Home Ice

Saxon James

TAI Ten years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my life. When Hawke left for the NHL and my hockey dreams went up in smoke, I ghosted my best and longest friend. It made sense at the time, but there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t missed him. So when we run into each other again, and his only response is “Do I know you?”, I know I deserve it. But I refuse to let one mistake keep us apart forever. Especially when he has bigger problems, and I’m in a position to help him. JENSEN All I wanted this offseason was to spend my time relaxing–not getting an emergency phone call from Mom to come home. My hometown is full of too many memories of me and Tai so I avoid returning there as much as I can. But now I have one more memory to add to the list: my high school girlfriend. And the kid we apparently had together. Kasen hates me and thinks I abandoned them, and my only way to get to him is through his coach. My ex-best friend. The friend that has been impossible to forget. No matter how much I’ve tried.

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Play

Nikki Markham

Bree is alone. She broke up with her boyfriend, stopped playing with her Domme, and after doing so, unintentionally lost all of her friends. Struggling to find a new balance in her life, she meets the beautiful and—hopefully bisexual—bookstore clerk, Harper, who offers her things Bree's only dared to dream of. Harper is friendless and wandering, wondering if maybe she's made up her attraction to women in her head. But after one look at Bree's wide, sad eyes, she knows her attraction is the real deal. Harper is sure she's ready to date a woman, but is she ready to be the dominant partner Bree so desperately needs? Nothing is off the table when it comes to the kind of games they want to play with each other and nothing is out of bounds...not even other people. Bree longs for the love she found through polyamory, but she's unsure if her relationship with Harper will stand once it's opened. Do Harper and Bree have a future together, or is love just another kind of game for them to play?

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Priestdaddy

Patricia Lockwood

The childhood of poet Patricia Lockwood was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children. When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity—and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.

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Higher (Hot for the Holidays, #2)

Roz Alexander

Where do dreams go to wait? Tali Blue is definitely going back to finish her last semester of rabbinical school...eventually. When she moved back to her hometown seven years ago to help her grandparents raise her younger sisters, she planned on it being temporary. Now though, she has a stable job and a stable life surrounded by the people she’s known forever. It’s all just fine - and then there’s the incredibly annoying surprise of Maple. Maple never meant to be successful. She just wanted to make weird art and practice her Ladino. And just like that, 15 years of adulthood has built a solid career, a great reputation as an art instructor, and a lackluster love life. It doesn’t help that she’s been spending all her free time consumed with making it as a Sephardic Jew into the Jewish art world that never seems to have space for her. And it definitely doesn’t help that she’s strictly a butch for butch lesbian. And then comes a sex goddess in the form of short, chunky, smoking hot, and incredibly nervous, butch, Tali Blue. When Tali’s love of family, Maple’s art ambitions, and a Rosh Hashanah effort to #savethebees force these two together, both of them may learn that the only way out is up, together. This new year the honey is dripping on a lot more than apples. Higher is a steamy, butch for butch, grump-sunshine sapphic romance about what happens when you choose to take your dreams higher. This is the sweet and sexy second volume in the "Hot for the Holidays" series, a collection of queer Jewish love stories that can be read in any order and all year round. Find all content notes on the author's site.

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