The original premise of the book Miami Horror was "Boyfriend for Hire," which was simply about a guy that was hired by different women to go and show up to parties pretending to be their boyfriend.
I tried my best to be a little more expansive of the story in the re-edit (focusing on the fantasy aspects), but truly the story was supposed to be mostly about Jackie and Antonio. The two both have this instant chemistry that is going on, but Antonio pulls away the moment that Jackie learns more about him.
So instead of keeping herself together, Jackie falls apart in a fashion while the rest of the book goes on without her input truly. Not to say that I didn't care for Jackie, I did, but the book turned out to be much more than even just that.
The magic and the fantasy of the book turns out to be more of a metaphor for Covid-19. Instead of keeping the world together, it tears the world apart and brings out the worst in people. For Antonio, this is no exception.
He literally gets with a woman that he has no feelings for and ends up having a child with her, then leaves by the end of the book with some other woman he hardly knows, marrying her and moving to Charleston, SC. He's the avoidant.
Unfortunately, in the process of running away from his emotions, he found out way too late that he actually had feelings for Jackie that he had been putting off the entire novel. So, in Singapore Sci-Fi, he ends up looking for Jackie and finds that she was actually cursed by an interdimensional virus.
So yeah, it may be super annoying, but Antonio and Jackie's love story is very integral to the entire premise of the series. Everyone, in some fashion or another, is running from their darkness within the books. It's through the character development in Jackie and Antonio (Jackie running away, Antonio going after her), that the book gets the ball on the roll. The entirety of book two (Singapore Sci-Fi) is Antonio dealing with all he put off in book 1.
