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Briar Pendelton is new to Lassiter, and he’s determined to get into Alpha Tau, even if that means lying about already having passed his LSAT and doing stupid pledge stunts like dressing as a sorority girl. Besides, he’s always looked killer in a skirt.
Casey Hill has been pledge master of Alpha Tau for two years. Keeping a bunch of pledges in line is a bit like herding cats, but Casey’s got it down to a fine art. When Briar sashays into their fraternity with eyeliner, attitude, and legs for miles, Casey is thrown for a loop—in the best possible way. Except what happens when Briar literally can’t make the grade? Uh oh. The Amazing Alpha Tau Pledge Project is a lighthearted contemporary m/m romance containing college shenanigans, a pretty pledge selling candy, and a confused frat boy who discovers he's a lot more heteroflexible than he thought he was. Or something. |
"The interaction between the characters are funny, adorable and honest ..... and that's what makes this an brilliant book. It's not just the honesty between friends and those you care about, but also in ones-self. An absolutely beautiful book and this series is just perfection!!"
- MM Romance Reviewed
- MM Romance Reviewed
An excerpt from The Amazing Alpha Tau Pledge Project:
So the craziest thing about being pledge master for the Lassiter chapter of Alpha Tau was that I’d never even wanted to be in a fraternity. Like, at all.
Insert record scratch here and cut back to three years ago. Let me set the scene: the Hill family home. The living room. Interior. Night. The cat has got into my mom’s crochet basket and dragged strings of wool everywhere, like one of those whiteboards in a movie about a serial killer where bits of bright thread connect all the photographs. I’m looking at the carpet wondering which series of deaths our cat might be investigating, and meanwhile my dad has turned down the TV to signal that this is a Serious Talk and he is Imparting Wisdom. That’s the scene; now, the dialogue:
I groaned and flopped back against the couch. “Jesus Christ, Dad, I don’t want to be some fucking dudebro snapback-wearing Scumbag Steve douchebag, you know?”
“I understood some of that sentence,” Dad said, but he didn’t sound too sure. He sighed. “Listen, Monty Tate’s son is in Alpha Tau, and he speaks very highly of them.”
“Monty,” I said. “Dad, you’re legit taking life advice off someone unironically called Monty. Let that sink in for a minute.”
Dad reached for the remote control. “Just think about it, Casey. If only because it’s the best accommodation available on campus.”
And so, when I went to Lassiter, I thought about it. I thought about how I likely wouldn’t fit in with the guys from Alpha Tau. I thought about how most of them were from the southern part of the state with its old money and older attitudes—and proud of it—whereas I was from the part that wished really, really hard it was on the other side of the Potomac. I’d grown up in Arlington, a Democrat stronghold since forever, with liberal-as-fuck parents who believed in crazy shit like equal rights and science, and Dad actually thought I’d have anything in common with a bunch of southern Virginians? I didn’t know what would be worse: frat boys, good old boys, or whatever the fuck happened when you mixed those two together. But I’d promised my dad I’d think about it, and so I turned up to that first party in rush week, prepared to hate every second of it.
And those Alpha Tau fuckers had the audacity to be nothing like I’d expected.
Like, they had been, once. Of course they had been. This was Virginia. But somewhere along the way, things had changed.
“Hey,” a guy had said that first night, slapping me on the back. “You a freshman? My name’s Marshall. Grab a drink. Hang around. Get to know us.”
It had been weird, friendly, and not at all like I was expecting. Wasn’t I supposed to be hazed in the basement and then accidentally die of alcohol poisoning? But, in the first shock of the evening, it turned out that Alpha Tau didn’t just pay lip service to all that “no hazing” stuff. They actually meant it. And so I’d hung around, and it hadn’t taken long to figure out they were a decent bunch of guys. Turned out they actually meant all the stuff about being inclusive too.
Over the course of the week, I’d found myself coming back a second time, and when they’d invited me, a third. And when they’d extended a bid, I’d surprised even myself by accepting. And I got super interested in the fraternity history stuff that my big brother quizzed me on, because by knowing that history—the stories of the guys who’d come before me—it was like I could see how Alpha Tau had transformed itself; this microcosm of society that every instinct in me told me should have stayed frozen because a fraternity was usually the last place anything changed. But because past brothers had pushed, Alpha Tau had shifted a little here, a little there, and each tiny step, however hard fought, had laid the path for who they were today. And that felt like something really important.
Something I could be a part of.
Okay, so it hadn’t been like an instant realization. It had taken a while and a shitload of reflection on both my behavior and that of the past brothers, but eventually I’d figured out exactly what sort of Alpha Tau I wanted to be. I wanted to be one who pushed. So when I was offered the position of pledge master after the previous guy transferred, I grabbed the chance with both hands, and I’d been doing it ever since.
And I tried to remember that this was important and meaningful and that I was shaping the future as I stapled celebrity names to elastic headbands so tonight’s freshmen could play dumb guessing games to get to know each other. And so we could get to know them too, see how they interacted, and figure out if they’d be a good fit when we offered bids.
So the craziest thing about being pledge master for the Lassiter chapter of Alpha Tau was that I’d never even wanted to be in a fraternity. Like, at all.
Insert record scratch here and cut back to three years ago. Let me set the scene: the Hill family home. The living room. Interior. Night. The cat has got into my mom’s crochet basket and dragged strings of wool everywhere, like one of those whiteboards in a movie about a serial killer where bits of bright thread connect all the photographs. I’m looking at the carpet wondering which series of deaths our cat might be investigating, and meanwhile my dad has turned down the TV to signal that this is a Serious Talk and he is Imparting Wisdom. That’s the scene; now, the dialogue:
I groaned and flopped back against the couch. “Jesus Christ, Dad, I don’t want to be some fucking dudebro snapback-wearing Scumbag Steve douchebag, you know?”
“I understood some of that sentence,” Dad said, but he didn’t sound too sure. He sighed. “Listen, Monty Tate’s son is in Alpha Tau, and he speaks very highly of them.”
“Monty,” I said. “Dad, you’re legit taking life advice off someone unironically called Monty. Let that sink in for a minute.”
Dad reached for the remote control. “Just think about it, Casey. If only because it’s the best accommodation available on campus.”
And so, when I went to Lassiter, I thought about it. I thought about how I likely wouldn’t fit in with the guys from Alpha Tau. I thought about how most of them were from the southern part of the state with its old money and older attitudes—and proud of it—whereas I was from the part that wished really, really hard it was on the other side of the Potomac. I’d grown up in Arlington, a Democrat stronghold since forever, with liberal-as-fuck parents who believed in crazy shit like equal rights and science, and Dad actually thought I’d have anything in common with a bunch of southern Virginians? I didn’t know what would be worse: frat boys, good old boys, or whatever the fuck happened when you mixed those two together. But I’d promised my dad I’d think about it, and so I turned up to that first party in rush week, prepared to hate every second of it.
And those Alpha Tau fuckers had the audacity to be nothing like I’d expected.
Like, they had been, once. Of course they had been. This was Virginia. But somewhere along the way, things had changed.
“Hey,” a guy had said that first night, slapping me on the back. “You a freshman? My name’s Marshall. Grab a drink. Hang around. Get to know us.”
It had been weird, friendly, and not at all like I was expecting. Wasn’t I supposed to be hazed in the basement and then accidentally die of alcohol poisoning? But, in the first shock of the evening, it turned out that Alpha Tau didn’t just pay lip service to all that “no hazing” stuff. They actually meant it. And so I’d hung around, and it hadn’t taken long to figure out they were a decent bunch of guys. Turned out they actually meant all the stuff about being inclusive too.
Over the course of the week, I’d found myself coming back a second time, and when they’d invited me, a third. And when they’d extended a bid, I’d surprised even myself by accepting. And I got super interested in the fraternity history stuff that my big brother quizzed me on, because by knowing that history—the stories of the guys who’d come before me—it was like I could see how Alpha Tau had transformed itself; this microcosm of society that every instinct in me told me should have stayed frozen because a fraternity was usually the last place anything changed. But because past brothers had pushed, Alpha Tau had shifted a little here, a little there, and each tiny step, however hard fought, had laid the path for who they were today. And that felt like something really important.
Something I could be a part of.
Okay, so it hadn’t been like an instant realization. It had taken a while and a shitload of reflection on both my behavior and that of the past brothers, but eventually I’d figured out exactly what sort of Alpha Tau I wanted to be. I wanted to be one who pushed. So when I was offered the position of pledge master after the previous guy transferred, I grabbed the chance with both hands, and I’d been doing it ever since.
And I tried to remember that this was important and meaningful and that I was shaping the future as I stapled celebrity names to elastic headbands so tonight’s freshmen could play dumb guessing games to get to know each other. And so we could get to know them too, see how they interacted, and figure out if they’d be a good fit when we offered bids.