Go girl, give us nothing!

This chapter was so lacking in substance, just him over explaining his perspective to someone who really doesn’t care at all. It was like the reverse of show don’t tell. We already had the image of him that what he was talking about seemed to promote, that he’s doing his role as a worker of his company and knows about the sports world from personal experience, it’s like his whole character so this whole conversation just seemed so forced like he was speaking from a script of his character description or something. The romance is slow burn, the previous chapters in the pool were good, but there’s a difference between slow burn and slow paced. I would not say the story is slow paced, the plot does not feel dragged out since there are other things happening that helps move the pace. The lack of… anything in this chapter feels off since there’s is a certain amount of things to take in from each chapter and this chapter, containing barely anything, is the same length as any other so you’re reading the same amount of pages which feels lacking. This chapter was kinda ”go girl, give us nothing”.

The ”would you sleep with him if he asked” also feels very unnatural since main characters usually have small talks and have been slowly building, or re discovering, a deeper relationship were they can begin to open up. We know that the athlete probably harbored romantic feelings and admired the MC, whilst the MC saw him as a younger brother and now is somewhere in friends-work territory. Since MC hasn’t even begun to have doubts about if his feelings could be romantic the comment about sleeping together from a third party feels like a way to force the romantic pace to go forward without the characters actually interacting. It would make way more sense if MC was at the stage where he’s trying to convince himself the relationship between them is purely work related (because he’s in denial of the romantic feelings being there) but since there is no doubt there is no self-convincing needed either so everything just falls flat.

There was also a bit of a sentimental(ish) moment where MC made a comment about the other guy having children and he answered that he wish he could but can’t, followed by hinting at him labeling himself as a beta for work hinting at the reason being gender discrimination. (I know the whole point was to drop the hint that he’s an alpha too but sill) Immediately followed by ”so if he asked, would you sleep with him”.

Also, I know the author didn’t literally give us nothing and I don’t mean no disrespect, this chapter stood out from the rest in a bad way because the rest, all other chapters, were good.