As soon as I closed the final page on Scoring With the Wrong Twin by Naima Simone, the first in Simone’s football-centric WAGS series, I hurriedly clicked over to the Kobo website and downloaded the second one. And within twenty-four hours, I’d devoured all three books, emerging on the other side sated if a little hungover from all the drama, all the feelings, all the scorching, sizzling sex scenes.
Here’s the thing: I don’t read a lot of contemporaries. I’ve never read a sports romance before. I think American football is, at best, a modern-day Gladiatorial sport, one that destroys the minds and bodies of players, in exchange for which society lets those players literally get away with murder. Yes, it’s more complicated than that … but my bias against football goes all the way back to growing up in a midwestern state that lived and breathed the sport. It’s hard to shake. However, as it turns out, in the hands of a writer like Simone -- whose fast-paced storytelling draws a reader in and refuses to let them go -- even football isn’t so bad. Actually, as it turns out, it offered the kind of embedded, idiosyncratic setting that I often miss with contemporaries, one that gives me more of a fantasy to hold on to than a typical contemporary meet-cute or romcom might offer. It’s a different world, with different expectations and different stakes, and while I suppose there might be a difference between a gentleman’s duel and the big game against the rival team, or White’s club and the locker room, the problem of powerful men in a masculine world struggling to acknowledge their tender feelings is the eternal stuff of romance.
Simone’s novels follow a group of friends composed of three professional football players: Zephirin Black, Dominic Anderson, and Ronin Palamo. All of them are huge, handsome, and cautious about love, having experienced betrayal and loss in the past. They’re also all phenomenal lovers with dirty mouths and massive dicks. Each book follows a similar pattern: the hero tries to have no-strings-attached sex with a woman he’s powerfully attracted to, but pesky feelings get in the way. However, each novel offers enough variation on this theme as to still be compelling.
Scoring With the Wrong Twin is, as you might imagine, a classic twin-swap story. Zeph thinks he’s hooking up with the confident, successful model Giovanna Cruz, but the woman he can’t stop thinking about is actually Sophia, Giovanna’s shy, non-famous identical twin. What really makes this story work, aside from the flame-hot chemistry between the lovers, is the relationship between Sophia and Giovanna, whose dissimilarities could easily have put them into a good twin/bad twin (or innocent twin/slutty twin) dichotomy. Instead, the sisters love each other deeply, with Sophia desperate to protect Giovanna’s career and Giovanna clearly invested in protecting Sophia’s heart. More than that, they don’t fit easy stereotypes. Sophia is the shy sister who works in app development, but she’s also the sister with tattoos and nipple piercings, and the inevitable moment when Zeph spots Giovanna embracing another man -- the slutty sister inadvertently confirming his fears about the unfaithfulness of women! -- in fact reveals nothing more than Zeph’s own insecurities.
Scoring Off the Field was my favorite of the three books. At first it seems like it’ll be the Two Weeks Notice of the sports world: Tenny works as Dom’s personal assistant, and her life revolves around him, which is a problem because she’s been in unrequited love with him for years; the solution, she decides, is to give notice, hire a replacement, and start dating men who aren’t her long-time boss/best friend. Where this novel excels is in the nuances of Dom’s and Tenny’s relationship, which simultaneously feels deep and essential, with a long history, and also extremely fraught with unspoken tension. Tenny is not exactly a mere overlooked assistant; it is apparent from the very beginning that Dom loves her dearly. They met as children in the same foster home, where Dom instantly took the younger Tenny under his wing, and in the years since, he’s paid for her college, offered her a job, and looked out for her as much as possible. However, Tenny’s romantic love for Dom -- which she has good reason to believe he doesn’t reciprocate -- combined with both a desire for independence and a fear that she has been a burden to him, lead her to attempt to get some distance from him. The more distant she becomes, however, the more Dom realizes that he loves and needs her in ways he’s never before admitted to himself.
The third book, Scoring the Player’s Baby, is a classic variation of the “oops baby” trope: Kim, who recently divorced her cheating husband, a football player, has a one-night stand with the magnetically sexy Ronin, not knowing that he’s also a football player. When she learns of his career, she vows never to see him again -- except, oh no, she’s pregnant! Ronin agrees to “platonically co-parent” the child with her, but of course, the platonic part is easier said than done. What sets this book apart from other accidental pregnancy stories is that both Kim and Ronin are dealing with significant and in many ways unprocessed grief: Kim, over both the end of her marriage and a previous miscarriage, and Ronin, over the chronically ill girlfriend who died two years earlier. This grief makes the reader more aware of and sympathetic to the vulnerability and fear these characters feel upon being thrown unexpectedly into parenthood and into each other’s lives.
These books do go wrong in a few places. There’s the occasional pop culture zinger that doesn’t land (quips about Britney, aside from being in bad taste, feel at least a decade out of date, and joking about Taylor Swift’s dating track record in 2018, after she’d been with Joe Alwyn for years, just feels lazy). There’s the off-puttingly essentialist lines like the following, when the heroine of one of the novels sees the hero’s penis for the first time: “the thick, long part of him that made him a man.” And then there are the grovels, which in my opinion, just miss the mark every time. Simone is evidently a fan of her characters performing grand gestures, but most of the time those gestures come across as awkward to me, and occasionally entirely out of place. In the second book, the hero’s grovel bizarrely takes the form of an on-camera interview; he says all of the things I wanted him to say, but for reasons I didn’t quite follow, he didn’t say them to her directly. Instead he … played her the video of the interview on his phone? Less confusing but still strange were a direct reference to a famous scene in Love, Actually in the third book and an extravagant financial offer in the first book, which had implications that didn’t feel entirely thought-through. Following all of the emotional build-up and moments of intense intimacy earlier in the books, I’m left a little unsatisfied with these moments when the lovers finally get their shit together and lay their feelings bare, because they do such in such public, pressurized ways.
There’s one area in which Naima Simone might be an unparalleled talent, however: her sex scenes are maybe the hottest I’ve ever read. Simultaneously sensual and dirty, these scenes range from mirror sex to cunnilingus in the locker room to blowjobs in a parked car, sometimes slow and steamy, sometimes quick and devastating, with plenty of spicy dialogue as the lovers talk around their feelings, lavish praise on each other, and swear that it’s definitely just sex, it doesn’t mean anything more. (Just keep telling yourself yourself that…)
Should you read these books? Well, that’s up to you, but I think they’re pretty much a home run (a touchdown?) in terms of a quick, sexy, entertaining read that still delivers enough of an emotional punch to feel worth it. For my part, I know I’ll be seeking out more Naima Simone in the future … and maybe even more sports romances.