Landon
On my university soccer team, people see me as an obnoxious loud-mouth, but this semester, I’m turning over a new leaf. Part of that involves supporting my best friend and his new relationship (with a guy!). Ravi being gay has really thrown me for a loop. The way he looks at Steven, it makes me feel… jealous? I’m not gay, but no girl has ever made me feel the way those two feel about each other. To top it off, I’m forced to take my university arts requirement in the form of a dance class! I have to fumble around trying not to fail while the teaching assistant Dane refuses to take it easy on me.
Still, the longer I spend in dance class, the more I get to know the real Dane: he’s fun, interesting, sweet, attractive, and… did I say attractive?! No way, that’s not what I meant. Because if I actually feel that way then… turning over a new leaf just got a LOT more complicated.
Dane
Dance is my life, and being a performing artist is my ultimate goal. That’s why I took this university TA position and why I’m hoping to secure an internship in the big city. I refuse to get distracted by some (admittedly handsome) jock that I’m tasked with teaching. He’s uncoordinated, but eventually, I can tell that he’s actually trying, so I cut him some slack. There’s also the tiny detail that he admits he may not be 100% straight.
That’s fine by me. It’s not like a guy like that would go for someone with a messed up face like mine. Still, as the weeks go by, something shifts and we become closer. I can’t let myself become sidetracked in catching feelings for a boy who’s new to being queer. I just need to disregard the burning chemistry we have whenever we’re in the dance studio alone. It’ll be easy to ignore the way he makes my heart flutter when he talks to me, or how charming he is when he lets down his guard.
Well… maybe one kiss won’t hurt, right?
The Moves We Make is a low-angst, male/male romance, opposites-attract story involving hands-on movement lessons, road trips, drunken dance floors, soccer games, and discovering what love and sex with the RIGHT person can actually lead to, HEA guaranteed. It is the second of the Artists and Athletes series but can be read as a standalone.
By CD Rachels
Amazon – Kindle Unlimited
Goodreads
Book 1: The Lines We Draw
Book 3: The Strings We Play (out August 8th)
Going through my closet, I manage to find an old dark-brown suit and a white button-down I haven’t used in ages. They’re still clean, and I’m sure they’ll fit Dane, so I grab them and some black dress shoes and walk next door to the guest bedroom. I lay out all the clothes on the bed and stare at them intently as if they’ll soon reveal to me some secret code.
“Hey, you’re back!” I hear Dane close the door behind me.
“Yeah, I got you some—” My words are cut off as my brain short-circuits. Dane is standing in front of me all wet and wearing only a towel. The remnants of shower water dribble down his rippling abs, and all of a sudden, I can’t speak. I knew dancers were fit, but I didn’t realize Dane was hiding the body of a Greek god under all those sweaters.
“Nice! A brown suit!” He thankfully doesn’t seem to notice my thirst. “Thanks, Landon!”
He walks over to the bed and puts on his white boxer briefs right in front of me under the towel, then lets the towel drop to the floor. Now that I have a direct view of his sculpted ass packaged in thin fabric, I can say for sure he’s nothing like the chicks I’ve been interested in before. Yet, with his back on full display as he pulls on my pants, it feels like…Do I think Dane is sexy? I can’t stop staring at his body, and these urges are pulling me toward him just like during puberty when I started jerking off to girls, but…Dane isn’t a girl. That would mean I’m…
I shake my head and take a step back. “Uh…” He turns to look at me. His right eye is so soft as he puts on the button-down shirt. “I’ll meet you downstairs!” I bolt out of there and shut the door, trying to catch my breath.
—
I stand outside by the buffet table, putting dressing on my salad. The inner courtyard of our house has been set up with a dozen round tables and heat lamps because it’s winter. Twenty guests roam around, most of whom are either chatting with my parents or talking to my siblings—Link, Kara, and my older brother Lars with his wife. Eventually, Dane makes it outside, and fuck, is he hotter with the suit on than he is half naked? Is that a thing?
I try to push down all these bi-curious thoughts. “Dane! Come get some food!” I smile and wave him over.
“Thanks man. This is”— he looks around— “lavish.”
“My parents like to do it big for these parties.” He smiles at this and starts putting food on his plate. Eventually we sit down at a table in the corner away from the crowds.
“You think you got the internship?”
“I hope so. They seemed genuinely interested in me.”
“I hope you get it too. Just think, if you get it, since I live nearby, maybe we can hang out in the summer.”
I eat some salad and look at him. An expression I don’t recognize flashes across his face before he smiles again. “For sure.”
Okay, I came into this one in the second book so I need to go back and read the first one because I feel like it’s going to be about Ravi and Steven, who are so very cute in this one, I really wanna read their story… in saying that, having started with this one, it didn’t take anything away from this one, so I didn’t feel lost or out of the loop with anything. This story is about Dane and Landon…
Landon, I was unsure about in the beginning. He’s your typical dude bro and obnoxious is putting his personality lightly. He wasn’t intentional about it though and he quickly became a lovable obnoxious dude bro… does that make sense? Anyway… a star player on the school’s soccer team, he’s forced to take an artsy class and his coach pulled some strings to get him into Dane’s dance class.
Dance is Dane’s life. He’s a TA for the dance class that Landon has just been enrolled in for the semester and he is not happy about. Dane has a physical abnormality and if you add that on top of being openly gay and a dance major, I can imagine the dude bro types are not his cup of tea.
Or, well, they are, but he doesn’t want them to be. He’s been bullied by those types because of those things and Landon just seems like one of them. He treats him accordingly in the beginning, but as Landon did with me, he won Dane over pretty quickly.
What I love about this story, is how real it feels. It was all really genuine, especially in Landon’s quest in curiosity. He was very narrow minded or maybe just uneducated in his idealization of what gay or bi means and the type’s of people that are. I liked how he didn’t really bat an eye at it once he realized his feelings or attraction for Dane.
As a matter of fact, nobody really batted an eye about it and I loved seeing that. I have teenage kids that are heading into college in the next year or two, one of them is gay. We live in a small conservative town with zero support for the LGBTQ community, so I’m hoping they can find a place where there’ an open community and such acceptance. Fingers crossed, right?
All in all though, I enjoyed watching Landon’s growth in not only himself but just his understanding. I loved how once he developed feelings for Dane, he didn’t question them and he was proud to be seen with him, especially because Dane has not really been self conscious about his appearance because of the eye but because he never expected someone like Landon to see him in any sort of romantic light and the fact that fell for him and let himself fall of Landon was so cute.
I really need to go back and read book one, but this series is going to be an insta-click buy for me because i can’t wait to see who’s next!
If you like charming loud mouths who occasionally sticks his foot in it, then you’ll love watching these two dance around each other…(see what I did there? Wink wink) Super cute story!
5 pieces of eye candy 
CD Rachels has been coming up with stories since he was little. At first it was all about superheroes and pocket monsters, but his genre of choice has expanded since puberty.
He’s been consuming young adult gay fiction since he was a teen, but within the past five years moved up to the big leagues of gay adult romance. In 2020 during quarantine, he burned through more male/male romance books than he ever had in the previous 29 years combined.
He lives in New York City with the love of his life and works in health insurance. When he’s not reading and writing, he’s playing board games and practicing music. He is honored to become a self-published author, and if you’re reading this, your support means so much to him that it’s giving him a tingly feeling (in a good way).
Follow him on instagram: @cdrachels
Or join his group on Facebook: “CD Rachels’ Chill Discourse Room”
Catch up with Sam:
IG: https://www.instagram.com/cdrachels/
Amazon Author’s Page: CD Rachels Author Page
Facebook Author Group: CD Rachels’ Chill Discourse Room
