Brief Encounters

Title: Noche Buena
Author: Neil Plakcy
Length: 44 pages, 12k+ words
Publisher: MLR
Genre: m/m contemporary, holiday
Rating: B

Blurb: Sean McCartney gave up a computer career to work as a carpenter on South Beach, but the real estate downturn has left him unemployed and questioning his decisions. He’s spending his free time in the pool with the other guys from the Miami Beach Gay Swim Team.

The team’s coach, Gaspar Fuentes, is single and forty-five, and feeling lonely at Christmas. So the guys decide to surprise him with a real Cuban Noche Buena, Christmas Eve. Because he has free time, Sean is roped into organizing with Magnus Anderson, a real Type-A personality who’s constantly hounding Sean to do this, do that. Sean can’t stand him, and he gets the impression Magnus thinks Sean’s a real loser.

But neither of them can deny the sexual attraction between them. Can they make it as a couple? When the party’s over on Noche Buena, will they open their presents together, or go their separate ways?

Review: I’m a big fan of Neil Plakcy. His Have Body, Will Guard series is my favorite, but I’ve read most of his novels set in South Beach, so imagine my surprise when I started reading this story and recognized a secondary character I really liked from his prior novel Mi Amor (and all of the other interconnected South Beach stories). In that novel, we meet Sean when that novel’s main character meets him at the pool. He’s a bit overweight, nervous to been seen by the other hunky swim team members in the locker rooms, and currently out of a job. He disappears from the story after the main character helps him find a job with his partner’s construction company, but when we meet Sean in Noche Buena, he’s once again looking for work, as the economy has forced his boss to cut down to a skeleton crew. One great thing has come out of his unemployment however, which is his new rock hard body from having nothing to do but spend his days swimming.

The story unfolds as we see Sean react to the team’s token asshole Magnus, who unfortunately, looks like an Adonis with a sexy British accent to match. Smart, successful, and stunningly gorgeous make it difficult to remember how much of a jerk he is whenever Sean thinks about him, and Sean’s mind is still lingering on his past chunky body, nervous and self-depricating. Yet, Sean finds that helping out others puts him on a path of self-discovery as the all-gay swim team sets out to cheer up their coach Gaspar when the Christmas season sets the Cuban down. And due to Sean’s current unemployment, he’s quickly named the man to organize a Noche Buena in Gaspar’s honor.

I always really enjoy Neil Plakcy’s writing because it’s so unabashedly homoerotic — at least with the stories set in South Beach, Miami, where the men are always horny, hung, and look like they’ve come out of a porn film. Magnus is the ideal of that stereotype, and he fulfills it with Alpha-toppy abandon, manifesting in a lifestyle that always seems to be two thoughts ahead of everyone else and with a personality that’s extremely arrogant:

Did he have the hots for Magnus? How could he? Magnus was such a major jerkwad … He knew the man had an amazing physique … But could he shut up long enough for them to fuck?

While he’s a character that is difficult to like (even though I started to by the end), what I really loved was getting to see Sean blossom when pitted against him. He matches his arrogance with wit, and even while secretly dying of the shame of starting to fall for a man who he thinks could never like him back (even as a casual hookup), the act of outward defiance acts as an affirmation of his own worth, one that he starts to believe. It isn’t just that the pounds have come off since his days of sitting behind a computer, but the fact that through his matchmaking and party planning, he sees that he can make other people happy, and that he deserves happiness as well.

I’m not sure if the story gave me enough time to come around and really like Magnus, but I definitely started to understand him. While the transition is a little quick, with the story being so short and in Sean’s POV, I think the author did what he could in the amount of time he had and made it work. Another thing that I thought was done really well was the little tidbits throughout the story of Cuban culture, from the party plans (especially the food!) to the representation of gay Miami and it’s various types of men.

I’m not sure why this wasn’t listed in connection Mi Amor, whether because it is published from a different publisher, or because it is only loosely based and definitely acts as a standalone story. I enjoyed it a lot and had quite a bit of fun reading it. I always like toppy characters, and Magnus is a good one. Of course, Sean is the heart of the story, and if you don’t mind characters that are written to be at the very least a little bit vain (and almost always slutty), then you should enjoy this story. B