Reviewer: It Was Me Signed [Report This]
Date: February 01 2024 4:29 PM Title: Chapter 5: Moving Out

What sticks out to me the most in this chapter is the growing confidence is Trish. I mean, going up to Melanie unprompted (and even discouraged!) to invite her to her house warming party, politely demanding that the staff figure out a way for her to have her outdoor times, and even the way she reacts to Thomas blurting out this was his job are all things I could have never seen her doing even in the previous chapter.

With the Thomas situation in particular, I feel like she would have crumbled and reverted back to trying to shrink herself in a ball if this had happened earlier in the story. She would have been devastated by this, and he would have lost her trust forever. To see her go from that fragile state to handling those difficult feelings with passive aggressive anger, actually processing her feelings, and apologizing the next day shows a lot of growth, I think.

So Trish's character development is already so rewarding, and it sounds like we're not even that far into the story yet. I'm looking forward to her continuing to open up as her confidence returns.

Poor Melanie. There's nothing bad happening to her yet, but you know that the closer she gets to Thomas, the more she's going to get hurt when Thomas and Trish eventually and inevitably stop fighting against what they really want. We haven't seen a ton of Melanie yet, but she seems really nice, and the fact that she seems to have more sympathy than fear of Trish makes her pretty likable early on. Every time I see her flirting with Thomas, there's a small pit in my stomach because I know how this ends (not literally, of course, but in a figurative sense). This is great writing, and I love how the story can make me feel this way about her, especially when she hasn't had a lot of "screen time" as of yet.

And the fact that Trish, in an effort to accept that Thomas is off-limits and move past her feelings, actually helped advance the relationship between Thomas and Melanie just adds to the whole thing. It was an innocent thing for Trish to do, but again, it's like seeing a train wreck coming from a mile away and not being able to do a thing about it.

As for Trish trying to move past those feelings, I think that was handled really well here. We've focused mostly on Thomas's efforts to do that so far, so with Trish starting to have romantic fantasies about him last chapter, it was a nice parallel to see her going through the same thing he is. This could have easily been a story about a moral, but fetish-obsessed therapist accidentally taking advantage of a lonely, lovesick patient (which is the ethical concern Thomas has, of course), but Trish coming into her own and fighting against her feelings gives them a more legitimate feel, if that makes sense. It doesn't feel like she's falling for him just because he was there at a time in which she was emotionally fragile. She seems to actually like him for who he is, and he just happens to be her therapist who has helped her through a really tough time in her life, too.

Also feeding into that feeling are the interactions between the two as the story progresses. I mentioned this last chapter, but I feel like it was more prominent here (and probably will be going forward, surely). You've written two characters that mesh, and it's easy to believe that they like each other. Their banter is a lot of fun without being over the top. Like I said before, Trish's reaction to Thomas's mistake didn't seem exaggerated. And the way they apologized to each other was cute and endearing without being overly dramatic. These characters feel real, as does the progression of their relationship with one another.

So great work once again! This story has been extremely enjoyable so far, and I look forward to seeing where you've taken it in the chapters ahead!

Author's Response:

Thank you so much for these reviews, you don't know how helpful they've been as I've gone back to do my weekly edits.