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meta-squash · 1 month ago

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Squash's Reading List Year In Review 2024

(I've also posted this on WordPress here, where it might be more readable: https://jesuisgourde.wordpress.com/.../30/readinglist2024/)

Last year I read 92 books. I didn't plan on trying to surpass that number but I did, quite easily. This year I read 116 books. I didn't start off with any specific reading goal, but early on I decided to make it my goal to read more books by not-cis-men (women, trans/nonbinary people, etc) than by cis men. I hit that goal with 72 books. I did want to reread a number of books; I reread 7 books, but not all were the ones I listed in my last yearly reading review. I read 89 fiction books and 27 nonfiction. Of the nonfiction, the genres were mainly biography/autobiography, essay, science, and history. I read 45 books from small press publishers. I read 39 books by and/or about queer people. I don't have a super nice photo spread this year because I read a lot of books at work; I was going to screenshot my goodreads grid but unfortunately they have (frustratingly) changed the format from grid to list in the past week.

Here's a photo of the books I read that I do own, which isn't a whole lot, since I read most of the books at work this year:

I'll do superlatives at the end, here is the list of what I read this year, in chronological order. (Apologies for the random line breaks in the middle of the list, tumblr doesn't like it when you have 50+ lines without breaks)

-The Sorrows Of Young Werther by Johann von Goethe -The Changeling by Joy Williams -Child of God by Cormac McCarthy -Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau -The Ghost Network by Kate Disabato -The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan -Richard III by William Shakespeare (reread) -The Recognitions by William Gaddis -A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines -Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter -Bluets by Maggie Nelson -The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March -The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani -I Love Dick by Chris Kraus -Minor Detail by Adiana Shibli -Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson -Rent Boy by Gary Indiana -One Or Several Deserts by Carter St Hogan -Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball -Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson -Die My Love by Ariana Harwicz -Missing Person by Patrick Modiano -Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio -Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi -The Address Book by Sophie Calle -In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado -Plastic Jesus by Poppy Z Brite -New Animal by Ella Baxter -The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel (play) -Green Girl by Kate Zambrino -Death In Spring by Merce Rodoreda -Harold's End by JT LeRoy (reread) -Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto -Stranger To The Moon by Evelio Rosero -H of H Playbook by Anne Carson -When The Sick Rule The World by Dodie Bellamy -Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson -Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector -Not One Day by Anne Garreta -Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard -Binary Star by Sarah Gerard -Slug and other stories by Megan Milks -Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block (reread) -The Deer by Dashiel Carrera -Mean by Myriam Gurba -Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum -The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites -Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato -Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

-Notes on Thoughts and Vision & The Wise Sappho by H.D. -Harrow by Joy Williams -A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews -Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante -Milkshake by Travis Dahlke -Little Fish by Casey Plett -Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor -Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook -Biography of X by Catherine Lacey -Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller -Hir by Taylor Mac (play) -Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney -Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag -Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed by Simon Doonan -Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo -Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell (reread) -33 1/3 Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott -The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides -red doc> by Anne Carson -Darryl by Jackie Ess -A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan -The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain -Body by Harry Crews -St Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber -The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams (reread) -Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour by Barbara Schoichet -Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer -Timbuktu by Paul Auster -Nevada by Imogen Binnie -The End We Start From by Megan Hunte -Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang -Like Flies From Afar by K. Ferraro -Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe -Bestiary by K-Ming Chang -Playboy by Constance Debre -Red Dragon by Thomas Harris -Parting Gifts for Losing Contestants by Jessica Mooney -The Outline of My Lover by Douglas A Martin -Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova -Essex County by Jeff Lemire (reread) -Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have To Offer by Rax King -The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter -Lover Man by Alston Anderson -Cecilia by K-Ming Chang -The Employees by Olga Ravn -It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over by Anne De Marcken -Mercy Killing by Alandra Hileman (play) -Tentacle by Rita Indiana

-Nox by Anne Carson -What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami -McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh (reread) -Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin -John by Annie Baker (play) -Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement -All Down Darkness Wide by Sean Hewitt -The Blue Books by Nicole Brossard -The Book Of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender and Unruly by Kate Lebo -Blood Of The Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jimenez -The Balloonists by Eula Biss -Ravage: An Astonishment Of Fire by MacGillivray/Kirsten Norrie -Gods Of Want: Stories by K-Ming Chang -Fem by Magda Carneci -Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Merino -Mr Parker by Michael McKeever (play) -Fucking A by Suzan-Lori Parks (play) -Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha -Otherspace, a Martian Ty/opography by Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker

I DNF'ed a few books, but all were put down with the intention of finishing them at some point. Mostly they were books I needed to read when I was less busy/in a different headspace. I DNF'ed: Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A true story of friendship, poetry and mental illness during the first world war by Charles Glass, a reread of Her by HD, and The Apple In The Dark by Clarice Lispector. The Lispector and HD are both modernist novels that need 100% attention, and the Glass book is a nonfiction book (very good so far) that I put down in favor of something that at the time was more interesting.

I gave out a lot of 5 stars this year. The books I rated as 5 stars were: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield, 33 1/3 Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott, Transformer by Simon Doonan, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Body by Harry Crews, Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

~Superlatives~

Like last year, I'm going to do runners-up because I read so many books.

Favorite book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I have to pick this one as my favorite for the year, because reading it was a journey, and because it was a book that was exactly everything I love in a book: fascinating, very human characters, weird formatting, great dialogue, metaphors galore, and most importantly, hundreds of cultural, artistic, historical, biblical and literary references. I started this book on January 4 and I finished it February 22. It was so unbelievably dense, probably the densest novel I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it. So much is going on in this novel that it's hard for me to summarize. In the very shortest version of a summary, it is a novel about counterfeits (specifically paintings, but counterfeits in all and any forms) and Catholicism in 1930s/40s New York. The main character is a young man named Wyatt Gwyon, a talented artist who instead of painting for himself, becomes a skilled counterfeiter-- not because he wants to make money, but because he's obsessed with the perfection of making exact interpretations of other people's art. He also struggles with religion and belief due to his strange religious upbringing. Many, many other characters are also focal points throughout the novel. The book is unique in that it doesn't use quotation marks when characters speak and rarely uses "he said"/"she said" or any similar phrase. But Gaddis is incredibly talented at writing dialogue so that each character's voice comes through, and it's obvious (except when he doesn't want it to be) who is speaking. Gaddis is also wonderfully scathing, and much of the novel is incredibly witty and intelligent observations about the Modernist art world and artistic spaces in general. The characters are all fascinating, there is a lot of mirroring and metaphors. I say this book is about counterfeits in every form, because it constantly highlights different ways in which each character is faking something, or lying, or pretending to be/know/do/think something they are not. This book was incredible, I annotated every single page and had so much fun reading it, even though or perhaps because it was so unbelievably dense.

Just for a bit of reference, here are a few of the more annotated pages in my copy of The Recognitions:

Runner up: Body by Harry Crews (more on this one further down)

Least favorite book: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. I was so disappointed by this book. The blurb on the back made it sound like it was going to be really beautiful and interesting and unique. It wasn't. It was all tell and no show. It follows Ada, a person who is born with one foot in the spirit world. A traumatic experience at university causes her to develop split personalities as the spirits from the other side step forward to protect her from trauma. Unfortunately, the spirits who now control her body have darker, more dangerous desires. Sadly, there was almost no plot, just description after description of Ada's unhealthy relationships and erratic behavior. But because the narrative is so distanced from said relationships and from Ada, the high stakes of this behavior is not felt, not really. Interesting characters can easily save 'all tell and no show type' books, but none of the characters get delved into with any depth, even Ada. The show rather than tell narrative also seriously undermines the poetic prose that crops up almost at random. This book felt flat. No plot, little stakes felt, no interesting characters, tell rather than showing everything, and it's not compelling at all.

Runner up: Playboy by Constance Debre. The back of this book describes it as a memoir detailing the writer's "decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer." Which sounds amazing! But it isn't! It's unbelievably pretentious and quite boring. It's mostly just complaining hidden by a facade of faux-philosophical meandering and directionless autobiographical vignettes. The author is a lawyer and she spends most of the time complaining about poor people and about women. It's so hilariously misogynistic. It's just various vignettes of her relationships with various women (who she dislikes and disparages for being femme or having bad bodies or for having lowbrow/uncultured interests etc etc) and then her going and visiting her ex-husband and teenage son, and then complaining that she has nothing. There's little to no emotion in the book, she is not charming, and her pseudo-philosophical musings are boring.

Most surprising/unexpected book: Body by Harry Crews. This book crept up on me in terms of a favorite. Crews' writing is not for everyone, but it's absolutely for me. The book follows bodybuilder Shereel Dupont and her trainer, Russell, who are at the world bodybuilding competition. Shereel has left home to compete over the past year and is now one of the most likely to win. Unfortunately, her family, who are "corpulent rednecks" with odd habits, show up to cheer her on, causing disruption and chaos throughout the hotel at which the competition is held and turmoil for Shereel herself. This book blew me away completely. Every time I thought it had reached a plateau of weirdness and chaos and insanity, it ratcheted that all up even higher, culminating in the most perfectly fucked up ending.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. A mother trapped in the liminal space between life and death is made by an unfamiliar changeling child to retell the events of the recent past, desperately trying to pinpoint the moment she can reverse the environmental poisoning of herself and her daughter. I picked this book up because it sounded interesting, and then it ended up being an amazingly written short horror novel. It had a lot of interesting thoughts on motherhood and the horror of being a parent - not in a negative way, but the horror of wanting to protect and keep your child safe and the inability to do so.

Most fun book: Like Flies From Afar by K Ferrari. I fully judged a book by its cover with this one, and it did not disappoint. Small-time criminal/oligarch Mr Machi thinks he's hot shit, until he pops a tire on the way to an appointment and discovers an unidentifiable corpse in his trunk. As he scrambles to deal with the body, his paranoia grows as he tries to calculate who out of all his enemies and employees might be responsible, and who is trying to frame him, and who the body might be, and his life slowly transforms into a nightmare. Everyone in this book is loathsome, but in a way that is so fun to hate. The whole novel is a romp of panic and paranoia, people who think they're so cool and hard exposing how uncool they are, and a mystery that's so fun because watching the protagonist panic is a kind of schadenfreude.

Runner up: Transformer by Simon Doonan. This is a book for people who love Lou Reed, by a man who loves Lou Reed. It's just a wonderfully written biography that focuses mainly on the album Transformer, but also gives Lou Reed's history and is interspersed with stories about Doonan's own thoughts and experiences with Reed. The whole book is really passionate and vivid, and fun to read even if you don't have the album immediately to hand.

Best queer book: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Leah, a marine biologist, has returned from a deep-sea voyage that went wrong. Her wife Miri begins to realize that something is wrong, and Leah came back changed. The narrative switches between Miri's point of view as she tries to reach Leah and struggles help her despite not knowing what's happening to her wife, and Leah's point of view as she remembers and recounts what happened to her during her submarine voyage. I started this book at work and brought it home. In the middle of reading it, I stopped to finish some task (I think it might have been to make dinner), and ended up having to cut the task short because I needed so badly to keep reading. The most compelling part of the book is the very different ways the two characters' love for each other shines through, even in the darkest moments of the novel.

Runner up: Darryl by Jackie Ess. The titular narrator of this novel discovers that he genuinely enjoys a cuckolding lifestyle, watching men have sex with his wife. But then he realizes that part of the reason he likes it so much, is that maybe he wants to be the wife. His explorations with sex and gender and relationships (and basketball) begin to unravel his marriage and his friendships and his own mind. Then he learns more about one of the men his wife has been sleeping with, and things get dangerous. I loved this book because despite it being written by a trans woman, the story doesn't at all go where you'd expect regarding gender or sexuality. It's satirical, it's witty, it's got some cool things to say about kink and about gender, and it's totally original.

Saddest book: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. This is a classic I'd been meaning to read for a long time. The narrator is an American WWI soldier named Joe who was hit by an artillery shell and has woken in the hospital having had his arms and legs amputated, as well as most of his facial features mutilated beyond use/recognition. Trapped in his body, he drifts through memories and musings on life and war and philosophy as he tries to keep track of the days and to figure out some way to communicate with the hospital staff. It's no wonder this book is a classic. The writing is incredible, the imagery vivid and the plot totally gripping, even as it switches between the peaceful past and the horrible present. The end is completely gut-wrenching.

Runner up: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. This novel explores what in history is a minor detail, and what impact that little moment might have on someone in the future. The first part of the novel opens in Palestine in 1949, in a military camp, where a group of Israeli soldiers (led by a captain suffering from a bite-induced hallucinogenic fever) kidnap, rape, and murder an unnamed Palestinian woman and bury her body in the desert. Fifty-odd years later, a Palestinian writer learns about this "small" moment in history, which occurred 25 years to the day before her birth, and becomes obsessed with learning more. She obtains an illegal pass to the Zone in which the woman died, determined to go there and find more information. I don't want to summarize much more because I don't want to give away any of the hard-hitting plot points. But Minor Detail was published in 2020, and it explores the cycles of violence and the ways in which oppression has not changed for the Palestinian people. It's a book that I wish I had read twice because (as the title suggests) there were a lot of small details that repeated themselves or were less noticeable at first but slowly grew or became important later in the story, and I'm sure I would have noticed more.

Weirdest book: The Changeling by Joy Williams. I love Joy Williams! I love everything she writes! Her themes are always so interesting and her writing style is so unique. The main character, a young woman named Pearl, escapes her terrible marriage by joining a rich older man and in doing so ends up living with him on an island that is populated by children he has taken under his wing. Pearl wants little to do with them and spends most of her days getting drunk by the pool -- the children are eerily smart and her son has joined their games and lessons, and they all want her attention. But her son is less and less her son as time goes on, and the children are not always the children, and the adults in the house are all bizarre and half-mad. I wish I could give a better summary, but Joy Williams books are always difficult to summarize, because so much of the stories are less about the plot and more about the characters just feeling things at the reader, and the plot is often built on or around odd occurrences and philosophical musings. This book blew me away with its imagery and its metaphors. I want to reread it, because it was just so amazing. My absolutely favorite thing about Joy Williams (and this is true for all of her books) is the way she writes these incredibly profound and philosophical phrases like they're nothing at all, like they're so easy, just breezes on by them even though she's just punched you in the chest. It's amazing.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

Most gripping book: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. This book is an absolute masterclass in pacing. It tells just a few fragments out of the whole history of the Irish Troubles, but the fragments that are focused on are woven together with brilliant timing, humanizing and vivid portrayals, fantastic analysis and contextualization, and altogether excellent writing. Every time I put this book down I wanted to keep reading, to know what was going to happen next. The book has 3 focal points: Gerry Adams, (alleged) leader of the IRA; Dolors Price, a member of the IRA; and the family of Jean McConville, a woman kidnapped by the IRA. At first, all three storylines are disparate, but Keefe slowly weaves them together, pulling all the threads of context and action and years in prison or government or delinquent schools together slowly but steadily. The book reads like a thriller, and I adored it completely. (Yes, I do know about the miniseries. I haven't finished watching it yet!)

Runner up: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield.

Book that taught me the most: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Runner up: The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites. This could also go under weirdest book, easily. As a graduate art school project, Thwaites decided to attempt to build the simplest (and cheapest) appliance he could think of - a toaster - fully from scratch. Quite literally, starting with mining the elements to make the right kinds of metal and figuring out how to make the right kind of plastic. Half of the book is Thwaites' attempts to build various elements of a toaster - and how they go wrong, or right, and why it's so hard. The other half discusses all the processes that go in to making all these elements in a more manufactured setting, their impact on the environment and the economy, and the difference between cheap mass-produced products that break down vs more expensive products that last longer. The writing was fun and included photos and diagrams and interviews with various industry professionals Thwaites contacted to learn more.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Runner up: Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang. I've now read everything this author has published and this is by far her best book. Her narrative style is so unique and so poetic, and the themes she always comes back to are so interesting, and they culminate in this amazing novel. This magical realist novel centers around two best friends, Anita and Rainie, who are both first generation Taiwanese-American. The story opens when they are adolescents, and Anita has recently learned that they come from generations of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs. They vow to become dogs together, tying a string around each other's throats as collars and playing at dogs in the empty lot near their apartment complex. But Anita's dreamlike imagination and obsessively loyal personality starts to clash with Rainie's more reserved nature, and when it becomes too much, Rainie's family moves away. Rainie grows up, while unbeknownst to her, Anita has sunk into a dreamworld and her body has begun to rot. She narrates her family's past and her mother's bloodline because she cannot narrate her own present. When she returns to the town she grew up in, Rainie discovers Anita's condition, and knows that she is the only one who can save her. This novel is beautiful, incredibly poetic, and experiments with formatting and narration in really unique ways. Its exploration of friendship and queerness and obsession and tradition and folklore is absolutely fascinating. I often write in my books and underline sentences or paragraphs that I really love. I didn't write in this one, because I would have ended up underlining the entire novel.

Longest/shortest book: My longest book was The Recognitions by William Gaddis at 952 pages, and my shortest was Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag at 57 pages.

General thoughts on all the other books that didn't get superlatives:

-Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. This is the first McCarthy book I've ever read (I know, I know) and I really enjoyed it. You just watch a horrible guy walk around in the rural countryside of a small town, doing increasingly fucked up things and committing various awful crimes. Which is exactly up my alley in terms of literature. The main character, Ballard, is someone who is so weird and pathetic that he becomes turned inside out into evilness. You feel sorry for him but you also hate him and he's also fascinating because he's so fucking weird. It's a great book.

-The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. This book was so much fun to read while living in Chicago. It's a rock n roll mystery novel that riffs on Situationism and the L tracks and maps. A rock star disappears, and the main character who is a fan of her's is determined to find out what happened to her. What she uncovers is a series of clues based on defunct lines and stations of the Chicago transit system, and the Situationist concept of detournment, which lead her towards finding out what actually happened to the rock star. This book was so much fun, and so much of it was based on real life defunct train lines and the actual Situationists, both of which I found really interesting. The ending was also just so good! Somehow I managed to have read everything I needed to in order to get every single reference in the book, which was really surprising to me, because they all came from different places.

-New Animal by Ella Baxter. This book baffled me. It is about a woman who works as a makeup-artist at her family's morgue. When her mother dies unexpectedly, she skips the funeral and goes to stay at her estranged father's house. While there, trying to figure out how to vent her grief, she decides to try out the local kink scene. Her first experience is with a dom who is a manipulative, horrible asshole. She has a bad time, but wants to try again, so she goes to a place that hosts scenes. She acts like she knows what she's doing when she doesn't, no one gives her any instruction, so she fucks up massively, and everyone has a bad time. It's the worst portrayal of the kink scene I think I've ever encountered. The author said she did a lot of research but it just seems like a lot of terrible assumptions and misinterpretations. I thought it was going to be a book that positively portrayed kink and people who like the kink scene, but it's very much not. It didn't even feel like the author was doing this so the character would learn that she can't run from her grief. It seemed more like the author had one bad experience due to poor communication or shitty individuals, and then decided that's what the whole scene was like.

-Harold's End by JT LeRoy. I read this book in high school (or perhaps just after graduating) and totally fell in love with it, and then never saw another copy until recently. It was so good to reread it, to re-experience the gorgeous watercolor portraits that come with it. The novel follows a young street kid/hustler who lives with other street kids; all his friends have pets but he doesn't. A john takes a liking to him and buys him a snail as a pet, who he names Harold. The book follows him as he lives on the streets and as his relationship with the john develops. The book is classic JT LeRoy, and the end is LeRoy's usual style of characters experiencing a life lesson and growth but not necessarily in a happy way. It definitely holds up!

-Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. This was such a fun and weird book and I really enjoyed it. Markson's idea for the novel was "what if someone actually lived the way that Wittgenstein's Tractatus suggests?". What we get is a woman who believes she is the last person on earth (it is never confirmed whether this is true or not). She muses on life, culture, art, philosophy, and her past, and discusses her trips across the world despite its emptiness. But her story changes constantly; she's always referencing things she said before and editing herself. It's a weird, fun, fascinating novel with a lovably weird main character.

-A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews. Yet another fucked up book that I loved. It follows Joe Lon Mackey, a former high school football star that now lives a dead-end life in his hometown in Georgia. Each year the town hosts the Rattlesnake Roundup, where people come from many states away to try and catch as many rattlesnakes as they can in order to win a competition. Joe Lon is in charge of the event now that his father is too old and ill. He's uncomfortably self-aware of his own personal failings and his inadequacy and his abusive relationship with his wife; he'd rather not think about any of it and is incapable of figuring out how to change things. But his old girlfriend is returning for the event, and his father's attempts to control the goings-on from afar mean he's unable to stop thinking about where his life has ended up and where it's going. All this drives him slowly crazy with desperation until the insane ending. Crews is incredibly talented at writing characters that are likeable despite being so flawed and fairly awful people. This book is no exception.

-Milkshake by Travis Dahlke. What a weird novel! In a near-future dystopian heatwave, an 11 year old girl escapes the environmental catastrophe by traveling back in time to her past life as a fertilizer salesman whose marriage is slowly collapsing. I really enjoyed it, because it was just so odd. Now that I'm thinking about it, I feel as though it would have been really interesting to read just before or just after reading Tentacle; both books focus specifically on time travel and on environmental disaster.

-Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. At the opening of the box, a Witch has been murdered in a small village in Mexico called La Matosa. The rest of the chapters are narrated by different characters, who all have some small or large hand in the death of the Witch, who was a woman who the whole town visited in secret for medicine, fortune-tellings, and advice. The narrating characters include a schoolgirl, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a hapless husband who wants to make something of himself, and a teenager in love with his young girlfriend. With each narration we learn more about the Witch, and her mother who was a Witch before her. Slowly, we get inklings of the nature of the murder, and the revelation at the end is brutal. Melchor's writing is incredibly vivid, and the characters are all caught in the cycle of poverty, driven by superstition and fear and hardship. None of the characters are likeable, but they're all so human.

-Biography Of X by Catherine Lacey. In a dystopic alternate-universe US, where the Southern Territory split from the North after WWII and established a fascist theocracy, a woman named CM grieves her recently deceased wife X, who was a famous artist. Despite X's wishes, CM decides to delve into her wife's past, researching her history before they met and before she was known as X. She uses her credentials and privileges as a journalist to cross into the Southern Territory and learn about X's family and the communities from which she came, her activism and her hidden lives, and begins to realize that maybe learning all this about the woman she loved won't benefit her in the long run and that maybe their relationship wasn't as rosy as she thought. This novel combined fiction and real life in really fascinating ways, and includes both real and fake sources in its footnotes.

-The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. A famous and successful painter murders her husband and then refuses to speak. A psychologist who is also a fan of her work is determined to get her to speak again. Obsessed with uncovering the truth, he ends up taking risks that threaten himself and his patient. A fun mystery that went down easy. It didn't attempt to be too realistic from the start, so suspension of disbelief wasn't hard. I do think the book could have done without the entire last part. Leaving it on the realization of what had happened and allowing the reader to sit with that realization (especially with how creatively the twist is presented) would have had more impact I think than the slower and less engaging denouement of the last 3 chapters, which were far weaker than the rest of the book.

-Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell. I reread this book for the first time since about 2009 and really enjoyed it. It's a very sad novel about a man living in NYC during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Most of his friends and lovers have died and he's scared and sad about his own life and cynical about love, but he's attracted to the man who owns the shop below his apartment. It's a dark book, sad and scared and jaded. I think the main character's anxiety and grief that slowly escalates into paranoia is an amazingly surreal way to portray all the emotions that consumed the queer community at that time. I also loved the sort of lack of closure at the end - because many people didn't get that.

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I don't generally go for science fiction novels, but I read this one because so many people said they had liked it. I really enjoyed it. The unnamed narrator, a biologist, is part of an all-female expedition into a harsh, unknown territory that has appeared adjacent to the US. The suspense and strangeness of the novel had excellent pacing. The descriptions were also so vivid and clear, which made the story's weirdness so compelling. I loved watching the main character struggle to remain objective the whole time while knowing that she's failing. Her growing fascination and terror is so fun to read as each feeling tries to overtake the other. I also think it was great as a standalone and I feel no interest in reading the other books in the same universe.

-Nevada by Imogen Binnie. I'm a bad queer person, I hated this book. In it, the narrator, a trans woman, is frustrated with her life and has just broken up with her girlfriend, so she steals her ex's car and drives away, ending up in a small town where she spends the night with a department store employee. I just really don't like books that are meandering tell and no show without characters or a plot that are interesting. This entire book felt like someone recounting their weekend over breakfast, complete with casual informal language and overuse of the word "like". Which would be fine if any of the characters were compelling, or if the plot was really interesting and went somewhere, but it didn't. A good portion of it is just musings on New York City, but without the creativity or vividness that other portrayals of NYC have to offer. After I read it, I learned this book was kind of the catalyst for a specific style of trans writing. Which also explains why I hated Detransition, Baby when I read it a couple years ago, as it's a sort of literary descendant of this. I'm happy to read books that are tell rather than show....so long as something interesting happens or at least one of the characters is unique and compelling. This book sadly has neither.

-Essex County by Jeff Lemire. I read this for an English class in university, so this was a reread and I really enjoyed reading it a second time! All the stories in this collection are so beautiful and compelling, all the characters are so real. And the art style is fantastic. The stories revolve around characters living in the titular Essex County in Canada, across a number of generations. It weaves together their relationships and their lives, much of which revolves around hockey. There were some storylines I remembered quite well and others I didn't remember at all, so it was really nice to revisit this one.

-Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire by MacGillivray. Man, this book had so much potential. This novel is a fake biography of a fake poet who disappeared from a Scottish island in the 1960s after falling into delusions that he has become a demon. The fascinating thing about this book (at first), is that it's completely convinced that it is an actual nonfiction book. It gives no hints that it's fake, and the first 50 pages are convincingly written with an academic, nonfiction voice as the novel is utterly convinced of its own delusion of factualness. The novel claims to be an analysis of found papers: first, the poetry and written tracts of Tristjan Norge, a Norwegian poet, then the analysis of his works by MacGillivray, and finally, the diary of his companion Luce Montcrieff. Unfortunately, it is fairly repetitive in a way that bogs the reader down quite a bit. Even so, I think I would have enjoyed much, much more if the ending did not abruptly switch genres to a supernatural/fantasy novel in a way that was startling and had no previous indications of earlier in the book. Up to the last 20 pages I thought it was interesting, even when it was dense, but the end felt like the author didn't know how to end the novel and just used the deus ex machina of supernatural occurrences.

My goal for 2025 is to read majority nonfiction. I don't know if I'm going to actually meet that goal, but I'll try. I don't have any goals for how many books I want to read, especially because I tend to read nonfiction quite a bit slower than fiction, so I don't have a good idea of what my reading amount goal should actually be. This year I also forgot entirely about my attempt to read all of Jean Genet's (translated) works, so I will hopefully actually meet that goal in 2025, since I only have one or two books left to read. But my first three books of the year are going to be Soldiers Don't Go Mad by Charles Glass, which I started this year but didn't finish, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews by Jean Genet, and Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe.

#reading list #reading list year in review #book list #book list year in review #book recommendations #reading #books

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ataldaprotagonista · 8 months ago

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você, enzo, matí, kuku, simon hempe, blás polidori (não ao mesmo tempo, sua safada)

Entrevistas e memórias...

"A SOCIEDADE DA NEVE" tornou-de em poucos meses um fenômeno mundial.

Bayona, como o anjinho que era, fez questão de concordar com o máximo de entrevistas para que vocês tivessem cada vez mais notoriedade.

Geralmente iam você, que era protagonista no filme ao lado de Vogrincic, Matí e Agustín Pardella.

Mas essa não.

Essa era uma entrevista com o elenco... inteiro. Bom, a maioria.

Estavam brincando de "quem é mais provável?". As perguntas, até então, tinham sido tranquilas, como "quem é mais provável de chegar atrasado no set?", "quem é mais provável a esquecer as falas durante as filmagens?"

Estavam tranquilas, porém foram subindo de nível e se tornando mais contrangedoras, até o entrevistador questionar: "Quem é mais provavel a ficar com mais pessoas do elenco?"

Todas as pessoas naquela sala, que sabiam das histórias, viraram a cabeça imediatamente para você.

Todas.

Você arregalou os olhos e então começou a encarar cada um daqueles idiotas que viraram o rosto em sua direção...

ENZO VOGRINCIC

Ele havia te chamado pra jantar. Isso antes das gravações começarem de fato, já tinha rolado várias reuniões com o elenco geral, mas como vocês ois seriam os protagonistas, seria de extrema importância, de acordo com Bayona, que vocês dois tivessem conexão.

Jantar não significa encontro, né?

Pois bem, acabou se tornando um.

Tomaram umas taças de vinho, conversaram sobre tudo: infância, família, gostos musicais, filmes, sobre os países de cada um... ele te elogiou pra caralho também.

A medida que as taças foram fazendo efeito, foram aproximando as cadeiras e aumentando os toques. Hora ele encostava no seu braço desnudo pelo vestido tomara que caia chique que vestia, hora você apertava a coxa dele por de baixo da mesa rindo exageradamento sobre algo que ele falava.

A partir de um momento, Enzo começou a encarar seus lábios avermelhados pelo vinho, lambia os dele enquanto observava os seus.

- Que foi? - você perguntou sem tempo de ficar envergonhada.

- É que... eu queria muito te beijar.

E como esse homem tem o rizz, você sorriu, observou os olhos dele brilhando e o beijou.

ESTEBAN KUKURIZCKA

Kuku sempre foi um cavalheiro com você.

Desde o primeiro dia que se conheceram, para tudo.

Era divertido e tranquilo o que fazia com que você sentisse a necessidade de estar sempre perto dele, necessidade essa que ele tinha com você. Um esquisitinho gostoso que dançava, lia, sempre te fazia rir e te levava para passeios culturais.

Iam assistir filmes no cinema em momentos livres, aqueles que não tinham ensaios nem gravações, visitavam museus, bibliotecas e livrarias espalhadas pela cidade. Você apresentou a ele Clarisse Lispector e ele te deu de presente livros de Jorge Luis Borges, um escritor e poeta argentino.

Conversavam sobre as peças de Nelson Rodrigues e de outros autores até que surgiu a oportunidade de assistir uma apresentação de um dos contos do autor. Ele fez questão de te buscar em casa, como o bom cavalheiro que era. Isso na ida, pois seus amigos iriam te buscar no teatro para um rolê na saída.

Foram o caminho todo conversando ansiosos sobre o tema, afinal, ambos haviam lido o roteiro da peça. E quando acabou, não deu outra, aplaudiram de pé o espetáculo.

Sairam do teatro andando lado a lado falando sobre as cenas, as atuações, os figurinos e tudo que havia chamado a atenção de vocês. Estavam muito felizes e empolgados, até ele parar a sua frente e segurar suas mãos.

- Gracias por ter vindo comigo, a experiência não teria sido a mesma sem você.

Você sorriu de canto e ele ficou todo derretidinho.

Mesmo envergonhado ele passou as mãos pela sua cintura e te puxou para um abraço tímido, você transpassou as mãos pelo pescoço do mais alto e quando afastaram um pouquinho os rostos, se encararam e parecia certo demais se beijarem naquele momento, naquele lugar.

E foi o que aconteceu.

Não sabia ao certo quanto tempo ficaram se beijando, só parou quando ouviu uma busina alta, gritos e risadinhas de um carro do outro lado da rua de onde estavam. Seus amigos haviam chegado... e visto a cena.

- Tchau, Esteban. Gracias por hoy - falou com um leve sotaque passando o polegar no rosto corado dele, puxando a cabeça do mais velho pra baixo e depositando um selinho.

Saiu correndo para o carro, fugindo e rindo como se tivesse aprontando. Já dentro do veículo em movimento, olhou para trás e viu ele paradinho lá, com a mão no rosto.

MATÍAS RECALT

Estavam a uns quinze minutos chapadinhos no quarto de hotel em que estavam hospedados para fazer as filmagens.

Matí, seu parceirinho de verdinha.

- Eu fiz um péé, lá no meu quintaal, to vendendo a grama da verdinha a um real.

Você cantou deitada na cama ao lado de Recalt depois de passar o beck para ele. O garoto te encarou por uns segundos e desatou a rir.

- Porra, nena, essa é nova...

- Pior que é velha - você deitou de lado, de frente pra ele, com o cotovelo na cama e a cabeça apoiada nas mãos. Merda, tinha fumado e quando acontecia... aquele tesãozinho de chapada vinha com força.

Já tava com o olhar venenoso, na maldade.

Matí não estava muito diferente, se aproximou deitado assim como você e disse:

- Deixa eu assoprar na sua boquinha?

E você deixou, ele puxou e então colaram as bocas. Só que quando a fumaça se foi, por meio de abanos de vocês, ele se aproximou de novo e dessa vez, beijaram pra valer.

SIMON HEMPE

Noite na praia.

Aquele safado.

Aquariano nato.

Quando soube das fofocas jurou para si mesma que não ia, de forma alguma, ficar com ele.

Principalmente porque havia, até então ficado com TRÊS garotos do elenco.

E quando convidou o pessoal do elenco para passar uma semana em uma praia brasileira com você, não achou que ele fosse topar, até porque tinha mais coisas pra fazer. Mas pelo contrário, ele foi e era muito divertido estar com ele.

Em uma noite, saiu para fora da casa que alugaram que dava direto pro mar e sentou na areia fria observando as ondas suaves. Ele estava ali fora fumando um, logo que o baseadinho acabou, sentou do seu lado e ficaram conversando.

Pararam uns minutos observando o reflexo lindo que a lua deixava na água calma até ele puxar assunto de volta.

- Sabe, acho que a gente podia se pegar, sem maldade, só pra ver se a gente beija bem.... dizem que você beija diferente das argentinas, um diferente bom, beeem bom - sabia que nem Enzo, nem Esteban falariam o que aconteceu entre vocês... porra, Matías Recalt filho da puta!!! Você riu mas não queria deixar na cara que super concordaria com a proposta.

- Ah, cala a boca, Hemp - falou segurando os joelhos contra si - Você é o mais pegador de todos.

- Você fala isso como se já não tivesse amassado geral do elenco - você olhou para ele com a boca aberta e os olhos bem abertos de choque. Deu um tapinha nele.

- Mentiroso.

- AH é? - você revirou os olhos e ele se aproximou de abraçando de lado. - Relaxa, S/Ninha, não vou falar pra ninguém... não se você me beijar.

- Ta me ameaçando é?

- Não se faz de sonsa - você fez uma cara de choque, mas não havia ficado puta, estava se divertindo com aquilo - Eu sei que você quer me beijar, tanto quanto eu. Só não se apaixona...

Porra, aquilo ali já era humilhação! Mostrou pra ele, empanados na areia da praiam o nosso jeitinho especial, único de beijar brasileiro e ele ficou maluquinho na sua. Se pegaram mais umas vezes naqueles dias... e era ele que chegava todas as vezes.

- Quem que é o "só não se apaixona" agora, ein? - zuou quando ele te levou para dentro do banheiro pela milésima vez no dia, mas Simon nem se dignou a responder. Te calou com um beijo.

BLÁS POLIDORI

Naqueles mesmos dias de verão em praias brasileiras. Aproveitavam o dia para sossegar e curtir a areia e mar, e as noites para baladar, drogas e bebida.

E com gente bêbada vem ideias extraordinárias (ou não), que te humilham (ou não) e que te fazem fazer coisas que jamais faria sóbria (faria sim, vai), como por exemplo: brincar de verdade ou desafio.

Quando viu estava - no meio de todos seus amigos de elenco - sentada no colo do garoto beeem mais alto que você, com a boca atracada na dele.

Na manhã seguinte se arrependeu do que fez, principalmente porque Blás... se apaixonou no seu beijo.

FELIPE OTAÑO

Um dia conseguiram ingressos para assistir a um jogo do time de Pipe, você nem era muito ligada nessas coisas, mas o rapaz de olhos bonitos te convidou com tanto carinho que você aceitou.

Felipe te deu uma camisa dele para usar no dia, vVocê só não sabia que era a final de um campeonato importante pra o time que ele tanto torcia e falava.

Quando deu um penaltí inesperado foi o momento perfeito pra você falar enquanto passava um gloss:

- Pipe, to com sede.

Ele que estava com os cotovovelos enfiados na coxa, a cabeça entre as mãos, olhou de você pro campo e do campo pra você. "Puta merda, o que eu faço agora?" pairava na cabeça dele.

- Tudo bem - ele falou e saiu correndo, subindo as escadas até sumir de vista.

Quando ele voltou com uma garrafa de água, dois copos de chope e um balde de pipocas você sorriu.

- Gracias - ele beijou a sua cabeça e questionou:

- O que aconteceu? - meio ansioso para entender qual foi o resultado da gritaria que ocorreu pós o lance.

- O moço de vermelho errou a bola, eu acho.

Ele riu fofinho e então começou a te explicar o que era cada coisa, o que estava acontecendo e tudo mais, só então você se sentiu mal por pedir pra ele buscar alguma coisa num momento tão importante.

No intervalo do segundo tempo vocês conversaram e como começou a esfriar ele deu o moletonzinho tão amado dele e enfiou o boné branco na sua cabeça. Tiraram umas fotos e então os times entraram em campo novamente.

Mais a frente ele explicou que faltavam apenas dois inutos para acabar e que o time dele precisava fazer mais um gol, se não estavam fodidos.

E, manas, esse gol veio nos últimos dez segundos de partida.

Ele levantou e você levantou junto, aí o inesperado aconteceu, de tanta empolgação ele te tascou um beijo da-queles. Te levantando pela cintura e tudo mais.

....

Você ficou vermelha quando, em poucos segundos, lembrou de momentos tão intensos.

- 3, 2, 1 - disse o entrevistador e em um milésimo de segundo teriam todos que apontar para alguém.

Puta merda.

Fechou os olhos temerosa e quando abriu soltou uma gargalhada.

Todos haviam aprontado para Francisco Romero.

- Ayyy, disculpe - disse ele fazendo todo mundo rir e você respirar aliviada.

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ann1e-on-earth · 5 months ago

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Freakblr month day 29: What does the main cast remind me of?

Oh fuck yes I have been waiting for this

Jake: Troy Bolton (Highschool musical)

Hailey: Fishes because if that one scene in the comic episode where she’s embarrassed and it says “Oh. my. God.”

Zander: Grapes (Ik it’s a basic answer but whatever)

Luke: NICK NELSON FROM HEARTSTOPPER

Milly: Millie from Helluva Boss

Sean: Penguins. I don’t even know why

Daisy: THE SONG “ARE YOU SATISFIED” BY MARINA, GO LISTEN TO IT I SWEAR IT’S LITERALLY HER

Drew: Kanye West

Zoey: Sharpay Evans (Highschool musical)

Henry: The boys in my class who say slurs

Liam: Tomatoes

Lia: Pacifica Northwest (Gravity Falls)

#the music freaks #freakblr #rosyclozy #tmf #freakblr month

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fics-by-em · 2 years ago

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Amorous Facades - Chapter Eleven

A wild night out leaves the lives of Jamie Tartt and Ophelia Adams more intertwined than they ever would have imagined.

Will their decision to try and use the situation to their advantage work out in their favour or will they realize that they should have cut their losses when they had the chance?

———-

previous chapter

———-

Note: I know this chapter is a little bit late, but unfortunately that might be happening a bit more for the next little while… I have a really busy couple of weeks ahead and then I'm going on vacation for two weeks where I'll have no access to my laptop to write or post anything. Then in September I'm starting a new job. I'm still hoping to update regularly, but the once a week schedule might not be possible. I hope you can all stick with me though because I do have lots more planned for this story!

———-

During their first few days as an official couple, Lia saw less of Jamie than she had every other week since they met. When he left early the morning after their date and didn’t come home until well after dinner, she couldn’t help but let her anxiety get the best of her as she worried that he’d changed his mind or decided that convincing her to agree to be his girlfriend was enough for him to claim victory and he no longer cared now that the chase was over. The hours she’d spent alone that evening after she got home from work gave her enough time to spiral into her own thoughts until she’d worked up the courage to confront him almost as soon as he walked through the door.

She’d immediately blurted out her concerns and while Jamie was shocked at first, a smile slid onto his face once he’d managed to process her words. That only annoyed Lia even further - as she assumed he was making a joke of the whole situation - but he’d quickly put her mind at ease. He apologized for the lack of contact through the day and he explained that their final match of the season was coming up that weekend. It was very important that they won if they wanted to be promoted which meant that the team would be spending the rest of the week training hard for long days. That information simultaneously had Lia feeling relieved and embarrassed as she mumbled out an apology for her reaction and suggested they work on their communication.

Despite the smug smile on his face, Jamie had agreed and spent the rest of the evening teasing her about being so clingy, but from then on he’d made more of an effort to check in throughout the day. She appreciated his willingness to listen to her concerns and by the end of the week she was feeling much more confident in her decision to give Jamie a chance. He really was working hard to prove his dedication to her and she was powerless to resist his charm.

However, when the day of Richmond’s final match of the season came around, Lia found herself feeling nervous again. Jamie had left mid-morning to get in a warm-up with the team before the match started as usual on game day which left Lia to show up at Nelson Road alone, wondering what kind of reception she would receive. She walked slowly through the hallways as if she could delay the inevitable rejection, but it still didn’t take her long to find herself standing outside the door to Rebecca’s office and she took a deep breath to steady herself before knocking on the door.

“Come in!”

It was Rebecca’s voice that called out to her and she accepted the invitation to poke her head around the door to see her sitting on the couch with Keeley as she’d expected.

“Hi,” Lia smiled, relaxing slightly when they didn’t immediately recoil at the sight of her. “I know it’s short notice, but I was hoping I could sit with you two at the match today.”

“Yeah, of course, babe,” Keeley nodded, her enthusiasm putting her even more at ease. “Do you want some champagne?”

She held up her glass as if to demonstrate and Lia accepted the offer as she moved to sit beside her. She was trying to think of a way to bring up the elephant in the room as Keeley poured her a drink, but Rebecca beat her to it.

“So,” she started. “How’re things with Jamie?”

Considering she hadn’t talked to Keeley at all since Jamie’s confession and wasn’t entirely sure how she was feeling, Lia answered somewhat trepidatiously.

“Things are actually really good,” she admitted. “We’ve decided to give it a shot and try being in an actual relationship, not just a pretend one.”

“Oh my god,” Keeley squealed as she handed Lia a glass of champagne. “That’s amazing! I was so worried that Jamie had messed it up all by saying what he said, but he really didn’t mean it. I know Jamie and I know he didn’t, he’s just more emotional than people think and the funeral got the best of him.”

“That’s what he said and it’s been kinda hard to blindly trust him, but we went on a date a few days ago and he really put in some effort. It was nice.”

“That’s so exciting,” Keeley gushed. “And I promise there’s nothing between us now. I was so worried you wouldn’t wanna be friends anymore after what he said so I’m really glad you showed up today!”

“Me too,” Lia smiled. “I didn’t want things to be awkward and I believe that things are over between you, but I just worry that Jamie’s just desperate for affection from anyone, not necessarily from me.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Keeley rushed to assure her. “He’s different with you. He cares about you, I can see it.”

“It always seemed like more than just an act to me too,” Rebecca mused. “But tell us about this date? Where did you go?”

Lia felt her smile widen and she tried to control her enthusiasm as she launched into an explanation, grateful to finally get some womanly insight into the situation. She told them about the flowers, about the board game pub, the walk home and the little boy in the ice cream parlour. The way they ‘ooh’d and ‘awwe’d at all the right moments brought her some comfort as she still couldn’t help but feel like she’d maybe been won over a little too easily, but Keeley’s response when she was done telling her tale only strengthened her belief that giving Jamie a chance was the right choice.

“Wow, that is way more romantic than anything he ever did for me,” Keeley informed her. “He’s smitten, babe.”

“I didn’t think he had it in him,” Rebecca agreed. “But obviously he just needed to find the right person and it would seem that person is you.”

“You think so? I can’t shake the feeling that he’ll toss me aside once he’s had his fun.”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

The question came from Rebecca - her shock clear in her voice - but Lia simply shrugged.

“Because he’s Jamie Tartt and I’m just me, a dork who works in a bookstore. I don’t want him to get bored once the chase is over.”

“But you’re not boring,” Keeley assured her. “You’re fun and so sweet, Jamie is lucky to have you.”

“You think so?”

Lia cringed, knowing that low self-esteem wasn’t a particularly endearing thing, but she hoped that they would know it was a sincere question and not just a way for her to fish for compliments.

“Absolutely,” Rebecca nodded. “And from what I can see, you’re both good for each other. You definitely bring out the good in him.”

Lia felt practically giddy from their reassurance and hid her smile behind her glass of champagne as she mumbled out a ‘thank you’ before taking a sip and switching the conversation back onto Rebecca to get caught up on the gossip of her own slightly messy love life.

——

The match was a rollercoaster of emotions and Lia wondered if they always would be now that she found herself rather invested in one of the players. The first half had things looking pretty bleak and while Lia knew it wasn’t over until it was over, she was bracing herself to spend the rest of her evening trying to comfort Jamie and help him through the loss.

However, those worries vanished from her mind shortly after the second half of the match started.

It was like Richmond were a different team and they quickly picked up the slack from the first half. It was tense and exciting, but they pulled it together enough to force a tie which was all they needed to get promoted. The girls leapt to their feet the moment the match was officially over, squealing and hugging with an enthusiasm that Lia never imagined she would feel about a sporting event before she met Jamie. The team and coaches all flooded onto the pitch as they celebrated with the roaring cheers from the crowd reaching almost deafening levels and despite the newness and instability of their relationship, Lia felt a pull towards Jamie that truly surprised her.

It was like she physically needed to be near him. She could see him on the pitch being embraced by his teammates and she craved the opportunity to do the same. The pride she felt swelling in her chest took her breath away and when the boys all jumped and ran off the pitch and Keeley suggested they head down to the locker room, Lia practically bolted for the door of the box they were sitting in. She paused briefly enough to congratulate Rebecca on her team’s win, but then she darted out into the hallway with Keeley hot on her heels.

The sound of exuberant chants echoed down the halls as soon as they got down to the main floor and Lia let out a joyful giggle as Keeley swung open the door, calling out to the team as she did. Their presence seemed to heighten the already rampant celebrations as the team let out a cheer at their arrival, but Lia was more focused on her search through the crowd for Jamie.

When her eyes finally landed on him, she felt her heart swell.

He looked relieved. He looked joyous. He looked on top of the world. And combined with his dishevelled post-match appearance, the look of success was incredibly sexy on him.

She couldn’t resist winding her way through the group until she was by his side and finally able to wrap her arms around him, finding the feel of him just as intoxicating as the sight. His strong muscles, clinging to his shirt that was damp with sweat. The deep, manly scent of his body after such an intense workout. The way he squeezed her so tight she wondered if he was ever going to let her go. It all had such a strong wave of emotion washing over her that she couldn’t stop herself from stretching up to capture his lips in a kiss.

There was a shyness to it - a moment of hesitance before she found the courage to slide her hand to the back of his neck and encourage him to dip his head - but Lia knew it was unnecessary. As far as the rest of the team was concerned, their PDA was old news. They’d been showing affection in front of the group for weeks, but it felt different now that what they had was real. The moment felt more intimate now that it wasn’t simply for show and Lia felt her cheeks growing hot as she pulled away.

“Congratulations, Jamie, you were amazing.”

“Nah, wasn’t me really,” Jamie shrugged. “Dani’s goal really sealed the deal.”

“But you let him take the shot,” she pointed out. “It was a team effort and you’ve really become a team player.”

“Thanks, babe.”

A lazy smile slid onto Jamie’s face that was so endearing that Lia found herself once again drawn to stretch up and connect their lips, but she was relieved to find that Jamie seemed to be as desperate for connection with her as she was with him as when she tried to slip out of his grasp, he tightened his arm around her waist to stop her from moving too far away.

There was a tension between them that was undeniable. It simmered through the after party in the locker room and seemed to grow with every casual touch or lingering glance. Lia felt absolutely smitten with Jamie. Seeing him in his element, celebrating after a win, bonding with the team that he’d been working so hard to prove himself too. The atmosphere amongst the group was electric and Lia was grateful to be a part of it, even more so now that she wasn’t just pretending.

And as Jamie’s touches grew bolder, she felt it was safe to assume that he was feeling the same way about her. His hand drifting down to squeeze her bum when no one was looking, letting his thumb slip under her shirt to stroke at the skin of her lower back when his arm was settled around her waist, the way he kept leaning in close to whisper things in her ear even when such closeness wasn’t really necessary almost as if he was just looking for an excuse to let his breath wash over her skin. There was no way that Jamie couldn’t feel the spark crackling between them and crawling up his spine the way that she could.

And so - if Jamie was intent on driving her wild - she decided to return the favour.

Being seductive or flirtatiously teasing wasn’t her forte, but the beer that she was sipping on helped her find a little inspiration - both due to its contents and design. She was deep in conversation with Isaac - the team Captain - and Colin - one of his teammates - when the alcohol she’d been sipping and the burn of Jamie’s gaze on her helped the idea take shape in her mind. Nodding along to what Isaac was saying as he told her some in depth information about a play they’d been practicing, she glanced over at Jamie and made eye contact as she deliberately let the neck of the bottle rest between her lips for just a moment longer than necessary, sucking gently in a way that she hoped would be at least somewhat suggestive. She saw Jamie’s jaw clench as he watched her and she bit back a smile as she turned her attention back to the men she was talking to, but it didn’t take long for her to feel an arm slide around her waist and she didn’t even need to glance up to know that it was Jamie.

For the rest of the post-game celebration, Jamie didn’t let her out of his grasp and Lia was more than happy to stay cuddled up against his side. When the team started discussing where to move the party and which club to take the celebrations to, she was relieved when Jamie turned down the invitation and suggested that they just head home. She eagerly agreed, but was surprised that when they got into the taxi to go home, Jamie became more withdrawn. The affection that he’d been lavishing on her all night was gone as he sat on the far side of the car, focusing his gaze out the window. It was reminiscent of how they’d been when their relationship was just an act and it was a stark contrast to the way he’d been all evening.

She tried not to let her anxiety bubble to the surface and get the best of her - assuming instead that perhaps he was just tired as the adrenaline of the match started to fade away rather than that he wasn’t truly interested in her - but she was still buzzing from the way they’d been teasing each other all night. Desperate for some kind of physical touch, she reached out to take his hand and was relieved when he turned his head to flash her a smile before interlacing their fingers.

It was sometime during their drive home that Lia started formulating another idea - one that was only emboldened by the fact that Jamie announced that he was in dire need of a shower almost as soon as they walked through the door.

——

Jamie had barely been in the shower for five minutes when he heard a knock at the door before it slowly cracked open.

“Jamie? Can I come in?”

The question was tentative and only added to Jamie’s confusion. In all the time they’d lived together, neither of them had dared to enter the bathroom while the other one was showering. The glass door left nothing to the imagination and as soon as she entered the bathroom he would be fully exposed to her. It was a thought made his cock twitch despite his concern about her urgent need to talk to him.

“Course you can,” he called back. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she squeaked as she poked her head around the door. He noted with pride that her eyes widened at the sight of him, but the next words out of her mouth left him the one feeling stunned. “I was just wondering if I could join you?”

He stared in disbelief as she shrugged the bathrobe that she’d changed into off of her shoulders and stood before him completely naked.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he groaned. “How could I say no to that?”

After the weeks of self-restraint, he felt himself begin to stiffen just from letting his eyes roam over her body, admiring her pert breasts and soft curves that he’d been fantasizing about for so long as her cheeks flushed a deep red and she open the door that separated them. When she moved under the water to let her hands trace over his damp chest, he grew thick and heavy as his cock strained for some of her attention. He was almost scared to move or even breathe in case it snapped her out of whatever trance she’d fallen into, but as she bit her lip and mumbled out a soft yet appreciative ‘wow, Jamie’, he couldn’t help but question her.

“What’s all this about?” He asked softly, hoping he didn’t sound in any way ungrateful. “I thought you wanted to take things slow.”

“I do,” she admitted. “But I thought you deserved a little appreciation after your performance today. You were so good, Jamie. It was so amazing to watch you.”

Her words came out like a purr and the thick honey tone was all his cock needed to swell to its full potential, but he tried to stay focused as he made sure she was serious about the situation.

“S’just the job,” he choked out. “It’s nothing special.”

“It was special,” she insisted. “You were incredible. I was so proud to be wearing your jersey, for everyone in the crowd to be thinking that I’m your wife.”

The praise sent shivers down his spine as he flushed at her words, but the request that came next almost short-circuited his brain.

“Can I touch you?”

“Yes! Fuck, Lia, please.”

He answered immediately, feeling his desperation climbing quicker than he was used to. But then again, he wasn’t used to being celibate for as long as he had been and a release with someone other than his hand was very much needed. He knew that he was very close to sounding like he was begging - something he wasn’t particularly used to doing in bed - but in that moment he would have promised her anything to get her hands to slide down his stomach the way that they were. When she took him in her hand, he couldn’t hold back the moan that slid from his lips and he kept his eyes from fluttering shut just long enough to see her peering up at her from under her long eyelashes with wide eyes.

“You’re so big…” He knew he was at least a little bit above average, but the awe and delight in her voice had a wave of pride washing over him. She had an air of innocence about her despite the bold way she’d come onto him and he was finding it hard to hold himself back. However, he didn’t have to struggle with his restraint for long before she sank to her knees, staring at his cock with a hungry look in her eyes. “I can’t wait to taste you…”

She looked up at him, almost as if she was waiting for permission, but he didn’t trust his voice not to crack so he simply nodded. That was all the encouragement she needed as she eagerly took him into her mouth earning a hiss of pleasure from Jamie as his head tipped back into the warm stream of the shower. He’d had a few doubts about the level of experience that Lia had, but it was soon obvious that he had nothing to worry about because if she was unpracticed then she was a natural talent.

The warmth, the pressure, the pace that she set. It was like she knew exactly what he needed even before he did. She took him deep, gagging slightly in a way that was another little boost to his ego, but his chivalrous side came out as he let one hand slide to her the back of her head to help steady her movements and keep her comfortable. He was careful to keep his grip loose - more to guide than to control - as she clearly needed very little help from him.

He watched completely entranced as she hollowed her cheeks, sucking him so enthusiastically that it was like she was honoured to do it. As her hand drifted from his thigh to gently cup and tease his balls, an obscene sound left his mouth and he felt himself quickly heading towards a peak. He knew it hadn’t taken long and usually he would have been feeling a little more sheepish about his lack of control, but he was too wrapped up in his pleasure to care.

“Babe,” he choked out, knowing he needed to warn her before he was too far gone to form any words. “I’m close.”

The only indication that she’d heard was a slight increase of her tempo and as he felt her tongue drag pointedly along the vein on the underside of his cock, Jamie was lost in his pleasure to repeat himself. His fist clenched as his other hand tightened its grip on Lia’s hair and he resisted the urge to buck into her mouth, letting out a strangled cry as the rush of his release washed over him.

His knees felt weak as his heart raced in his chest, but even when Lia pulled away to swallow, she used her hand to gently stroke him until he came back down from his high. And once his mind began to clear, he reached down to offer her a hand and help her back to her feet.

“Fuckin’ hell, babe,” he murmured. “Where did that come from?”

“You deserved it,” she smiled. “Was it okay?”

“Okay? You were fucking amazing,” he assured her. “Didn’t expect you to be so bold.”

She blushed so hard that even her chest was flushed and a glimmer of the more trepidatious girl he was used to reappeared.

“I can be bold when I need to be.”

Based on what he’d seen so far, Jamie had no argument to that claim. There was obviously far more to Lia than he’d expected and he was excited to peel back even more of her layers.

“Yeah? Well, so can I,” he informed her. “How about we get out of this shower and I can return the favour?”

She bit her lip as his words made her shiver against him, but to his surprise she shook her head.

“No, it’s okay,” she assured him. “Tonight was about you.”

“You don’t want me to? It should be about both of us. You were just saying what a team player I am.”

His words were said with a smirk and he felt Lia giggle as she leaned her head against his chest.

“You are, but I didn’t expect any reciprocation. I just wanted to do something special for you.”

“Touching you would be pretty special too.” He slid his hand down to cup the cheek of her bum, revelling in the feel of her smooth skin and noting the way she turned her body slightly when he gave it a little squeeze, almost as if she was opening herself up to him. “But you didn’t answer my question. Do you want me to?”

She whimpered in response as Jamie let his hand drift over the curve of her hip, but he waited and simply rubbed his thumb against her skin until she gave him proper confirmation.

“Yes…”

It was a short response, but it was almost as desperate as Jamie's earlier plea and after her efforts to bring him pleasure, Jamie wasn’t going to make her ask twice.

Sliding his hand lower, he was somewhat surprised to find that the skin between her legs was bare. It was a detail that escaped his notice when she’d first dropped her robe, but now his mind had been cleared by his release, it caught his attention and he shelved the thought for another time to avoid embarrassing her or doing anything that might cause her to make him stop his exploration. Instead, he stayed quiet as his hand dipped lower until she parted her legs to grant him more access and the wetness he found between them had another groan falling from his lips.

“Fuck, babe, you’re soaked,” he informed her, as if she might be unaware. “Is this all for me?”

He stroked her gently, letting his fingers trail just beside the sensitive bud that he knew would be desperate for his attention as she murmured out a soft ‘mhmm’. He could feel her hand gripping his bicep as he watched her eyes drift shut and a moan slipped from her lips as he let a finger dip gently inside her. She was tight and the thought of the muscles that were gripping his finger being wrapped around his cock was almost enough to have him twitching back to life, but he kept his focus on her as he paid attention to the movements that earned him coos of pleasure or gasps of encouragement. It wasn’t long before he added another finger to his explorations, enjoying the way she stretched around him as his thumb came to settle finally on the bundle of nerves he’d been carefully avoiding. The sound she made at the contact was one of pure bliss and had Jamie feeling desperate to see her fall apart under his touch.

“You’re so fuckin’ pretty like this,” he groaned. “Let go for me, baby. Wanna see you cum, wanna feel it.”

His encouragement had her whimpering again, but he could tell from the quick rise and fall of her chest and the way her nails were digging into his skin that she was close. He kept his movements steady and it only took a few more moments for her to come undone, letting out a moan that sent shivers down his spine as he felt her clench around him. He coaxed her through it until she was quivering him against him when he slowly moved his hand away.

She clung to him, but as her breathing steadied and he felt her heartbeat slow in her chest, he realized the water washing over them was starting to get cold.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The words were murmured into her hair and he felt her nod as she stumbled away from him as if she was in a daze. He smirked, knowing that if she was shaken now she would be absolutely wrecked when he was able to really take his time with her, but he also knew that she seemed sincere when she insisted that she still wanted to take things slow. Considering she’d just given him far more than he’d expected to get anytime soon, he was more than happy to respect her wishes and he turned off the water before grabbing a towel and following her out of the bathroom, eager not to let her too far out of his sight.

-----

chapter twelve

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