reviews_and_ramblings | Top 100 Gay Novel: Faith & Fidelity by Tere Michaels

2 place winner as Best Characters in the 2009 Rainbow Awards

I think that the moral of this story is that love has not sex... and don't get me wrong since now I will explain why.

Evan is a NYPD Vice detective. He is the perfect good boy, a wife, four children, a suburban house. His life is perfect till the day his wife is killed in a car accident. After that Evan is lost: Sherri was his highschool sweetheart, they met when they were 14 years old and there was no other woman in his life; they grew together and Evan was perfectly happy, really. He never regretted to marry at 18 years old and to have soon after his first child. And now at 34 years old he is still young, but he seems to not have any reason to live if not his children.

Matt is a former NYPD Homicide detective. He trod on the toes of the wrong people and he was reassigned to patrol car service in Staten Island. Not suffering to fake his policeman role, he resigned and now he works in a security firm. But he is alone; the police department was his home, he has no family, and he seems to have no any purpose to go on.

Matt and Evan meet in a pub with a beer between them. They recognize the mutual loneliness and they make an unusual alliance; whenever Evan can have a night free from the kids, they meet at the same pub. They talk of work, sport, and whatever else two men can talk, but not of feelings or of the real reason they are together, that they are both alone. When Matt starts to realize that he has feelings for his friend, he is stunned: he has never had the same reaction to another man, he has always gone along well with women.

This is a love story, but I believe that this is also the tale of a deeply friendship. Both men have their reason to seek a gay relationship, even if maybe they don't realize it. Evan was so in love with his wife, that the thought of a new relationship with another woman is impossible, it would be a betrayal, like losing his wife again; loving a man is different, Matt is completely different from his wife, pun intended, and also the feelings and the sex is different. Evan can have both Matt and his wife memory at the same time, without having the feeling to betray one of them.

Matt sees in Evan the family he never had. Since he has always considered the Police Department his family, the fact that Evan is a detective is even better, it's something more that links them. And then Evan has a real family just ready to be picked and loved. Loving Evan in a physical way is easy since with him arrives an heavy luggage that Matt is eager to share. And loving Evan is also a way to re-enter the Police Department family he lost.

There is sex in this romance? Yes there is, but it's the sex you would expect from two apparently straight men who get together: clumsy, tentative, tender and sweet. It's always strange when you read about two men that should know nothing about gay sex, and that from the first time seems that they are playing in a porn; instead Matt and Evan don't know nothing and have also some fears, and you read and understand it. But they try and trying they are so sweet.

It's the first book I read by Tere Michaels, and it's also a very long book, 330 pages, but I hope not the last.