HEY FRIENDS, I AM SOOOO EXCITED ABOUT THIS NEXT REVIEW, NOT ONLY IS MY GIRL AMY HERE TO REVIEW IT, BUT I READ THIS ONE TOO AND IT IS BEYOND AMAZING!! BELOW IS AMY'S REVIEW, THE LINK AND EVEN AN EXCERPT OF SEPTEMBER BY ROBERT WINTER!!
THIS QUOTE IS PERFECT FOR BOTH OF THESE MEN IN THIS STORY! TRUST ME!! HERE IS AMY'S REVIEW:
September
A Pride and Joy Novel
by: Robert Winter
reviewed by: Amy Casey
David James is smart, successful, handsome… and alone. After the death of his lover, Kyle, from cancer, he buried himself in his law practice and the gym. At forty-eight, he is haunted by his memories and walled off from the world. When David injures himself working out, he’s assigned to Brandon Smith for physical therapy. The vibrant young therapist is attracted to David and realizes he needs a hand to get back into dating. What begins as a practice coffee date escalates to friendship, passion, and maybe something more, as they navigate a new relationship in Washington, DC, and the gay mecca of Provincetown.
But David remains trapped behind the barrier of fear and guilt. Will he remain loyal to Kyle’s memory if he moves on? Can he and Brandon manage a twenty-two-year age gap? Brandon thinks he understands David’s concerns, and for him, the answer to those questions is yes. He wants to be with David, and he believes he can overcome David’s barriers. But Brandon fails to account for the world’s reaction to a handsome young man attached to an older, wealthy lover. David’s memories, Brandon’s pride, and an unexpected tragedy might cost them something very special.
This is a new author for me and what a story he wrote. Robert Winter wrote an amazing love story!!! Truly had me gripping my Kindle, hoping for the best and fearing for the worse. You will shed some tears, its that good, really good!
Brandon is a young man from Texas now living in Washington DC and working as a physical therapist. He doesn't have much with student loan payments, a very small apartment and credit card bills. He wants a relationship.
David is a lawyer, still grieving over the loss of his partner after 15 years together. He has a fantastic job, a beautiful house, money but he is alone. He doesn't think he can love again, he can't go through losing someone he loves. His friends are encouraging him but he turns them down.
David has an injury he sustained during CrossFit workout and the doctor sends him to PT. First look at David and Brandon is hooked but will David give him a chance?
The story goes through getting to know each other, falling in love, fighting against falling in love and making mistakes that seem insurmountable. Then tragedy strikes, can this bring David and Brandon together or push them farther apart?
There are twist and turns, love and anger, sweetness and craziness all wrapped up in this wonderful love story. You can't miss this book!! It has it all, funny, sad, sexy and sweet!!
I give this book 5 weights......I'd give it 10 if I could!! I look forward to more books by Robert Winter!!!!
I'M WITH AMY ON THIS ONE, THIS WAS MY FIRST ROBERT WINTER BOOK ALSO, BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR BISCUIT IT WON'T BE MY LAST! AMAZING!! BELOW IS THE LINK, GRAB THIS BOOK TODAY!!
NOW FOR AN EXCERPT:
David
WE OPEN on a man, forty-eight years old, stretched out on a king-size bed in a room in Washington, DC. The room is large, the man quite handsome, but he is alone. Except for an orange cat, no one else shares his big house.
He sleeps restlessly, occasionally pounds his pillow in frustration, and then drifts back into fitful dreams. For more than two years—at work and at the gym—he has been reasonably successful at exhausting himself so he can get through the night. Something has changed, though, and work and hard exercise are no longer enough.
If confronted he might admit that he has been burying himself prematurely. Perhaps all he was really doing was allowing himself time to grieve, to heal. Now he feels a tug back toward the surface. He’s starting to think that it’s time at last—time to see what the next phase of his life can hold for him, time to discover if he can still feel the passion that has been missing for so long.
Maybe time to let someone in, past the walls he has erected.
DAVID DREAMT that he and Kyle were diving somewhere. Jewel-colored fish caught shafts of sunlight from the surface and glittered in the cool water, and Kyle swam ahead as the beauty surrounding them distracted David. When David looked up, he could find no trace of his lover. He began to panic, and frantically pulled himself through the water as he tried to catch up. He knew, in dream logic, that his air was running out. He could see daylight above, could save himself, but he couldn’t abandon Kyle. He had to reach him….
The alarm went off, and David jerked up in bed, gasping. As reality set in, he looked at the clock. It read quarter past six. “Fuck,” he muttered as he slammed the edge of his fist on the snooze button.
He lay back down, wide-eyed, but the dream was already fading. Despite having the rest of the king-size bed to claim, his cat Eartha was curled in a ball by his thigh. She didn’t move when he stirred. She was too used to his restlessness. David stared at the ceiling as his heart rate returned to normal. When the alarm buzzed again, he got to his feet and switched it off. Already he had forgotten most of the dream and knew only that it had been about Kyle. Again.
The oak treads creaked under his feet as he went downstairs, and Eartha padded after him. David took his first cup of coffee of the day into the living room, where he liked to stretch and get himself ready for CrossFit. He lay on his side on a foam roller and worked his right leg up and down slowly, easing tension and a few knots. Eartha pushed her cold nose against his cheek as he worked, but scampered away as he rolled over to repeat the stretches on the left. Next his calves and then his ankles. He could remember being thirty and running to the gym with no preparation at all.
No one had warned him what it was like to reach forty-eight and to need to get the muscles moving each day. Kyle, a natural athlete, used to laugh at David’s preparations. Kyle was always limber, flexible, and ready to go when he jumped out of bed. David’s chest tightened—had been ready to go.
Twenty minutes later he left the house on a chilly March morning, and his breath puffed in the air. That early only a few cars passed as he walked up Fifteenth Street, turned right onto Church Street, and entered the CrossFit gym. He shook off the last of the dream as he hung his hooded jacket and his keys on a small pegboard near the door.
The usual morning crew was already there, warming up. One of his workout buddies was lying on his side, stretching his shoulder with a hard rubber ball. “Hey, Terry,” David called.
Terry grunted, obviously having found a tight spot. “Morning, Davy. Did you see the WOD today? Gonna be a bitch.”
David glanced at the dry-erase board, where the coach wrote out the workout of the day, or WOD. Not too terrible, he thought. Three rounds of exercise, measured for time—fifteen burpees followed by twenty pull-ups and twenty-five sit-ups in each round. He was slower than a lot of the men and women in his group, but he could get through that workout.
After a warm-up, the coach, Rebecca, started the digital clock and called out, “Go.”
Most of the athletes were a lot younger than both Terry and David and flew through the early stage of the routine. One guy, Jack, was a show-off but had the body for it. After he finished his first round, he ostentatiously pulled off his shirt and threw it to the ground to expose his wide shoulders, well-developed arms and pecs, and the light spray of hair across his chest. Torso glistening with sweat, hips hugged by his workout shorts, he was damned sexy, and he knew it. Just recently David had become aware of trying not to look. Geez. He could have a son that age.
David felt a little competitive fire and slammed through the next set of pull-ups as fast as he could. He squeezed his shoulders together, pulled his chin above the bar, and then dropped to full extension, kipping to build rhythm for the next pull-up. His shoulders and biceps burned, but he gritted his teeth and kept going, quietly chanting, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
He dropped from the bar, shook out his arms, and then flopped to the ground on his back to begin the sit-ups. His gut burned with the exertion, so after twenty-five, he gave himself a short breather and rested on his back. Two of the men and one of the women were already done.
Steeling himself mentally, he stood to begin the third set of burpees. God, he hated these. Down to his hands, kick out with both feet, execute a tight push-up, spring back to a squat, jump up into the air and clap his hands. Then another, and another. Sweat poured down his face. He called up a mental image of Kyle for strength—Kyle in shorts and a tank as he finished a marathon, exhilaration on his handsome face as he crossed the line after four hours of running. The WOD was nothing compared to that.
David moved on to the pull-ups. As he neared the fifteenth, he felt a strange pain in his right shoulder but he kept working, kipping his body hard to get through.
Then the last set of sit-ups. He was panting, abs on fire, almost done. Finally he finished the last sit-up and gasped out, “Time.” He lay on his back, sweat-drenched against the gym floor as he gathered his breath and his strength.
When everyone was through, Rebecca said, “Nice work, everybody. Good intensity.” She gave them some instructions for mobilizing their bodies to get ready for the next day’s WOD, and they were done. The following class was ready to take the gym floor, so David moved off to the side of the room and grabbed his keys and hoodie. Jack was wiping sweat off with his discarded shirt, and Terry murmured next to David, “Maybe we can get him to work out completely naked next time.”
David laughed. “Perv. He’s straight.”
Terry said, “Doesn’t mean we can’t fantasize. Besides, I think he likes to show off a little too much, considering how many of us queers are in the class. And I saw him watching you finish your WOD.”
David shook his head ruefully. “He probably just wants to see if I’ll have a heart attack so he can use his EMT training.”
Terry said, “Always with the age shit. You do great here, but you like to talk like you’re a hundred.”
“I feel like it sometimes. Those burpees kill me.”
“You got time for breakfast?”
David nodded. “Sure. That sounds nice.”
Seated at a booth in a diner around the corner from the gym, David ordered coffee and an omelet with egg whites, chicken, and spinach. Terry rolled his eyes. “I want chocolate chip pancakes with extra syrup, please,” he said to the waiter. Then he looked back at David with one brow quirked. “How you can eat so healthy after a WOD like that is sickening. What’s the point of working hard if you can’t indulge later?”
“What’s the point of working hard if you just eat back all the calories? You’ll see. At some point the metabolism just slows down, and you can’t eat everything in sight.”
“Okay, I’ll eat like a pig until I’m fifty, and then I’ll start starving myself like you.”
“What have you been up to?” David asked.
“I had a fun hookup over the weekend, but it was one of those no-strings-attached, on-the-down-low, what-the-fuck things. I doubt he even gave his real name.”
“And Joe really doesn’t mind when you play around with someone else?”
“Fuck no. Joe gets off on my stories. We have sex together too, sometimes. But with Joe it’s more… cerebral. He likes hearing about my adventures. Like last night this guy had this great cock that curved to the left….” Terry paused as the waiter returned with their food.
David chuckled. “Stop with your stories. I’m not Joe, and I don’t want to hear the sordid details. Besides, I don’t have enough time to jerk off before I go to work.”
Terry shoved a forkful of pancakes into his mouth and chewed, looking directly at David with his eyes narrowed. “When was the last time you got laid?”
“Oh God. I haven’t had sex in, well, I don’t even remember,” David lied. He did remember. It was the morning of the day that Kyle started chemo. They had both been scared, and it wasn’t particularly good, but they needed some way to connect. After that, Kyle was always weak and ill from the treatment, and the cancer was aggressive. They touched a lot, and held each other in Kyle’s hospital bed—but no sex.
And nothing since Kyle died.
I CAN'T STRESS ENOUGH HOW AMAZING THIS STORY IS, YOU GUYS HAVE TO READ IT, AND THANKS TO AMY FOR A WONDERFUL AND OH SO TRUE REVIEW! SEE YOU GUYS NEXT TIME!
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