Affairs of M/Men

Here's a little tip: remind yourself of the character names before reading a short that appears before the start of the series. If you forget a character's last name and the story is about police officers, who go by their last names, you will completely miss the point of the story and have to read it over again.

In this case, it was fine because the story was nice the first time and fun the second. Here we are shown how Jacob and Vic first meet and we see Vic from Jacob's perspective. We see Vic's nerdiness and discomfort with himself, see that these neuroses are such a part of him that he is completely inwardly focused and unaware of a lot of what goes on around him. We see the beginning of Jacob's attraction and how Vic is completely oblivious as usual. I particularly liked how Price presented Jacob's attraction without using words that are only about what someone looks like or that are the kinds of things girls would say, like "adorable" or "cute" or "hot" which wouldn't really fit at all anyway.

The whole scene is really adorable despite the lack of that word appearing in the text, and a delightful look at this couple from a different perspective. It's also a good intro to the series, although understandably it doesn't have the tenderness of the later works simply because they aren't dating yet.

Again, I highly recommend this story as well as the whole series.