When she starts her freshman year at Clinton Hill University, Nea’s just coming off the death of her boyfriend. She meets Van, a wealthy white boy and talented painter, and becomes his muse. Nea believes it’s love. However, everything isn’t what it appears. Some white men who like Black women can be white supremacists and racists, too.   

Nea’s roommate, Amber, is engaged to Henry, her hometown boyfriend, but when she meets Homando, a Clinton Hill senior, she begins to question her engagement. Homando is intelligent, charismatic, outgoing, and different from what she’s used to. He also sells drugs to support himself through school. They create a bond, both sexual and mental, and she falls in love, but some forces are against their interracial dating and will stop at nothing to ruin Homando’s future and end their sexual tryst by any means necessary. 

And then there’s Tiffany, a rebellious student. Tiffany comes from a strict, religious family, and now that she is in college, the whore has come out to play. Tiffany is liberated and promiscuous. Juggling three men in her life like she’s in a carnival act, she becomes estranged from her parents and family. She has no time for Christ because being a thot is so much more fun. She has yet to learn that the same thing that makes you laugh will eventually make you cry. 

Erick S. Gray explores the interplay between race issues and romance in Butter Soft, a novel about the complicated love lives of three young women from very different backgrounds.