I think when I first came across Jay Northcote’s Housemates series, only the third book was available on Kindle Unlimited. I don’t think I was too inconvenienced, because, the first two didn’t grab me right then. They were made available on KU a few days ago, so I decided to give them a go. Fortunately, the books work well as stand-alones, so reading them out of order didn’t leave me feeling like I was turned around in the story.
This first book in the series is about Mac and Jez who kind of bombed in their freshman year and were now hanging back in their sophomore year to make up for it. Jez was on a mission to pay down his overdraft and Mac was burying his nose in his books. Nights and weekends saw these two making do with home entertainment. That generally came in the form of movies and video games until one day Jez got a little turned on by a scene in a film. Seeing as it wasn’t a skin flick, it wasn’t quite doing it for him, so he introduced porn to their chill at home routine. I suppose you can figure out what happens from there.
I enjoyed the story–it was cute. I liked that Mac was upfront about how weird it–group masturbation–was for him, but yet he kept going with it. I also liked how Jez was constantly telling himself that he wasn’t forcing Mac and if Mac didn’t like it, that was on him. He was right, of course, but I was happy that he wasn’t crooning to the tune of “I dragged you into this” for the whole story. My favorite part was the conversation they had when they decided they wanted to be together.
“What do you want, Mac?”
“You.”
It was a total “aww” scene.
This was a decent story and I’m glad I didn’t read it when I first came across it, because it was a perfect read for when I finally did.
