I think there's a lot of romanticizing that goes on out here, so I wouldn't worry about that if I were you. I probably have over-romanticized Ryan throughout the whole piece making him overly needy, but in his head, which was where I was half of the time, he is very affection-starved.

As far as pairings go, I would probably have ranked them as such, including a few not mentioned in this series: McManus, Murphy, Alvarez, Ortilani, Beecher, Adebisi, Stanislavsky, Gloria, Claire, Keller (okay, maybe if someone else was writing him, he could move up).

You convey the lushness of Miguel's stories without giving a lot of details that might make them read more like O'Reily's stories.

This drove me crazy for a little while because when I first wrote it, the tone from story to story was so uneven and didn't work until I finally settled on the idea that Miguel's would be the less porn-y of the two - my brain could never hear Alvarez saying "I fucked her", but those same words would roll naturally off Ryan's tongue.

The jump at the end was originally supposed to be an epilogue, but the timing necessitated that I combine it with this part (and it also solved a lot of my "how the heck do I get out of this" problems).

I'm really thrilled that you enjoyed these. I got a kick out of writing them. Thanks for the support and encouragement along the way.