A
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance
Theme: Friends to Lovers, Friends with Benefits/No Strings Attached, Forced Proximity, Second Chance, Small Town, Sports
Archetype: Athlete
I’m not even going to pretend that I picked this book up by chance. I had meant to read it last year when it came out, but didn’t. I don’t know why. I don’t have a good reason. Post-Heated Rivalry TV show obsession, I remembered I had this novel waiting for me on my Kindle. I started it last night when I got in bed. I read it while I was pumping milk in the middle of the night. I read it when I woke up at 4am because it was hot already. I read it through my work day, ignoring the furious pings from my work computer. I just finished it now. It’s 11:35 and I’ve sent one work-related email today. Otherwise I have been reading. Such is the power of it.
Adam and Riley both played professional hockey for a Toronto team. They were best friends with benefits, but Adam always shied away from them being more. Adam married a woman and had kids. Riley moved to another hockey team and went decidedly off the rails thanks to a problem with alcohol and an undiagnosed mental illness. Riley left professional hockey behind and moved home to his small town in Nova Scotia. Adam carried on playing for Toronto. When the book opens they haven’t spoken to each other in 12 years. But have they been in love with each other the whole time? YOU BETCHA!
Second chance romance is tough to get right because the reason that it didn’t work out needs to balance with the love that pushes them back together. For the first 50% Riley is mad at Adam and he needs to be. Through his cowardice (not saying “I love you” back even though he felt it, etc.), Adam really let Riley down, but it was Riley who ultimately severed ties with Adam (to save his sanity). So both have some blame but it is Adam that has to do the grovelling. And he grovels beautifully.
The character development for both is great! In the intervening years, Riley has worked hard to reach stability, but growth rockets for both of them when they’re in each other’s lives again. Adam has to learn to be an out gay man and Riley has to learn to trust again.
Incidentally, while Adam spends a decade married to a woman and has two children with her, when he does decide to speak freely about his sexuality, he describes himself as gay.
These are giant emotions and as a reader, those emotions put me through a workout, in a good way.
Everything about their history and their past and present is a mess. The particular nature of the mess is revealed in bits and pieces as you read and you only have the full picture of the breakdown in their relationship after the halfway point, so I won’t go into specifics here.
Given how badly messed up things were between them at the end and how much ground they have to cover, is there a third act break up?
No! Instead there is a steady, inexorable, exhilarating build of emotion until they confess their endless love for each other. It’s glorious!
The sex is hot and in keeping with the kind of breathless besottedness they both feel. The way they love and explore each other’s bodies, bodies that have changed and not changed over the twenty-odd years since they first had sex, well, it’s mesmerizing.
There is so much emotion packed into this book. Big ones (the size of their love is extraordinary), overwhelming ones (predominantly around Adam getting to grips with his sexuality), messy ones (“you hurt me and I still love you and I want you to go away but I also want you to stay”). All of them!
And all of them were handled with such care. As a reader I felt safe letting my own emotions run with the story, knowing that they would be managed capably and my heart would glow by the end of it. And it did!
If you’re looking for a book that packs an emotional punch but is going to have you beaming with your whole body by the end, then this is the one for you. I heartily recommend it to the Bitchery.
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It’s a fabulous book: angsty, melancholy, hot, with two very strong character arcs of growth and self-insight. By a strange confluence of reading preference, subject matter, and publication dates, three of my favorite books of 2025 were dual-timeline/second-chance m/m hockey romances: Ari Baran’s GOALTENDER INTERFERENCE, Sarina Bowen’s THE LAST GUY ON EARTH, and Rachel Reid THE SHOTS YOU TAKE. Each one addressed the past in different ways, but THE SHOTS YOU TAKE was the most melancholy and emotional of the three. Reid’s writing (which you could already see strengthening with each subsequent Game Changers book) is really superb here as she transitions seamlessly between then and now and lets us see the hard work Adam is going to have to do to be forgiven (all the while accepting that his efforts may not be sufficient for Riley to be able to forgive him anyway). It’s a wonderful book—and your review highlights so many of the reasons why.
I steer clear of hockey romance in general because I DGAF about the game (and, IRL, hockey seems tied with baseball for “worst” in terms of how the players are used and abused by the governing bodies) but I picked this one up because it focused on players at the end / past the end of their careers, i.e. doing something other than hockey, so I could see them outside of that feculent, gladiatorial zoo.
For me, the gradual reveals and rapprochements were done very well, with one caveat. Adam did Riley real harm. The grovel was good, but the hasty conclusion to this otherwise leisurely-paced book left me unsatisfied. I did not get to see how they were actually going to make this relationship work.
Falling in love is always the easy part. It’s everything else that’s difficult, so skipping from “wow I still really love you let’s never stop doing this” to HEA without showing the work drives me nuts. In this case, not due to the author’s lack of ability to write it out, but almost as if someone told her the book could only be so long, so she had to wrap it up.
It would have been a five-star, guaranteed re-read if not for that.
SPOILER
Pre-epilogue, Adam hasn’t even come out! How are they going to have an out-in-the-open relationship?!
I stand by my StoryGraph review: If you took TOMMY CABOT WAS HERE (by Cat Sebastian) out of 1950s boarding school and put it in the modern NHL, you’d have this book. That’s not a bad thing, though.
Yess this is a great one!
I love this one! It was in my top ten reads in 2025. Great review!
This one really didn’t work for me. I never felt like Adam was anywhere near sufficiently redeemed. I didn’t think there was enough character development in general. Everything that wasn’t a sex scene seemed like it was just there to provide a little connective tissue between the sex scenes.