In The Boyfriend Subscription by Steven Salvatore, Salvatore takes all the elements of Pretty Woman, mixes them up, and comes back with a unique story.
Our heroes are Teddy Hughes and Cole Vivian (get the names?). Teddy is more Julia Robert's Vivian and Cole more Richard Gere's Edward, except that Cole is the sex worker in this story. Teddy has just lost his husband, his business, and all his money in a bitter divorce. He has declared bankruptcy and is getting ready to move back home with his mother while he figures out how to start from scratch.
Cole is a poor little rich boy with daddy issues. He was disowned by his father a few years before the action of this book when he refused to go to work for the boring family business, because that was not his dream. He moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he started a sex work app for gay, transgender and nonbinary people, and became a billionaire from it. He also provides content for the app himself. This part is a little unclear but it appears that he both does sex work and also provides video of himself doing sex work.
Cole is in New York for business and a family wedding. He meets Teddy, they go back to Cole's hotel, they like each other and are massively attracted to each other, and Cole offers Teddy $7,000 to present himself as Cole's boyfriend for a week. Sex is not part of the paid deal, but they both want it.
There is a disapproving but ultimately kindly hotel concierge. There is a shopping montage. There is betrayal by Cole's second-in-command at work. In other words, all the Pretty Woman beats, some of them explicitly name-checked.
There were things about this book that I loved. Okay, I loved Teddy and his story, mostly because I believed it. If you read this blog regularly you know that nothing warms my heart more than a story that takes a character's work seriously. Teddy is a horticulturalist who, prior to losing everything, owned a very good and very popular plant shop in Manhattan. The best scene in the entire book is towards the beginning, when he is closing his shop for the last time. A customer comes in and is looking for a gift. The shop is almost cleared out but Teddy is able to put together a beautiful presentation by combining some leftover planting scraps. Salvatore's description of this creation was so vivid that I could absolutely picture it. This scene made me believe in Teddy's training, competence, and love for plants. In short, it made me believe in Teddy.
Not so much with Cole. His job made no sense. On the one hand, in a few short years he has become a self-made billionaire, or at least a very multi-millionaire, through his app. He is the CEO of his company. But he also does sex work and creates content from the sex work? During the action of the book he simply walks out of an important work party, with no consequences. Then he does barely any work for the rest of the week.
This made no sense to me. CEOs of huge companies that are going public work very long hours (at least, if they are doing the actual work, as seems to be the case with Cole, and are not merely a figurehead). They do not have enough time to create their own content, much less keep their bodies in the kind of shape that would make them the hottest person in the world (more or less) to people scrolling the app. That -- the content creation and having the body to do it -- is in itself a fulltime job. And, why would Cole continue doing sex work himself? I'm not knocking sex work. (No one could knock sex work after the many discourses in this book about how no one should knock it.) I'm just saying, I can't imagine any sex work paying enough that it is worth the tradeoff from the hours Cole needs to spend in his position as CEO, which, given how rich he is, must provide a return on time hundreds or thousands of times greater than the best paid sex work could possibly do.
That aside, this book told a sweet story about two people having to fight very hard to overcome their baggage to make their way to each other. I enjoyed it and I recommend it.
Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited and in paperback. Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
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