This is my second Kuwabara title after Blue Sky, and her first BL. I looked back what I wrote about Blue Sky and turns out it was pretty similar to what I thought about this title too: nice art, boring, generic, but not unenjoyable overall. It’s a chocolate chip cookie – safe, simple, sweet.
This story stars two guys who work together as police officers, Naru and Kita. Kita wakes up in Naru’s bed after a night of drinking and can’t remember a thing, which makes things awkward between them at work. Naru teases Kita and they clearly both like each other, but Kita isn’t as open to admitting it, and has to sort through his feelings – but this doesn’t stop him from submitting to Naru’s advances. And that’s – about all the plot there is, honestly.
I like “buddy cop” pairings but their job and the setting never really came into play at all, which was kind of disappointing – they could have been ordinary salarymen and the story would have been the same. It felt like a missed opportunity to put some action into the story and develop their characters and relationship through crime-fighting together (notable BL that do this theme well from around the early 00s are Fake, as well as Yellow).
Something Kuwabara does well is sweet and tender moments between the characters. Even if nothing is really happening plot-wise they are always being cute or hot together, even if they aren’t actually having sex…in fact the book doesn’t have much actual butt-in-asshole in general.
She said in the back that she was shy and embarassed about drawing sex scenes and nudity, her other book was like this too. The physical scenes are pretty tasteful, non-explicit, and ambiguous, which was fine and fit the story I guess. The fact that there’s some other types of hanky panky between the couple throughout the story makes it so that you aren’t building big expectations for the ending for the physical fireworks.
She has a pretty cute art style too that looks appealing despite its age.
Overall I found the book a bit hard to get through as it seemed to struggle moving the plot forward, it had the feel of a short story extended to a full-length one. This may be due to her inexperience but for a first BL story it’s still decent despite being on the boring side. Definitely temper your expectations about there being police action though if you decide to read this one.
TL;DR Wholesome police officer romance but sadly without any fun action. It seemed to have trouble moving the plot forward and ended up being a little boring, but Kuwabara’s art style is attractive despite its age and there are many sweet romantic moments between the main couple.