Mate

So, you know how in fandom there are PWP's (formerly lemons; help me I'm old)? Stories that take familiar characters, shove them together, make them do naughty things, and then are over roughly ten seconds after the mutual climax? That's what this, except the characters aren't familiar.

They're just two random guys. Apparently, one (or maybe both?) of them will be attending an upcoming Halloween party as a (were?)wolf, and this sparks a little bit of roleplay between them of the mostly unkinky variety. I think they were supposed to be playing at a consensual nonconsent scene, since one of them pretends to beg not to be hurt (while the other tries not to laugh, iirc), but this is honestly super tame and just involves a bit of rough shagging against a wall with a small amount of biting and play-growling. In fact, the ‘smut' is incredibly tame with no heat to it. Just some descriptions of thrusting, more or less, and a lot of focus on how good it felt or whatever.

In case you didn't notice: I'm already fuzzy on the details and I started writing this review immediately after I was finished. The story's so forgettable I legitimately can't recall which pieces were disclosed and which were blanks I filled in to make it make more sense. Maybe if the characters were actually familiar, there'd be some thread to tie this together and make it worthwhile. As a random scene in a romance novel, for example, I think it'd probably be alright.

As is, it's just meh, but at ten pages I hardly feel like it's long enough to rate. I borderline feel guilty it's going to count toward my 2021 reading challenge; if I hadn't already completed the goal, I'd probably refuse to add this one to the appropriate shelf.

Oh, one more thing! The download here on Goodreads is abysmal. It's a .pdf in a weird, small font that gets fuzzy when zoomed. Trying to convert it to an epub or mobi for accessibility purposes through Calibre just made a jumbled mess, thanks to the paperback-like structure with the author's name and book title atop every page. (C'mon. It's a ten-page free fiction. You don't need to do that!) So if you're like me and get eyestrain easily but are too lazy to deconstruct a converted ebook and fix it for merely ten pages of writing, you might want to skip this one.