Corey Allen Forces a Kiss on Ellie

Corey Allen’s forced kiss turns a calculated distraction into an act of physical coercion, prompting Ellie to abandon restraint and answer him with violence. The encounter exposes the gap between his joking excuse and the force he uses to keep her from resisting.

The Kiss as Deception and Force

Ellie is trying to pass Corey Allen after going to the bathroom, holding to a resolve to exercise self-control despite imagining her teeth sinking into his throat. He stops her by the arm and directs her attention to something he claims is on the ceiling. When she instinctively looks up, he seizes the opening: he grabs her, presses his lips to hers, and forces his tongue into her mouth. Ellie tries to push him away, but he pins her with one hand and grabs her buttocks with the other. His strength surprises her, especially given his appearance as an elf, and the kiss seems to her to last an eternity before he finally releases her. She staggers back, gasping and certain she is about to vomit, then demands to know what is wrong with him. Corey laughs and says he thought he saw mistletoe, presenting the assault as a mistaken holiday gesture. Ellie does not accept that framing: she judges the kiss worse than being bitten, and truly monstrous. His excuse makes no amends for the restraint and unwanted touching that defined the encounter.

Ellie's Counterattack

The kiss changes the meaning of Ellie's effort at self-control. Before Corey Allen distracts her, she is trying to restrain an imagined bite; afterward, the thought of biting him becomes a decision. She judges his attack more monstrous than being bitten, then seizes the moment to act on the impulse she had been suppressing. The shift is not from violence to calm, but from a violence she has held in check to one she deliberately directs back at him.

Though she has not practiced biting for twenty years, Ellie retains steady nerves and precise aim. She opens her mouth and lunges at Corey's cheekbone, which cracks beneath her teeth. He screams, struggles, and scratches at her, but she keeps hold, shaking her head three times like a dog delivering a fatal tug, until she tears away a piece of his face. The bite gives force to her rejection of his joking excuse: his claim that he mistook her for someone beneath mistletoe had made the assault sound trivial, but her response makes clear that she experienced it as a violation. Her retaliation is itself brutal, yet the scene's reversal is exact: Corey uses a feigned distraction to control her body, and Ellie answers by turning the bodily aggression she had been trying to contain against him.

Consent and Bodily Control

The encounter’s decisive feature is not simply that Corey Allen initiates a kiss without permission; it is the way he arranges the moment to make resistance difficult. He invents a reason for Ellie to look away, then uses her reflexive attention to seize and hold her. His mistletoe joke recasts the act as a holiday mishap, but the sequence itself offers no sign of a mutual gesture: Ellie tries to push him off, and he restrains her until he chooses to release her. The difference between his breezy explanation and the force of his actions leaves the violation plain even before Ellie names it monstrous.

That distinction matters in a book that presents sexual encounters with sharply different conditions of consent. Margot, for example, continues with Robert not because she fears he will force her, but because she feels unable to reverse the social commitment she believes she has made; her discomfort grows as he handles her roughly. In another encounter, a woman explicitly asks Ryan to punch and kick her before sex, but her request does not spare him the responsibility of confronting what he is doing: after he kicks her in the stomach, she vomits in the motel shower, and he proceeds to have sex with her. These scenes are not interchangeable with Corey’s assault. Together, they make the surrounding question more exact: desire, compliance, and permission are not the same thing, and another person’s body cannot be made available by a joke, by momentum, or by an act of force.

Pacing and Reversal

The scene’s pacing makes control change hands before its violence does: a glance upward interrupts Ellie’s attempted exit, and the kiss stretches into a duration she experiences as nearly endless. Once released, she pauses long enough to judge the act, then the narration sharply accelerates from that judgment into a precise, sustained counterattack. The contrast turns the mistletoe pretext into more than a thin excuse: Corey Allen has tried to direct how Ellie understands the encounter, but the scene gives its final movement to her decision about what happens next.