HeartShip

By Amy Jo Cousins

Benji never meant to catfish a hot college football player in Minnesota when he met a fellow anime fan online. But when @joshfortytwo announces he’s coming to Miami for a spontaneous visit, Benji is pretty sure the left tackle—whatever that is—expects to meet a cute girl in a bikini, not an aging twink hoping to finally get his life together when he finishes massage therapy school.

Josh doesn't let himself wonder about questions like:
•why don't you want to ask @princessglitter if she's a girl?
•why don't you tell your friends that you can't hang on Sunday nights because you've got a date to watch anime with your new BFF?
•why do you call it a date?
All he knows is that he needs to escape from the stress of having been injured just before the bowl game, and @princessglitter has somehow become his best friend.

But when Josh's secrets and Benji's sex appeal smash together for forty-eight scorching hours, they're going to feel the heat from Miami to Minnesota.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amy Jo Cousins
• Release date: Apr 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370320646

Amy Jo Cousins

A.J. Cousins knows one thing for sure: the people who read and write romance novels are the smartest, funniest, kindest, and most optimistic souls on the planet and finding a place in this community has been like coming home. She lives in Chicago, where she writes contemporary romance, tweets more than she ought, and sometimes runs way too far. She loves her boy and the Cubs, who taught her that being awesome doesn't necessarily have anything to do with winning. Please visit her online!

Book preview

HeartShip

HeartShip

Amy Jo Cousins

Contents

About This Book

YouTube comment section, August 2015 (RWBY, Episode One: Ruby Rose)

Chapter 1

Twitter, August 2015

Chapter 2

Twitter, September 2015

Chapter 3

Twitter, October 2015

Chapter 4

Twitter, November 2015

Chapter 5

Twitter, December 2015

Chapter 6

Twitter, December 2015

Chapter 7

Twitter, January 2016

Chapter 8

Twitter, January 2016

Chapter 9

Twitter, February 2016

Chapter 10

Twitter, April 2016

Thank you!

Excerpt from HeartOn

Want More Books by Amy Jo?

Excerpt from Off Campus

About the Author

Some mistakes are worth making.

Benji never meant to catfish a hot college football player in Minnesota when he met a fellow anime fan online. But when @joshfortytwo announces he’s coming to Miami for a spontaneous visit, Benji is pretty sure the left tackle—whatever that is—expects to meet a cute girl in a bikini, not an aging twink hoping to finally get his life together when he finishes massage therapy school.

Josh doesn't let himself wonder about questions like:

why don't you want to ask @princessglitter if she's a girl?

why don't you tell your friends that you can't hang on Sunday nights because you've got a date to watch anime with your new BFF?

why do you call it a date?

All he knows is that he needs to escape from the stress of having been injured just before the bowl game, and @princessglitter has somehow become his best friend.

But when Josh's secrets and Benji's sex appeal smash together for forty-eight scorching hours, they're going to feel the heat from Miami to Minnesota.

For the amazing Rooster Teeth family. You guys are the best.

YouTube comment section, August 2015 (RWBY, Episode One: Ruby Rose)

joshfortytwo: holy crap. how come i’ve never seen this before? this is AWESOME.

princessglitter: Where have you been, silly boy? Come join the cool kids. #Bumblebee4eva

joshfortytwo: what’s bumblebee?

princessglitter: Yang and Blake, duh. They’re my OTP.

joshfortytwo: what’s an OTP?

princessglitter: One true pairing. OMG. You really are a newbie, aren’t you? Come sit at my feet, Joshua, and learn. . .

1

December 2015

---

Josh stared blearily at the wavering glow of his laptop screen, head propped up on three pillows, consciousness fading fast just past midnight. He fumbled for the proper keys, thick fingers missing half the letters, but deleting and retyping felt like a Sisyphean task.

Replying to @princessglitter: sleep tight. good luck with your final tomorrow. ur gonna kick ass. p.s. no way would blake ever go for yang

Replying to @princessglitter: yang didn’t say a word when weiss was spouting all that crap about faunuses. fauni. faunees. blake’s gonna remember

He rolled onto his side, laptop sliding to the mattress and nearly off the edge of his too-narrow college-dorm single bed. Tugged the quilt up to his shoulders and smashed his face deeper into the pillow.

So tired. Wish I could go to sleep and wake up in the NFL. . .

He crushed that thought before it had a chance to spiral into hours of fantasy racked with a whole new set of anxieties. Physical therapy was his only task right now. Getting healthy during the remaining weeks of the season—missing the fucking bowl game—and being in peak shape for spring training. His last chance to be scouted before the draft.

And he wasn’t the only one dealing with stress right now. His eternally cheerful and chipper online friend was freaking out about a final massage therapy exam. They shouldn’t have stayed up so late chatting. He felt kind of guilty about that, knowing he was the one who needed the distraction of the nonstop gossip about their favorite subject: Ruby Rose, and the friends, enemies, and rivals who made up the cast of the animated web series RWBY.

Replying to @joshfortytwo: Thanks, honey. You’re the best.

Josh grinned sleepily. His teammates would laugh if they knew how much time he spent online talking to what felt like the one person who really knew him. Five months into a friendship that had started in the YouTube comments sections of his favorite anime-style show, it was rare for more than a few hours to pass between conversations. Graduating to fanfic message boards and the Twitter account he’d started so he could talk to his new BFF had just made it easier for them to chat constantly, day or night.

Replying to @princessglitter: anything for you, babe. :)

When he woke up three hours later, the last tweets they’d exchanged before he’d drifted off were still echoing in his head.

Replying to @joshfortytwo: Maybe I’ll come see one of your games sometime.

Replying to @princessglitter: that would be awesome. or I could come to Miami. bet it’s nice and warm there. we could go to the beach.

Replying to @joshfortytwo: 85 and sunny today. I’m working on my tan. (Ha ha, as if. This final is killing me.)

Replying to @joshfortytwo: The ocean would be pretty perfect though. I’ll buy you a beer, if you’re even legal for beer.

He snorted and stretched to work out the kinks in his spine that never quite went away. Old enough for a beer. What with his late kindergarten start, his gap year, and using his fifth year of college ball eligibility, he’d been old enough to buy his own booze when he was a sophomore. Not that he had much time for partying. Between spring training, summer camp, and the fall football season, college ball was a year-round time suck. One he’d happily dived into with a passion that wouldn’t quit five years ago.

Guess I have plenty of free time now. . .

Josh rolled over and grabbed the tennis ball he used for stress relief off his desk, whipping it up at the ceiling and catching it one-handed when the ball bounced back like a rocket. Fuck.

Gus and Deion were still waiting for him to decide if he was tagging along for their Sunday-night jaunt to the casinos after Saturday’s home game. And by casinos, they meant strippers, because Lord knew the two of them were the worst gamblers ever. Josh didn’t know much more about poker than never draw to an inside straight, but he could still take those two jokers for everything in their wallets whenever they played. Which meant they’d blow their gambling bank in an hour and be at the strip club stuffing singles into some poor dancer’s G-string.

Benched for the rest of the fall season practices and the bowl game his team was almost sure to win, Josh was the only one of them who wouldn’t end up in trouble for breaking curfew—still in force during the three weeks between the end of the regular season and their bowl game on New Year’s Eve, seven days a week, twenty-four seven. But he didn’t give a damn about gambling or strippers.

He really didn’t give a damn about the strippers.

Wallowing in his misery in his dorm room was his current plan.

Sounds like a winner.

Besides, Sunday nights were reserved for watching a single episode of RWBY, live-tweeting it with princessglitter. The tradition had started because he’d been too busy and too tired at first, during the weeks of summer training camp, to stay awake for more than one fifteen-minute episode. Practices were way lighter in the summer, but he loaded up his schedule with as many academic classes as he could to take the pressure off his fall semester when there really wasn’t time for anything except football.

Plus, after a handful of episodes Josh had realized he was drawing out his viewing of the animated series because it made him happy to have an excuse to get amped up and excited with princessglitter every week, beyond the chatter they shared about their regular daily lives. If he made it a ritual, they could spend months gossiping about the characters, princessglitter—who’d been a fan from the show’s early days, as opposed to Josh’s latecomer status—teasing him about all the exciting plot points yet to come. For one brief slice of heaven a week, Josh would get to take his mind off the constant strain of trying to be the best, always.

Sunday nights had become the highlight of his week even before his injury. After, well . . . they were the only thing that made a dent in his unhappiness at all.

The light from his laptop flickered as his screen saver rolled over to a new image: Ruby Rose with her High-Caliber Sniper-Scythe, the most kick-ass weapon ever.

He’d seen pictures of groups of cosplayers wearing Ruby’s tall black boots with the red laces, the short black dress with the stiff, red-ruffled skirt, and the red, hooded cloak. There had even been some guys in the group, because who wouldn’t want to cosplay as the most badass fighter in the RWBY universe? (In his imagination, he could already hear princessglitter arguing with him about that fact. princessglitter was a Yang fan.) Josh’s envy had licked sticky, wet stripes of want up his spine whenever he thought of those cosplayers.

Aside from the fact that football players at his school would only dress up like a girl if they were being hazed, Josh was pretty sure he’d look ridiculous.

And no amount of arguing that it was just for fun and cosplaying was cool would prevent him from getting his ass kicked if he did it. Not in a physical way, because Josh was six foot six and 285 pounds, and not too many people were dumb enough to mess with him. But he’d be getting that ass-kicking verbally in the form on nonstop teasing for the rest of his time at school.

Not much time left though.

Acid roiled in his stomach. The extra-large bottle of TUMS Ultra 1000 was wedged in between his mattress and the wall. He thumbed out three tablets and tossed them into his mouth.

Yum. Calcium carbonate.

He’d been caught without his antacids once and had ended up choking down most of a piece of blackboard chalk, which was apparently the same thing as the stuff he bought at the drugstore.

Way more gross tasting though.

While the TUMS settled his stomach, he hit the space bar on his laptop and woke it up.

3:04 a.m.

Like clockwork.

His anxiety woke him up every night at three a.m. as if his brain had set an alarm that couldn’t possibly be ignored. Which was awesome, because there was nothing Josh liked better than lying in bed wide awake and stressing about shit he couldn’t control, like how long it was going to take his ACL to heal, and what was the point of the offensive linemen religiously wearing their prophylactic knee braces if they were just going to get injured anyway, and whether or not he had killed his chance at a spot in the draft.

What he really wanted to do was watch an episode of RWBY. Maybe the next one would have another scene of pure silliness like the food fight. Josh told his friends he liked RWBY—which they insisted on mangling the pronunciation of, even though he’d told them a thousand times that it was just a team acronym pronounced ruby—for the fights and the weapons and the adventure of it. But mostly he loved it for the awkwardness of half the characters—or more than half, because almost all of them were boneheaded about something—and the pure goofiness that made him chuckle like hardly anything else could.

When Yang had done battle with her fists deep in the guts of two roast turkeys, while Ren sliced at her with

Reviews for HeartShip

[Carmen Windham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awesome story, maybe a little quirky love story with romance from a newly outed man and his fierce princess.