Superb stuff. Classic vintage age-gap melodrama and super steamy. Dana’s 17, Mark’s 35, and they can’t stop lusting over one another despite his scruples about sleeping with someone half his age. Even though he didn’t have many scruples about marrying her. All in all a perfect May-December (or perhaps October) dynamic.

There’s a rather unrealistic fade-to-black forced first-time sex scene, followed by a multi-orgasmic earthshattering one only a few minutes later.

He reached her before she could press herself to her feet, pushing her down on to the bed with hands that hurt and pinning her there while he found her mouth with his. She had felt his weight on her before, but not like this. It crushed her, forcing the breath from her lungs until she had neither strength nor will left to fight.

She lay like a block of ice when he finally moved away from her, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the ceiling. Her mind felt numbed, the ache in her body a thing detached. It had happened at last, this mystery she had yearned to plumb—the experience denied her on her wedding night. How had she ever imagined it might be enjoyable? she wondered. All she had been aware of was pain and degradation.

Then right afterward he goes in for a second time, actually bothering with a bit of foreplay this time, and we get:

no pain, no sense of intrusion, just soaring, mind-bending pleasure and final shattering release…

How someone recovers that quickly after having their virginity forcibly ripped away is anyone’s guess. Perhaps she has a Cast Iron Vagina. 

I did like this bit:

Dana shook her head, shyness sweeping over her. Last night they had slept naked in each other’s arms; looking at him now it scarcely seemed possible. Could this tall, dark, controlled man really have done what he had done to her, said what he had said to her? In the morning light she could see the faintest flecks of grey at his temples.

Somehow that served to make him seem even more remote from last night’s lover.

There’s a bit too much of the younger brother and his endless insta-puppy-dog love. I got very bored of him. And the “older woman” being only 27. Still, the early 1980s were a different era, albeit this seems more like a 1970s setting – there’s a fur-lined leather jacket and white roll-neck sweater at one point.

But who the hell is Julian?