Review: The Friend (It's Just Us Here #1) by Christopher X. Sullivan

An asexual man meets a male model... and slowly falls in love.

Mark, the model, has not been challenged in his life and is emotionally withdrawn. He returns to Chicago in the hopes of reconnecting with his college friends, but everyone has moved on without him, starting families and growing up.

Chris, the writer, is socially awkward and introverted. He actively tries to be as invisible as possible.

The two men meet one day in Chris' favorite park and strike up a friendship. Since this is written as a romance, you probably have a pretty good idea where the story goes from there.

You'd be wrong. (Well... and kinda right.)

I'm Chris and this is my story. It's not a traditional romance. This is my version of a Happily Ever After, which means Mark and I became great friends... and that's it.

Mark and I end this first installment of my self-portrait in a Queer Platonic Relationship. There was cuddling and emotional closeness, but nothing remotely sexual... at least not to my mind. Mark obviously wanted more and he would eventually get it, but this book, Book One of It's Just Us Here, would have been my perfect, ideal romance.

If you need banging and crazy monkey sex to keep your interest in a story, then jump in at Book Four of this self-portrait (The Lover). Otherwise, come along for the ride and meet the man who would sweep me off my feet, Mark Wolff, one of the top ten most self-absorbed men in the whole world.

[NOTE: This book is a 95,000 word romantic self-portrait featuring the beginnings of a queer relationship. It the first book of a trilogy, which is itself part of a larger trilogy. Low heat... for now. I don't think we need trigger warnings for this book, but future installments might warrant them. Maybe that can serve as enough of a warning? Warning: this book if full of life.]

I admit that the thought of starting this really long and really ambitious autobiography was intimidating. I had hesitated over The Book of Beginnings which is the skeleton of a planned 10 volume omnibus, but I didn’t just want the outline. If I was going to attempt this behemoth, I wanted every word, every detail, and not just a chapter here or a snippet there. Actual books were on the horizon, and I was going to wait and see.

So I waited… and I wasn’t disappointed.

To be honest, you might think this is a weird story - an odd, self indulgent endeavor and maybe it is, but it’s also so very quirky and funny and real.

Chris is kinda a loner. He’s regimented, particular, and very sure in how he lives his life, planning out every minute detail. All was smooth sailing until one day, that very safe and reliable routine is interrupted by a force of nature named Mark.

Now Mark is probably one of the biggest extroverts ever. He certainly bamboozles his way into Chris’s life and somehow slowly, they become nigh inseparable. Mark is the complete opposite of Chris and with the best intentions (sometimes with benign selfish intent), he irrevocably turns his and Chris’s life upside down.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the main caveat of this story which may matter to some and not at all to others. Chris is asexual, and how he interprets and interacts and responds to Mark is all colored by this. Inevitably and not surprisingly, this provides some pretty great entertainment when coupled with each of Chris and Mark’s own array of special personal neuroses.

This made me smile, this made me laugh, this made me emote. Who knew I'd find such entertainment in bickering over bed sheets, the merits of proper underwear, making bacon, and buying the suit of all suits?

For further disclosure, I don’t think it’s a secret that I like established couples, and though Chris and Mark aren’t established yet here, the fact that this is a true story just appealed all the more to me. I also have absolutely no problem with the day in and day out mundanity of coupled life. I don't always need drama and angst and these two have plenty of unintentional shenanigans that kept me on my toes.

So that’s a long winded way of me saying that this first volume is all about how Chris and Mark meet, how their friendship starts, and how this ends with them on the cusp of realizing that possibly, probably, feelings might have developed and that love is just around the corner.

This is 400+ pages long and most who know me know I try to avoid anything over 200 pages if I can help it. All I’m saying is that despite the lack of romance, despite no smexy, what is promised ahead makes me look forward to the next 9 tomes!! If that doesn’t properly say how I felt about this, then I don’t know what will!

A copy was provided in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Book of Beginnings: It's Just Us Here (Unfinished Self-Portrait) by Christopher X. Sullivan

An asexual man meets a male model... and slowly falls in love.
Chris is a nerdy bookworm with a very direct personality. He tends to take jokes literally. He doesn't like small talk.

Chris has never been sexually attracted to anyone in real life, though he can look at photos and think up exciting scenarios in his head... as long as the people are all wearing clothes. Porn is definitely a no go.

Mark is a charismatic, beautiful man with a pretty person job and pretty person problems. He's very pushy.

Mark is also struggling with a summer college course for business writing. Luckily, Chris makes a living from his writing and always falls for a sob story... so he ends up helping the model with his assignment.

After a chance encounter in Chris' favorite park, the two men's lives slowly entangle until the pair become inseparable.

First Chris and Mark become friends, then companions, then partners, then lovers... and then they get engaged, married and... finally... adopt a very amazing kid.
This is their story... or, well, I guess it's my story. I'm Chris and I wrote this. It's very weird to refer to myself in the third person, so I'm going back to first person now.

Mark didn't tell me he was into guys until I was very much in love with him. Anytime he got close to telling me the truth, I would instinctively pull back. But I never ran away completely, and he kept coming after me.

I guess you'll have to read the book to understand why.

[ADVISORY: I'd just like to make sure you know that this book is not the complete love story between me and my husband. I've broken my story up into ten 100,000 word installments. Each installment follows its own 'arc'. There are four 'super arcs' typical of romance novels spread over the ten installments.

"The Book of Beginnings" contains the beginning of each of those ten installments. So we're going to jump through time quite a bit. These 'beginnings' total over 140,000 words and the final project will be over 1,000,000 words.
Don't worry, I will finish this story. It's terribly important to me. But it is huge. So I will also be posting an Abridged Version, which will consist of the chapters in "The Book of Endings" and "The Book of Beginnings".

This is an unfinished project, but my health is prompting me to search for an audience before I'm finished. If you want to be an early reader and look for typosz, please get in touch. You will make the completion of this story possible and free up more of my energy for non-typo stuff. Thank you so much.]

I tried to type a review for this a few times and finally realized that it’s impossible. So, I’ve decided to provide a warning: incoherent ramblings ahead on this memoir-romanceish book. Before we commence to the ramblings, I think it’s important to know that this isn’t a conventional romance, it’s a true “story.” Please see the author’s special note in the blurb. More books are in the works that break down important stages of the MCs relationship with a full arc. This book is strictly the beginnings of each of those stages coming together to form the Book of Beginnings. Make sense? Fabulous.

Chris: Asexual man, writer, friend, worrier, planner

Mark: Model, highly sexual, laid back, incredibly social

These two men come together randomly in a park after Chris’ typical Monday run. Chris is on a bench writing and Mark is a lonely man looking for a friend. From their first meeting, it’s a whirlwind where they create their own boundaries on what it means to be friends, lovers, partners, and eventually parents. Chris and Mark come from diverse backgrounds, have diverse sexual appetites, opposite personalities, and experience real life growing pains as they move through each stage of their relationship.

Book of Beginnings is written in the format of a romance novel but the situations these men face aren’t romanticized. The writing style is easy to breeze through but the angsty content isn’t easy to read. There was so much more feeling involved while reading this book because I couldn’t forget that these are real people with issues that aren’t sugar coated. Having to *see* the struggle Chris and Mark go through in their intimacy was gut wrenching, especially from Chris’ POV as he tries to be all his partner needs sexually while still being very much an asexual man at his core. Early on my heart was breaking for Mark as I could see the love he had for Chris but couldn’t fully release his feelings. Another difficult aspect of this story is the dynamic between Mark and Chris. Mark’s personality is larger than life and he has such a pull over Chris. It may seem like Mark steamrolls (and rightfully so, sometimes) Chris into capitulating often- but Mark knows Chris and is able to nudge him out of the comfort zone he likes to exist in. Mark usually has Chris’ best interests at heart and even though he may be resisting something, a part of him seems to crave it as well.

It’s a captivating read that allows us to focus on the emotional aspect of them falling in love way before physical intimacy is introduced. I adore the connection they have, the foundation they build, and the growth each man makes toward their HEA.

Y’all, I was hooked from the beginning. It’s a beast of a book in length but I couldn’t put it down. I pretended to be productive and do adult things but I was really just reading this and when I wasn’t reading, I was thinking about reading it.

Was it perfect? No, but it’s a work in progress and the author makes that point clear multiple times. As mentioned above, The Book of Beginnings: It’s Just Us Here is written in an unconventional format, needs more editing, has incomplete “story” arcs, has multiple big-moment time lapses, and missing very important bits of their lives. All of those are noted in the blurb warning. Did I care? Not one teeny tiny bit. I went all Dr. Seuss on this book and would read it in a boat, with a goat, in the rain, on a train… (I’m a dork, sorry *shrug*)

There were times I wanted to scream at my kindle because I just had to know what happened only for it to have a time jump. This actually reminds me of a CliffsNotes version for their life story with the main parts coming out as their own books over the next year.

At the heart of this book is a “story” of two people meeting, loving each other, and then falling in love. Life can be a major bitch sometimes and still, Chris and Mark find a way to love on their own terms as the relationship evolves into something deeper. Something real. Something beautiful and imperfectly perfect.

I’m SO frakin’ glad I chose to take a chance on this love story and I'm looking forward to reading the first full installment. This author now has a new stalker stage-10 clinger big fan. Highly recommended.