IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD

Skylar King is a college recruitment officer with a rare chronic illness. Brandon Pike is a former pro snowboarder whose career ended in a very public accident. With pain setting the pace of their relationship, will they have the patience to learn one another’s rhythms?

The most important parts of Skylar’s life happen online, in the support group for people with chronic pain she started with her friends. It’s where she can be herself without having to worry about being professional or polite. Pike is an Olympic athlete whose entanglements with women are almost as legendary as his skill on the slopes. He finds much-needed anonymity in Skylar’s group until his mother pops up, responding to one of his posts on New Year’s Eve. Misinterpreting Pike’s raw grief for suicidal ideation, she threatens to call the police for a wellness check if he doesn’t call her. When Pike doesn’t respond, Skylar, trying to help, writes that she knows he’s fine because he’s asleep in her bed. Which is, to say the least, not true. And Pike is not happy, having always promised to tell his mother if he ever started dating someone. To make his mom stop hovering, Pike lightly blackmails Skylar by threatening to tell the other group admins what she did; thus, they enter a two-month fake-dating situation. Unlike the protagonists of many romance novels, Pike and Skylar get gritty—honest about their physical obstacles and very real about things like medical misogyny and toxic positivity. This book is also an extremely slow burn that pays off exponentially. The sex is super hot. Because Skylar and Pike learn early to communicate about pain and limitations, they’re great communicators by the time they do eventually hook up, which makes for some steamy dirty talk. Together they learn that while chronic illness comes with restrictions, their desire for one another does not.

A strong debut about characters who meet in the pause between pain and hope.