Lisa's Reviews > Taking It All

This is an unfortunate one. The story was going along well enough for the first 75% or so, but then the author has the hero do something so awful that even the other characters in the story say it’s utterly unforgiveable. She created a scenario where I just couldn’t see their relationship EVER recovering, so the HEA just wasn’t believable and it made me pretty much hate everyone involved.

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The story is about Chessy and Tate. They’ve been married for five years, but Chessy has been unhappy for two of them. Chessy even confesses to her friends that she worries Tate is cheating on her. He runs an investment banking firm and apparently a few years ago he had a partner lined up who backed out at the last minute. This has caused Tate to become obsessive about making his business a success, and to do it all on his own. He’s refused to take on any partners to help share the workload because he got burned the last time.

Unfortunately, that requires him to basically do everything, including hosting parties to schmooze with the rich people. He used to bring Chessy to these events and let her naturally vivacious personality win people over, but at some point decided “not to burden her” with it and just stopped inviting her…without discussing it with her at all. So naturally Chessy saw this as a rejection.

Their bedroom life has also taken a serious nosedive during this time. Chessy and Tate have always had a Dom/Sub relationship, but in the last two years he’s hardly ever dominated her. In fact, they rarely sleep together at all and when they do, it’s more of a wham-baam-thank you-ma’am event than anything that rocks Chessy’s world. Tate has also blown her off every time she’s tried to bring up the subject of having kids, even though he’d previously been in agreement with her about wanting a whole bunch. This makes Chessy very sad and again suggests to her that he might already have one foot out the door….but she hasn’t talked to him about ANY of these things. TWO FREAKING YEARS this has been going on and she never ONCE said anything to him. Girl, grow a damn back bone!

Things finally come to a head on their anniversary. Tate has promised to take the whole weekend off so they can spend it together. It’s all supposed to begin Friday night, when they meet for dinner at their favorite restaurant. Chessy is very excited and hopes this weekend will be just what they need to get back on track. Tate is coming from work so she drives herself to the restaurant and is seated. And then she waits. And waits. More than an hour after Tate was supposed to be there Chessy is still sitting there alone and he’s not answering his phone. She finally leaves, but as she’s passing by the restaurant’s bar, she sees Tate, laughing and having drinks with some gorgeous woman who is fawning all over him.

Chessy is devastated and her first instinct is to slink away to cry, but Tate catches sight of her before she can leave. He rushes over and tries to apologize. Saying that the woman is just an “important client” and he really needs to land her account. So he figured the best thing to do was to arrange to have drinks with her at the same restaurant, so that when he was done he could just walk over to their table and start his night with Chessy. But he didn’t realize how late it was getting. He’s super sorry about keeping her waiting.

Chessy FINALLY finds her backbone and tells him that she’s not happy and hasn’t been for years. She also makes several comments about how that woman back at the bar had been all over him and he wasn’t stopping her. Tate claims to be completely blindsided by all of this. He had NO IDEA that Chessy wasn’t blissfully happy. He apologizes and admits that he messed up, though he categorically denies that the woman at the bar was hitting on him. Chessy isn’t convinced and in her inner monologue she tells us that she “knows a woman on the prowl when she sees one,” though she doesn’t pursue the matter with Tate. Chessy sleeps in the guest room that night.

Next morning, Tate does some more apologizing and begs to have a chance to fix their marriage. He says that he’s still very much in love with her and will do whatever it takes to make things right. He swears that she’ll be his #1 priority from now on. Chessy accepts his apology and then they go and have sex.

Things meander along from there for a while. Tate does seem to be trying to prioritize her a bit. He still has to work late a lot, but he does it less and tells Chessy in advance so she won’t be sitting at home wondering where he is. After about two weeks of this, Chessy is feeling much better. All the great sex they’ve been having has reassured her that Tate wasn’t cheating, and the extra attention he’s shown her makes her feel special and taken care of again.

Then Tate arranges to take Chessy to the local BDSM club, something he hasn’t done in ages, though they used to be regulars there. He has a whole night planned out. He’s picked out a special outfit for her, and handpicked another Dom to participate in their playtime. The way it is supposed to work is that Tate tells this other Dom what to do to Chessy, while he watches. She’s excited by all of this.

They get to the club and meet this other Dom. But right from the start, Chessy is feeling uncomfortable. Tate goes through a ritual of officially handing Chessy’s leash to this other Dom and saying that he’s entrusting Chessy into his care. Chessy notices that the other Dom seems impatient with this formality, but Tate apparently doesn’t. Then the Dom roughly tells Chessy that she’s to do as he says. Chessy looks to Tate for reassurance, since he’s supposed to be directing this event, but he’s not paying attention and before she can signal to him, the other Dom grabs her by the chin and snarls that she’s to obey HIS commands tonight and no one else’s.

Then he straps Chessy into a submission contraption that makes it so she can’t see anything but a blank wall. She can’t see what the Dom is doing to her, and she can’t see Tate, which is the whole point of the exercise. The appeal of this situation for them as a couple is that she allows this other Dom to do things to her because it’s what TATE wants her to do, as her true dominant. If she can’t see the satisfaction in his face that tells her he’s enjoying the show, then it defeats the whole purpose. But, again, she doesn’t say anything because she’s supposed to be submissive and she trusts that everything is going according to Tate’s wishes.

Right away the other Dom is much harsher than Chessy prefers. He starts hitting her with whips and crops and things, but starts at the pain point, rather than beginning gently and working her up to the point where pain and pleasure mix. Things escalate quickly and Chessy isn’t liking any of it. None of this is fun to her; it’s just straight up pain. And what’s worse, she hasn’t heard Tate say a word. She expected to hear his voice directing the action but he’s not. She calls out to him, but he doesn’t answer. Meanwhile the Dom is out of control and grabs her hips, preparing to rape her. She screams her safe word over and over but the Dom doesn’t stop. He has to be tackled by the club bouncers and dragged away from her, all while Tate is nowhere to be found.

Because HE LEFT HER. While she was naked and completely defenseless. He left her in the middle of a BDSM session that was supposed to be for their mutual pleasure. Because he got a phone call from an “important client.” The same client who was with him at the bar that first night.

He comes back inside in time to hear Chessy desperately screaming her safe word over and over. Tate runs up and asks what the Dom did to her. The club owner says “shouldn’t you know? You were supposed to be here!” Tate runs over to Chessy to try to get her to tell him what happened but all she wants to know is where he was. Tate admits he stepped out to take a work call, but swears he was only gone a second and he’s really sorry, honest!

The club owner apologizes to Chessy and tries to take some of the blame because he’d given Tate a list of Doms who were available and this bad one was on that list. He swears there was nothing in the Dom’s history to indicate he’d ever do such a thing. Honestly, this all felt like a set up. Like, isn’t it coincidental that this Dom who’s never had an issue before just happened to go bonkers tonight? And that Tate just HAPPENED to get a work call in the middle of the session so he could be pulled away for a few minutes? You combine those coincidences with Chessy’s insistence earlier that this client woman had been all over Tate and it just all seems to point to her having set the whole thing up. I mean, she was there in the bar and witnessed Chessy’s devastation at finding Tate with another woman on their anniversary. So it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to guess that their marriage was one good hard push away from falling right off the cliff. And what better way to ensure Chessy has lost complete faith in Tate than to set her up to be abused when Tate should have been protecting her? But, apparently I have a wilder imagination than MB because none of that turned out to be the case. It was all just totally unrelated coincidences.

So anyway, Chessy says she’s the one to blame for believing her husband’s lies that she would be his priority. They ask her if she needs to go to the hospital for her injuries, but she refuses. And I just thought it strange that no one ever even considers GOING TO THE POLICE. For goodness sake, that man had just tried to rape her! And MB actually makes it a point of having two characters straight us say that she WAS raped. That even though the guy never penetrated her, everything he’d done up to that point still constituted rape. So, okay, why wouldn’t they press charges then!?

Tate of course realizes how royally he screwed up and apologizes again and again. He swears that if she’ll just give him one more chance to save their marriage, he’ll get it right this time. Chessy refuses and goes to stay at a friend’s house. And both of her friends’ SO, who are both doms, say that what Tate did was unforgiveable.

Chessy wallows for two weeks. Her faith in Tate is shattered. He’s broken every promise he’s ever made to her and made it clear that she’ll never be a priority. At this point I didn’t see how they could ever be together again. By MB’s own words, Chessy had been raped because Tate put work above her. And what’s worse, this happened while Chessy was engaging in BDSM as part of their Dom/Sub relationship. How could she ever participate in that kink again when she was so brutalized by it? And even if she somehow could bring herself to engage in it again, how could she ever trust Tate to keep her safe again? That was a key part of their relationship. Something Chessy said she NEEDED in order to be happy. So I just didn’t see any coming back from this. Not without years and years of therapy. You can’t rebuild a trust that was THIS badly broken in just a few weeks.

Tate spends the two weeks sending Chessy flowers and jewelry while blowing up her phone. Chessy is a wreck. She doesn’t know what to do with herself now. She really counted on letting Tate, as her Dom, make all the decisions for her. But after a mere two weeks of this waffling, she decides that she needs to go to the doctor and get some anxiety and depression medication. They run a pregnancy test and lo and behold, Chessy is pregnant. Now she’s even more on-edge because she knows this will tie her to Tate forever. She also says that she knows he’ll be a great father, which I didn’t understand. How can a guy who’s never there be a great dad? Why isn’t she worried that he’ll do something dangerously stupid when the kid is around? Like, say, taking a work call while he’s supposed to be watching the kid in the bath? But no, she doesn’t draw any correlations whatsoever between Tate’s behavior over the last 2 years and how he’ll behave when he’s a dad.

Chessy calls Tate and arranges a meeting. He’s ecstatic and tells her that he’s got big news to share and she says she does too. She goes over and Tate reveals that he’s taken on two partners. It’s to show her that he’s really, really serious about her taking priority this time. Then she tells him that she’s pregnant. He’s happy and immediately says he wants to be part of everything. Chessy says she needs to think about it.

Then she goes back to Kylie’s house and her girlfriends then ask her if she really wants to get a divorce, or if she just wants Tate to suffer. Which seemed terrible to me. They’re basically telling her that she’s just being petty by staying away from Tate instead of, you know, legitimately separating from the guy who hand-picked her rapist... So she just decides to forgive him for everything and forget it ever happened. She goes to see him and they have sex and are instantly blissfully happy again. It was way too fast and not at all justified by the story. Chessy also has zero residual hang ups about her rape. She’s still fine with BDSM. Still fine with allowing herself to be in a completely helpless position while trusting Tate to keep her safe.

Yeah, I’m just gonna have to go ahead and call BULLSHIT here.

There’s absolutely no way that Chessy would be totally fine with everything with zero issues or hesitation a mere two weeks after it happened. The abuse she suffered is never even really talked about in the book. Like, MB made it a point to call it rape on two occasions, and described in detail how black and blue Chessy was from the abuse, but no one ever asks how she’s coping with that trauma. Everything centers around Tate breaking her trust. Which, yes, is a very big deal and devastating…but I doesn’t completely eclipse the SEXUAL ASSUALT she suffered!

Anyway, a few weeks later Chessy falls and thinks she might have lost the baby so she calls her friends. She insists they not call Tate because…he had an important meeting that day and she doesn’t want to bother him! Seriously, I can’t even, with this chick. For goodness sake, has she learned NOTHING from this experience? Didn’t gain even one vertebra that she could use to stand up for herself? No, apparently she didn’t. Dash ends up calling Tate and he of course drops everything and rushes to the hospital. Chessy is blown away by this display and Tate says three times in the same scene that “from now on” she’s his priority above all else. Which was annoying to read and really struck me as odd since the “from now on” was supposed to have started weeks ago when they got back together again, but whatever… The baby turns out to be fine and they live happily ever after.

And that’s the end of the story. Nothing felt resolved. Chessy just decided to give up being mad because she was pregnant. Her sexual abuse wasn’t handled with even CLOSE to the proper weight it should have been. And Tate didn’t suffer NEARLY enough for the unforgiveable things he’d done. Totally lame! (hide spoiler)]