Nate is struggling with the transition from a failed eight-years-long relationship to single life and tries not to crush too hard on his allegedly straight best fried Ryder who’s just come back home from an overseas deployment. Ryder, meanwhile, is at the very least bicurious and the only reason he’s never tried anything is because Nate was in a long-term relationship with someone else for most of their twenties. But now they’re both single at the same time, so obviously, it’s time for a drunken first kiss. And then for some actually sober experimentation, intermixed with trying to pretend like no one’s catching feelings.

All of that leads to a fairly short and straightforward friends-to-lovers story. Nothing that I can complain about, but nothing that particularly stood out, either. I wonder if perhaps I should’ve started poking at this series from the first full-length novel, not this prequel novella, because one of my friends has been reccing it to me so enthusiastically, and for now, I just… don’t see the appeal? Like I’ve said, nothing to really complain about, except for maybe some repetitiveness here and there, but I feel like this is just… a very run-of-the-mill rendition of the friends-to-lovers trope with nothing to make it stand out. But maybe if I’d already known the characters from the main series, I would’ve felt differently—that happens!