"Red Flags and Tuesdays"

 - by Jack Chandler
   Entertaiment Writer

Pull up a chair. I have a confession: I like the occasional MM Romance. Same way I indulge in Braum’s malts three times a year—drive-thru at night, sunglasses on, hoodie up. Gulp it down before returning home. Bury the evidence so hubs doesn’t find out.

And, like my sweet tooth for strawberry malts, my go-to MM Romance is Red Flags and Tuesdays by Nordika Night.

Beware, though: a little bit of MM Romance goes a long way—with the exception of this one. More on that in a minute.

This genre is dominated by straight female authors catering to an audience composed mainly of straight females.

That dominance comes with strict rules for their gay characters: slow-burn longing, maybe a kiss at page 25. Next up: a hundred pages of misunderstandings that could have been resolved if either character had picked up a phone. Finally: a glorious sex scene that fades to black at just the point where the audience doesn’t want to think about what really happens when two men play Scrabble—or because the author doesn’t understand what she’s writing about.

Kinda like pretending to be an auto mechanic while I write the manual.

Red Flags and Tuesdays break all the rules.

The opening scene has bad boy Reid waking up to find his one-night stand, Atticus, scrabbling to find his clothes in the dark and make his escape. Atticus is furious at himself for having broken his own rule of no sex on Tuesdays. Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday.

Reid sits up and enjoys the show. Dangles three used condoms when Atticus, hungover, asks if they even played it safe.

These two guys simultaneously repulse and attract each other in a way that crackles. I may not know my way under a hood, but I do know chemistry when I see it. There is no slow burn, no contrived misunderstanding that yawns through a hundred pages.

Either Nordika Night is a gay guy’s nom de plume—or this lady went to auto-mechanic school. Either way, the proof is on the page. There’s never a fade-to-black moment. And the sex is all the more believable because Night dares to have Atticus reference the need for prep work, something Reid never considered since, until now, he viewed himself as straight. (Belated spoiler alert.)

The real beauty of this book isn’t the sex, although I have to confess that the dorm room scene that starts around page 287 will rev your engine—the real magic here is two damaged characters reaching beyond mere sex to find true intimacy. You’ll tear up when you learn why Atticus hates Tuesdays.

And Reid’s backstory for that Death’s Head moth tattoo on his throat—chef’s kiss, from the guy who likes Braums.   

This book is as close to G2E realism—Gay, Gritty, explicitly real—as the genre gets.

Buy it and read it on a Tuesday.

The Gayly online. 2/23/26 @ 1:20 p.m. CST.