Alan

The phrase 'Xmas Dom' badly needs a comma to save us from visions of a leathery Santa with a whip, but I digress. The short story kept me going over Christmas, but (excellent as it was) it's wearing off and fullblown withdrawal symptoms are setting in. I may be forced to start whimpering in a big way in the near future... And that would just be embarrassing to all of us, especially since I doubt I'll be alone.

My comp is set to post the ievitable DD22 demands automatcally so it can still happen during the shock and awe phase.

Don't worry. C21 wll soon be with us. About 20 minutes later we'll all be screaming for C22.

If you read Desert Dropping closely it's absolutely clear that Rory will end up with Braxton.

That's not quite what is said in Chapter 15:

I'm sorry, but I just don't see anything there (or anywhere else) to support Luke taking the rap voluntarily. Both Aaron and Luke say that Eddie is a good lawyer elsewhere and both say he did a good job getting Luke's sentence reduced. Aaron actually gives it as an excuse for throwing the blame on Luke, because he knew Eddie would get the sentence reduced.

Luke did not take the rap for Aaron. Aaron perjured himself in court to throw the blame on Luke.

Nothing much to contribute, except I'm a junkie for hot fudge sundaes. Alan (the blue)

I agree it says Luke wasn't getting any vibes. That's different from whether Luke wanted to get said vibes.

Look, I know someone else has already said this upthread, but I grew up with two older brothers. There was a distinct absence of nudity, flirting, 'inadvertent' genital contact, protectiveness, etc etc. If anything my brothers were distinctly shy about being naked. Ditto my friend's brothers. The idea of the 'twist' is a contagion we've caught from TV where it's become standard to abandon continuity at the end of a season to produce a cliff-hanger. The cliff-hanger effect has been measured fairly carefully on Australian TV. Our showrunners don't do them any longer because they tend to lose more viewers pissed off at the blatant manipulation than they gain from people desperate to discover who survives the fire/earthquake/invasion from Mars. There are ways that Luke and Rory might not end up together, but we'd have to discover a really dramatic twist to their characters. Somehow I don't see Dom suddenly writing that Luke is Alice the Incomprehensible's secret love child or that Rory is actually an insightful judge of character and he was right about Luke's feelings at the beginning.

The problem with the Luke/Dave boom is that Luke is very concerned with honesty. He was clearly uncomfortable with the Vow of Silence that Eddie imposed, but he followed kept his promise about it anyway. By the time the Vow was lifted Aaron already had his claws into Rory and Luke couldn't do much about his own feelings for Rory. Consider the way Luke described how keeping the Vow of Silence felt when he talked to Rory about it. Consider that Luke was incredibly careful, even when defending Eddie to Rory, to keep his promise not to give away the two big secrets. Consider the only time Luke's ever been even faintly sleazy was an effort (if misinformed and misdirected) to show Angela that Seth is gay. It is Aaron's dishonesty, more than anything else, that outrages Luke. Ditto Seth's perceived dishonesty. Honesty is just not compatible with some secret passion, long-held and long-concealed, for Dave.

You should take the death threats as a good thing. It measures how much the threateners like reading your stuff. Still, an insecure Christmas is not a happy Christmas... No, I'm not going there, I'm too drenched in Christmas spirit to get into pathetic whining and begging.

The elders of the Domahlic tradition are not doing their job. I got a prize for much less striking symptoms of Domaholism. Welcome to the club.

It's getting a bit strange. We had a Luke/Seth boomlet because Luke did about a hundredth of what he's done with Rory for Seth's benefit. Now we've got a Luke/Dave boomlet for no discernible reason at all. I guess I should address the hearsay thing, since a lot of people have commented. You can use hearsay to prove what someone says, but not to prove the truth of what they say. In the unlikely event the Aaron/Rory confession ever ends up before a judge Rory can prove Aaron said those words. And Aaron can say he wanted to make Rory happy so he made it up. The probative value of just about anything Rory, Jase or Eddie say about Luke is really, really limited. I only mentioned it because someone said there couldn't be any legal troubles because Aaron's spilt his guts to Rory. Eddie's first legal strategy should be to sit on Luke.

Unfortunately, Aaron's confession to Rory is hearsay and wouldn't go anywhere in court. After all, Aaron's already made the same confession to Luke, Jase and Eddie. I agree that being incensed, and not having much insight into his own actions, is enough to explain Aaron's presence.

I suspect he's all three. There's probably some insane thought that he can spin some or all of Rory, Luke, Eddie and Jase. He's tried before with the famous apology that left Luke with a criminal record. You wouldn't need to be Einstein to work out that apology was not going to fly. Aaron's not thinking all that clearly, if at all, and perhaps thought Eddie and Jase would not be home and if they were that Rory would be more worried about getting found out for seeing Aaron than angry with Aaron. There's probably a degree of desperation. This town can't have that many gay teenagers. The trickery and lies to Luke, Seth and Rory have all blown up in his face. Who else and where else is there for him to go? Lastly, Aaron probably does not remember very clearly what actually happened last night. None of this makes Aaron a good guy. He's committed actual crimes in the course of getting his own way and protecting his own arse. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems in his life, but they do not excuse the perjury or authorise him to exploit other people.

I sincerely hope whoever does deck Aaron has a clean criminal record because the next step is certainly going to be: 'Officer, I was just a regular guest at this party and then X tore my liver out without any warning.' Life could get seriously complicated if X is Luke.

We'll survive. We'll also serve process against Dom under the Convention against Torture. There are just so many good things in this chapter. Rory actually engaged his brain for the first time. Eddie sounds like he's had a lot of advice from Jase. Seth's story is really well done. The cliffhanger, however, is deliberate and blatant torture. I have this image in my head from Flying High when the passengers all grab baseball bats and queue up to brutalise the main character. I'm really glad Eddie stepped up behnd Rory. :mace:

I don't doubt that Aaron will try yet another time with Rory and spin the usual drivel to make it all go away. (It was all Seth's fault. Or Luke's. Or his parents. Or some guy who bumped him in the sreet in 1993) We see the whole Luke/Seth thing through Rory's eyes and I wouldn't trust Rory's judgment of people to tell me much about anything. What I do trust (sadly) is Rory's inability to tell Aaron to go jump when Aaron turns up, does his act, and throws in a kiss. Said inability is prolly going to be a bit worse because of what Rory's feeling about Luke, but not talking about with Luke. Thinking back to the scene in the bedroom, Rory was saying: 'No!' and Aaron was getting on with getting what he wanted. Aaron was using physical force to get there. In a lot of places that could get you charged with sexual assault. Being alone with Aaron strikes me as a really bad idea just now and that may be what Dom is blogging about.

Actually your post confirms why it is such a nasty comment. The only implication is hypocrisy and that's a fairly low blow, especially when it's used to avoid a conversation merely because Rory doesn't want to have it.

Trust me, you aren't, although it also has to be said that Eddie's attempt at fatherhood was as fumbling, tentative and ineffectual as usual. There were really easy comebacks like Eddie and Gina could have said it to their own parents and it would have been just as irrelevant or Rory should stop channeling the Alice the Incomprehensible. Or perhaps even that Rory should grow some manners. It's probably also time to recall the other much-lauded line, the one by Aaron. 'I don't want to be your friend' was not a clever come-on. It was literally true.

I'd agree if Luke had sent a press release to the local media or postered the school. Outing Seth to a group that are themselves gay-friendly is not anything like that. Breaking up a couple when one of them is misleading the other is not such a bad thing to do. Remember, also, that Luke's beliefs about Seth are coloured by Seth's closeness to Aaron and his apparent treatment of Rory.

Not sure, people like Aaron need their victims isolated. Everyone under 18 who lives in this town seems to hate Aaron's guts, so if Rory became friendly with anyone he was likely to hear things Aaron couldn't explain away. Rory should stop cutting people off. He does it to everyone he deals with. He hates it when Alice the Incomprehensible does it to him. I wonder how different the whole tale would be if Luke hadn't thrown Aaron's number out the window back in Chapter whatever. Word! Jase will be calm and rational. Eddie will freak until someone hits him over the head with a piece of four-by-two. It runs in the family.