Two Card Sharks, One Lie, and a Road Trip That Wrecked Me

Two grown men, a card game tournament, and a lie that gets out of hand

Conrad Nelson is the kind of guy who alphabetizes his sock drawer and has a five year plan taped inside his cabinet door. He’s also the reigning champion of Guardian Fighter, a Magic-the-Gathering-adjacent card game that the book treats with total sincerity, which is honestly one of its best choices. He needs a fake boyfriend to bring to a wedding so his big dramatic family stops setting him up, and the person he asks is Halvor Torpen, his card game rival turned reluctant friend turned road trip companion turned, well, you know where this goes.

Here’s the thing though: Albert doesn’t rush the fake part into real. She lets these two drive across several states in a cramped car, bicker about game strategy, admit small humiliating truths to each other in gas station parking lots, and slowly stop performing for each other. Conrad’s arc is the more interesting one to me, a control freak learning that letting someone see him fail at something is not the same as failing at everything. Halvor gets less interiority than I wanted, honestly, he’s a bit more of a golden retriever archetype than a fully rounded person for the first half, and that’s my one real complaint. But by the back third he earns his depth, especially once his own family stuff comes into focus.

What actually works here, and the one thing that bugged me

The card game nerdery is not garnish, it’s structural. These men understand each other through strategy and probability before they understand each other emotionally, and Albert uses that beautifully. There’s a scene at a tournament table where Conrad reads Halvor’s tells the same way he’d read an opponent’s hand, and it lands harder than most declarations of love I’ve read in this genre because it’s earned through specificity, not vibes.

I read most of this on a red-eye with my neck pillow slipping off every twenty minutes, half asleep, and I kept jolting awake to keep reading, which is the actual test of whether a book works, not whether I can write a smart paragraph about its themes later.

What doesn’t work as well: the pacing sags in the middle stretch of the road trip. There are a couple of stops that feel like Albert needed word count more than the story needed them, a diner scene, a motel argument that repeats a beat we already got. And the side cast, particularly Conrad’s family, is sketched broadly enough that the wedding climax leans on shorthand rather than earned tension. It doesn’t wreck the book. It just means the last quarter moves faster than it should have to compensate for a middle that moved too slow.

I also want to be honest that I went in skeptical of the fake dating trope in general, I’ve read so many versions of it that fall apart the second the leads have to have an actual conversation. This one doesn’t fall apart. The dialogue is genuinely funny in a way that reads like two specific people talking, not romance-novel banter generated to hit beats. Whether that’s enough to forgive the sag in the middle probably depends on how much patience you have for slow burns, and I’ll admit my patience for this one was higher than usual because I liked these two idiots so much.

If you want to actually buy it, here’s the Amazon listing, though I’d also just say go find it used, it’s the kind of book that’s better dog eared than pristine.

The best fake dating stories aren’t about the lie, they’re about what two people learn to be honest about while telling it.

About Annabeth Albert

Annabeth Albert has been writing sweet, nerdy, deeply horny-in-a-wholesome-way queer romance for over a decade, and she clearly does her homework, her military romances read like she interviewed actual veterans, her gamer romances read like she’s sat at an actual tournament table. She’s prolific in the way category romance writers used to be before the industry stopped rewarding that kind of output, and her backlist is enormous if you like her voice and want to just keep going. She writes with real affection for dorky, earnest men who are bad at expressing feelings and good at everything else.

If this wrecked you, read these next

Try “The Long Game” by Rachel Reid for hockey players instead of card gamers but the same slow, earned tenderness. “Boyfriend Material” by Alexis Hall if you want the fake dating premise with more acid wit and faster banter. “Him” by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy for another sports-adjacent friends-to-lovers that trusts silence as much as dialogue. And if you specifically want more True Colors, “Two Wrongs Make a Right” continues in the same world with a different, messier couple.

For your book club

1. Conrad and Halvor bond over a card game before they bond over anything else. Does building intimacy through a shared hobby feel more believable to you than instant chemistry tropes, and why?
2. Conrad’s control extends into every part of his life except his feelings for Halvor. Where do you see that control cracking first, and what triggers it?
3. The book treats a niche nerdy hobby with total sincerity instead of irony. How does that choice change how you read the characters who love it?
4. Halvor gets less interior life than Conrad for much of the book. Did that bother you, or did you read it as intentional given his character?
5. The wedding climax moves fast after a slower middle section. Did the ending feel earned to you, or rushed to make up for lost time?