WARNING: This piece discusses plot details, character arcs and endings for Blindsided (Fake Boyfriend book four) and the Winning You novella (book 4.5, part of the Fake Boyfriend Breakaways collection). If you’d rather go in blind, bookmark this for after you’ve read them.
Four books into Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series, and Blindsided is the one that got me the most — even if it doesn’t quite knock Deke off the top spot. It’s a close second, and after six years of two men aggressively not talking about their feelings, I’d say it earns the placing.
Who are Miller and Talon?
Shane Miller and Marcus Talon are new leads rather than background characters graduating from an earlier book, which makes Blindsided a bit of a structural departure for the series. They’re college best friends turned NFL teammates on the Chicago Warriors — the same team Matt Jackson plays for in Trick Play. Talon left for pro ball six years before the book opens; Miller buried what he felt for his best friend under his own drive to get drafted. Now Talon has taken a trade to Chicago specifically to play alongside Miller again, and Miller has no idea how to be near him without giving himself away.
Like the previous books before (and the Puckboys books), both men narrate, and the book’s blurb lays out exactly how long they’ve been circling each other.
Miller: “When Talon left to play pro ball six years ago, the hole in my chest confused me. I focused my heartache into making my own NFL dreams come true, and by the time I was drafted, the longing I had for my best friend was buried deep. Now he wants everything to be like it was in college, but we can’t have threesomes and be reckless like we once were. The media storm would be enough to break both our careers. That’s not my biggest concern though. The torch I had for him burns brighter after so long apart, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Marcus Talon is straight. I need to stay away from him.”
Talon: “Years ago, Miller and I made a pact that we’d win a Super Bowl together. When I’m offered a position on his team in Chicago, I don’t hesitate. I move across the country to chase a dream that’s a decade old. Only, now that I’m here, he’s avoiding me every chance he gets. If he was anyone else, I’d cut my losses. But this is Shane Miller — the guy who makes everything better just by existing in my universe. The guy I’d do anything for. The guy who’s more to me than a brother, a friend, or even a teammate. I’m not going to let him get away.”
Miller and Talon have had their share of threesomes and foursomes over the years, but never with each other — not since college, anyway. Now they’re on the same NFL roster and it’s starting up again, minus the touching, plus a lot of loaded looks.
READ MORE: Trick Play, the Fake Boyfriend book that introduced Matt Jackson
The twist Finley doesn’t mention until the thank-yous
Here’s the thing I didn’t clock until I got to the author’s note: Blindsided doesn’t actually contain the fake boyfriend trope. Two best-friends-to-lovers NFL players, six years of pining, zero fake dating required — and it works so well I didn’t notice its absence until Finley pointed it out herself. It’s confirmed on her own site, too: “unlike other books in the Fake Boyfriend universe, this entry does not contain a fake boyfriend trope.” Four books in, and the series can apparently carry itself without its own gimmick. I loved that more than I expected to.
READ MORE: Trick Play was book two of the Fake Boyfriend series — here’s how it went
READ MORE: Deke: the Fake Boyfriend book that finally made me pick a favourite
The Damonverse continues
The found-family sprawl keeps expanding. Maddox gets a cameo, and we learn it’s been about a year since he and Damon got together — a small detail, but it made me disproportionately happy to check back in on them. Ollie (from Deke) and (supporting Soren) turns up for a press event and Ollie’s partner Lennon Hawkins, the journalist from earlier books, interviews Miller and Talon directly. Damon King keeps quietly collecting queer sportspeople onto his client roster, one at a time.
The most affecting crossover is Matt Jackson’s. With Matt, Talon and Miller all on the same Warriors roster, Miller and Talon’s coming out inevitably lands on Matt too, and Finley uses Blindsided to keep exploring what Matt’s post-coming-out life looks like, rather than treating Trick Play‘s ending as the end of that story.
READ MORE: Deke, the Fake Boyfriend book my favourite so far
Winning You, and the accents that got away
Blindsided is followed immediately by Fake Boyfriend Breakaways’ final novella, Winning You (book 4.5), following Marty and Luce. I went in expecting a direct follow-on from Blindsided and got something else entirely: Winning You has very little to do with book four, and works much more as a prequel to book five. It took me an embarrassingly long time reading it to stop trying to connect it back to Miller and Talon.
What I didn’t expect, and loved, was the setting. Winning You is set mostly in Australia, which means actual Australian English on the page for once in a series that otherwise lives entirely in the US. Marty is a physicist; a nice Back to the Future nod given his name, and he picks up the nickname “Doc” for it. Luce teases Marty as “the devil” early on, then can’t resist the follow-up: “Which is funny, coming from me,” the first hint that Luce is short for Lucifer. Marty gets one of the better jokes in the series when Luce introduces himself: “Loose? Not really a great name if you’re a bottom.” Marty also turns out to be a big fan of Radioactive, the band Jet (Matt’s younger brother from Trick Play) fronts. He’s referred to as Jay throughout Winning You, which is the confirmation that “Jet” has been a nickname all along.
Winning You started life in the Heart2Heart anthology before it was extended and folded into the Fake Boyfriend Breakaways collection, released in September 2019. When I noticed that the lead characters were Aussie, I had to check out the audiobook. The audiobook is narrated, like most of the series, by Alexander Cendese and Iggy Toma … and was … a little disappointing. I was hoping the narrators would attempt to give Marty and Luce Australian accents the way Novi got a Russian accent in Puckboys book nine, Stubborn Puckboy, but no such luck. Both are performed American, which gets a little grating whenever someone says “MAL-BORN.”
Finishing Winning You means I’m officially done with Fake Boyfriend Breakaways: Rebound, It’s Complicated and now this. I loved all three, but this one might be my favourite of the set, purely for the novelty of an Australian setting inside an American series.
Where Blindsided sits in the series
Blindsided was released in March 2019, slotting in as book four of five, ahead of Hat Trick. Between Deke, Blindsided and the Breakaways novellas, this reading order has turned out to be far more interconnected than I expected going in.
Next up: Hat Trick, book five, which finally gives Jet Jackson his own story and is paired, if my notes are right, with hockey player Soren.
READ MORE: Starting ‘Fake Out’, the origin story behind this whole reading project