Honeymooning With My Best Friend

A Sapphic Friends-to-Lovers Fake-Married Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Fake Marriage, Only One Bed, Forced Proximity, Honeymoon for the Wrong Two, Runaway Bride, Mutual Pining, Vacation Romance, Light Bondage, Praise, Strap-On, Grumpy/Sunshine, Romantic Comedy

She cancelled the wedding. She kept the honeymoon. She brought her best friend.

Tessa Mercer said yes to everything. The ring. The venue. The move to Denver. The life someone else planned for her. Three weeks before the wedding, standing on a platform in a bridal shop, she finally said no.

Now she has a non-refundable honeymoon in Mexico and nobody to take.

Except Morgan.

Morgan Vale builds museum exhibits for a living and has carried a nine-foot plaster whale through a loading dock without breaking a sweat. Five years of Thursday takeout. Two years of quietly wanting her best friend and saying absolutely nothing. She agrees to come on one condition: I’m not your rebound. I’m your friend on a beach.

Then the front desk checks them in as Mrs. and Mrs. Mercer. Correcting it would cost the private cabana, the couples’ massage and every perk Tessa already paid for. So they play along. Fourteen-dollar gift-shop rings. Kissing towel swans. One king bed, and a five-foot-two velvet chaise that Morgan, at five-eleven, lasts exactly one night on.

The kiss for the resort photographer is supposed to be fake. The sound Tessa makes in the outdoor shower, with Morgan on the other side of the screen, isn’t. Neither is the name she says.

So Morgan writes the rules. Two weeks. It stays at Maravela. When they land in Philly, they go back to being friends. Either of them can stop it, any time.

Tessa agrees too fast. Morgan meant every word. And neither of them has the slightest idea how to come home.

Honeymooning With My Best Friend is a high-heat, standalone sapphic friends-to-lovers romance with a fake marriage, only one bed, dual first-person POV, no cheating, and an HEA guaranteed. Explicit content. 18+.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friends checked in as newlyweds who keep the lie for the cabana
✅ One honeymoon suite, one king bed, and a five-foot velvet chaise that loses
✅ A tall, deadpan exhibit builder who has loved her best friend for two years and says nothing
✅ “Either’s fine” versus a woman who makes her pick between Option A and Option B
✅ A couples’ Newlywed Game, a pleasure-menu box, silk ties and lights-on, eyes-open heat
✅ Two years of pining finally said out loud on a steel worktable in Kensington
✅ Fourteen-dollar rings that turn a finger green, and a proposal a year later
✅ No cheating, no villains, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat and an HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, fingering, masturbation, overheard masturbation, semi-public scenes in a beach cabana and an after-hours pool, light bondage with silk ties, edging with a vibrator, a strap-on, praise, and video-call phone sex), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes a called-off wedding, an ex-fiancée handled with care, and an emotional breakup-and-reunion arc. No cheating between the leads. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Tessa

The heat hit me like an apology I hadn’t earned.

Six hours earlier I’d been scraping gray Philadelphia slush off my boots in a rideshare that smelled like pine air freshener and regret. Now I was standing in an open-air lobby with a roof made of palm thatch and no walls at all, just a long view of turquoise water and white sand, and a breeze that moved through the room like it owned the place. Somewhere out of sight, a steel drum was playing a song I was pretty sure was a cover of “Wonderwall.”

Beside me, Morgan Vale was holding the welcome bouquet like it was evidence in a homicide.

It was enormous. Birds of paradise, pink ginger, some kind of waxy red flower I didn’t know the name of, all of it bound in a ribbon that said MARAVELA BAY in gold cursive. A woman in a linen uniform had pressed it into Morgan’s arms the second we stepped out of the shuttle, and Morgan, who builds museum exhibits for a living and has once carried a nine-foot plaster whale through a loading dock without breaking a sweat, had not figured out a single thing to do with it since.

“You could set it down,” I said.

“Where?”

“Literally anywhere. It’s a lobby. It’s mostly floor.”

“It feels rude.” She shifted it to her other arm. A petal fell off and landed on her sneaker. She looked at it like it had personally betrayed her. “Somebody arranged this.”

“Somebody arranged it for me and Elise.”

“Well.” Morgan considered the bouquet. “It’s not Elise’s fault she’s not here. And it’s not the flowers’ fault.”

That was the thing about Morgan. You handed her a disaster and she started sorting it into whose fault it wasn’t.

The front desk was a slab of polished wood the length of a city bus, and behind it a young man with perfect teeth and a name tag that said ANDRÉS was typing on a screen with the intensity of a surgeon. I’d handed him my passport and the confirmation email and then stood there sweating through the long-sleeved shirt I’d worn on the plane because it had been nineteen degrees when I left my apartment.

I’d told myself the whole flight that this would be fine. I’d called the booking company two weeks ago, changed the second traveler from Elise Warren to Morgan Vale, paid the fee, and gotten a very polite confirmation email. Morgan had insisted on paying for her own drinks and half of anything that wasn’t already prepaid, and we’d had a whole stupid argument about it at the Thai place on Passyunk that ended with her saying, “Tess. I’m not letting you buy me a vacation as a consolation prize for you,” and me saying, “It’s not a consolation prize, it’s a sunk cost,” and her saying, “That’s so much worse,” and both of us laughing so hard the waiter came over to check on us.

So. It was handled. I’d handled it. I was very good at handling things.

Andrés stopped typing. His face did something luminous.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, congratulations.“

I smiled the way you smile at someone who’s about to say something you can already feel coming, like a sneeze or a car accident.

“Welcome to Maravela Bay, Mrs. and Mrs. Mercer!”

Morgan did not move. I didn’t look at her, but I felt her not move. It’s very specific, the way Morgan goes still. It’s like being next to a building.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually—”

“You are in the Palapa Honeymoon Suite, number two-fourteen, one of our very best.” He was already sliding a leather folder across the desk, opening it, turning it toward me with the reverence of a man presenting a wine list. “And of course, as part of your honeymoon package, you have the private beach cabana for the length of your stay, the side-by-side couples’ massage, the sunset catamaran sail, the couples’ photography session with our resort photographer, champagne turndown on your first night, and priority reservations at all four of our restaurants.”

“That’s—” I said. “So the thing is—”

“These are non-transferable,” Andrés said warmly, tapping the page, “and reserved for our honeymooning couples only. We are so happy to celebrate with you.”

He looked up at us with genuine joy. Not hotel joy. Real joy. Like he’d personally introduced us.

There’s a version of me that exists only in my head, the version who says things in the moment instead of thinking of them in the shower forty minutes later. That version of me would have said, Oh, how sweet, no, we’re friends, the wedding’s off, long story. She’d have said it with a little laugh. Andrés would have apologized. The cabana would have evaporated. Everybody would have been fine.

That version of me has been unavailable for most of my adult life.

What I actually did was open my mouth, and keep it open, and say nothing at all, while my brain flipped through the fourteen months of deposits and the non-refundable package and the couples’ massage I had specifically, in a fit of optimism last June, upgraded to the ninety-minute option.

Morgan leaned down. She’s five-eleven and I’m five-six, and when she leans down to say something to me privately her voice arrives right at my ear, low and dry and completely without inflection.

“We’d hate to lose the cabana.”

I closed my mouth.

Andrés beamed. He handed over two key cards in a little envelope with a heart on it. He said someone would bring our bags. He said if we needed anything at all, anything, we should call the front desk and ask for him.

“Thank you,” I said. “Andrés. Thank you so much.”

“Of course, Mrs. Mercer.” He turned the smile on Morgan. “Mrs. Mercer.”

“Hi,” said Morgan.

And that was how I got married.

We walked away from the desk at a normal speed. I counted that as a personal victory. Morgan still had the bouquet. Neither of us said anything until we’d turned the corner past a fountain shaped like a leaping fish, where a narrow stone path led toward the water under a tunnel of bougainvillea.

“I was going to correct him,” I said.

“You were not going to correct him.”

“I was absolutely going to correct him. I had the sentence. I was building toward it.”

“You were building toward a cabana.” She glanced down at me. Her mouth was doing the thing it does when she’s laughing on the inside and refuses to give you the satisfaction of seeing it. “It’s fine.”

“It’s lying.”

“It’s two weeks. We’ll tip big.”

“Morgan.”

“Tessa.” She shifted the flowers again. “You paid for the cabana. You paid for all of it. You’re the one who has to look at the credit card statement. If they want to call us something to give you what you already paid for, let them call us something.”

I wanted to argue with that, but it was annoyingly reasonable, and also we’d just reached a small wooden sign at the fork in the path, and the sign said, in hand-painted letters with a little drawing of two interlocking hearts:

COUPLES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. PLEASE ENJOY RESPONSIBLY.

We stopped. We looked at it. We looked at each other.

Morgan held out her hand without a word. I put my phone in it. She took the picture, framed it carefully, checked it, took one more for good measure, and handed my phone back.

“Send it to yourself,” she said. “So it’s in the archive.”

“You’re the archive.”

“I’m the backup archive.”

Five years of bad sign photos. A gas station in Delaware with a sign that said WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR CHOICES. A church in Fishtown with a marquee that said COME AS YOU ARE, LEAVE BEFORE NOON. A dentist’s office in South Philly that announced, with total confidence, TEETH. We had a shared album on our phones with four hundred and twelve pictures in it. It was, I thought, possibly the healthiest relationship I’d been in.

“Enjoy responsibly,” Morgan read again, sounding personally offended by the phrase. Then she walked past the sign, into the couples-only zone, carrying the honeymoon flowers.

I followed my wife.

The path to the suites wound through gardens so lush they looked fake, and I let my brain do the thing I’d been trying not to let it do for twenty-two days, which was replay the whole thing from the beginning.

Elise Warren and I were together four years and engaged for fourteen months, and if you’d asked me at any point during those fourteen months whether I was happy, I’d have said yes. I said yes to a lot of things. I said yes to the ring, which was beautiful and which she’d picked out with her sister. I said yes to the venue, a converted mill in Manayunk that her mother loved. I said yes to the date. I said yes when she got the promotion in Denver and came home with champagne and a list of neighborhoods and said, We’ll love it there, Tess, you can work from anywhere, and I said yes when she put down a deposit on a rental house with a yard because she’d always wanted a dog.

I didn’t say yes to the dog, actually. I said, Let’s talk about it. That was the closest I ever got to no.

Then, three weeks before the wedding, which would have been yesterday, I stood on a little carpeted platform in a bridal shop on Walnut Street while a seamstress with pins in her mouth fussed with my hem, and I looked at myself in the three-way mirror, and I couldn’t breathe. Not in the romantic way. In the actual way. The seamstress had to unzip me. I sat on a velvet bench in my slip and drank a tiny cup of water and thought, very clearly, the way you think the stove is on when you’re already halfway down the block: I don’t want to move to Denver. I don’t want any of this. I’ve never wanted any of this. I’ve just never said.

I told Elise that night. I sat across from her at our kitchen table and said it, all of it, and it was the worst conversation of my life and also the first honest one I’d had with her in about a year. She cried. I cried. She asked me if there was someone else and I said no, and it was true. She asked me why I hadn’t said anything, and I didn’t have a good answer, because the true answer was I didn’t know I was allowed to, and that was a sentence that would only make everything worse.

Elise isn’t a bad person. That’s the part that made it so hard. She’s organized and ambitious and generous and she loved me the way she loves everything, which is completely and with a spreadsheet. She just loved me into a life I’d never actually chosen, and I let her, and then at the last possible minute I pulled the emergency brake and the whole train went off the rails.

The next day I called Morgan.

Everyone else said the same thing: Are you sure? My mother. Elise’s sister, with edge. My sister June said it in the voice of someone who’d been waiting three years to ask, then said, Oh thank God, then, Sorry. Sorry. Are you okay?

Here’s what Morgan said: “Do you want me to come help, or do you want me to bring wine?”

I said both. She came over with two bottles of a Spanish red and a roll of packing tape and a tape measure, because she’d correctly guessed I’d be pulling my things out of the apartment I’d shared with Elise and wouldn’t have any boxes. She built them for me in my new kitchen without asking a single question. Then she made me sit down on the floor and eat an entire container of pad see ew, and she ate her extra-spicy basil chicken, because it was Thursday, and we always got Thai on Thursdays, and Morgan Vale does not let a disaster interfere with a ritual.

Three days after that, at our usual table on Passyunk, I told her about the honeymoon.

“It’s fourteen nights at an adults-only resort in Mexico,” I said, “and it’s non-refundable, and the airline will let me change the second passenger for a fee, and I’m going to just not go, I think, because what am I going to do, go alone? I’ll get a bunch of work done here instead. I have that cookbook layout.”

Morgan put her fork down.

“Come with me,” I said, before I’d decided to say it.

She looked at me for a long time. Morgan has a way of looking at you that makes you feel like a measurement she’s checking twice. Her eyes are a strange gray-green that turns almost silver in bad restaurant lighting.

“I have one condition,” she said finally.

“Okay.”

“I’m not your rebound.” She said it plainly, the way she’d tell you a beam won’t hold. “I’m not a stand-in. I’m not coming as your—” She waved a hand, encompassing everything: the wedding, the cancelled cake tasting, the ruined honeymoon. “I’m your friend. On a beach. That’s it.”

“That’s all I want,” I said, and meant it.

She picked her fork back up. “Then yes.”

I did, of course, make her choose her seat on the plane. Because Morgan, asked whether she wanted the window or the aisle, said “Either’s fine,” and five years ago I’d learned that when Morgan says either’s fine it means she has an opinion and has put it in a drawer and locked the drawer and swallowed the key.

“Option A,” I’d said, holding up one finger. “Window. You can lean on the wall and sleep, but you have to climb over me to pee. Option B. Aisle. Extra legroom for your ridiculous femurs, but the drink cart will hit your elbow every forty minutes.”

“B,” she’d said immediately, and then glared at me, because she knew I’d caught her.

It’s the only trick I’ve ever had that works on her. She’ll tell you what she wants if you make it specific enough. Ask her an open question and she’ll hand you back whatever answer makes your life easiest.

The path forked again near a low stucco building with a hand-carved sign that said BOUTIQUE. Through the open door I could see racks of sarongs, shelves of sunscreen, a glass case of jewelry glittering under a ceiling fan.

I stopped.

“No,” Morgan said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re going to say something.”

“I’m going to say,” I said, “that if we’re going to be married for two weeks, we should probably look married. For authenticity.”

“Tessa.”

“It’s a matter of professional integrity. I’m a designer. Details matter.”

She sighed. It was a very long sigh. She carried the bouquet into the boutique like a woman carrying a casket.

The rings were in the glass case next to a tray of shell bracelets. Plain silver-tone bands, the kind of thing you’d buy a twelve-year-old on a boardwalk. The woman behind the counter took them out and put them on a little velvet square. The price tag said fourteen dollars. Each.

“Very romantic,” Morgan said.

“Do you have any idea how much I paid for my last ring?”

“I was there when you got it. You called me from the bathroom.”

I had. I’d locked myself in the restroom of a very expensive restaurant and whispered she proposed into the phone, and Morgan had said, Congratulations, and then, after a pause: Are you happy? and I’d said, Of course, and she’d said, Okay, in a voice I’d been thinking about lately for reasons I didn’t want to examine.

I paid twenty-eight dollars plus tax. The woman put the rings in a tiny paper box and wished us a happy honeymoon. Outside, in the dappled shade of a giant ceiba tree, I opened the box and held the bigger one out to Morgan.

I expected her to make a joke. She usually does.

She didn’t. She took the ring off my palm and looked at it for a second, and then she shifted the bouquet to the crook of her elbow and slid it onto her left ring finger, and it fit, and she didn’t say a word. Then she looked at me, waiting.

I put mine on. My hand was shaking a little, which I put down to the flight.

“There,” Morgan said. Her voice was the same as always. Dry. Level. “Married.”

“Married,” I said.

We walked the rest of the way without talking, and I spent the whole walk feeling the cheap metal on my finger like it was much heavier than fourteen dollars.

Suite 214 was at the end of a curving row of thatched bungalows, set back from the beach behind a hedge of hibiscus so thick and red it looked like a wall someone had painted. Morgan used the key card. The door clicked open.

We both stood in the doorway for a second.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes,” said Morgan.

It was gorgeous. That was the problem. The suite was one long room with white plaster walls and dark wood beams and a ceiling that rose to a peak of woven palm far above us. The floor was cool terra-cotta tile. On the far side, sliding doors stood open to a private terrace, and beyond that, past a low wall and a strip of garden, the sea did its best impression of a screensaver.

And in the middle of the room, under a canopy of white mosquito netting that hung from a dark wooden frame, there was a bed. A single, enormous, unmistakably-intended-for-sex king bed.

On the bed, someone had arranged red rose petals in the shape of a heart. In the center of the heart, two towels had been folded into swans, and the swans had been positioned with their necks curving toward each other, so their beaks touched. Kissing.

On the pillow, a card in gold script: Welcome, newlyweds.

“They’re kissing,” Morgan said.

“I can see that they’re kissing.”

“The swans.”

“I know, Morgan.”

She walked in slowly, set the bouquet down on a dresser at last, and stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips, surveying it like a site she’d been brought in to fix.

“I called,” I said. My voice had gone up half an octave. “When I changed the booking. I asked if there was another room type, a two-queen, a sofa bed, something, and they said the package was tied to the suite, and that all the suites had alternative seating, and I thought—”

“There’s alternative seating,” Morgan said.

She pointed.

Under the window, against the wall, was a couch. Except it wasn’t a couch. It was a chaise, a fainting couch, the kind of thing a Victorian lady in a corset collapses onto in a period drama. It was upholstered in emerald velvet with a carved wooden frame and one curling armrest at one end, and it was, at a generous estimate, five feet two inches long.

Morgan walked over and lay down on it, fully clothed, sneakers and all. Her head went on the armrest. Her calves went past the end. Her feet stuck out into the room like a drawbridge.

She lay there and stared at the ceiling.

“Great,” she said. “I’ll sleep folded.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Take the bed. I’m shorter. I’ll take the—”

“No.”

“Morgan, you will literally fracture.”

“No,” she said again. Too fast. She sat up, swung her legs off, and stood in one motion, and she wouldn’t look at me. She looked at the window instead, at the light coming through the slats of the shutters. “It’s your honeymoon. You paid for the bed. I’ll be fine.”

“You won’t be fine. You’re going to wake up as a question mark.”

“I’ve slept on worse.”

“Name one thing.”

“An installation crate in Pittsburgh,” she said. “With a sculpture of a mastodon in it.”

“Was the mastodon a good roommate?”

“He didn’t snore.” She finally looked at me. Her face was perfectly composed. “I’m fine on the chaise. Done. Decision made.”

I knew that tone. It’s the tone she uses on clients who want to hang a two-ton sign from a ceiling that won’t hold it. There’s no arguing with that tone. There’s just waiting.

So I let it go, and I unpacked.

That was a mistake, because the suitcase I’d packed for this trip had been packed a month ago, before everything, by a woman who was going on her honeymoon. And so as I unzipped it and started pulling things out onto the bed — carefully, around the swans — what came out was the wardrobe of somebody else’s idea of me. White eyelet sundresses. A sheer lavender coverup that hit mid-thigh. A pair of strappy gold sandals I’d never once worn because they gave me blisters. A lace robe. Elise loved lace.

And at the bottom, still with the tag on, a bikini.

It was red. Not a polite red. A siren red, a stop-sign red, the red of things that end up in country songs. It was barely a bikini, really. It was more of a suggestion: two small triangles and a string, and bottoms cut high on the hip, and the whole thing weighed maybe as much as a paper napkin. I’d bought it at a boutique in Rittenhouse in a fit of honeymoon bravado. I’d been thinking about how Elise would look at me in it.

I held it up and looked at it and felt — nothing about Elise, which surprised me. Just a vague sense of embarrassment, like finding a costume from a play you were in once.

“Wow,” Morgan said from the bathroom doorway.

I jumped. I hadn’t heard her walk over. She was leaning against the frame with her arms folded, looking at the bikini. Her expression was absolutely neutral.

“It was for—” I started.

“Yeah. I figured.”

“I wasn’t going to wear it.”

“Why not?” she asked, and her voice was a little strange, a little careful. “It’s a beach.”

“It’s a lot of bikini.”

“It’s not very much bikini at all,” Morgan said, and then she turned around and went into the bathroom and shut the door, and I heard the water start running in the sink, a lot of water, for a very long time.

I put the bikini on the dresser next to the bouquet. I hung the eyelet dresses in the closet. I opened the nightstand drawer on my side of the bed to put my book and my phone charger in it, saw that there was some kind of black lacquered box already inside, and decided, with great maturity, that it was a problem for tomorrow.

Then I reached up and redid my hair. My curls had gone feral in the humidity, and I twisted the whole mass up off my neck and clamped it with my tortoiseshell claw clip, the one I’ve had since grad school, the one Morgan always says looks like a beetle. The air on the back of my neck was a relief.

The bathroom door opened. I heard Morgan come out, heard her unzip her duffel on the floor by the chaise. I was hanging up the last dress, my back to the room.

“I’m going to change,” she said. “Then we should eat. I’m starving.”

“Okay,” I said. “Give me one sec, I just need to grab my—”

I turned around.

Morgan was standing beside the chaise with her back to me, and she’d pulled her T-shirt off over her head, and she was holding it in one hand while she dug through her bag with the other.

I’d seen her like this before. Sports bras at the climbing gym. A ratty bikini at the Jersey Shore. Stripped to her bra in her workshop in August, cursing museum climate control in front of a box fan.

But I’d never seen her in this light. Late afternoon, gold and slanting through the shutters in bars, laying stripes across the broad, freckled span of her shoulders. Her back was long. Longer than I’d ever registered. Pale, dusted with freckles that got denser toward her shoulders, like someone had flicked cinnamon across her. The muscles there moved when she shifted her weight — the cut of her shoulder blades, the shallow channel of her spine running all the way down to where her shorts sat low on her hips, two small dimples just above the waistband. Her auburn hair was cut sharp at the jaw and curled damp against her neck from the sink, and there was a single drop of water rolling down the back of it, slow, finding the groove between the long muscles on either side of her spine and following it down.

I watched it go.

All the way down.

There’s a filing cabinet in my head. Everyone has one. I’d built mine carefully, over years, and there was a drawer in it labeled IRRELEVANT, and I’d been putting things in that drawer since the night I met Morgan Vale at that arts fundraiser, when she’d crawled out from under a display stand with sawdust in her hair and said, Your sign is two inches too wide, and I’m going to need you to tell me how you want to fix it, and I’d thought, Oh, and then immediately thought, No. She’s with someone. File it. So I’d filed it. The time she’d fallen asleep on my couch with her head in my lap during a movie, I’d filed it. The time I’d watched her forearms while she rebuilt my bookshelf, I’d filed it. All of Elise, all four years, I’d kept that drawer locked shut.

I hadn’t realized how full it had gotten.

Morgan found the shirt she was looking for. She straightened and shook it out, and the movement rolled through her back, and the drawer in my head slid open on its own, and every single thing I’d ever filed under irrelevant sat up and looked at me.

I turned around so fast I nearly knocked the bouquet off the dresser.

“Did you say something?” Morgan asked.

“Nope,” I said to the wall. “Nothing. Just— flowers. Nearly fell.”

“Okay.” I heard her pull the shirt on. Heard her zip her bag. “You ready?”

“One second.”

I stood very still and looked at the wall and waited for the drawer to close.

It didn’t.

I’d seen Morgan Vale’s back a hundred times. I had never once wanted to put my mouth on it.

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One year later. Suite 214, the night of the proposal. A year ago Morgan heard everything through the slats of the outdoor shower. This time Tessa sits on the other side of the screen, and asks to listen.

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