This one really started to impress me by the second chapter. The drawings are nice, and towards the middle of the story they get kind of gorgeous. The setting of the beach town they live in is a pretty backdrop and adds a nice ocean-side feeling.
As for the story itself, the pacing of the romance felt right to me, which I find unusual in yaoi. The seme kept gently pushing for a faster pace, but the uke had to figure out how he felt slowly. Surprisingly, he wasn't an annoyingly cliche tsundere character, which is what I expected after his initial reactions to the seme's advances, but instead was just hesitant and slowly digesting each new experience with every interaction. Both characters had time to observe each other in various situations, and time to get to know each others' true character and fall in love.
There were also many interesting undercurrents of the MCs pasts affecting their emotional needs, and making their romantic interest in each other deeper and more complex because they each satisfied much more than romantic love/sexual desire for each other.
Especially for the seme, the uke represented and fulfilled a deep-seated need to be loved and appreciated as a human being, that he had never been able to fully experience before from either family or sexual partners. Romance that has multiple layers of emotional complexity like this is my favorite kind.
This was a very sweet, and in some ways simple, version of a multi-layered romantic relationship, and there isn't a ton of conflict. The angst was minimal and easily soothed by a bit of clear communication and loving embraces. This was not one of those stressful, dramatic, angst-ridden, psychologically complex thrillers...far from it. Instead this is a quiet and slow progressing story that allows you to get to know the characters somewhat, especially their emotional landscapes, their worries and fears, their needs, their past hurts, and their desires.
One thing I will note is that this yaoi has some of the least explicit sex scenes I think I've seen so far in the genre. However, there is enough there to let you know basically what happened, and what the tone of it was. And there is the satisfaction of knowing it did indeed happen and that their love is experienced on a sexual and physical level as well as emotional. Still, I for one prefer a less classy take, with more sex. ? Seriously though, I prefer to be able to witness the full progression of the romantic relationship, and the sexual aspect is an important part of that for me, not just because it is titillating and enjoyable but also because it provides huge insight into the dynamics and atmosphere of the relationship.
As usual for most mangas, there is a bit of cheesy humor thrown in, which never does much for me, and the extras at the end clashed, in my opinion, with the resolution between characters that had happened during the main story, for the sake of ending with humor, as most of the publishers (I'm guessing) seem to think is a good idea. Besides that aspect, I felt the atmosphere of this manga was unerringly lovely in an introspective and slightly melancholy way, filled with longing, loneliness, and, in the end, fulfilled and requited love.