Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Off Campus
SERIES: Bend or Break #1
AUTHOR: Amy Jo Cousins
NARRATOR: Cooper North
PUBLISHER: Insatiable Press
LENGTH: 10 hours and 28 minutes
RELEASE DATE: September 14th 2016
BLURB:
Everyone’s got secrets. Some are just harder to hide.
With his father’s Ponzi scheme assets frozen, Tom Worthington believes finishing college is impossible unless he can pay his own way. After months of sleeping in his car and gypsy cabbing for cash, he’s ready to do just that. But his new older-student housing comes with an unapologetically gay roommate. Tom doesn’t ask why Reese Anders has been separated from the rest of the student population. He’s just happy to be sleeping in a bed.
Reese isn’t about to share his brutal story with his gruff new roommate. You’ve seen one homophobic jock, you’ve seen ’em all. He plans to drag every twink on campus into his bed until Tom moves out. But soon it becomes clear Tom isn’t budging. Tom isn’t going to let some late-night sex noise scare him off, especially when it’s turning him on. But he doesn’t want any drama either. He’ll keep his hands, if not his eyes, to himself.
Boundaries have a way of blurring when you start sharing truths, though. And if Tom and Reese cross too many lines, they may need to find out just how far they can bend before they break.
Warning: This book contains cranky roommates who vacillate between lashing out and licking, some male-male voyeurism, emotional baggage that neither guy wants to unpack, and the definitive proof that sound carries in college housing.
REVIEW:
I started this series with Nothing Like Paris, book 2 in this series. The antipathy toward Jack that I read in several GoodReads reviews made me curious to know what had transpired in book 1. Boy am I glad I looked into it. Of course I got my answer, but more importantly, my predilection for broken winged birds was fulfilled here two fold with Tom and Reese.
Tom Worthington has been incredibly damaged by his father’s “guidance.” The old man was part con-man and part businessman. The exposure of his dad’s ponzi scheme, his criminal prosecution and imprisonment effectively made Tom an orphan, (and a pariah). Tom went from privileged prep school golden boy athlete to tabloid fodder overnight. With all the family assets seized and/or frozen, Tom lived in the family mansion until it was sold.
When the book opens, Tom’s been sleeping for a time in his BMW, the only thing that seems to be beyond the feds’ seizure ability. He’s been driving the car as a gypsy cabber to make money for food (when he can afford it.) Saving every penny he can, after a year he has managed to squirrel enough away to pay for his next semester of college. Given his notoriety, he’s been given clearance to live in some student housing off-campus.
Openly gay student Reese Anders is also returning to college. A victim of sexual assault during his first foray into academia, Reese has also been permitted to live off campus in what he assumes to be a single. He’s not at all prepared to return to his room to find a straight jock standing in “his” room. Both boys have lost their ability to trust anyone. Seeing this prickly pair come together is one of the sweetest reading surprises I’ve had this year.
Sweetening the pot, we soon find that Tom possibly isn’t as straight as he always thought he was. Reese’s attempts to drive him away with a constant stream of tricks probably isn’t going to work. Seeing these two get over their initial antipathy and move toward empathy is perhaps one of the best “enemies to lovers” scenarios I’ve ever encountered.
A scene where Tom is suffering from a burn and Reese takes his mind off it, is one of those scenes that immediately etched itself in my mind. Yes, it’s many a gay boy’s fantasy to seduce a straight boy but this scene told from the POV of that straight boy is just plain hot. It’s also one of the most romantic sex scenes ever. No matter how many books I read this year, this is one of the scenes that I’ll remember.
Tom’s attraction to Reese is also possibly one of the most convincing “gay for you” scenarios I’ve ever encountered. At the book’s outset he truly thinks of himself as straight. Toward the end when the boys have (temporarily) split up, Tom finds that he can be attracted by another man, but he immediately realizes that he’s “still Reese’s.”
Oddly, the least enjoyable bits of this were attempts at verisimilitude where the author gets much too specific about the subject matter that Tom is reading for his business degree. Almost without exception those references felt like breaks in the “real” story. At one point I tried to decide if it was because the material was so far from what I’d had to read as an undergrad business major, or if it was just distracting from what I’d rather she be talking about. I know that getting background details right is a tricky balancing act. e.g. I can still recall that James Hart was studying contracts in The Paper Chase but I can’t recall a single specific thing that Oliver Barrett IV, studied when pursuing his law degree.
Another uncomfortable thought came after one of the sweetest parts in the story. Reese is reassuring Tom that simply going out of one’s way isn’t being manipulative like Tom’s dishonest dad had been. It becomes clear that a lifetime of living with a man like that was more damaging to Tom than Reese’s being betrayed by his room-mate on the night that he was molested had been to him. A brief flicker of a thought that the 45th President of the USA had grown up with that type of father, and any empathy for that pathetic human being was the most uncomfortable part of listening to this whole book.
One other note… Tom’s straight friend Cash is a charmer. He has that adorable, “dude-bro,” brash puppy quality, so many straight jocks tend toward. He’s equal parts clueless and potentially damaging without any real ill-intent. He was such a well liked figure among readers when this book first came out that book three ends up being his. Though it’s basically an M/F tale, I’ll probably read it as well.
Cooper North does the narration here and he does a great job of it. He gives Tom a gravelly, world weary pissed off quality, while giving Reese a more youthful, chipper quality. Despite his wounded nature, and his repeated protests that he’s not a “kid” and is only a year younger than Tom, he just sounds younger and less damaged. Cash and Bi gal-pal Steph are also fun in this and well voiced by Mr. North.
RATING: 
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