Various stories on two couples who live next door to one another. In the first case we have two friends who, after an impulsive act by the party who's had a crush on his friend for some time, end up fooling around regularly, but with the party who knew of his feelings before hand believing the other is only in it for the sex. For the the other couple, childhood friends and roommates, one confesses, the other has to sort his feelings out about it. After those plot lines are resolved, there's the usual stuff about dealing with jealousy/past lovers, working up to sex (with the second couple), moving in together, etc.

As you can probably guess from the plot description, nothing new here. But I do think that the beginning half is at least fairly charming. There's some angst, but there's more a feeling of working through it than wallowing in it as many do. The art is really appealing even if not entirely striking. The characters each have their own personalities and play off one another in endearing and amusing ways, particularly the first couple (the seme from the second is rather a bland-patient-nice-seme type). Nothing hilarious but a little funny sometimes (“Namichi Oootomo, 18 years and 11 months old. Here's his boyfriend of one month. Today they share their twenty-first kiss. Their fifth French kiss, to be exact.”). One thing I do like about these kind of sex-first-love-later plots is that by default they pretty much have to recognize that sex is not the ultimate culmination of a relationship, that there is more to romance than 'getting together.' It's no guarantee of quality, but just the fact an author is dealing with such a plot is at least a little promising. As it is here, it's not doing wondrous or original things with the idea, but it's using it comfortably well, and just that makes it better than your average yaoi. As I was reading the first half, I was aware it was pretty generic stuff, but it was so pleasant I was almost mildly impressed.

On the other hand, the latter half goes even more generic than the first. The plots were always unoriginal even in the beginning, but the nice character interactions helped make it more fun. The later parts seemed to me to take less time developing that and just went through the usual motions. The characters were still the same people, but the fun qualities of their relationships and personalities came out less. It wasn't horrible, but I started reading faster, hoping it would end soon so I could get on to something else.

In the end, I could go either way with worth your money vs. not on this one. If you only want stuff that's truly solid and good, you might pass. If it's ok to just be fairly pleasant (or a little more than that even with the first half), then you might like it quite a bit. ( )