This month’s ‘friend squad’ prompt had me picking up Tal Bauer’s You & Me, which is both a gorgeous slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance between two forty-something single dads, and a fantastic story about an estranged father and son finding their way back to each other. I was completely captivated by it, although I will admit that the prose is sometimes a bit flowery and that perhaps the mushiness is dialled up to eleven on occasion, but – and I say this as someone who is generally not a fan of mushy – I honestly didn’t care because I was so invested in these characters and their story.

Widower Luke Hale has been solo-parenting seventeen-year-old Emmet since the death of his wife, Riley, the previous year, and is at an absolute loss as to how to connect with his son. Their estrangement had begun many years earlier, well before Riley’s death; Luke was a devoted father and absolutely loved being a dad, and he and Emmet been very close when Emmet was younger, but things began to go wrong when he started “showing great promise” at football when he was just six. Luke and Riley married young after discovering Riley was pregnant, but wasn’t long after Emmet was born when it became apparent that Riley didn’t really want Luke in her life and wasn’t interested in making things work. As Emmet grew older, and hanging out with his dad drawing or watching Saturday morning cartoons fell by the wayside in favour of homework and football practice, football became Riley and Emmet’s thing, a special mother-son club that Luke was never invited to join. He’d never been all that interested in sports – art was his thing – but he hoped that if he learned a bit about football, he’d be able to talk to Emmet about it, but when he asked Riley to explain the game to him she’d just laughed and belittled him and he never asked again. With Emmet’s teen years increasingly full of after-school practices and drills, there was no time for anything but football – and no room for Luke in his son’s life.

Now Riley is gone and Luke wants desperately to be part of Emmet’s life again, but doesn’t know how. After receiving a letter from the varsity football moms’ association that Riley had obviously joined the previous year, Luke decides to go to practice to tell them why she isn’t around. As he scans the field looking for his son, Luke is hailed by another man – a good-looking, well put-together guy of about his own age wearing a Rodeo Riders Booster Association t-shirt – who introduces himself as Landon Larson and explains that his son Bowen, the team’s star quarterback, is friends with Emmet.

The two men get talking and Landon explains that he’s the vice-president of the Last Waters Rodeo Riders Booster Association, and that volunteering to help at games and practices is a way for him to spend more time with his son. He suggests that Luke should join them, or at least give it a try – and Luke, while terrified of screwing up, realises this could be the chance to reconnect with Emmet he’s been looking for and decides to take it.

This sets the stage for romance to blossom between Luke and Landon – and the author takes his time, growing and establishing a strong and intense friendship between them before taking things any further. Luke is a good man but he’s barely hanging in there when he meets Landon and his weariness, his pain and his distress are so well written they just leap off the page. Landon is lovely, a kind, warm-hearted and generous man who was brought up Mormon and only discovered his sexuality later in life, which then prompted his divorce. He seems at first to be exactly the SuperDad Luke nicknames him, but as the story progresses, we realise that although he and Bowen have a really close relationship (that Luke envies) Landon, too, struggles at times, with a father’s natural concern for his kid, some residual guilt over ending his marriage and the complicated relationship he has with his ex-wife.

Although the story is told entirely from Luke’s perspective, the author does a terrific job of showing the reader that Landon is developing a crush – one he can never reveal because Luke is straight and Landon doesn’t want to lose the best friend he’s ever had. They click from the start, both realising they’ve found something special in each other, and they start spending time together outside their volunteering gig, sharing meals, watching movies and just hanging out. Luke opens up a little about what his life and marriage were like; Landon talks about coming out later in life and breaking with his faith; they bond over their love of being dads and love for their kids. That Luke is falling hard for Landon is clear to the reader long before he understands it himself; Tal Bauer brilliantly captures those heady feelings that accompany falling in love – the excitement, the longing, the hope – and Luke’s realisation that he’s not as straight as he’d thought is sensitively handled, with no unnecessary or overblown drama. He doesn’t rush to put a label on anything – he’s in love for the first time in his life, and Landon is who he wants. That Landon is a man doesn’t make any different to how Luke feels about him.

While the romance between Luke and Landon is the main focus of You & Me, the father/son plot is not just an authorial device to get Luke and Landon into each other’s orbits; it’s integral to the story and I was pleased at the weight given to it.

Right from the first chapter, when Luke talks about the depth of his love for Emmet and describes their relationship from when he was a child, through seeing him grow and watching the distance slowly opening between them, I was rooting for Luke to find a way to back into his son’s life somehow. His sense of raw desperation, of loss, heartache, and loneliness are palpable, as is his bewilderment at never having really known what he did wrong. My heart broke for both of them – for Luke at having lived a miserable, incomplete life for so many years with someone who disliked and resented him, and for Emmet, an angry, grief-stricken teen who has lost his mother and is taking out his frustrations on the father he’s been led to believe doesn’t really care about him. The way they find their way back to each other is superbly done, as Luke works hard to become a part of Emmet’s life again, and Emmet gradually realises that he can have his dad back if he’s prepared to meet him half way. There are some heartbreaking revelations along the way, too, as Luke and Emmet both discover the extent to which their estrangement was helped along and Luke realises he needs to tell Emmet the truth about Riley’s death. The way Luke and Emmet reconnect, from the tentative first steps – Luke helping out at games, Emmet not freezing him out so much – to getting to know each other all over again and getting back some of what they’d lost, is incredibly touching and extremely well done.

Although You & Me is quite serious in tone and deals with some difficult issues, the story is fairly angst-free – there’s no contrived third-act break-up or silly miscommunications (in fact, there’s lots of honest, open communication here) – but there’s enough going on in the story to generate tension and keep things moving.

“You’re him. You’re the man I’ve been searching for my whole life.”

There’s something so immensely satisfying about watching two people in their forties who have resigned themselves to that fact that love has passed them by finding their forever person. From the moment Luke and Landon meet, it’s clear they’re ‘it’ for each other, and You & Me takes readers on a sweet (and sexy) romantic journey as they come to the same realisation.