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A Decadent Bi4Bi Romance: The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

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The Pairing cover

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[I] wonder if heartbreak will fuck you if you learn to love it enough.

It feels unnecessary to recommend the new Casey McQuiston romance, given how incredibly popular Red, White, and Royal Blue and One Last Stop are. I’m sure this will also get a ton of press and publicity. But I just can’t help it: I loved this book. 2024 has been an incredible romance reading year for me — all of my top three romance books I’ve ever read came out this year. The Pairing (August 6, 2024) is a decadent, sensual trip through food, wine, Europe, and a very queer bi4bi (M/NB) relationship.

Theo and Kit were best friends who grew up together and then started dating. Their lives were completely intertwined until they had a huge fight during their flight to their dream vacation, a food- and wine-tasting guided tour through France, Spain, and Italy. As soon as their plane landed, they went their separate ways and haven’t seen each other since. The tour, though, was nonrefundable, and four years later, the voucher is about to expire. So, Theo books the trip in the last month possible… and then arrives to find that Kit had the same idea, and they’re stuck together for the next three weeks. Along the way, they make a bet about who can sleep with the most people during the trip, but despite the distractions, Theo is having trouble suppressing those familiar feelings resurfacing for Kit.

Let me start here: The Pairing is such a great representation of the queerness of bisexuality. (If you’re not a fan of any depictions of bisexuals being promiscuous, you can skip this one, but it’s all consensual and there’s no cheating.) Not only are both of them sleeping with people of any gender, but I also was charmed by Theo and Kit discovering that after four years, despite having different genders, they have almost identical hairstyles and outfits. Amazing. (Theo is nonbinary, but we don’t find that out until well into the book.) I love these bisexual sluts. (As they self-identify—in fact, the working title of this book was Sluts in Europe.)

While the competition is a good way to pitch this book, it’s really not the focus. Instead, it’s about Theo and Kit’s tenuous new friendship—specifically, the yearning. THE YEARNING. This is such an interesting set up of best friends to lovers to exes to second chance romance. They know each other so well—but they also don’t know anything about the last four years in their lives, and they’ve both changed considerably. They’ve slept together countless times, but the sexual tension is unparalleled. It’s very obvious to the reader—both because we know this is a romance novel and because it’s obvious to absolutely everyone but the two of them—that they’re falling for each other again, but they both think it’s one sided, which leads to them doing things like making out with other people while holding eye contact with each other. And then pretending it doesn’t mean anything!! Absolutely ridiculous. (Which I mean as a compliment.)

The tension and sexcapades through Europe is decadent enough, but Theo is also an aspiring sommelier and Kit is a professional pastry chef. They take their food and drinks very seriously, which means it’s described in mouth-watering detail. And that’s not even counting traveling through some of the most beautiful locales in Europe. The sex, food, travel, and tension give this such a decadent, luxurious, almost overwhelming mood. Read this while eating chocolate truffles and lounging poolside.

And then, of course, there’s the romance. I’m used to dual point of view romance novels alternating between them, but The Pairing is a little difference. We get Theo’s POV in the first half and Kit’s afterwards, meaning we watch Theo reluctantly fall back in love with Kit while thinking he doesn’t feel the same way. Theo worked very hard to try to get over him, but they were never able to completely put it behind them, feeling like relationships weren’t worth trying again: “The thought of starting from scratch, the ordeal of rebuilding something I already spent my whole life building with someone else—it’s exhausting. It’s a fucking Olympic triathlon of mortifying vulnerability, and at the end, I might not even like them as much as I liked Kit.”

I know enemies to lovers is the more popular trope, but I think best friend to lovers is severely underrated, and this couple shows why. It shows what it’s like to be known and loved for every part of you, for all the sedimentary layers of who you once were and who you have become. It’s being loved by someone who knows every facet of you, who’s seen the worst of you.

Part of what I loved so much about this book is the second half, Kit’s section, so I have to include a spoiler paragraph here. (Even though it’s not really a spoiler, because you know which genre you’re reading.)

(Spoilers, highlight to read.) It is so effective to go from Theo’s reluctant, hesitant falling back in love to Kit’s perspective, who never stopped loving Theo. He absolutely adores them, which also hits so much harder because we’ve seen how self-conscious Theo is about certain things. (Including executive functioning and memory problems that are ADHD-coded.) When he learns new things about Theo, things that have changed in the last four years, he thinks, “What a wonder, what a miracle: somehow, more of [them].” When Theo comes out as nonbinary, Kit immediately switches pronouns and affirms their gender, and we can see how he’s genuinely always admired Theo’s masculinity and their femininity.

Kit has been so head-over-heels in love with and heartbroken over Theo this whole time, trying to distract himself but never giving up hope. He reads and references poetry about love and heartbreak, resulting in lines like “I am half agony, half hard” and “[I] wonder if heartbreak will fuck you if you learn to love it enough.” His absolutely adoration of Theo truly sets an unattainable standard for romance. (End of spoilers.)

I went into this with high expectations, but The Pairing still exceeded them. And yes, I cried. This might be the perfect summer romance read.

Traumatized, Angsty Bisexuals: 6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Did) by Tess Sharpe

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Penny and Tate’s mothers have always been best friends—but the same cannot be said about the daughters’ relationship. Having clashed their entire lives, they must now put aside their bickering when Penny’s mom agrees to become a liver donor to Tate’s mother, as both parents have decided to combine households for the summer. Although this will help the families get through this physically, emotionally, and financially difficult period, it will certainly not help Penny and Tate’s ever-confusing dynamic. Because, for some reason, they keep almost kissing. And even though they made a pact to keep the shared home drama-free, living across the hall from each other makes it increasingly more difficult to continue pretending that nothing ever (almost) happened between them.

As a fan of Sharpe’s writing, I can confidently say this is her best work. I’d read The Girls I’ve Been and Far From You in the past and really enjoyed them, but neither of those books got close to packing the same kind of emotional punch that I experienced while reading 6 Times We Almost Kissed.

Now, granted, it may be unfair to compare two thriller/mysteries to an angsty romance, and, granted, I am a very emotional reader. But this book… This book had me sobbing the entire way through. I know this is usually said (often by me) in a hyperbolic way. But it is a factually accurate assessment of my reading experience to say that tears were streaming down my face, non-stop, throughout the entirety of this story. I refused to read this book out in public because it was a guarantee that I would embarrassingly start crying in front of unassuming strangers on their daily morning commute.

I’d know from her other novels that Sharpe was particularly skilled at writing teenage characters who have suffered through unimaginable trauma. Therefore, it should have been no surprise that the cast of characters in this story were equally well-written, if not more so. The complexities of their family dynamics felt extremely raw and realistic, and I couldn’t help but deeply root for each of them to grow and heal. It is in fact quite a heavy story, but it felt almost therapeutic to read through, to the point that even though I knew it was going to cause me irreparable emotional damage, I could not put it down.

Sharpe does an excellent job of showing how a parent’s illness, a parent’s death and/or a parent’s grief will affect their child in the short- and long-term. The book really is an in-depth look into the ways our reactions to collective trauma impact those who were also affected by it, and the ways in which their own coping mechanisms can bend and mold the person that we become after the fact.

I do have a soft spot for sapphic main characters with complex mother-daughter dynamics, which ultimately are at the core of this novel. Yes, it is about romance and love and allowing yourself to believe that people can care deeply for you even after witnessing you at your lowest. But it is also about how difficult it is to be a mother after facing life-altering events; how painful it is to be the child of a parent who struggles to recover from pain, suffering, and loss; how limited rural medical access can force people to put themselves at risk for the sake of those they care about; how you can hurt those around you, but it does not necessarily make you a bad person unworthy of forgiveness and love.

If you’ve read some of Sharpe’s other novels and appreciated either the character analysis or her iconic non-chronological style of storytelling, you will love this book. She definitely included much less mystery than in her other YA novels, but she makes up for it tenfold in angst, love, and tears.

Representation: bisexual main characters

Content warnings [as listed by the author]: emotional abuse, neglect of a daughter by a mother, PTSD, accidental death of a father, ovarian cancer, remission, oophorectomy, liver donation, mentions of suicidal ideation and pain medication being monitored, mentions of a past interrupted assault, anti-therapy and anti-medication attitudes

Gory Bisexual Horror/Fantasy: The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey

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the cover of The Dead Take the A Train

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One thing about a Cassandra Khaw book: I never know what I’m getting into. Even two-thirds of the way through this, completely invested in the story, I still kept thinking, “What genre is this? And also, what’s the plot?”

Julie is a 30-year-old exorcist for hire, not quite scraping by in New York City by taking on the deadliest and most gruesome jobs carving monsters out of people and going head to head with demons. Her arms are wrapped with barbed wire magic, which she tears from her flesh in order to use those spells. She keeps a suitcase full of fresh organs in case she needs to swap any of hers out on a mission gone wrong. She also is not making enough to pay her rent, never mind support her drug habit.

She just broke up with her ex-boyfriend, Tyler, who works for an investment company that is mostly invested in souls, body parts, curses, and making deals with unfathomable gods. It’s a dog-eat-dog environment where you’re more likely to be killed gruesomely than be promoted, but Tyler loves it there, and he sometimes hires Julie for the jobs he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty for. When Julie doesn’t go along with one job, though, he plots revenge.

Just as Julie is beginning to wonder how she can possibly scavenge up any cash, her high school friend Sarah shows up suddenly at her door. She’s been secretly in love with her for years. Side note, my favourite bisexual woman stories are the ones that name a bunch of faceless ex-boyfriends, and then there’s ✨ her ✨. This is definitely one of those books. After a lot of prodding, Sarah finally admits that she’s here because she’s running from her abusive ex, Dan… and then has to make Julie promise not to torture and kill him.

And that’s sort of the plot. Two bisexual girls falling for each other while their ex-boyfriends try to ruin their lives. It’s probably the goriest book I’ve ever read—the descriptions are truly skin-crawling—but it doesn’t feel like horror to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m supposed to be afraid. If you’re the kind of person who needs to understand the magic system of a fantasy world, this is not for you. It’s a mess of different types of magic, demons, curses, Eldritch gods, and other inexplicable weirdness. It’s dense with world building, without any one structure weaving it together. This totally worked for me, but you need to just let it was over you.

In fact, I think that complements the setting well, because New York City—as the title suggests—plays a major role in this story. And this tangle of different kinds of magic felt like a reflection of many different worlds all living in parallel inside of NYC. Also, did I mention that lay people have no idea magic is real? Despite the unending encounters Julie has with possessed brides-to-be, foxes puppeting zombie bodies, and so much more, it somehow goes completely unnoticed; she can walk onto the A Train covered in blood and viscera, and no one looks twice.

In some way, it actually reminded me of a noir story. Julie is trying to track down Dan, and she is constantly getting injured. That dogged pursuit in a gritty environment while getting beaten down and somehow surviving felt like it would be at home in that genre… just with a lot more tentacles than usual.

Then, just to keep things interesting, at the heart of this gritty, gruesome, often gross story is a ridiculously cute bisexual F/F pining love story. I love a sapphic friends to lovers story. I won’t spoil it and say whether they get together in the end—also, this is only the first in a duology—but I will say the pining is not one-sided. I’m also annoyed that I had such trouble finding out if this was a queer book before I read it, because so much of the book is about Julie and Sarah’s relationship.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this big, sprawling book. I haven’t mentioned the angel, or what the plot turned out actually to be about, or Tyler’s point of view chapters, or how about halfway through the book we start to get one-off POVs from other characters. And I have to squeeze in the fact that there’s a character who is cursed to not be able to die until he has sold every book in the bookstore to the Right Customer, and as a former employee of a used bookstore, I felt that in my bones. I’m pretty sure I’ve met someone with that same curse before.

If you can stomach gore and a whole lot of weirdness, I really recommend this one. It kind of reminded me of Welcome to Night Vale, with a lot more blood. So if that’s your vibe, you need to pick this up.

Content warning: gore, blood, violence, body horror, relationship abuse (not described in detail), drug use.