situation where she was taking care of an actual toddler, so, less weird than I initially thought.

Anyway, she drunkenly tries the whole don’t-want-to-be-alone-tonight line and Trav’s not interested. Carissa tries kissing him at midnight anyway and he pulls away, runs off into the bathrooms, struggles with himself over whether to phone Abby, and ends up resisting the temptation and hurling his phone at the wall instead, startling some poor guy at the urinal. Then he tells the guys he’s going and Trent drives him home…. despite having been drinking heavily through the evening. Sigh. They make it back without incident but Jesus fuck, McGuire, stop normalising drunk driving. Stop normalising something that destroys lives both metaphorically and literally.

We time-jump ahead to the start of spring semester, which Trav has very mixed feelings about because he’s longing to see Abby again but at the same time dreading it. He tells us that he was ‘determined to be all smiles, never letting on how much I’d suffered, to Abby or anyone else’, which makes me suspect that we’ve got some sort of ‘clearly he doesn’t really care that much about me at all’ misunderstanding coming up, but, oh, well, hopefully I can skim through it quickly if so.

Anyway, Trav sees Abby at lunch but spends the first part of lunch telling his frat boy friends Wild Anecdotes of drunken adventures with his brother, then briefly tries making heartily casual conversation with Shep and Abby while resting his hands on Abby’s shoulders and… swinging her from side to side? Is she now a fidget toy or something? Anyway, Abby sounds unhappy and it’s all seriously awkward and Trav heads outside pretty quickly.

Trav makes it through his last couple of classes and heads home with Shepley. Shep reluctantly tells him that America reported that Abby’s been miserable over Christmas break. Since Shep isn’t sure why she’s miserable or what she wants from Travis, this doesn’t really help the situation and Travis just gets upset again.

Shep, still trying to be helpful, tries the following suggestion:

“You think . . . you think if maybe you focused on all the bullshit you had to endure with her, that’d make it easier?”

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what ‘bullshit’ Shep thinks Trav had to ‘endure’ as a result of being with Abby, though I’d have no problem coming up with examples of the converse. Trav’s reply that he wishes he could ‘have all the bad stuff back . . . just so I could have the good’ is not much help in clarifying what the hell McGuire thought she meant here.

Shep is saved from his further clumsy struggles to be helpful by Trent texting to ask Trav to pick him up from work and take him to Cami’s, as his own car’s broken down. Oh, sorry, not Cami’s place, but the Red, where she works. (Cami is the main bartender there and Trent’s love interest for the next book in the ‘Beautiful’ series, or at any rate the next one after ‘Beautiful Disaster’, since I believe ‘Walking Disaster’ was written later.)

Trav borrows Shep’s car to take Trent to the Red and proceeds to get blasted drunk, without Trent trying to stop him despite the fact that he is supposed to be driving someone else’s car home. McGuire, fuck your horrible examples with a cactus. Megan (I think she’s the one who was staying over in the first chapter but who gives a fuck at this point) comes and tries to get off with him; she does offer to drive him home and Trent persuades him to let her, which, despite her obvious ulterior motive, is a pretty good idea right then.

They get out to the car and Megan promptly starts snogging the face off Trav and moves on to pretty much dry-humping him. Trav goes along with this in a why-the-hell-not kind of way, and they go back to the apartment, obviously planning sex. I assumed from the start of reading this bit that Trav would look up at some point and see Abby was watching all this, and, with depressing predictability, so he did. When he and Megan get back to the apartment, to be specific. Also, Abby is holding Toto, so Maguire has clearly remembered his existence yet again after weeks of him getting ignored during the breakup.

Abby storms out in a huff saying that she doesn’t even know why she’s surprised. Yes, Abby, you broke up with him weeks ago, I don’t know why you’re surprised either. He does get to move on.

No matter what I did – moving on without her, or lying in my bed agonizing over her – she would have hated me.

Trav follows her screaming at her for being mad at him for this, and, just for once, he’s not wrong. (Oh, wait… have now checked the scene out in ‘Beautiful’ and it seems my skimming means I missed the bit where this whole argument, including the bit where Abby is getting huffy with him, is only happening because instead of just letting her go he runs after her and grabs her coat to keep her there. Which, by the way, is on icy ground so she damn near falls over. OK, I retract my statement. Trav’s still actively being a dick.)

There’s a short scene which is basically several lines more of Abby being mad that the man she split up with has now decided to have sex with someone else and Trav being upset about that she’s mad about it, and then Trav grabs Abby’s arm to try to stop her leaving. Which I agree isn’t great and he should lay off, but America loses her entire shit over this and starts hitting him.

“How could you? She deserved better from you, Travis!”

So once again America, who has regularly been willing to give Travis a pass for his aggressive, stalkery, and borderline abusive behaviour, decides that the one thing she’s not going to stand for is Trav having sex with someone else while he’s single. And, when Shep tries stopping her, she ‘glares at him in disgust’ and we get this:

“Abby broke up with him. He’s just trying to move on.”

America’s eyes narrowed, and she pulled her arm from his grip. “Well then, why don’t you go find a random WHORE” – she looked at Megan – “from the Red and bring her home to fuck, and then let me know if it helps you get over me.”

America gets in the car with Abby and drives off after telling a pleading Shep ‘”There is a right side and a wrong side here, Shep. And you are on the wrong side.” Shep reacts to all this by punching Trav, which Trav figures he deserves, for… the heinous crime of being about to have sex with someone else almost two months after his girlfriend broke up with him, I suppose. Anyway, this all puts a comprehensive damper on anything he was about to do with Megan, and the chapter ends with Shep being about to drive Megan home.

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty-Three: Acceptance Speech

I hope, dear readers, that you will not be too shocked to learn that when Trav promised Abby that this Thanksgiving meal wasn’t ‘some stunt to try and get back together’, he was in fact lying. We have this unsurprising point confirmed for us in the second paragraph:

The plan was for her to play the part, start to miss me, and then maybe I would get another chance to beg her back. It was a long shot, but the only thing I had going for me.

Well, at least that last bit is true; it’s not as though he has charm, personality, or skill in bed going for him.

However, I did then get a pleasant surprise just a few paragraphs further on; when Travis’s father says he’s putting them in the guest room (apparently there’s a double bed in there), Travis does admit right away that it’ll only be Abby in the guest room and he’s going to sleep in his own bedroom. It’s the first time I can remember Travis not trying to push Abby into something.

Trenton does his bit of stirring by asking why they’re in separate bedrooms when of course he knows exactly why. Since he’s described as having a look of ‘disgust’ while he does this, which doesn’t quite go with the situation, I do wonder whether the bit about him having supported Travis through this was only added for this book and Maguire is trying to find a way to retcon this in.

Anyway, turns out there’s a problem because Thomas’s room is being used for storage so they’re short of a room. Abby reluctantly volunteers to sleep in the same room as Travis and makes some excuse about how they were just trying to ‘be respectable’. They get up to the spare room and Travis offers to sleep on the floor and Abby tells him damn straight he’ll be doing that.

I sat on the bed, realising just how unhappy she was about the situation. I guess part of me hoped she’d be as relieved as I was to be together.

Sigh.

The two of them go and start prepping the stuff for tomorrow, which is, apparently, all there already, so I guess at least someone went shopping for it. The other brothers arrive. Their dad regales them with stories of cooking disasters of attempted Thanksgiving meals in the past; apparently he just decided there was no point trying to cook meals after his wife died. Clearly a grown man can’t be expected to learn cooking skills. (And, all right, turkeys are notoriously difficult, but other foods exist, FFS. Last Christmas was my first since separating from my husband and therefore the first in which I’d ever had to do Christmas dinner myself; I got round the problem by finding a decent traybake recipe. Which I thought of as an option because I’d tried other traybake recipes in the course of actually cooking regular meals in the previous months because doing that was my responsibility as a parent. Which of course raises the question of what Jim was doing for dinner on the other 364 days of the year.)

Trenton wants to start a poker game but their dad puts his foot down about no gambling that weekend; he’s got the dominoes out instead. It’s not clear why, since he doesn’t know any of what happened with Abby, but under the circumstances it’s a damn good thing. This doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mr Sensitivity, who doesn’t really have any sort of reaction to it at all. He does say he’ll stay and finish helping Abby, but she waves him away telling him she’s nearly finished, so everyone just goes and plays dominoes and leaves her to it. Except we’re then told it’s half an hour until Trav hears the dishwasher start. So that doesn’t sound like ‘nearly finished’, that sounds like a bunch of menfolk leaving their supposed guest to do a lot of clearing up on her own. (We get absolutely no indication that anyone else thought to say ‘Hey, let’s all pitch in and then we can get the rest of this done in no time’.) I mean, points to Trav for at least offering, but minus points to the patriarchy.

Having got the meal prep done, Abby’s ready to head up to bed. Trav persuades her to stay and watch a film with the family, and she keeps up a not-very-convincing pretence to the rest that nothing’s wrong between her and Trav until she can go upstairs. They do finally go up to their room and Trav is actually doing a good job of being considerate, checking whether she wants him to wait outside while she changes and making up a bed on the floor. Good contrast to previous behaviour.

They have a poignant little conversation where Trav asks whether she did love him and she says she still does. Trav asks if he can just hold her for the night since it’s their last night together and Abby, after being clear about this not leading to sex, agrees. However, she then finds it too difficult:

“I . . . I don’t think I can do this, Travis,” she said, trying to wriggle free.

I didn’t mean to restrain her, but if holding on meant avoiding that deep burning pain I’d felt for days on end, it just made sense to hang on.

Oh, FFS, I’m even out of snark. Once again I’m actually liking the way Travis is behaving and then, wham, it all turns around. He’d rather keep forcibly holding her when he sees she’s upset by it than be upset himself. He’s treating her like a human teddy bear, and putting her through this crap because he can’t face telling his family how much he screwed up.

They have an angsty little conversation where he says he’ll never love anyone as much as he loves her and he knows he could never be good enough for her, to which I would have sharply replied ‘Well, then, start thinking about how you can be better for the next person. Goodnight.’ But, to be fair, that is middle-aged me with decades of life experience.

Travis is woken early next morning by the sound of Abby in the kitchen, getting the turkey into the oven with what he describes as ‘commotion’, which conveniently doesn’t seem to wake anyone else. It’s freezing cold and they snuggle back under the covers together and look out at the snow outside.

I pulled my mouth into a half smile, and then leaned down to kiss her lips. Abby pulled back and shook her head.

“Trav . . .”

I held on tight and lowered my chin. “I’ve got less than twenty-four hours with you, Pidge. I’m gonna kiss you. I’m gonna kiss you a lot today. All day. Every chance I get. If you want me to stop, just say the word, but until you do, I’m going to make every second of my last day with you count.”

And, of course, this is once again treated as sweet and romantic instead of one more round of boundary pushing from a man who has already been told no. Abby starts kissing him and they end up having sex and he keeps on kissing her throughout the day. Wow, thanks for those great ‘she didn’t really mean it when she said no’ messages.

The meal comes out really well. Their father tells Abby that she’s ‘a Maddox now’ and that he expects her at every holiday, which I’m sure was meant to sound warm and welcoming, but, even allowing for the fact that he doesn’t know they’ve split up, is waaaay OTT for a couple of teenagers who’ve been dating for a few weeks. Trav’s brothers do cleanup duty (about time they did something) and Trav sits and massages Abby’s feet for her. We get one of the rare good lines in the book:

Abby did love me, but she also cared about me too much to send me packing when she should. Even though I’d told her before that I couldn’t walk away from her, I finally realised that I loved her too much to fuck up her life by staying, or to lose her completely by forcing us both to hang on until we hated each other.

And not only that, but it’s followed up by, if technically not quite an apology, a really good apologetic speech:

“I don’t know what happened to me in Vegas. That wasn’t me. I was thinking about everything we could buy with that money, and that was all I was thinking about. I didn’t see how much it hurt you for me to want to take you back there, but deep down, I think I knew. I deserved for you to leave me. I deserved all the sleep I lost and the pain I’ve felt. I needed all that to realize how much I need you, and what I’m willing to do to keep you in my life.

“You said you’re done with me, and I accept that. I’m a different person since I met you. I’ve changed . . . for the better. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to do right by you. We were friends first, and I can’t lose you, Pigeon. I will always love you, but if I can’t make you happy, it doesn’t make much sense for me to try to get you back. I can’t imagine being with anyone else, but I’ll be happy as long as we’re friends.”

“You want to be friends?”

“I want you to be happy. Whatever that takes.”

Abby jokes that she bets he’ll be thanking her when he meets his ‘future wife’, and then says she’s ready to go home. Trav takes her back to the dorm and actually leaves her there without hassling her, then goes home. Trenton’s already told his family about the breakup and they all rally round and support him (and give him more whiskey because terrible coping skills, but nothing’s perfect). So, in an unprecedented event, I got an entire consecutive two and a half pages of this book that I actually quite like. Even better, this brings us to the end of another chapter.