51 pages • 1-hour read
Kiss the Villain
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Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of sexual content, emotional abuse, sexual violence, rape, cursing, and self-harm.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth Carson makes his way to a party thrown by the Serpents, a rival university gang at The King’s U that often clashes with his own gang, the Heathens. Hidden under a mask, he stalks the Serpents’ leader, Yulian, and slips a drug into his drink. When Yulian goes to his room, Gareth follows him and reflects on how he’s kept his antisocial and psychopathic-coded behaviors concealed under his “golden boy” façade.
Gareth intends to humiliate Yulian by undressing him and taking a picture to make it seem as if he had sex with Gareth. As he undresses the man in the room, however, he discovers that he’s made a mistake in the dark—the man isn’t Yulian. He tries to escape, but the man threatens him with a gun.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth tries to defend himself with a knife, which the man shoots out of his hand. The man taunts and demeans him, accusing him of planning to rape Yulian. He threatens Gareth by rubbing his gun against Gareth’s genitals and forces Gareth to perform oral sex on him. Gareth is revolted, but he becomes aroused, which confuses him as he typically finds any sexual act a chore, and he believes that he isn’t attracted to men. After finishing, the man leaves.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth leaves the party and goes home. He self-harms to remove the feeling of the man’s touch and becomes mesmerized by his own blood before rallying himself. He encounters his younger brother, Killian, who antagonizes him. Though Gareth and his brother share similar behavior patterns, Killian is brazen about his lack of social investment, abnormal attachment style, and penchant for blood, pain, and death.
Killian stitches Gareth’s wound, wondering at the source of the injury, but Gareth dismisses his interest. As they talk, Gareth thinks about the man he found in Yulian’s room and asks about Yulian’s sexuality. Killian notes that Yulian was interested in their friend Vaughn after he slept with Vaughn’s girlfriend.
The next day, Gareth speaks with his friends and cousin Niko about the Heathens’ initiation ceremony, then goes to class. He discovers that the man who sexually assaulted him the night before is his new criminal law professor, Kayden Lockwood.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Gareth”
Kayden recognizes Gareth and antagonizes him as he delivers his opening remarks about the criminal justice system. He makes a point of using a rape case as an example to needle Gareth. After class, he confronts Gareth, taunting him when they’re alone. He implies that they will share more sexual encounters in the future and reveals he’s aware of the persona Gareth adopts in public.
Surprisingly, Kayden then offers Gareth a position working with him, which Gareth vehemently refuses. As he leaves, Gareth tells Kayden to watch his back.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Kayden”
In the next class, Kayden enjoys needling Gareth as he presents the rape case with which the class will practice a mock trial. He calls the smartest students to the prosecution team and appoints Gareth to the defense team, along with the least competent students.
After class, Kayden reflects on his sexual and sadism-coded interest in Gareth and the fact that he’s never been attracted to men before. He notices that Gareth is following him once again, as he has for the past week, and reflects that he’s enjoying how much he’s disturbing Gareth’s cultivated social mask.
Later, as he sleeps, Kayden has a nightmare about bloody faces and wakes up to find Gareth plunging a syringe into his neck.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth reflects on Kayden’s monotonous and predictable routine as he presses on the syringe’s plunger. They struggle, and Kayden overpowers Gareth while taunting him about wanting to have sex with him. Using the syringe, Kayden injects Gareth with the drug. Gareth tries to escape.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth struggles as Kayden touches him. His loss of control unnerves him, and while Kayden claims Gareth disgusts him, he nevertheless rapes him. Gareth struggles to understand why he enjoys Kayden’s touch despite the pain and humiliation. He blames it on the drugs, but Kayden doesn’t believe it and makes him beg for release. When they’re both done, Gareth runs away, frightened by his own pleasure and intent on never encountering Kayden again.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Kayden”
Four days later, Kayden provokes Gareth by texting him and calling him a coward. Kayden meets with Yulian, who happens to be the son of one of his associates. Yulian tells him about receiving an invitation to the Heathen’s initiation, which Kayden then gives to his friend Jethro to gain access to the ceremony for himself.
During the initiation, which involves a “hunt” of the initiates, Kayden stalks Gareth, who is protecting a blond woman named Cherry. When he sees Cherry kiss Gareth, Kayden feels a pang of jealousy and confronts him. Gareth sends Cherry away. Kayden tries to intimidate Gareth, who threatens to shoot him with a real arrow. After provoking Gareth by highlighting his inability to rise above his “primal urges,” Kayden bites the ear Cherry had been kissing.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Gareth”
Gareth is bewildered by his inability to act against Kayden when he had the chance. He hates how easily Kayden can entrap him. As Kayden bites, licks, and kisses him, Gareth struggles to accept that he enjoys Kayden’s dominance. Kayden claims to own Gareth, which Gareth denies.
As Kayden initiates sex, he explains that he forces everything since Gareth will not admit to liking it. Gareth is disturbed at feeling pleasure from Kayden’s pain infliction, penetration with fingers, and dirty talk, but even though Kayden pressures him to allow penile penetration, Gareth begs him not to go that far.
As they both finish, Kayden calls into question Gareth’s claim to be heterosexual. Before he leaves, he tells Gareth to break off any relationship he has with a woman, and while once again claiming to own him, Kayden states he wants Gareth’s “everything.”
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
In this first section of the narrative, Kent uses a dual-perspective narrative structure to highlight the dichotomy between her characters’ unreliable public personas and their inner monologues, underscoring how much of their dialogue exchange is dishonest and establishing the theme of The Cost of Social Masking. In the context of their burgeoning attraction to one another, Gareth and Kayden struggle to accept their innate sexual desire for each other and often resort to denial and external justification in order to rationalize their feelings. They do so, Kent argues, because they cannot resolve their newfound sexual desire with their hitherto-held belief in their heterosexuality, as Kayden’s narration demonstrates in this passage:
I don’t particularly want to fuck [Gareth]. I’m actually straight and have never found men attractive. So how come the thought of filling Carson’s pretty face with tears […] makes my dick twitch in its confinement? Power. Control. Breaking someone in their subhuman form. Those elements are clearly more important than actual sex or attraction to me (58).
While the persistent subtext of dominant behavior in Kayden’s personality could indicate a desire for power and control over sexual attraction, the tone Kent employs in Kayden’s narration implies that even he doubts the legitimacy of his explanation. The expression “clearly more important” is a presumptuous assessment of his behavior, given how sex and control seem to be fundamentally interlinked in his interactions with Gareth; all their interactions are sexually charged and involve sexual reactions and/or sexualized dialogue. Kayden’s judgment appears deliberately misleading so that he can remain comfortable in his assumed sexuality while still proceeding with sexually assaulting Gareth.
In terms of character roles, both Kayden and Gareth subvert the expected portrayal of a protagonist. Both, in fact, might qualify as villains in a different text, given how Kayden repeatedly sexually assaults, intimidates, manipulates, and sexually harasses Gareth while retaining a skewed power dynamic over him as his professor. Likewise, Gareth is far from a heroic character, as he attempts to use date-rape drugs on both Yulian and Kayden, attempts to slander Yulian, trivializes and demeans fellow students and women he dates, stalks Kayden, and threatens harm against him on multiple occasions. Though an argument could be made that Gareth is within his rights to leverage violent repercussions against Kayden, Kent deliberately highlights how Gareth is not easily redeemable—he actively dreams of harming and/or killing others, such as when he elaborates on why he chose to drug Yulian: “I was never that good with my fists, which is why I learned archery and use arrows to shoot people at our initiations. Pity I couldn’t slip my bow in [the Serpent’s mansion]. He’d look cute with an arrow between his eyes and blood dripping down his face” (16). While Kent will later reveal backstory to nuance the origins of her main characters’ behaviors, both Kayden and Gareth present themselves as morally reprehensible, ill-intentioned, and concerned only with their own gratification.
This section also develops the theme of The Relief of Establishing Power Dynamics. While Kent initially does not attempt to qualify Kayden and Gareth’s interactions as anything other than sexual harassment, assault, and rape, she frames the growing appreciation and pleasure they both experience during these encounters as the foundation for what will eventually become their BDSM-coded relationship. The author builds tension with Gareth’s attempts to maintain his fury and indignation against Kayden’s sexual assaults and Kayden’s attempts to manipulate Gareth into accepting his dominance. For Gareth, Kayden is a “monster” and “a literal damn rapist who enjoys debasing [him]” (101), which is factually true (101). Kent opposes this assertion, however, with Kayden’s explanation of why he forces everything: “Because you wouldn’t admit to liking this otherwise. […] If it allows you to enjoy this better, think of me as forcing you, taking your will and fight and allowing you no way out just because I love to see you squirm. You can make me your villain, baby” (97). Kayden’s portrayal of himself as a magnanimous character who allows himself to be misrepresented to assuage Gareth’s alleged discomfort is an elaborate distortion of reality. It is purposefully designed to make Gareth associate any pleasure within the rape as confirmation that he, in fact, does desire and consent to these encounters. At this stage, Kayden has not yet relinquished his revenge plot against Gareth’s grandfather, making his psychological manipulation especially morally reprehensible. Nevertheless, Kent will prove Kayden’s assertion true as his and Gareth’s relationship develops and the nuances of Gareth’s social masking are revealed in the next sections of the narratives.
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