As far as Clay Carpenter
is concerned, his abusive relationship with food is the best thing he’s got
going. When a good friend starts kicking his ass into gear, Clay is forced to
reexamine everything he learned about food and love—and that’s right when he
meets troubled graduate student, Dane Hayes.
Dane Hayes doesn’t do the
whole monogamy thing, but the minute he meets Clay Carpenter, he’s doing the
friend thing in spades. The snarky, scruffy bastard not only gets Dane's wacky
sense of humor, he also accepts the things Dane can’t control—like the bipolar
disorder Dane has been trying to manage for the past six years.
Dane is hoping for more
than friendship, and Clay is looking at him with longing that isn't platonic.
They’re both positive they’re bad at relationships, but with the help of
forbidden desserts and new medication regimens, they prove outstanding at being
with each other. But can they turn their friendship into the love neither of
them has dared to hope for?
Cat gives this one 4 Meows with a 3 Purr heat index...
Fall Through Spring ticked
off several boxes for me. I love a good friends to lovers but I love flawed
people even more. So when I saw that Dane had Bi-Polar and anxiety issues and
Clay had weight and self-confidence issues I was on board. Both are topics I can seriously relate to and
Amy Lane handled them well.
Clay and Dane are great
characters but we also have Skip and Mason. Skip is Clay's best friend and
Mason Is Dane's brother. This is how the two meet, through mason and Skip.
The topics are good as we
watch both men battle their problems and fall in love. They become great
friends then more. It is a slow burn but when we do get to the sex it is hot.
This is book three. Skips
book is 1 and Mason is 2 but this stands alone quite well. I loved the book. My
only issue was I felt it could have been just a little shorter.
If you like friends to
lovers, flawed men, coming out, slow burn and a good ole romance this is for
you.
Excerpt…
Carpenter and Food
At Seven
CLAY ALEXANDER Carpenter
was the first to admit it—his first love was a chocolate chip cookie. It was an
illicit affair, because he wasn’t supposed to eat cookies like that. His mother
didn’t believe in refined sugar, red meat, gluten, dairy, or saturated fats.
This cookie was four out
of five of the things his mother disdained most about the world.
And it wasn’t that
Carpenter hated his mother. In fact, she was a lovely woman, kind, giving out
hugs during appropriate times, very worried about making sure her children grew
up to be happy, productive citizens with a closet full of childhood memories
that would give them strength as they got older.
It was just that, well,
she was a very busy woman—never too busy for her children, mind you—but she had
meetings, and she had to give the maid directions to clean the house, and she
had a job too, as a lobbyist, and she had to make sure her children were happy
and fulfilled and doing extremely well at school.
Carpenter’s father was the
same way. Kind, civic-minded, spent an allotment of happy, fulfilling time with
his children, never yelled.
That was another thing.
There was no yelling in
the Carpenter household. Yelling would be the sixth thing his mother hated in
her home, but that would have involved hating and bringing the toll up to seven
things. And honestly, Carpenter’s mother was really a nice person, and she
didn’t have room in her heart for that much hate.
By the time Carpenter was
in second grade, he was beginning to suspect he might.
For one thing, he hated
the kids in his school.
He’d shown up on the first
day of second grade wearing jeans that fit perfectly and a T-shirt that had a
picture of Chewbacca on it. His mother had allowed him to pick his own clothes,
and she’d been surprised. “Chewbacca, honey? Do you even know what that is?”
“It’s a who, Mother,” Clay
had answered reasonably. “He’s a Wookiee. His species doesn’t make a difference
in his personhood.”
His mother smiled happily.
“What a wonderful argument, Clay. Well, with reasoning like that, I’m pleased
to buy it for you. But where did you see this movie?”
“I don’t remember,” Clay
lied. Of course he remembered. He’d awakened one night over summer vacation,
when they were allowed to sleep until eight in the morning instead of six
thirty. He’d been hungry, so he’d made himself an organic peanut butter with
sugarless preserves on nut-grain unleavened bread sandwich, and turned the
television on in the family room, very quietly. It was after eleven, so he must
have found East Coast feed on cable—but he’d never forget that movie.
It had been perfect. A
revelation. A vision of stars and wars and laser weapons and giant hairy beasts
who wore artillery packs on their chests.
When he’d seen the T-shirt
in the store, he’d almost cried.
So he was proud of that
shirt as he walked into school. And then the kids had hit him with, “But isn’t
that passé?” “Oh my God, the second series is so dumb. My parents said Jar Jar
Binks was a racist stereotype.” And, worst of all, “You’re going to
grow up to be a big fat hairy Wookiee just like Chewbacca!”
Carpenter didn’t realize
that this was the price he had to pay for going to a “good” school, where all
the kids had television sets in their own rooms and the parents were rich and
trying to send their kids to first-tier colleges, which was why they’d all had
flashcards in SAT vocabulary by the second grade. He knew he was smart because
he had test scores that proved it—smarter than most of his peers, but he
wouldn’t know that until middle school when he started to suspect he was the
only one who got tutored in algebra by his older sister, Sabrina, and not a
college student desperate to make ends meet.
All he knew at that moment
was that he would throw himself in traffic for Chewbacca, and while he was not
allowed to say “hate” in his home, he hated his peer group
with the solar viciousness of the suns of Tatooine.
He’d felt that way until
Calliope Prescott sat at his table and looked furtively around.
“They’re dumb,” she said
softly. “They’re stupid dummy heads and I hate them!”
Carpenter gazed at her
with enchantment in his eyes. Calliope Prescott was different from the other
kids at school. For one thing, she was not as pale. Without knowing anything
about race, Carpenter totally appreciated that Calliope Prescott had slightly
darker skin than his other classmates—skin the color of the organic bread his
mother was so fond of, but on smooth apple cheeks instead. She also had
luxuriously thick and curly hair, often tamed into long asymmetrical braids
with bright rubber bands on the end.
Calliope Prescott
was extraordinary, and she’d said the magic forbidden word.
For a brief moment, Clay
thought she was the best thing to ever happen to him.
“I hate them too,” he
whispered, staring at her with stars in his eyes.
“Star Wars is
a great movie,” she told him staunchly.
“It’s the best,” he said.
She pursed her lips. “Empire
Strikes Back is better, I think. And I love the little teddy bear
things in Return of the Jedi.”
Clay’s mouth fell open
slightly. “There’s more movies than just the one?”
She’d laughed, her mouth
open, unafraid to make noise. “Yeah, silly! You should come over to my house
and watch them!”
Clay nodded. “Oh yes,” he
whispered. “I would love that. Do you think your mother would let me?”
She regarded him soberly.
“Do you think your mother would let you? We’re the only black
family in the entire school.”
“You’re not black,” Clay
said, confused. “You’re brown. But my parents have lots of brown friends. They
won’t care.” His parents were lobbyists for a civil liberties organization.
Later, he would realize that meant they had money and a social
justice conscience, but right now he knew she looked a lot like his mother’s
best friend and her wife. But Calliope wasn’t ordinary, like his mother’s
friends. She was extraordinary, because she was Clay’s friend.
Calliope smiled widely.
“Good, then! If you can give me your number, I’ll have my mom call your mom.
It’ll be fun. My brother has friends over all the time—this time it’s my turn.”
Her brother, Jordyn, was a
nice kid—as beautiful as Calliope and just as invested in Star Wars.
The three of them spent hours watching the trilogy while their mom baked
cookies.
Clay was entranced by the
smell. To him, the pew-pewing of lasers would forever be linked to permission
to relax on a couch with his bare feet up while two friends sprawled over his
legs as that scent—perfect and wholesome and sweet and amazing—rolled through a
slightly messy house.
After Empire
Strikes Back spun through the VCR, Mrs. Prescott came into the living
room—the living room!—with a plate of cookies and three glasses of
milk.
Clay stared at that plate
of cookies with lust in his eyes.
“Do you have any
allergies, Clay?” Mrs. Prescott asked, as if she had just remembered. “Nut
allergies, gluten, dairy?”
“No,” Clay whispered,
because his mother had gotten him and his sister tested, just in case they
accidentally ingested a strawberry soaked in cream and deep fried in chocolate
frosting. “Are those cookies?” They did not look like the
applesauce carob cookies he got on special occasions.
“Yes—here. I’ll rewind
the Jedi tape, and you kids can come have cookies. No more
than three, okay? Clay has permission to stay for dinner, and I don’t want you
three wrecking your appetites.”
“Three?” Clay loved this
house. He loved Calliope, he loved Jordyn, he loved their mother, and he loved
the entire Star Wars franchise.
“Is that not enough?”
“It’s perfect,”
he breathed.
Amy Lane lives in a
crumbling crapmansion with a couple of growing children, a passel of furbabies,
and a bemused spouse. She’s been a finalist in the RITAs™ twice, has won
honorable mention for an Indiefab, and has a couple of Rainbow Awards to her
name. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure
movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv,
Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy,
urban fantasy, and gay romance—and if you accidentally make eye contact, she’ll
bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She’ll also tell you
that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
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