Book Summary: 

Ben

Aidan Kelly. To everyone else in the world he’s the star of a successful extreme travel show, but to me he’s the one that won’t go away.

It started with one of those typical high school crushes on my best friend’s older brother, which turned out to be not entirely unrequited…

There was that time just after high school where someone (not me) may or may not have hurled all over someone else’s c*ck. Then there was that incident in Austin where…well, let’s just say it gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘bull-riding’. And let’s not forget that little thing with the rental car…

But it doesn’t matter how good the sex is, or how deep the attraction is, Aidan and I are just never going to work. There’s the distance for one, and the fact that one of us (not me) is a closeted celebrity…and that’s all without going into how whenever we’re in the same place we just can’t seem to stop from hurting each other. And not just in the good way…

The only option to maintain my sanity is to avoid Aidan and force myself not to think about him. But that’s easier said than done when—thanks to my best friend’s misguided ‘help’—we end up living in the same freakin’ apartment…

Mini Review:

To be honest, this one is almost neck and neck as my favorite in the series. If “Fake it ’til You Make Out” had all the humor, this one had all the heart. Ben and Aidan’s story just about gutted me. We start off at a high school senior farewell party for Declan, with Aiden consuming a little too much liquid courage leading to a long-awaited hookup that went terribly wrong. We then proceed through the years where these two just can’t get their acts together. They come so close each time, but either the wrong thing is said, there’s a misunderstanding, a secret comes out, or fear causes one of them (normally Ben) to bail. The worst part is that they are like two magnets and can’t stay away from each other. You would think the push and pull throughout the book would get old, but it doesn’t; it just keeps you trapped in their orbit, hoping these two can find a way to work things out. The story overlaps with several prior books, allowing us to see previous storylines from different perspectives. We are also introduced to Ellie (whose story is the last book of the series), Aidan’s transgender best friend, and learn that Aidan is pansexual with a homoromantic orientation. These two points are critical in the story because we also learn how the transphobic producer of their show treated Ellie and how the network is forcing Aidan to hide his sexuality, which causes a bigger rift between him and Ben. There is so much in this story, and it is by far the most dramatic of the nine books, but also the most rewarding.