Review: Bennie's Wish by Xara Xanakas

Bennie's Wish by Xara X. Xanakas
Dreamspinner Press
Short Story: 74pgs
3.75 Pants Off

Blurb:
For years, Ally Theodisius has suspected his “friends” have been humoring him to stay in his good graces—and his wallet—so when a No Pants Day breakfast ends in his humiliation, he finally takes a stand.

When model Bennie Arnold runs into Ally, his first impression is of a cute, adorably dimpled writer in dire need of a real friend. Bennie would be happy to fill the role. There’s just one little problem: he’s going commando, and it happens to be No Pants Day. If he has any hope of getting his wish, Bennie will have to use his best assets to convince Ally he’s the real deal.

Review:
Ally Theodisius is rich and wants to be a writer, but all his work keeps getting rejected. He can't understand why, when his friends are saying that his work is genius. Ally suspects that they might just be leading him on to keep on spending his money, and he could maybe go so far as ruling them out as friends. His entire life has consisted of people being kind to him because of what he could offer them, and he wonders why he even keeps around the leeches but in the end it beats being completely alone. It's No Pants Day and his so called friends are finding ways to spend his money again, and after reading some of his writing Ally is going to give his friends one more chance to prove some sort of sincerity and then take it from there.

Ally is a little apprehensive about not wearing pants because of his less than stellar body (his opinion and pointed out by his douchbag leeches) he decided to make it work. They hit up a local restaurant where Ally sees a beautiful man and is instantly smitten. But of course said man is out of league that is until he is approached by the beauty and he realizes that this man calling himself Bennie is nothing but a prostitute (or is he?) Ally is humiliated by how low his friend's are willing to stoop to get him laid, but he's taking it no more. As the saying goes "don't bite the hand that feeds you" and clearly Ally Theodisius has been bitten too many times.

This is another story that I wished was longer, Bennie and Ally are so super cute that I wanted them to have more pages. I liked and was frustrated by the whole prostitute situation. I could understand Ally believing the worst, because a good-looking guy like Bennie has never shown interest in him without money somehow being involved. I just wanted Bennie to shout "Hey I like you and those sexy dimples and I gots my own money" would that have been so hard? Don't even get me started on those sorry excuse for friends, I loathe them and wanted them to cry just a little (leech ass Mofos).

In the end it was a really cute story with likable characters so likable that they needed another 100pgs more. I hope I see them again because I am missing out sexy scene time because somehow I feel like they would set fire to the pages.

Geek Level: 2.5 out of 5. Ally is clearly geek but it doesn't really get set in the story until the very end. kudos for the celebrating of No Pants Day, but the icing on the cake was Towel Day ( Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). I feel like if it were longer it would have been a strong 4 geek wise.