Stella is woman in her 30s (?) with a good job, good money, good relationships with her parents, but horror of horrors she does not have a boyfriend or husband. When her mother suggests that she’s ready for grandchildren, Stella feels the pressure of all of her failed romantic encounters dragging her towards childlessness. Stella knows that she is bad at sex and that is the reason why she cannot hold down a man. So she makes a plan to fix herself so that she can get a boyfriend, who will eventually be her husband.
Right off the bat, the author does an interesting job balancing problematic ideas that the characters hold with a more truthful reality. While out to dinner with her parents, Stella’s mother refers to her as having Asperger’s, an outdated term. It becomes clear throughout the course of the book when everyone else uses “autism” instead of “Asperger’s” that this shows that Stella’s mom is supportive but out-of-touch. Similarly, we are quickly disabused of the idea that Stella is correct in assuming she is bad at sex. We get vignettes of her previous sexual encounters and immediately see that the men in these scenarios were selfish, indelicate, and a bit gross. Stella’s main faults in these encounters are blaming herself for others’ inadequacies and not communicating her actual needs. This is all before we actually meet the MMC.
Back to Stella’s plan. Her plan is to hire an escort to teach her to be good at sex so that she can apply her new knowledge to help her get and keep a boyfriend. Enter Michael. Michael has begrudgingly taken up escorting. We start off knowing very little about Michael except that escorting isn’t his full time job. He seems to mostly do this as a Friday-night gig to pay some kind of mystery bills. From his first meeting with Stella, he knows she’s not like his other clients. She is thoughtful, considerate, and a bit misguided about her own sexual interests and abilities. He’s not super keen to go through with the plan of “lessons” because he’s had issues with clients getting too attached in the past, but Stella wins him over and he agrees to three lessons.
From there we get more insight into each character’s lives, an escalation of their relationship, tension created by miscommunications, and some decent smut. I had a few issues with the book throughout. I’m finding that I don’t love the repetitive, internal monologue that riddle (some?) romance books, and there was a lot of repetition in Michael’s narration that came off a lot like vague-booking. There were some plot points that felt a bit contrived, and all of the other male characters are duds. But overall, the characters are charming and interesting, the story is cute enough, and the smut is smut.
