I'm reading all the romance finalists for the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards, which explains why I'm reading Tessa Bailey again. Reading this confirmed my truth: Tessa Bailey is not for me.

First up, Bailey creates these characters that are always so damn weird. There were things here that bordered on understandable. For the MMC, the weight of sexualizing him as a child and the difficulty of breaking free from his reputation. In true Bailey fashion, however, she takes it past understandable and into a place of unenjoyable. It was kind of ridiculous that Fox gets rejected ONE TIME IN COLLEGE and so he decides that the best thing to do is just treat women like objects??? Repetition doesn't help either because if I had to hear ONE MORE TIME that he was so hot that no one took him seriously, I was going to roll my eyes into an early death.

The FMC wants to take a next step in her career and be more assertive in her life, which is again understandable. Less so when she's complaining about not wanting to take advantage of being rich. Like, can't relate bestie. Get me out of here. Same with her love of music. It was a cute character thing until we mentioned it 3-5 times a page, send help.

The dynamic between the two of them had good bones. I enjoyed that it was kind of a quieter romance, in that it wasn't super dramatic, but in practice it kept making me uncomfortable. This is not really friends to lovers because Fox wanted to bang her from the beginning. And while we got a bit of their story in It Happened One Summer, the rush to establish their "friendship" at the beginning of this book with a few text messages did not work for me. Plus, it really bothered me that Fox spent so much time essentially thinking about how he didn't want to be Hannah's friend because he wanted to have sex with her. The story tried to play this off as part of his trauma, but Fox was making active choices about how to treat the women in his life. The fact that the tl;dr on this romance was Fox not wanting to be friends and Hannah wanting to fix him? Yeaaaah... Almost as bad as how blatant this was in using Hannah as therapy for Fox. They even joked about it and otherwise joked about therapy in a way I didn't actually find funny.

Because the conflict is very internal (Fox doesn't think he can love!) it means that it relies pretty heavily on mis-and poor communication. That's never my favorite, but there were a few moments here when it felt like downright plot holes because someone would would say something and the other character acted as if they never did??? Which led to a couple other things I don't like: breaking up for your own good and the third act inexplicable break-up.

As if all of that weren't enough, I really find Bailey's "dirty talk" and sex scenes cringey. I wanted to hide from the book I was reading at points. I know that makes no sense, but it's how I felt. Bailey kept describing things as male and female in ways that made no sense except for "yay, gender essentialism."

"In a daze, she watched as she wet his lower lip, rubbing the moisture with the top one, leaving his mouth looking fresh and male."

HIS MALE LOWER LIP? WHAT.

""Drop the oil, wet girl. We both know you don’t need it. ""

DID HE JUST CALL HER WET GIRL? Yes he did. And he called her a few other ____ Girl sort of nicknames that I also wanted to immediately purge from my brain.

He also kept referring to her vagina as her "thing." And her butt as her "buns." I wanted to die a little bit inside.

But I much preferred "thing" to whatever this was:

"the split of femininity"

"milking his thickness with her femininity"

THE SPLIT OF FEMININITY. I G2G.