Lust at First Bite 1: Bury Me

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Vigilante

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I wasn't going to recommend this one, but most of what I had in mind is either off-topic here or else gone from the web. Vigilante is the story of a cute college student working as a barista who ends up in love with a superhero, and that gets both of them into trouble. To be honest, the book bothers me because the titular vigilante is irresponsible and kind of a jerk. The setting is also realistic, so there are no superpowers, and people get hurt. But it's a good story, and might help quench someone's thirst for cute boys smooching. Things never get any farther than that within its pages, anyway.

The bigger problem is, you'll need a Wattpad account to read this (otherwise free) book, because they're just that much of a walled garden. Oh well.

How much romance does a book need?

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Asking because a few years ago I wrote a novel (my only one so far) that features a gay romance subplot in the last third. Which doesn't even get past the stage of cuddling.

(The reason it happens that way is because a whole other pairing was planned initially. Things didn't work out, and I got stuck, until an early beta reader pointed out that something was happening between these other two characters.)

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Might as well also advertise it as a vampire story simply because it happens to feature vampires extensively, even though it's not the main focus.)

Come to think of it, a trio of novelettes I wrote for a shared setting a few years before could be said in retrospect to be about the love story between a human and an AI. One that can't become physical, because reasons, and so remains purely romantic. Moreover, it's not even very explicit until the third part. Does that disqualify it?

In case you haven't noticed the trend, I'm pretty bad at noticing the way my own characters are looking at each other. (Don't ask about my love life.) And in most stories I'd rather not even go there, not least because, as I posted recently elsewhere:

It's 2018. There's no shortage of gay "romance" fiction where the protagonists shag each other silly, but not much else. We need more stories of men being sweet and gentle to each other, intimate not in bed, but in the sense of sharing secrets, and tears.

And yeah. I just recommended a book written along those lines earlier today. What can I say.