Fair Game by Josh Lanyon

[lightreads]

Fair Game by Josh Lanyon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I started this book about six hours ago, just after eleven last night, and read it through in bleary bursts, folded in half in a wooden-armed hospital chair. My feet tucked up to keep warm, disentangle every hour or so to stretch out and pace. Midnight vitals check, three a.m. narcotics, realizing that I’ve heard everything that the woman in the other half of the room has said for the past sixteen hours – about a hundred times more exposure than anyone on staff – and wondering how exactly one goes about pulling aside a night nurse and gently suggesting that they need to slow down a second, take another look, maybe it’s time for a psych consult here. Clocking my girlfriend when she can actually get to sleep to see if she’ll get through a full REM cycle even once tonight, tracking meds, icepacks, mugging the charge nurse to make sure the order for solid food actually goes through. And this book.



Books are – okay, yes I have in fact been awake for days at this point, but it’s not like I don’t also think this when I’m fully sane: books are amazing. Books are fucking magic. The right book, matched to the moment. (My brain supplies at this juncture a reference to transcendentalism, and a stupid metaphor about keys in locks).



And this was the right book. Gay romance – well, a serial killer hunt while estranged lovers, fledgling relationship smothered by the shock and trauma of sudden injury, find their way back to each other. A bit playful with mystery tropes, nice depth, pockets of quiet emotional richness. I picked this book because I thought it would be distracting. It was, but I had no idea it would make me laugh a little to myself. There you are sometimes, having what’s supposed to be a one night stand, and then boom five years down the line you’re crunched up in a hospital chair at four in the morning, listening to your girlfriend dream oxycodone dreams and sighing as you finish the exact right book.



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