Practice Makes Girlfriends
Sapphic Friends-to-Lovers Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Sex Lessons, Praise Kink, Contractor Romance, Forced Proximity, Practice Turns Real, One Bed
She asked for practice. Her best friend wants permanence.
Elowen Price can control every muscle in her body. Her marriage is another matter. Newly divorced and painfully aware that twelve years of perfectly fine sex taught her almost nothing about desire, Elowen decides to rebuild her life with the same discipline she brings to her Pilates studio. First objective: learn what she actually likes. Second objective: become confident enough to date women. Third objective: avoid humiliating herself.
Tamsin Rook has loved Elowen for eleven years, which makes her the worst possible person to provide practical instruction — and apparently the only person Elowen trusts enough to ask.
Their agreement is simple: seven lessons, explicit boundaries, no jealousy, no romantic expectations, and a final graduation before Elowen starts dating for real. But Elowen is an overachiever. Soon she’s inventing extra credit, turning Tamsin’s instructions against her, and making the experienced contractor forget who is supposed to be teaching whom.
Meanwhile, Elowen has ninety days to save her studio building from being sold. Tamsin can restore the property. She cannot keep rebuilding a future Elowen intends to share with somebody else.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Best friends to lovers with eleven years of pining
✅ Bisexual awakening with a structured lesson plan
✅ A very flexible heroine and a very capable contractor
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Praise kink, mirror play, toy introduction, power reversal
✅ Found family through a wellness cooperative
✅ A heroine who learns to want and a love interest who learns to ask
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, divorce, identity questioning, and depictions of emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Perfectly Fine
The secret to a perfect teaser is making the client believe the shake is voluntary.
“Extend through the heel,” I say, circling behind Margot’s reformer. “Find the line from your hip to your ankle and hold it there. Let the spring do the arguing.”
Margot’s left quad starts to tremble. She clenches her jaw, adjusting her grip on the straps. I know she wants to drop her knee, reset, pretend she started a new rep. I also know she can hold it. I’ve watched this woman power through eighteen months of reformer classes and a knee replacement without complaining about anything except the parking lot.
“Three more breaths,” I tell her. “Inhale through your ribs, not your shoulders.”
“My ribs,” Margot grits, “are staging a coup.”
I almost smile. “Let them. Then exhale and prove you’re still in charge.”
The class has eight bodies arranged across the studio floor, each working a variation I assigned based on what they walked in needing today. Sandra: hip opener, left side tight from sitting at a desk for nine hours. Raj: thoracic extension to counteract his cycling hunch. Keiko: postpartum core restoration, third month back, progressing faster than she gives herself credit for.
This is the part I’m good at. Reading what a body is hiding and building a movement around the truth of it. I can look at someone’s gait across the studio and tell you which hip is compensating, which shoulder is bracing, where the restriction lives. I’ve been doing it since I was nine years old in a ballet studio, learning to hold a smile through pain that made my eyes water.
Control. Breath. Adaptation.
I built this business on those three words. They’re printed on the wall behind the front desk in a clean sans-serif font, just above the rack of complimentary eucalyptus towels. My husband picked the font. My best friend built the wall.
My best friend is currently crouched at the studio’s entrance, doing something violent to the bottom hinge of the door that’s been sticking since August.
I do not look at Tamsin Rook’s forearms while she works a screwdriver into the hinge plate. I do not watch the tendons shift beneath her tan skin, or the way her short black hair falls across her forehead when she tilts her head to inspect the mechanism. I am a professional, and I am teaching a class, and I have been not looking at Tamsin’s forearms for eleven years with the discipline of a woman who has perfected the art of peripheral observation.
She catches the door, lifts it slightly off its track, and adjusts the pin with her thumb. No tools needed for that part. Just hands.
Tamsin has exceptional hands. This is an objective architectural observation.
“Beautiful work today,” I tell the class as they finish their cool-downs. “Margot, your extension has improved significantly. Sandra, ice that hip if it talks to you tonight. Everyone hydrate.”
They filter toward the cubbies and the changing area. Tamsin holds the repaired door open for each of them, receiving compliments on her fix with a crooked half-smile that does something unreasonable to her face.
“You should charge for that,” I say, stacking resistance bands.
“For what?”
“Standing in doorways looking handy. You could monetize the whole experience.”
She grins. The scar through her left eyebrow crinkles. “I do charge for it. Just not here.” She nods toward the hinge. “Your bottom screw was stripped. I replaced it, but the frame has some swell from the humidity. Might want to shave it down before winter.”
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“I am the list.”
I find Gavin in the second-floor office space. He’s set out Thai takeout from the new place on Birch Street — which means he stood in the wait — and a bottle of the Riesling I like. Two glasses, already poured.
“The green curry is yours,” he says. “Extra Thai basil.”
He wraps both hands around his wine glass and looks at a point slightly to the left of my face, and something in my chest goes very quiet.
“El, I want a divorce.”
The words arrive like a diagnosis delivered in a language I studied but never became fluent in. I understand them individually. The meaning takes longer.
“Okay,” I say.
Tamsin comes back for a wrench she left in the utility closet. She crosses the studio floor, lowers herself to the ground beside me, and sits close enough that I can feel the warmth along my right arm without contact.
“Gavin asked for a divorce,” I say.
“How could I be married for twelve years,” I say, “and not know it was over?”
“Sometimes a building looks stable for years because nobody’s checking the foundation,” she says. “Doesn’t mean it was ever sound.”
“Stay,” I say. “Not — just don’t leave yet.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She says it like it’s simple. And something about the way she says it makes me think about all the times I’ve heard Tamsin say that exact sentence, across eleven years of friendship.
I think I’m only now hearing what it means.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Office Hours — After the Final Lesson — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Three weeks after the HEA, Elowen schedules one more “office hours” session in the renovated studio after closing. No index cards. No curriculum. Just two girlfriends, a locked door, a reformer, and the discovery that Tamsin’s professional composure is significantly less durable when Elowen is the one giving instructions.
More from Aurora North
Browse all Aurora North books.
The Straight and Narrow Escape
She was supposed to marry the perfect man. Her driver was only supposed to get her to the altar.
Practice Makes Girlfriends
She asked for practice. Her best friend wants permanence.
The Lesbian Clause
She put fake dating in the contract. No one said anything about falling in love.
The Hot Neighbor Problem
She complained about the noise. Then she became it.
Soft Launch, Hard Feelings
The chemistry is sponsored. The feelings are not.
Practice Makes Perfectly Gay
The Match Point Series
Her forehand was elite. Her heterosexuality needed work.
Never Miss a Release
Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.