Amy Jo Cousins

NFL player Deion goes to visit his friends Josh and Benji in Miami, after being injured with a probably career-ending shoulder injury, where he meets Benji's friend Carlos, a set designer. Both of the guys are bi, which is something neither ever explored, and attracted to each other, so they decide to use the vacation for some no-strings attached experimentation. But things are rarely that easy, and Deion has to wonder if he even wants to go back to playing, when he could just stay in Miami near Carlos.

I did enjoy this one more than the first book, though the end pulled it down a star.

I really liked that the relationship did not happened as lightning-fast as in the first part. Technically it still happens in a rather short time frame, but it's more than just a few days, and it also takes up a all of the book. I felt the pacing was a lot better, though I thought the separate scenes where sometimes a bit choppy, and it wasn't always quite clear where and when a new scene was happening.

I really liked the MCs, the characterization was great. The author is always really good at that. Josh & Benji from the first part had plenty screen time too.
And the sex was a lot hotter this time around. It still felt realistic, just not quite so awkwardly unsexy.

But I really hated the ending. It felt like the book ran out of pages and they had to squeeze a mandatory separation and a happy end in half a chapter. I felt that really took a lot away from my enjoyment. I want to have at least a little bit of time to savor their making up, the love declarations, not just half a page at the end. I'm still pissed at that.

joshfourtytwo and princessglitter have been bonding over an anime for a while now and chatted a lot. But when a sports injury keeps college football player Josh from playing he spontaneously flies out to Miami to meet the girl of his dreams, just to find a slightly older gay guy instead. But Josh is not deterred for long. Even if Benji isn't a girl, he's still the person who's been helping him deal with his shit and vice versa.

This was a fun read overall, but it has some flaws.

I just did not buy some of the plot-points, especially Josh believing princessglitter to be a girl only to make a 180 turn around and confess that he knew it was a guy, but didn't want to admit to himself, that he might be attracted to a guy. I felt that whole thing did not make much sense at all and his behavior didn't quite fit into it either. Especially since he admitted to being gay very soon and with no trouble whatsoever.

The romance was going a bit too fast for my taste, it was pretty much insta-love and continued at a rather fast pace. But that allows us to see a lot of couple interaction, which was a nice change of pace for me, since I usually read a lot of slow-burn.
I really liked the MCs together, though. Josh is just a really big, dorky sweetheart while Benji is a bit more level-headed, but can achieve similar levels of enthusiasm. They are just so cute and happy together, and really honest with each other. It's just heartwarming to read.
Though I have to admit, I did not think the sex scenes where all that hot. They seemed rather more on the realistic and slightly awkward scale of things.

It's really a very cozy book. There's no drama to speak of, no angst, no conflict. It's just two guys meeting for the first time, falling in love and figuring out their life together. I did enjoy it, because I specifically wanted something warm and fluffy.

Toms dad got busted for some ginormous money scam. Tom has been haunted by the press and is left with no money at all. He manages to get back to his college, barely managing to scrape together the money with cab driving at weekends, being essentially homeless until he gets approved for college housing. He's being tossed in with a traumatized gay kid, Reese, who wants nothing more than for this jock to be out of his room he was promised alone. But Tom won't budge, not even when Reese brings around guys to fuck, regardless if Toms in or not. But Tom actually finds himself unexpectedly interested in those encounters he can overhear.

So I loved this until about 60%, when I get overwhelmed my Toms negativity and problems. Nothing seemed to get better, only worse.

I liked the characters, the main ones and the supporting cast, too. I thought they where all very well portrait, with depth and realism. Both of the main characters had some horrible thing happen to them and they both had to dig through it. And for the most part I thought it worked very well. Their friends Steph and Chuck where also awesome, supportive and fun. I especially liked Chucks entirely unfiltered but nevertheless complete support of the whole situation.

But the book is pretty much in Toms head all the time. And Toms head is a fucking dark place. There are some light spots, especially when he gets together with Reese, but at some point I just got too overwhelmed with all the unrelenting negativity in there.
And I did not always get him. The longer the book went on, I felt Tom should make some progress. I admit, I have no idea what either Reese or Tom would feel, but at some point I stopped being able to relate to his troubles and just thought he was being an asshole to Reese, or just a drama queen in general.

In the end, all the progress and happy end was so sudden, compressed into one single chapter, that I felt the book was not well paced. Maybe showing the progress over a longer period and stretching the troubles out less would have helped, or maybe the book was just too long for my taste.
In the end I thought it was more of a 3.5 than the solid 5 I would have given for the first half of the book.