So, I have brought you here today in order to explain why Angel and Matteo are both victims and perpetrators. And I will add another thing, too.

First off, I think a lot of people didn't read Angel's story correctly in chapter 24 of this book. More than a few people angrily told me off for "supporting rapists" and making rape "okay," which is not true. I am usually showing two sides to things, especially with Matteo's arc and why he responded so horribly to Blaine coming onto him in an unwanted sexual manner.

As for Matteo, I did actually explain in a thread within the last few months that Matteo was sexually assaulted by Blaine back in chapter 19. I honestly thought people would realize that based off Matteo's odd wording of "he came onto me," especially when considering the fact that Blaine had been repeatedly confessing/professing his "love" for Matteo, even getting within his personal bubble and making the older man extremely uncomfortable. Matteo had repeatedly rejected Blaine, but the teen kept coming onto him and pulling him aside into a room for privacy. Anwyll was privy to that a couple times before chapter 19. With that in mind, Blaine had already come onto Matteo multiple times before, but I wanted people to think: "What was different this time?"

But no one understood and completely missed the key point there.

Eventually, by the time Matteo's arc began to be peek out, I did forget that he was assaulted due to the numerous kinds of "I hate Matteo, he's garbage" comments that I received by the time I reached chapter 43. So Matteo's own sexual assault was never brought to light and I truly regret that since he's a character I personally really like (excluding the bad thing he did).

Both Matteo and Angel had similar issues in their reactions, but Matteo obviously had severe mental trauma from watching his mother get repeatedly raped.

Angel was sexually assaulted by his friend before his friend brushed his horn, which inevitably caused Angel's sane mind to retreat. He was not conscious of what he had done until the end. Both that and the sexual assault made him both a victim and a perpetrator. Because even if you like someone, there has to be verbal consent or even a nod to show that going for more is okay. Especially if you didn't tell the person that you liked them.

I think the people that got furious were so focused on the rape of Angel's friend that they didn't even notice Angel was a victim before that. In fact, most people just breezed right past that part in chapter 24 without even thinking about the context and assumed that it was okay since Angel liked his friend (although he never confessed). He never gave verbal consent, neither did he give non-verbal consent like a thumbs up or a nod. People need to read my work carefully. It was a brief mention, but it was stated in the story.

Also, when Anwyll was saying that Angel was not a murderer/rapist, if used in the proper context with the earlier sentence, it explains that was not how Anwyll and the others saw him. Angel didn't purposefully rape his friend, but it happened because of his horn. He accidentally murdered his friend. He didn't want to, but he did. Yes, he is a criminal in society in terms of what he did, but his family does not see him that way.

Sorry for the rant. Even recently I was shouted at and told I was a "rape supporter," asked how I could even "write this crap," and so on. I muted the person and deleted the comments from them, but it still hurt. It was their fault for not reading the story properly, though.

I would like to remind you that I am supporting rape in any way, shape, or form. Where it is shown in any of my works, it is always as an awful, traumatic experience. The characters always have trauma afterwards and they all handle it differently. It's not an easy process and sometimes there's no change in personal behavior until the second part of the book or in the sequel. DeLuca's Home for Mentally Disturbed Boys is a book about characters healing from trauma, betrayal, anger, mental agony, depression, and much more. I feel like this should be obvious if you're here now. There are obviously a lot of uncomfortable topics in here, but they are not sexualized and are instead talked about in these "pages."

If you have not read chapter 74, then you're going to get a huge spoiler. But I warned you up top, so shame on you if you came here before fully reading the story up until now.

Anyway, as you should know by now, Alexandre is not Anwyll's real father. Back when Alexandre thought he was in chapter 17, some people were saying that Alexandre was a pedophile for falling for his "son" as a newborn. I deleted those comments. Now, let me clear something up. Most happy, expecting parents fall in love with their children when they first see them. It's not a sexual or romantic love. It's a deep, familial love. Alexandre did feel that to the nth degree, but he also felt a slight romantic interest towards his "son."

So here's the difference between him and a pedophile: Alexandre was not viewing his newborn as a sexual object of affection. He was not imagining having sex with his child or doing horrible sexual acts with Anwyll. There were no sexual urges, no imaginations of sexual acts or anything of that nature. He wasn't sexually attracted to Anwyll (or children, for that matter).

What he was imagining was holding his child, cuddling him in his arms, kissing Anwyll's cheeks until his baby boy giggled—basically being a much more affectionate father than a standoffish one. He wanted to shower Anwyll with affection and give him as much love as possible—to the point where other families' parents would have been more than a little weirded out. Alexandre wanted to take the "mother's role" in caring for and loving Anwyll.

In that sense, he believed it was wrong—societally, especially. After he was forced to leave, he went a little crazy—mostly because his intense desire to care for and love on Anwyll was ripped to pieces by his own father. His romantic affection came forward more as he thought about his son as an adult. And he properly fell for Anwyll after reuniting with him, and imagined more naughty things once he allowed himself to after revealing the love he had for Anwyll in chapter 17.

So finding out that Anwyll wasn't his real son was (like Alexandre said) both relieving and heartbreaking. Their consensual relationship wasn't actually incestuous as they had thought, so that was the good part. But the heartbreaking side was that Alexandre could have, in fact, stayed with Anwyll and kept him from being horribly abused. Even so, Alexandre is in love with Anwyll—an adult now; a person he loved deeply (non-sexually and mostly non-romantically) for three years as he took care of him.

I would also like to mention that romantic interest is not the same as sexual attraction. Sexual attraction obviously refers to how attracted you are to a person's physical appearance and what you want to do with them in a sexual manner, but having a romantic interest in someone is wanting a deeply emotional relationship with that person.

I hope that makes sense. I feel bad that I have to explain this now, like 114 chapters after it happened. Gosh...

So here we are. I hope this clears up any leftover confusion from my subtle hints and unclear, brief mentions of those parts. I'm in a constant learning process through continuous writing, and I admit that I have left lots of things out over time in my books that should have been explained. I realized that there are a lot of people that don't/can't read between the lines, do skip paragraphs, aren't really paying attention or have a disability that affects their attention span, etc. so I have to make things absolutely clear.

Anyway, I think that's all for now. Again, I'm sorry I had to say all of this now when it should have been said in the beginning. I might just transfer the contents of this note to the specific chapters the sections need to go in and or edit the story a bit to make these points more understandable. But this is a good note for consistent readers and re-readers that scour these pages. It's often new readers that I have problems with on these topics.

See you again next Sunday. I love you all very much.

- Alessa (Kelpie) xoxo