WARNING: This piece discusses plot details, character arcs and endings for Trick Play (Fake Boyfriend book two), the Rebound novella and its bonus scene. If you’d rather go in blind, bookmark this for after you’ve read them.
I’m back with book two of Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series, and this time the two people I was quietly rooting for in the background of book one get their own story.
Who are Matt and Noah again?
We already met both of them in Fake Out. Matt Jackson was the college friend Maddox was hooking up with before Damon showed up. Noah Huntington III was Damon’s beautiful, obscenely rich best friend — the one Damon nearly set Maddox up with, before deciding he wanted Maddox for himself.
Matt is an NFL tight end for the fictional Chicago Warriors, and Trick Play opens with about the worst possible way to have a football career end: getting photographed in a compromising position at a gay bar. He’s outed involuntarily, his agent goes into damage control, and the fix on the table is becoming “the poster boy for gay football players” whether Matt wants the job or not. He doesn’t. He just wants back on the field.
Noah, meanwhile, is the son of Noah Huntington II — a former New York governor, now a sitting senator and he’s biracial, old money, and living in a Manhattan townhouse he inherited from his grandfather. He also founded Rainbow Beds, a charity providing housing for LGBTQIA+ youth, which tells you plenty about the gap between how Noah shows up in the world and how his own father actually sees him.
That gap is the hook. Noah’s best friend Damon — yes, that Damon, now Matt’s agent and, per the blurb, Matt’s first-ever client — talks Noah into playing fake boyfriend to Matt. “It’s supposed to be a win-win,” Noah says in the book’s blurb. “I get to stick it to my politician dad who thinks no one is good enough for the Huntington name, and Matt’s reputation of being the bad boy of football dies.”
Matt isn’t exactly sold on his half of the deal either. “If only my fake boyfriend wasn’t Noah Huntington III,” he says in his own blurb, “the most arrogant, entitled rich guy in the world.”
Neither of them plans on it turning into anything real. Obviously, it does. “What I don’t expect is to start caring for the guy,” Noah says. “That’s not part of the plan. Then again, neither is fooling around with him on my private jet.”
Matt is also a member of the “Gay Brigade” — Finley’s version of the found-family device I flagged when I worked through the Puckboys series (their NHL Queer Collective is basically the same idea, a decade of books later).
It’s a nice reminder Finley was already building this kind of queer athlete support network back in 2018, well before she started co-writing Puckboys with Saxon James.
The novella hiding inside it: Rebound
Here’s the bit I wasn’t expecting going in: Trick Play has its own spin-off, a novella called Rebound, and it forms part of the book Fake Boyfriends: Breakaways Specifically, it kicks off on the New York-to-Bermuda cruise that features in Trick Play, then plays out over about two months back in New York.
Rebound belongs to Aron Roe and Wyatt Black. Aron was Noah’s on-and-off hookup for about a year before this book (they’re still friends), and Wyatt has been quietly carrying a college crush on Aron since their Newport University days, back when Aron friend-zoned him without a second thought. A few drinks later — scotch, then tequila, not that anyone’s counting — Aron decides Wyatt is exactly the rebound he shouldn’t be having.
It’s a small, contained story, but it’s stitched firmly into the same universe as everything else. Noah, Damon and Aron’s old college girlfriend Skylar all turn up, all four of them friends from their Newport days. If you’re the kind of reader who wants every corner of a series filled in, Rebound is very much for you.
The bonus scene, and the book I’m reading next
Trick Play also comes with a bonus scene available at EdenFinley.com, told from the point of view of someone we haven’t properly met yet: Jet Jackson, Matt’s little brother.
Jet is a member of the Gay Brigade too, and the lead singer of a band called Fallout. The bonus scene is set after the Super Bowl (Trick Play itself runs from the end of a football season through to that Super Bowl), at an LGBTQIA+ charity benefit hosted by his now brother-in-law Noah, and it’s Jet’s nervy live debut of a deeply personal new song about growing up with Matt in a homophobic household. He spends the whole performance fixated on a tall stranger up the back of the room just to steady his nerves, and then the guy leaves before the song is even finished.
It’s a small scene, but it’s clearly doing set-up work. Jet is the lead of book five, Hat Trick, which is now next on my list. For anyone who’s been following along since the Puckboys pieces, Jet actually already got a cameo over there too, turning up in Clueless Puckboy. Small world, one author.
READ MORE: Heated Rivalry season two: the new castings, and the theory behind that shaved head
Where Trick Play sits in the series
Trick Play was first published in June 2018, with Rebound following two months later that August. They sit second and second-and-a-half in a five-book main series that runs Fake Out, Trick Play, Deke, Blindsided and Hat Trick, plus, it turns out, three novellas tucked in along the way.
Two books in, and Finley is already doing what she’d later do across all 10 Puckboys books: recurring friend groups, cameo after cameo, and a found-family network that keeps expanding sideways as much as it moves forward.
Next up: Deke, book three, then Blindsided, before I finally get to Jet’s book. If Trick Play is any indication, the connections are only going to get more tangled from here, in the best way.