Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell came from the Amazon free list. (At the time of posting it was still free.)

A friend of mine said to me recently that he was beginning to think that bulging biceps are to women what lush breasts are to men. Hmm, maybe. But for me it’s a well-muscled back. Keeping that in mind, you can probably imagine that this cover appealed to me. I hardly even read the description if I’m honest, just grabbed the pretty picture and went with it.

Description from Goodreads:
Kel isn’t at all the animal locked in a cage that he appears to be. Secrets keep him there, hidden from those who hunt him. But what does a man do when he needs physical contact to survive, but can’t stand the burning pain that comes with another’s touch? He’s found a way to get a small fraction of his needs met at the nightclub, Sleeves. What happens when he lets in an unknown woman with a healing hand? Casey can see past the vulgar mouth to the affection-starved man hiding inside. When she does, all hell breaks loose, and the past finds him. Will he be able to avoid the agency, or will they add Casey to their twisted experiments? She entered the cage with him, and now it seems there’s no way out.

 Review:
A previous review referred to this book as a ‘Hot Mess.’ And while Hot Mess isn’t a phrase that I’ve ever found myself tempted to use, I find it describes this book aptly. It’s not that it’s necessarily a bad book, it’s not, it’s just all over the place and full of holes the reader has to overlook to enjoy the story. They are overlookable, but it would be a little ridiculous to pretend they aren’t there.

To start with and probably most importantly, it’s never said but I’m gonna have to assume that Casey has some sort of preternatural power of super-empathy, because nothing in the book makes any sense otherwise. If she doesn’t then she just fell in love with a man who, in their single 30 minute interaction, forced her to jack him off in front of a crowd while calling her a slut, bitch, whore, cunt, and probably more I’ve forgotten. She in turn told him he was a beautiful, sweet man. (WTF!?) So unless she can magically see through his shit, to his kernel of true-self she is either really, really stupid or masochistic.

What’s more, her main strength seems to be in her ability to accept any verbal abuse thrown at her with aplomb and willingly offer up, “anything you need, baby.” Now, I get that this is supposed to show how much she loves Kel and maybe how brave she is. But what it mostly says to me is that she must be one of those women who is so desperate for a man that she will do, become and take anything without complaint. It makes me wonder if she really has any sense of self herself. And while we kind of find out what warped Kel (and I say kind of because it’s not a complete explanation) we don’t really find out what whacked Casey out. Which suggests that we’re not supposed to see her behaviour as inappropriate. (WTF!?) We do get a little of her sob story, but I couldn’t see how it would result in her willingness to accept Kel’s shit (and it is shit) so openly.

I did really like her ability to banter though. She didn’t have Kel’s foul language, but she had no problem slinging a one-shot back at him on occasion. This verbal sparring between the two of them was by far the best part of the book. And it’s good.

Kel in turn swung wildly from angst, clingy teenager to angry, dangerous alpha man with a tenuous grasp on sanity and back again, over and over. Now I’ll give you that when he was in his charming, boyish charm phase he was about as cute as they come. In these moments I really loved him. I even kinda liked his weird clingy, needy side. It was creepy as hell, but still kinda cute. Unfortunately his angry instability was truly scary and his inability to go two sentences without calling Casey some foul name often curled my toes…and not in a good way.

The thing is though, even though his language was deplorable and Casey didn’t deserve to be called all the names she did, it generally just boiled down to a whole heck of a lot of dirty talk. Because the actual sex was pretty clean. It never actually crossed into abusive, as his verbal description would suggest. Plus, even as he was playing Mr. Dominance he never failed to worship Casey and be honest about how much he needed/wanted her, which made it quite obvious that all of the mastery he held in their sexual relation was given to him by her. I found this dynamic damned sexy. 

This book is in desperate need of a little world building. It’s set in 2023, so I accept that there should have been some social evolution and scientific advancements. But the reader isn’t ever told what these might be. Everyone did seem to accept the whole ‘a secret organisation experimented on me and is currently hunting me’ with awe-inspiring ease. Not a single person raised an eyebrow at the fact that Kel had some strange sensory issue going on and apparently displayed regular feats of strength on stage, not to mention some truly horrific social skills. 

I also have to wonder if another thing that isn’t said, but must be true, is that people are…I don’t know, educated in their sleep or something. I mean Kel was apparently kept in a cage with a filthy, blood stained mattress and little else. So if his basic hygiene wasn’t worth taking into consideration I can’t imagine his education was either. But somehow he was a genius–able to create mysterious genetic cures and micro technologies. How did he learn these skills?

I think the best way to describe this book is what happily ever after would look like if two damaged nymphomaniacs found each-other. The actual sic-fi aspect of the story is a…well, a Hot Mess. It’s never explained what the secret organisation was actually trying to accomplish with Kel, for example, or what the mysterious ‘serum’ does to a person, or how the cure reverses it, or why Kel needs touch, or what will happen if he goes without it, or why it hurts, or why he treats women so badly. But the sex is a lot of fun, and for all their many faults, Kel and Casey are too.