Lifeline

3.00 From my cold cold heart. (Really 2.75 but ¼ stars don't exist)

On paper Alex Goodwin's life is peachy. His dream of becoming a doctor has come true and he's now starting his internship. He has a handsome & loving boyfriend who even helped pay for his medical school. He has friends who care for him even when his family does not. Reality is quite different.

Alex's home life is a living hell. His live-in boyfriend, Cole, is controlling and abusive physically, verbally, and emotionally. This translates into an Alex who's always nervous and exhausted which bodes ill for a medical intern. Cole has rage issues because ... well basically because he's a sociopath but the character's back story is that before DADT he was outed and kicked out of the army. In civilian life he's an accountant who resents everyone, is prejudiced, racist, and any other bad quality you can peg on a human being, but basically he's an a*hole. One day a police officer gets injured in the line of duty and is brought to the hospital accompanied by his partner, Jack Reed, and Alex's world is thrown for a loop. It so happens that Jack was Alex's college boyfriend. Things did not end well. Jack ended them spectacularly badly. They were young shy gay boys, closeted from their religious families at home, who, as is true for many, took their first forays into exploring and embracing their sexuality when they went away to college. They met during their freshman year, back when Alex was feisty and outgoing and Jack was seduced out of his shell. Things went well until Jack, incapable of publicly admitting his sexuality, sundered them inexorably apart. But the new Jack, the one who shows up at Alex's hospital is an out and proud gay man, a police officer, who looks at Alex with tenderness, regret, and longing for the past. He offers a lifeline to Alex, even though he doesn't “know” the extent of what is happening to Alex. Ultimately this is a second chance, hurt/comfort story wrapped in a PSA about domestic abuse, and how it's not a problem exclusive to heterosexual couples, or those without higher education. All of this is laudable and fairly well done and I'm a terrible person because ultimately this story left me cold. Sorry.I've been racking my brains trying to figure out why I really didn't care at all for these characters or their story, plausible & believable, though it was, and I've come up with things that are probably particular to me and my tastes. Therefore you should absolutely ignore them. My biggest problem is that I felt nothing for Alex & Jack as a couple. Yes we get flashbacks to their cutesy campus life but that didn't sustain or flesh them out for me. I didn't believe or care enough about them to slosh through their, necessarily, messy reunion. All of the drama inherent to a person, Alex, who's living under domestic abuse and has their happy/painful past come back, was just exhausting. Alex was terrified of Cole, snippy to his best friend, and prickly towards Jack. Perhaps accurate and understandable behaviour, but *ducks he's a character you don't really want to hang out with. Why were Alex & Jack still in love each other? Dunno.

The side characters were also THAT: characters out of central casting. Again totally a personal taste thing. Jack has the boozy landlady, whose seen it all and done it all, but has a heart of gold. Fine. I can live with that. But did she have to be called Delilah? Then we have Alex's “best friend” Andrea. I'm not sure whether to applaud the inclusion of her character or be annoyed. For starters how is she Alex's BFF? It would seem, and I may be wrong, that they've known each other since Alex started at the hospital, where she's a nurse. A year. Alex doesn't appear to have any other friends which is usually true of people in coercive relationships. Their captors do everything possible to isolate them. Also Alex was so heartbroken after his break-up with Jack that he just lost touch with former classmates and friends; how is Cole, a racist control freak, okay with this “newfound” friendship with Andrea, who is presumably Mexican? To me her character was more of a nudge & wink to “we've got diversity here” and part of the “every gay guy has a female bestie” canon. Also, again personal, but can we stop with every character who's meant to be Latino dropping random Spanish words when speaking to non-Spanish speakers. I would venture to say it's not a thing. Don't get me started on Andrea calling Alex papi at work? Umm ... NO. Just no. Alex doesn't come off as warm and fuzzy, more like nervous and reserved. I don't think someone like that would invite one calling them papi. Much less at work. And I won't get into how the use of papi as an endearment is usually more prevalent to folks from Caribbean descent than Mexican. Prevalent being the operative word. Anything is possible and can happen and I'm sure someone has a best friend who .... etc. etc. etc.

This brings me to my other BIG stumbling block. Cole. He's properly evil and believable in his treatment of Alex. His belittlements, threats, and later crumbs of affection. He was perhaps the best fleshed out character in the ordinariness of his horribleness which is why when things took a movie-of-week turn I was disappointed. It was as if the author didn't trust that the everyday humiliations, random physical violence, and unwanted sexual contact were sufficient to make Cole a proper villain. It was.

Again, this was the author's story to tell however they saw fit, but all these factors and the lack of others made this not work for me. Not as a romance and only marginally as a hurt/comfort story. Others may enjoy it. It's not badly written and tries to earnestly tackle domestic abuse. Kudos. I've never been so sorry to dislike something.