Previously: Tessa makes herself feel like less of a horrible person by calling Noah.
—
Marines: Tessa takes out her notes and her textbooks and very haughtily tells us that she does all of her assignments a week in advance so there’s no chance of her falling behind. That would be more convincing if she didn’t immediately follow it up by telling us that she can’t pay attention to the essay she’s writing because she’s thinking about Hardin “and his moodiness.” I really don’t understand what all there is to think about. “Damn, he’s moody.” Fin.
Samantha: Sure, Tessa, you did all the assignments but did you do them WELL?
Mari: Tessa gives up on studying and decides to watch a movie. This is all just filler because I mean do any of us expect for Hardin to be offscreen for more than a page? No, we don’t. Because Anna Todd thinks plot means throwing two people together in a scene, doing the same things over and over again.
“Less than ten minutes into the movie I hear someone cursing outside in the hall.”
Oh my goodness! Who could be cursing outside Tessa’s door??? Her mom? Her brotherish boyfriend? One of the indistinguishable tattooed side characters?
“A few minutes later, I hear the cursing again– a male voice, then a female voice joins in. The guy shouts louder, and then I recognize the accent. It’s Hardin.”
Tessa jumps off the bed and opens the door to find him sitting outside her room. The girl who is screaming is pissed because this drunk guy is just sitting there and has spilled vodka all over the floor. Tessa skips over all that explanation and all she registers is that the angry girl called Hardin her boyfriend. (S: Yeah. That’s what’s important here. Okay.) Hardin apologizes for spilling vodka, but he eye rolls when he says it, which is good, or else we might have to see Hardin doing something with a modicum of decency. And that would be confusing!
Samantha: How *dare* this girl be annoyed at Hardin for expressing his feelings in a vaguely disruptive and destructive way!
Mari: Hardin tries to walk past Tessa into the room, but she blocks his way. As if any of us here believe that Tessa will be at all successful in keeping Hardin out of her room. Hardin asks why he can’t come in and promises to be nice to Tessa’s “grandpa.” He means Noah and he laughs at his own joke. Remember when Hardin ratted Tessa out to Noah on the basis of “I would want someone to tell me” and “it’s the right thing to do?” Well, Tessa tells him Noah is coming over and he shows up here drunk. On the basis of….
Oh I know. On the basis of
Tessa says Noah isn’t there and Hardin’s like, “great, let me in.” Tessa can tell that Hardin is drunk, but he thinks it’s not a big deal that it’s been twice he’s been drunk since meeting her, even though he said he never drinks. That of course is followed by “he pushes past me and flops down on my bed.”
Samantha: We are only, oh god 33% how?, through this “book” but I am running out of things that aren’t blind hatred for this asswipe. I LOATHE him. I’ll just brush up on my synonyms for now.
Mari: Hardin asks why Noah didn’t come, but then jokes about how there was probably a sale on cardigans at the Gap. He’s so funny and witty and wow I can see why everyone is so in love with a fictional character that can drunkenly make fun of cardigans. Tessa’s comeback is, “where is Molly? At a Skanks ‘R’ Us sale?”
Yeah, keep judging her Tessa. You lied about Noah being here and you’ve got a boy on your bed while you have a supposed boyfriend, but okay. Keep judging.
Samantha:
Mari: Hardin tells her that’s a terrible comeback, though he probably thinks so for vastly different reasons than I do. Tessa tells him to GTFO because she’s officially back together with Noah. In response, Hardin compliments her pajamas. Tessa repeats that he has to go and he doesn’t.
Samantha: It’s so fun when he ignore her requests to gtfo. It’s not scary at all.
Mari: Hardin guesses that one of Noah’s conditions for getting back together with Tessa is that she stay away from Hardin. I mean, good guess bro, probably Noah isn’t into getting cheated on again.
Tessa doesn’t get why that’s a big deal, seeing as how last time she checked, they weren’t friends or even speaking. She asks him why he dropped Literature and why he punched Landon. Hardin whines that she asks too many (…2?) questions.
“I don’t want to talk about any of that! What were you and your cool pajamas doing before I came in– and why is your light off?” Hardin is much more playful when he has been drinking but I am beginning to wonder why he’s begun drinking when he didn’t before.”
1- Theresa is so thick it makes a terrible book painful to read.
2- This is playful? THIS is playful to her???
3- We’ve all talked about it before, but given Tessa’s history with alcoholism, this is near unbelievable.
4- This is a disgusting message to send to young girls. A drunk guy in your bed refusing to leave isn’t PLAYFUL. CALL THE POLICE.
Samantha: I literally tried reading what he said OUT LOUD in different tones to see if I could make it playful and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Mari: Tessa tells him she was watching The Vow and he hates on the movie.
“I don’t have to see it to know it’s stupid. I can tell you how it ends right now: she gets her memory back and they live happily ever after,” he says in a high-pitched voice.”
“No, actually that isn’t how it ends,” I laugh. Hardin makes me insane most of the time, but it’s the rare occasions like this when he makes me forget how terrible he can be.”
SERIOUSLY?
1- Am I reading the right thing???? How is this exchange making Tessa forget how terrible Hardin is??? HE’S JUST BEING TERRIBLE.
2- Girl. Honey. Child. If there are only RARE occasions in which you can forget how TERRIBLE someone is, RUN AWAY.
3- HE’S DRUNK. FFS. You have to have him drunk to make him tolerable? THIS IS NOT ROMANTIC.
Samantha: It is SO messed up. Down with the notion that alcohol brings out ones “true self.” And yeah, also, you can’t just pretend he’s not being terrible. We can all see he still is!
Mari: But no. She of the “natural suspicions” is just going to laugh and throw Steph’s pillow at Hardin because ha ha ha so playful. Hardin “half-asks, half-demands” to be able to stay and watch the movie with Tessa. She says that’s a bad idea, but Hardin logic is that “the worst ideas are often the best ideas.”
Of course Tessa says yes, especially when he says she wouldn’t want him to drive home drunk, but she does tell him that he has to sit on the floor or on Steph’s bed because who knows what would happen if they were both on the same bed. I truly hope I never have to read about it. I’m convincing myself that this book actually has no sex. She makes sure to tell us that she stands her ground on this, so of course, we can expect her to quickly lose all ground in about 2-3 pages. I’m getting really good at this.
Samantha: If Tessa sits on her bed and Hardin sits on the floor and everything remains gross, how many pages until Mari and Samantha get drunk themselves?
Mari: No matter what you guess, it’s probably still too many pages until we get there. Too many.
Tessa scolds herself for thinking about sex especially because she just promised Noah to stay away from Hardin and she’s the only one left who thinks she still gives a fuck about Noah. “Somehow,” she says, she always finds a way to Hardin or Hardin finds a way to her. It’s such a mystery. I’m so intrigued.
Samantha: It wouldn’t have anything to do with Hardin disrespecting her boundaries and the word “no”, would it?
Mari: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
She takes a paragraph to remind us how hot Hardin is with all his tattoos and then presses play on the movie. These two flirt like one of them is 13 and one of them is drunk, and it makes Tessa feel calm and at peace. It’s weird that she feels this way, because Hardin spends the whole movie looking mostly at her, which would make me feel creeped out and at not peace.
The movie is over and Tessa asks him what he thought, even though she knows he just spent the whole time staring at her. He jokes that the movie was rubbish and Tessa ruffles his hair before realizing what she’s doing. Things get awkward, presumably because they aren’t supposed to like each other, but probably because she ruffled his hair. Like a puppy.
Samantha: Here everyone, take a puppy break:
Mari: Aw, that was kind. Thank you, Sam.
Hardin wants to pick the next movie and she says she didn’t say he could stay for another. He says he’s still drunk and can’t drive. Tessa knows he’s lying but thinks that he’s right and should stay. Because there are no taxis, no friends, no other cot damn solution for getting him the heck out. Only this:
“I will deal with whatever Hardin decides to do to me tomorrow, just to be able to spend time with him.”
She calls herself pathetic and I really wonder why anyone would want to read about these two. This is really disturbing.
Tessa wants to ask Hardin some questions but decides to wait until after the movie so as not to ruin the mood with stupid things like questions. (S: Yikes that is familiar.) Hardin picks a Batman movie and he gets all excited about it. Tessa says that she and Noah used to watch movies together, but it was never this fun, obviously, because Noah is just here to be shit on. He can’t even watch a movie right.
Hardin complains about the hard floor and if he sits on Steph’s bed, he won’t be able to see the movie. He promises to keep his hands to himself and SHOCK. WHAT? TESSA GIVES IN. BUT SHE JUST STOOD HER GROUND! My god.
He joins her on the bed and Tessa gets so into the movie, she doesn’t notice that he’s fallen asleep. We spend a paragraph reading about how perfect his is in his sleep before Tessa decides against touching his face. Good call, girl. She locks the dorm room door and gets comfortable on Steph’s bed. As she’s drifting off to sleep, she thinks about how she’s spent the night with Hardin a few times now but never with Noah. Her subconscious (why does this happen in writing why) “playfully” reminds her that she’s done a lot with Hardin that she never did with Noah.
Wow, so I guess she really doesn’t feel bad about any of it.
Next time on After: Tessa and Hardin have the talk they’ve already had 87 times in Chapter 42.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a 28 year old graduated English major and almost librarian. I can often be found singing too loudly (poorly) in the car or spending some time (hours) on Tumblr. I am a lover of Harry Potter, the Spice Girls, and too many other things.
