Us (Him #2) by Sarina Bowen, Elle Kennedy

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Title: Us (Him, #2)
Author: Sarina Bowen, Elle Kennedy
Series: Him #2
Published by: Indie
Release Date: March 8, 2016
Format: Kindle Book
Pages: 328
Genres: LGBT, Sports Romance
Reading Challenges: CC's Finishing the Series Reading Challenge, CC's Goodreads Reading Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon
My rating:

Blurb:

Can your favorite hockey players finish their first season together undefeated?

Five months in, NHL forward Ryan Wesley is having a record-breaking rookie season. He’s living his dream of playing pro hockey and coming home every night to the man he loves—Jamie Canning, his longtime best friend turned boyfriend. There’s just one problem: the most important relationship of his life is one he needs to keep hidden, or else face a media storm that will eclipse his success on the ice.

Jamie loves Wes. He really, truly does. But hiding sucks. It’s not the life Jamie envisioned for himself, and the strain of keeping their secret is taking its toll. It doesn’t help that his new job isn’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped, but he knows he can power through it as long as he has Wes. At least apartment 10B is their retreat, where they can always be themselves.

Or can they?

When Wes’s nosiest teammate moves in upstairs, the threads of their carefully woven lie begin to unravel. With the outside world determined to take its best shot at them, can Wes and Jamie develop major-league relationship skills on the fly?

Warning: contains sexual situations, a vibrating chair, long-distance sexytimes and proof that hockey players look hot in any shade of green.

My Review:

Favorite Quotes:

He hates this as much as you do, my conscience whispers. Fuck off, conscience. I’m having a pity party, here.

My parents are in PFLAG and everything.” “Cool,” I say, although I’m not exactly sure what that means. I’m, like, the worst queer dude ever. Somebody pass me the manual.

I finished another series!  Or dualogy, whatever. It counts! #FinishingTheSeries2018 

I did really enjoy this one. I think more than the first book.  The struggle they went through to hide their relationship, albeit temporarily, was pretty intense. I couldn’t even imagine pretending to just be friends and not being able to show my affection to my SO.

Ryan is torn between his love of Jaime and his love of hockey.  He beats himself up thinking he is betraying himself because he feels like he has to choose between his love life and his career. And I get why he felt that way. I agreed with him about hiding it because if the public knew about his sexual preference they WOULD make his career about that and not his stats.  And he was having a fantastic season.  He is a good hockey player; gay, straight or bi.  It really sucked that he felt that way and I sympathized with him about it. But a time comes when you have to choose whats more important.  I think he may have lost sight of that along the way.

Jaime is loving and understanding about the whole thing but I think he came to resent the fact that Ryan was out doing hockey team engagements and he felt like he was being left behind.  When in fact he was holding himself back from finding his own friendships to help him weather the storm.  And I think he overreacted a bit towards the end by not addressing what he was feeling with Ryan.  That miscommunication was drawn out a bit too much and honestly, I felt it was unnecessary.  But the ending made up for their lack of communication.

I gotta say that Blake was a refreshing character who brought some great levity and evened out the drama throughout the story.  I am excited for his story.