Things We Hide From the Light

“I wanted to move, to thrust into that heat, using her body to bring myself back to life […] I wanted to be buried inside her so deep that she’d take me with her, hear her whisper my name in that husky, sex-soaked voice. This was more than a crush. What I felt teetered on the line of uncontrolled craving.”

The vocabulary is full of resurrection imagery. The scene, in which Lina helps Nash rescue a stray dog from a drain pipe, suggests how from the moment they meet, everything they do and say is charged with sexual urgency. Nash feels that his attraction to Lina might be key to bringing him back from his emotional death.

“We share a wall.”

Lina and Nash are neighbors in the apartment complex, but this comment about their shared wall is laden with innuendo. It is a reference to the fact that Lina can hear Nash masturbating while yelling out her name; it is also a metaphor for the fact that Nash and Lina are only as close as their emotional and psychological walls will allow.

“‘No.’ It was a whisper. A smoky plea that started my blood simmering.”

Nash and Lina flirt, turning a casual confrontation sexual with incendiary immediacy when Nash asks Lina, who admits to having trouble allowing others to touch her, whether she wants him to stop. Her answer is sensuous and smoldering, foreshadowing the volcanic sexual connection to come.

“Are you saying you want me to be some kind of emotional support fuck?”

After Lina and Nash spend the night cuddling after Lina helps Nash through a panic attack, they set up boundaries for their relationship. Sex is not out of the question, but it would be used only as emotional support, a kind of “crutch,” which amuses Lina and bothers Nash.

“I hated myself. Hated the weakness. The lack of control. Hated the thought that this was all in my head. That it could happen anywhere.”

Nash perceives his panic attacks as a weakness, out of keeping with his position as police chief and “inappropriate” for true masculinity. Nash’s self-flagellation is misguided; eventually, he will allow others in to help him cope.

“Why shine the light on things when you can pretend they don’t exist. It’s the Morgan way.”

Lina perceives how guarded Nash can be about his inner life: his problematic relationship with his father, his envy of his brother’s fortune (the lottery and Naomi), and his struggle to recover from the shooting. Only gradually does Nash trust Lina sufficiently to share any of these.

“It was a feeling. Some kind of magic. A rightness, I guess. It definitely didn’t make any logical sense. On paper we couldn’t be more ill-suited to each other. But there was something right about how it felt to be with him.”

The emotional core of the romance genre is the moment when the heart suddenly and undeniably knows what it wants. Lina, ever suspicious of her heart, asks Naomi how she knew she loved Knox. For all her confidence, the answer reveals exactly how impossible love is to quantify.

“Without me noticing it, Knockemout had sucked me into its gravitational field. And it was up to me whether I wanted to break free.”

Alongside the relationship between Lina and Nash, the novel tracks another evolving connection: Lina's gradual absorption into the Knockemout community, Lina, a globetrotting insurance claims adjuster used to a life of hotels and restaurants, develops fast friendships with the women of the town. This network of friends will save her life.

“We Morgans weren’t huggers and for good reason. Years of disappointment and trauma had made physical affection between us a foreign language. I’d always promised myself when I had my own family, it would be different.”

Nash’s meeting with his estranged father is tense and full of bitter resentment. Certain that Duke is in town to hit him up for money, Nash keeps his emotional distance. When his father shares that he is taking steps toward recovery from alcohol addiction, Nash begins making peace with his identity and origins.

“[T]hey can’t get together […] This idiot practically has ‘put a fuckin’ ring on it’ tattooed on his fucking ass […] And that pain in the ass has ‘love ’em and leave ’em’ tattooed on hers.”

In his rough-edged way, Knox summarizes the dilemma facing Lina and Nash. They are completely wrong for each other: Nash wants stability and family, while Lina wants freedom and a lack of commitment. After affirming this seeming incompatibility, the novel will bring its Opposites Attract couple together by showing how well they actually fit—a standard romance novel framework.

“We’re dangerous to each other. I can’t keep my head on straight when you’re touching me. We’re the worst decision we could make.”

When Nash and Lina get close to each other sparks fly. Sometimes, the sparks are bad: debates about relationships, trust, family secrets, and job responsibilities. Sometimes, they are good: intense physical attraction. Lina wonders whether love means making terrible choices.

“I dare you. Because you do and you’re not making it out intact. I am itching to add ‘broken nose’ to your physical catalogue of ‘beer belly’ and ‘receding hairline.’”

In standing up to the belligerent and drunken Dilton, Lina signals a strength Nash has yet to appreciate. Her wise-cracking retorts to his sexual harassment are defiant, threatening, and demeaning—she has the confidence of an extremely physically fit athlete. The ugly confrontation allows Lina to reveal what makes her such an effective bounty hunter.

“What’s that psychology minor say about a girl who doesn’t like to be touched except by the guy who just keeps pissing her off.”

Nash probes the heart of Lina’s emotional dilemma. Overprotected by parents who fretted over her defective heart, Lina has rejected emotional attachment in favor of short-lived flings. Now, she is terrified over what he and his heart will do to her carefully-defined independence.

“‘I’m gonna turn you around, Angel. And when I do, you’re gonna stop running and I’m gonna stop fighting this […]. Do you get me?’ A shiver rolled down my spine. I so got him. I got him so good.”

This is the tipping point moment for Lina and Nash. After all the games, flirting, and emotional walls, they finally consummate their attraction. The novel deploys one of the standard tropes of romance fiction: that the first sexual experience between two people could have life-altering intensity.

“I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. I couldn’t do anything but feel.”

One of the ways Score updates the romance genre for modern readers is by using graphic, colloquial, and detailed descriptions of sex acts. Most likely, this change has been prompted by the easy access to other forms of pornography and titillating material, including fan fiction. Here, Lina experiences orgasm, which the novel portrays with the same heightened realism it brings to all of its sex scenes.

“Welcome to the team.”

Tracking down the thugs in Duncan Hugo’s crime ring becomes a community effort. Nash might be a trained police officer, but to crack this case, he draws on a loose confederation of neighbors and friends, a team that includes a retired widow, a librarian, an ex-FBI agent, a bartender, a barber, a secretary, and a 12-year-old. Together, they manage to foil the bad guys, affirming The Power of Community.

“You told your mom about me [...] That deserve a reward.”

One of the first tells that Lina takes her relationship with Nash seriously, is that she consults her mother about him. Lina has long kept her parents in the dark about her life—another version of the novel’s complex treatment of the dysfunction that marks father-son relationships. That moment of reaching out signals to Nash the depth of Lina’s commitment to him.

“I knew better. I knew that leaning on a crutch just to get through the day was the beginning of the end. But wasn’t that exactly what I was doing with Lina?”

Momentarily shaken by the letter his father sends him telling him about his use of alcohol as a coping mechanism for grief, Nash panics about his genetic ties to a man he sees as “weak” and “vulnerable.” In response, he mistakenly equates his feelings for Lina as a similar kind of “crutch”—a sign of weakness.

“I’m over it. You were right. This was a really fucking stupid idea. We barely know each other.”

The break-up Nash fabricates to protect Lina when he fears he cannot keep her safe is the novel’s darkest moment. Nash’s rejection of Lina and himself reflects his kneejerk reaction to his father’s letter. Nash is curt, rude, and cold—and very quickly sees the folly of his rash actions.

“It didn’t feel like we were careening toward our death […] Like gods surveying the world they’d created. Above it. Apart from it […]. We were so far from everything that seemed so important on earth […]. Here was only silence, peace, and beauty.”

The skydiving experience allows Nash to feel the power of his connection to Lina, the licensed skydiver. Strapped together and dropping from the plane, Nash and Lina embody the absolute union of love, protected from the world.

“I need to figure out some grand kind of gesture to make her believe in me. In us.”

When flowers and fancy dinners won’t do, Nash comes up with the idea of tattooing angel wings on his butt, Lina’s favorite of his physical features. The tattoo symbolizes his commitment to her, the permanence of his love, and the fact that he has adopted some of Lina’s more dare-devil qualities—a sign that he and Lina belong together.

“I didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Didn’t calculate. I acted.”

When Lina fights Duncan Hugo’s henchman in the horse barn, her strategy here suggests that she too has absorbed some of Nash’s qualities—especially his impulsiveness. In this case, avoiding planning and calculation allows her to master the situation.

“Dilton’s lip curled, lifting his moustache. ‘You really have no fucking clue.’”

When Nash confronts the man who shot him, Dilton refuses to clarify his animosity against Nash. Even while dying, Dilton will not explain what—besides the conviction that Nash is too soft to be chief of police—triggered his vendetta. The mystery suggests that Dilton’s backstory might be part of a future volume of the Knockemout series.