Chris Owen: Bareback

Bareback by Chris Owen
From: Torquere Press

He was almost to River, had actually lifted the saddle and was about to settle it over the blanket when he heard it, probably the only groan on the planet that could make him freeze when heard out of context. With him in a stall and Tor not right there, naked and wanting with him, it was most definitely out of its proper context. He didn’t think, just turned and put the saddle over the stall wall and headed to the doors, not bothering with stealth. He stood in the open doors, knowing he was in full light and watched.

It wasn’t anything like what had happened two years ago at the auction. He didn’t feel the rush of anger, the need to run over and stop it, to stake his claim. Maybe because this time he knew for a fact it was Tor. Maybe because he wasn’t surprised. This time, when it mattered, he said nothing. Felt nothing.

He watched Tor in the shadows, leaning against the outside wall, his head thrown back as Travis finished undoing their jeans. Listened as Tor gasped when Travis started jerking them both off. Watched as Tor moaned and thrust and begged for more, told Travis to suck him off. When Travis grinned and went to his knees, less than ten feet away, Jake watched as Tor’s eyes closed, heard him hiss with pleasure as Travis took Tor in his mouth.

He noticed the way they were just outside the fall of light from the doors, the way Travis knelt with one knee in the dirt, the other leg bent so his boot was planted solid. Travis’s jeans were dusty, like he’d not had time to change after playing ball in the yard all afternoon. Tor had showered and changed, though; was wearing his good boots, and new jeans. The shirt wasn’t new, but it was one of Jake’s favorites–it was the same blue–gray as Jake’s eyes.

Jake noticed other things, too. The ring in Tor’s cock and the way Travis played with it. That Travis was noisy, his mouth soft and wet, his lips already swollen, probably from kisses. That Tor had no hesitation in using Travis’s name or telling him how nice it felt. That Tor’s breath was coming faster and faster, even though he seemed to be in no rush to finish.

He noticed how pale Travis was, how his hair seemed to shine in the less than half-light. How the lean muscles in his back flexed as he moved. How young he looked.

Jake didn’t turn and walk away until Tor was thrusting hard, fucking Travis’s mouth and Travis was stroking himself off, his hand in rhythm with Tor’s hips. Tor sounded like Travis was good at what he was doing.

Jake walked through the stables, from one end to the other, and out into the crowd. If anyone spoke to him he missed it. He didn’t feel anything yet, and that sort of worried him. He should feel something, after all. Anger. Hurt. Humiliation. Anything at all–but he didn’t.

He just felt empty, like nothing could touch him. Cold.

Ranch manager Jake Taggart, after two years of working together, against his better judgment of fucking around with someone who works for him, starts a relationship with cowboy Mark Flynn *aka Tornado or Tor*.

Did you read that excerpt? I want you to know I actually just finished re-reading this damn book to make sure what I felt about it was correct.

What can I say about a book that for 26 chapters gives you a sweet gentle Gay Cowboy Romance and then keeps going despite the fact the arc is complete and the characters are getting their HEA and by chapter 35 knifes you in the stomach with a scene that anyone with half a brain would walk away from silently and never, ever, want to talk to the guy who betrayed him so throughly, so personally, so tragically? How would you have the guts to ever label the damn book a Gay Romance after destroying the Romance?

I don’t have that nerve to do that to anyone. I have absolutely no problems in saying that the first 26 chapters I was reading a decent Gay Romance with a few problems… Love scenes that were slammed into the story in single sentence rapid fire sequences like…

“Fuck. Tor, please. Need you. Need to feel.”

Which is not only awkward to read, but it was the only way that Chris Owen could write a man on man sex scene and let’s face the fact that after a while it just gets bland and boring because it all comes out like B.A. Tortuga cut and paste sex.

But… I found enough meat between these sex scenes to see a love growing between two hard headed manly man characters that were interested in having something more meaningful.

After chapter 26 the Romance dies. The chapters get spliced and diced with silly things like headings of Winter, Spring, Fall, Summer and short little nonsense scenes that do nothing to forward the growth of the relationship and simply seem to be there to provide fluff and filler to show they had done something for two years.

Then Chris Owen suddenly wants the ongoing relationship to get REAL dramatic so she has Tor fuck around on Jake. Now this would not have been a problem in a certain sense because early in the relationship in chapter 4 she has this foursome sex scene where Jake watches Tor getting fucked by some other guys. So there was groundwork there for implying Tor likes to mess around with a little strange, every now and then, and Jake did not seem to mind at the time.

Unfortunately Chris has a scene much later at an auction where Jake sees Tor flirting with another cowboy and he clearly put his foot down and sets down some “limits” and “boundaries” in regards to how he wants a relationship with Tor.

Jake then tells Tor, with good reason, not to fuck around with the help on the ranch because they have to ALL work together and he implies that his relationship with Tor was a total exception to this rule.

The biggest problem I had was these were some of the few scenes that actually stand out among the ongoing sex and show them defining their relationship so they were very clear in my mind when Tor did what he did.

So this final scene… for me it was the final scene for the whole book… is the ultimate betrayal a Gay guy can do to another in any relationship. It is not a mistake, like Chris wants to write it, that Tor made, Chris never shows us any deep personal conversations that imply clearly the relationship is in trouble bad enough to justify Tor’s drastic actions. Tor’s point of view is never fully represented enough to not see him as a immoral flaming asshole that took Jake’s heart and purposefully ripped it all into little pieces for no good reason.

I personally felt she slammed this Tragedy into place and barely did anything to couch it in any way to make it work in a Romance story.

Tor walked over and passed him a bottle of apple juice without a word, then sat next to him, looking out over the field. Jake waited, but Tor didn’t seem ready to say anything, so he shrugged and opened the bottle, drinking a little less than half of it.

When Tor still didn’t say anything Jake turned his head to look at him and said, “Well?” Tor took a breath, then looked back. “I’m sorry, Jake,” he said quietly.

“I know.” And he did know, knew it from the way Tor looked as bad as he did, knew it from the way Tor’s eyes were always sad and self loathing. He’d never doubted that Tor was sorry–sorry he’d been caught, and even sorry he’d done it in the first place. “Just not sure it matters,” Jake added softly.

Tor looked at him, eyes searching, questioning his meaning, not the words.

“It’s just…” Jake paused, trying to decide how to word what he was thinking. “We were falling apart, anyway. If everything had been all right you would never have done it, you would’ve laughed, or walked away, or hit him. You wouldn’t have…done that, if we were okay.”

Tor nodded slowly. There wasn’t any point in denying it, Jake knew. “Want to fix it,” Tor said, his voice rough. “I want to fix us. I can’t–I can’t keep going like this. Looking at you, watching you. Know I did it to you, Jake, but I want to make it better.”

Jake felt something loosen, something he didn’t know was tied up in a knot inside him. Maybe. Maybe there was a way to get past it. But the roots were somewhere else, not in Travis.

“I just don’t know what I did,” Jake said. “I keep going over it, the whole day, and I don’t know what I did that made you so mad you didn’t walk away.”

If he hadn’t been looking right at Tor he would have missed it. The look in his eye, the flash of pain and regret. The guilt. But he was looking and he didn’t ever have to worry about what Tor would have done, if he would have kept lying, kept hiding. He saw Tor’s gaze slide away from him, the tightening of the jaw, the flash of panic. And he knew. He stared and waited for his heart to start beating again, watched Tor crumple into himself, burying his face in his hand for a moment before setting his hat back further on his head.

“How long?” Jake asked, his voice sounding like it was coming from inside a well.

Tor looked at the ground. “Jake–”

“How fucking long was it going on?” Now there was anger, white heat and noise crashing over him, filling the hollow inside him. Taking over. It hadn’t occurred to him that what he’d seen was anything more than a one-time thing.

“Almost two months.”

Jake closed his eyes and told his stomach that the apple juice wasn’t worth throwing up. Two months and he’d not had a clue, not a single suspicion. The idea that Tor could hide it that well for so long stung him, cut deeper than just about anything. Or maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice. It really didn’t matter; all that mattered was that it underlined just how finished they were, that they’d been done for a long time now and hadn’t even known it.

“Jake, it wasn’t–”

“Shut the fuck up. One more word right now and I’ll kill you.”

Silence, for a long time. Minutes passed and Tor sat next to him, not moving. Jake kept his eyes closed, trying to find something, anything, that had happened which would have clued him in. Any looks, any unexplained time away. Any hesitancy that Tor had had with him. Anything. Aside from the fights they’d had and the few hours of strain they produced he couldn’t remember anything. Not a smell, a taste…nothing.

Jake opened his eyes and looked at River. “Did you fuck him?”

Tor sighed. “Yeah.”

“Did he fuck you?”

“Jake–”

“Tell me.”

Another pause. “Couple of times, yeah, but–”

Jake stood up and threw the bottle at the next tree, watched Tor flinch when the glass shattered. He moved to River and took his reins in one hand. “I’m going to talk to the Boss.” Tor watched him as he mounted the horse and turned River toward home. “We’re done, Tor.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, Jake.”

“Too late for that.”

“I know.”

This is only on chapter 37 and this books goes on and on and on till chapter 50. I am so done by this point. It is all over for me.

I feel sorry for Jake that things got this bad but I HATE Tor so much I cannot ever want them together again. Tor BETRAYED Jake’s TRUST. Professionally; because Jake told him not to fuck around with the help. Personally; because Tor never came to Jake complaining about whatever it was that was failing in their relationship that he might be unhappy or unsatisfied or felt unloved. Then Tor goes further than that and betrays Jake Sexually; because he was fucking around for two months and there was no mention of condom use and there was no scene that showed what the hell Tor was saying to Travis (Since a one time suck or fuck, sure, but what would be said to make a guy think he would not get fired for keeping it going with Tor like that? Who else got BETRAYED?) and Tor let Travis fuck him. An explicit sexual boundary that Jake stated clearly, DO NOT DO THAT. For a relationship, that in this book consisted mostly of sex scenes, I do not know how much more Tor could have said “fuck you” to Jake or Travis for that matter. USER!

Chris Owen tries to save all this crap by showing this totally uncharacteristic , for this book, deeply personal conversation between the most stoic cowboy in the story Jake and a mutual friend of theirs called Hound. Hound accuses Jake of letting Tor go because of pride? Wow, that’s a big old “no” Chris Owen, no no no you do not seem to understand what you or Tor did to Jake.

There simply was nothing left between them that Tor could possibly BETRAY. No emotional blow that could cut Jake deeper. The relationship and the love was over because there could never again be TRUST. The fact Chris throws this surprisingly uncharacteristic private conversation in the book after all the fluff and filler we had to read through representing two years of their actual relationship shows to me she knows she did something that cannot be fixed by any amount of bad sex scenes.

Tor knew what he was doing and he knew Jake would figure it out, he knew that he and Travis would get fired, he knew what he did would destroy their relationship and probably even knew it would make Jake start drinking and put Jake in serious mental and emotional jeopardy. This is so OVER!

The fact you kept writing this story after destroying Jake’s trust with so much unspoken hate, it totally blows my mind.

F is for going way too far. F is for carelessly throwing infidelity into a story you want to sell as a romance no matter how tragic and painful it is to the characters but also to the readers who trusted you. F is for blatantly attempting to rip off Brokeback Mountain in spirit and totally missing the part where no matter how over they said they were with each other they never betrayed their love. F is for just not getting what Romance is about.

If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?

Tags: Chris Owen, Gay, Grade F, Torquere Press, Western Romance

Sarah Black: Wolf

God Damn it! If they do not stop playing with my databases and losing my posts I will hurt someone. I swear. Now where were we? Oh yeah, this crap.

Wolf by Sarah Black
From: Torquere Press

Dr. Jake Miller has cut himself off from the world after having contracted HIV while whoring around in the national park bathrooms while supposedly doing his job as a Park Ranger. Seems the jerk gave HIV to his wife too who is not happy with him over this fact. Out of his three kids his daughter Lisa is the only one that will still talk to him, the wife and his two sons will have nothing to do with him. I wonder why?

Unfortunately Lisa decides to run off to help a troubled family of wolves in the nearby Gila National Forest. Her college professor Dr. Nathaniel Briggs calls Jake up to get his help in finding her. Turns out Dr. Briggs is also HIV+ having contracted it from his lover who later committed suicide.

If you think for a minute this is a light hearted romp of a Gay Romance I have some Russian novels I can review that will leave you in stitches.

This is an early story by Sarah Black and once I read the blurb for this one I knew I had to read it. Let’s just get this out there. I have been HIV+ since 1989 so this story was just begging for me to read it.

Jake rubbed down between his eyes. Was he getting a migraine? He needed to take some aspirin before they left.
“She telling everyone?”

Nathaniel shook his head. “I don’t think so. Besides, people are so wrapped up in their own pain, you know?” He shrugged. “They don’t have room for anyone else’s burdens.”

Jake got to work on his breakfast again. “What did she…?”
Nathaniel got up and went to the stove, poured another cup of coffee. “I think she only told me, Jake. And she told me that you picked up HIV somewhere, and nobody knew you were sleeping with men until you gave HIV to her mother, who is dying because of it. And the rest of the family, and all of your friends, have ostracized you. You’ve put yourself into voluntary exile, in punishment for your sins.”

Jake nodded, his food abandoned. “That’s about the size of it.”

This was the first warning sign. I love imperfect heroes with dark pasts and guilt. This however is not much in the past here. In fact, it is still going on and he seems pretty comfortable with his daughter running around the campus telling everyone his life story.
That sucks in my book. I would smack her one just for making my HIV status the topic of her conversations but add in the whole betrayal thing and man. I would be most angry with her.

Jake nodded, a little reluctantly. “I am, because I’m sure there’s a reason I should be. I just can’t imagine what that reason might be. I keep thinking I’ll figure it out, why I need to keep living. They’ll lose the life insurance if I shoot myself. I don’t know. And Lisa’s mother is not dying, unless she’s dying of spite. She’s taking the medicine, too, and enjoying being a feminist martyr. I’ve ruined her life several other times before this. But giving her HIV, that was a big one, no question.”

As I was saying, I love dark imperfect heroes but not one that calls the mother of his three children a “feminist martyr” because she happens to be a little pissed at him over his betrayal of their wedding vows and the little fact he gave her a terminal illness. How am I supposed to want to see this jerk in a new relationship? This is a Gay Romance right?

“I know this is awkward for you, Jake. I’m sorry. I know so much about you, so much personal stuff, and you didn’t have any say in it. I feel like you’re a really private person, and the dog just got into the laundry basket and dragged your dirty underwear out into the middle of the living room.”

Jake smiled. “I think I’m just used to being alone. I’ve never taken my medicine in front of anyone else, not even Lisa. My ex-wife, now, she probably takes her AZT with a video camera rolling.”

“What do you mean? Come help me with this firewood.” They walked back over to the downed tree and started breaking the smaller branches over their knees and feeding them into the fire.

“She tried to convince the DA to arrest me for attempted murder. She’s video-documenting the course of her illness and death, in case they ever change their mind and decide to toss my sorry ass in jail.”

Nathaniel looked up, surprised. “Are you kidding? Why does she think you gave her HIV, anyway? Maybe she gave it to you.”
“I don’t think so. I never saw her when I was out trolling the park for a quick blow job. Besides, we were just acting out our assigned roles, you know what I mean? Our lives have been set in stone since we were teenagers.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “Tell me.”

“I was seventeen. Her mother called me to get over there quick, the rabbit had died. I walked into her house. Gail had flung herself face down on the sofa, sobbing like Scarlett O’Hara. Her father’s glowering from the corner, balling his hands into fists. Her best friend’s perched next to her, stroking her hair and making all these soothing little noises. And that’s what it’s been like between us since. She’s the victim, I’m the asshole who ruined her life. So it was really no big surprise for either of us when I gave her HIV.”

“Trolling the park for a blow job? That sounds real lonely, Jake.”
Jake turned away, and his voice sounded like he was strangling. “That’s what I really regret. I can’t get it out of my mind. I think about those guys. Some of them were so young, and I didn’t even know their names, most of the time. Tad, Todd, I never cared. I hope I didn’t make any of those guys sick.” He cleared his throat and looked up.
“If we don’t get this fire going and change the subject pronto, you’re gonna be eating peanut butter crackers for supper.”

What The Fuck? Hey! Wow, wait a second!

First off this jerk, this doctor, this scum bag, has no fucking clue there are these things called condoms available over the counter at most corner 7/11s? Is protection from pregnancy and STDs the little woman’s job in his opinion? I mean, with that “feminist martyr” crap he is spouting I get the feeling that Dr. Jake Miller is a chauvinistic PIG FROM HELL. Not to mention all the self hate he displays for only a brief mention of all the men he probably infected also. All those men he was so hot for when he should have been home taking care of his wife and kids.

The first kid was a mistake. I can handle that. The second kid and the third kid were what? Forced on him by the eeeeevil bitch that trapped him into marriage? This with his continued harping on how she is somehow overreacting to HIS betrayal of their marriage, HIS giving her a terminal illness, and HIS public shaming of her by having “come out” in such a fucked up way.

Altogether this guy is a royal fucking jerk. At no time in this whole story does he admit just once he should have talked to her and been honest about the fact he was bi-sexual (The kids… I mean three, come on, catch a clue.) or gay *snort*. At no time does Jake really state he is responsible for the mess his life has become. Again and again I get this feeling he sees himself as yet another unfortunate victim when he chose to act in the way he did. There is no personal responsibility here for his own actions, no feeling that he honestly regrets anything but getting HIV and getting caught. Otherwise he feels he is spotless. What an asshole!

Let’s look up the definition of Involuntary Manslaughter for shits and giggles, shall we? (an unintentional killing but with a willful disregard for life) Oh yeah, I think Jake with his little “Condom? What’s a condom?” problem needs to be a little less nonchalant when it comes to the legal ramifications of his irresponsible sex practices. If she dies he could fall under this in a court of law. He most likely will not, but he could, it is possible. Where is the motivation here for him to change his love of strange sex in bathrooms with other men when he figures out he is not going to die tomorrow? I think he will not, not with the drinking and the denial and I hate to think he probably will infect others eventually.

Do not get me wrong after ten years in the Navy I can handle the fact male sexuality is not black and white. That due to our culture’s prejudiced nature married men suppress their sexual attraction towards other men all the time and in doing so find relief in the local public restrooms and parks. Hell, I have even been there. But… I do not lie to myself. I take responsibility for my own actions and try to live my life so I have as few regrets as possible. Not disavow my mistakes like this guy is doing and blame peoples negative reactions towards me on some stupid conservative pablum like a gay Rush Limbaugh. If I know they have a good reason to hate me, I will freely admit it has nothing to do with my being gay or HIV or whatever. If I make a mistake I try my best not to depend on shaky justifications and face the truth.

Grade D. For the simple fact I could not possibly ever want to see this asshole fuck anyone else over in another relationship with the admitted lies and demeaning attitude towards women he displays. It shows there are probably other deeper issues that simply do not make him a prize catch for anyone gay or straight.

What do other people say…
TwoLips Reviews
Joyfully Reviewed
Coffee Time Romance Reviews
Fallen Angel Reviews

Tags: Contemporary Romance, Gay, Grade D, Sarah Black, Torquere Press