Coach Next Door

Sapphic Small-Town Hockey Romance
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Single Mom, Coach/Parent, Neighbors to Lovers, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort

The butch coach next door. The single mom who forgot she deserves. The pipe burst that brought them home.

Rachel Ames arrived in Millhaven, Vermont, with a ten-year-old who didn’t want to be there, a U-Haul of everything she’d been allowed to keep from her marriage, and a key that didn’t fit the lock. She’s thirty-three, newly divorced, and so tired of being the one who handles everything that she’s forgotten what wanting feels like.

Jordan Clarke lives twelve steps away. She fixes the faucet on day one. She gives Rachel’s kid a team. She carries the mattress, shovels the walk, and says good girl in a voice that undoes thirty-three years of Rachel’s careful armor. She’s a former pro hockey player turned small-town coach, butch and steady and absolutely not supposed to be falling for a parent on her roster.

Between the lasagnas and the storm nights, the shared wall and the pipe that bursts at 2 a.m., Rachel learns she isn’t broken — she’s just never been touched by someone who means it. But when her ex-husband weaponizes the custody agreement and a town selectman files a complaint against Jordan’s coaching, they’ll have to decide: shrink back into safety, or fight for the family they’ve been quietly, impossibly, building all along.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Single mom x butch coach sapphic romance
✅ Neighbors to lovers with a thin shared wall
✅ Praise kink and touch-starved heroine finding her voice
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Small-town Vermont setting with found family hockey team
✅ A ten-year-old who ships them harder than the reader
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), praise kink dynamics, strong language, references to infidelity in a prior marriage, a custody threat arc, and depictions of anxiety and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

The key didn’t fit.

Rachel Ames stood on the sagging porch of her new half-a-house, a sleeping ten-year-old in the back seat of her Corolla, a U-Haul full of everything she’d been allowed to keep from her old life, and a key that did not fit the goddamn lock.

She jiggled it. Twisted. Applied the kind of focused, desperate pressure she usually reserved for opening jars of pasta sauce after Maddie went to bed and the silence got too loud. Nothing.

“Come on.”

October wind knifed through her jacket. Millhaven, Vermont, had looked charming in the rental listing photos — Cozy duplex, quiet street, walking distance to elementary school and town center! — but the listing hadn’t mentioned that the porch tilted slightly to the left, or that the paint was peeling in sheets the size of her palm, or that the front door apparently required a blood sacrifice to open.

She stepped back and stared at the house. Her half — the left side of a converted Victorian, white with green shutters that were more suggestion than shutter — stared back, unimpressed.

In the driveway behind her, the U-Haul ticked as its engine cooled. Inside it: one queen mattress, one twin mattress, a kitchen table with three chairs (she’d thrown out the fourth, the one Kevin always sat in), fourteen boxes she’d labeled in her neatest handwriting, and one box she’d labeled KEVIN’S CRAP — DONATE in Sharpie at two in the morning after half a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

She tried the key again. It went in halfway and stuck.

“You’ve gotta lift the handle while you turn it.”

Rachel spun around. The voice came from the other side of the duplex — the right half, which had a slightly less tragic porch and a pickup truck parked out front with what looked like hockey equipment piled in the bed.

The woman walking toward her was tall. That was the first thing Rachel noticed. Taller than Kevin by a couple of inches, which put her around five-ten, with broad shoulders and a lean, angular build that moved with the easy confidence of someone who’d spent a lifetime being athletic and never quite stopped. Short dark hair, messy like she’d been running her hands through it. A flannel shirt — green and black, rolled to the elbows — over a white tee. Work boots. A toolbox in one hand.

“The lock’s been sticky since before I moved in,” the woman said, stepping onto Rachel’s side of the porch like the boundary between their halves was more of a polite suggestion. “Landlord keeps saying he’ll fix it. He won’t fix it.”

She set the toolbox down, reached past Rachel — close enough that Rachel caught a scent of something woodsy and clean, like cedar shavings and soap — and demonstrated. Grip the handle, lift slightly, turn the key. The lock surrendered with a soft click.

“There you go.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said, and meant it more than the situation warranted, because if she’d had to stand on this porch for one more minute failing at the simple act of entering her own home, she might have sat down on the tilted steps and cried. And she did not cry in front of strangers. She did not cry in front of anyone. She hadn’t cried since the night she’d signed the divorce papers, and that had been in a Wendy’s parking lot at eleven p.m., so it barely counted.

“I’m Jordan.” The woman extended her hand. Her grip was firm, warm, a little rough with calluses. “Jordan Clarke. I’m next door. Obviously.”

“Rachel. Ames.” She pulled her hand back a beat too late. “We’re — I’m moving in. Also obviously.”

Jordan smiled. It was a good smile — not wide or performative, just a slight curve at one corner of her mouth, like she found most things quietly amusing. A scar cut through her left eyebrow, silver-white against tan skin, and Rachel’s brain filed that detail away without permission.

“Need help carrying anything in?” Jordan glanced at the U-Haul. “That’s a lot of truck for one person.”

“Oh — no. I’m fine. I can handle it.” The words came out automatically, the way they always did. I’m fine. I can handle it. I don’t need help. Rachel’s default setting, installed by a mother who believed needing things was a character flaw and reinforced by a husband who treated every request for assistance like an accusation.

Jordan looked at her for a moment — gray-green eyes, steady and unhurried — and then nodded. “Offer stands. I’ll be next door.”

She picked up her toolbox and started back toward her side. Rachel watched her go. Noticed the easy stride, the way she carried the toolbox like it weighed nothing, the breadth of her shoulders under the flannel.

Stop that, Rachel told herself firmly.

Then, from the backseat of the Corolla, a small, cranky voice: “Mom. Are we there yet or are we living in the car now.”

Rachel closed her eyes, took a breath, and went to wake her daughter up properly.

Maddie Ames was not impressed with Millhaven.

She was not impressed with the house, which she declared “smaller than our old one.” She was not impressed with her bedroom, which was technically the second bedroom but felt more like an ambitious closet. She was not impressed with the kitchen, where the faucet dripped a steady, maddening rhythm onto stainless steel.

“This faucet is broken,” Maddie announced, standing in front of it with her arms crossed like a building inspector who’d seen enough.

“It just needs a new washer. I’ll fix it.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“When is soon?”

“Madeline.”

Maddie — lanky, gap-toothed, with Kevin’s blue eyes and Rachel’s stubbornness weaponized into something neither parent could fully control — slumped against the counter. She was ten, which meant she existed in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction punctuated by occasional bursts of wild enthusiasm, usually about things Rachel didn’t understand or couldn’t afford.

“I didn’t want to move,” Maddie said, for the twelfth time that day.

“I know, baby.”

“Chloe and I were going to do the talent show together.”

“I know.”

“Dad said we didn’t have to move.”

Rachel’s jaw tightened. Kevin said a lot of things. Kevin said he’d be more present. Kevin said the affair didn’t mean anything. Kevin said he’d fight for fifty-fifty custody and then took every-other-weekend and skipped half of those. Kevin said whatever made Kevin feel like the reasonable one, and he said it in a voice that made Rachel question whether her own feelings were a form of overreaction.

“We talked about this,” Rachel said, keeping her voice level. “This is a fresh start. New school, new town. It’s going to be good.”

Maddie looked at her with the devastating clarity that children sometimes wielded like a scalpel. “You always say that. ‘It’s going to be good.’ How do you know?”

Rachel didn’t know. She had no idea if it was going to be good. She’d picked Millhaven off a list of small Vermont towns with affordable rentals and decent schools, and she’d driven here on faith and fumes and the grim determination of a woman who’d spent eight years slowly disappearing inside her own marriage and needed to exist somewhere her ex-husband had never touched.

“Because I’m going to make it good,” she said, which was closer to the truth.

Maddie considered this. Then: “Can we at least get pizza?”

“After we unload the truck.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

Maddie groaned with the theatrical agony unique to preteens and stomped toward the front door. Rachel followed, mentally running the list — mattresses first, then the kitchen boxes, then Maddie’s room, then everything else, and I need to find the box with the sheets before bedtime and the one with the coffee maker before morning or I will not survive —

She stepped onto the porch and almost collided with Jordan Clarke, who was coming up the steps carrying one end of Rachel’s queen mattress. Sam — or somebody — was not carrying the other end. Jordan had the whole thing balanced on her back like a turtle shell, one hand gripping the frame, barely straining.

“You left the truck open,” Jordan said, by way of explanation.

“I said I could handle it.”

“I know you did. But this thing’s easier with two people, and I was right there.” She adjusted her grip. “Where’s the bedroom?”

Rachel opened her mouth to argue. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Top of the stairs, first door on the left,” she said, because the mattress was already halfway through the front door and arguing with someone who could apparently carry a queen mattress solo felt like picking a fight with gravity.

Maddie, standing in the yard, watched Jordan maneuver the mattress through the doorway with wide eyes. Then her gaze drifted to the pickup truck in the next driveway — specifically, to the hockey bags and sticks visible in the bed.

“Mom.” Maddie grabbed Rachel’s arm. “Mom. Is that hockey stuff?“

“Looks like it.”

“She plays hockey?“

“I don’t know, Maddie, I just met her—”

But Maddie was already gone, drawn toward the truck bed with the single-minded focus of a kid who’d been begging for ice time since she could walk. Rachel watched her daughter peer into the truck, practically vibrating.

Jordan came back out, dusting off her hands. She spotted Maddie inspecting her gear and something shifted in her expression — a softening, a recognition.

“You play?” she asked, walking over.

“I used to. In my old town. I was on a team.” Maddie looked up at her. “Are those real hockey bags?”

“Real as they get. I coach the girls’ team here — U-twelve. Millhaven Ice Center.”

“You coach?“

“Head coach. Going on four years now.” Jordan leaned against the truck, arms crossed, giving Maddie her full attention. Not the performative attention adults sometimes gave children — the kind where they half-listened while checking their phones — but real, steady focus. “What position did you play?”

“Forward. Left wing, mostly. But my coach said I could try center.”

“Left wing’s a grinder position. You like getting into corners?”

“I like scoring.”

Jordan’s mouth twitched. That same quiet, amused curve. “Yeah, I bet you do. What’s your name?”

“Maddie.”

“Well, Maddie, we practice Tuesdays and Thursdays, five-thirty. Season just started. We’ve always got room for one more.” She looked at Rachel, who’d come to stand behind Maddie with the particular expression of a parent watching her child light up and doing the math on what it would cost. “If your mom’s okay with it.”

“Mom. Mom. Can I?”

Rachel did the math. Registration fees. Equipment costs. Gas to and from the rink. Reshuffling the already-impossible schedule she’d built around a new job, a new school, homework, dinner, bedtime, and the forty-seven other things she managed alone every single day.

Maddie’s face was incandescent. She hadn’t looked like that since before the divorce — before the whispered fights behind closed doors, before the apartment Kevin moved into smelled like another woman’s perfume, before the careful division of holidays and belongings and a life Rachel had thought was permanent.

“We’ll see,” Rachel said, which they both knew meant yes.

Maddie launched herself at Rachel’s waist, squeezing. “Thank you thank you thank you—”

“I said we’ll see—“

“That means yes! You always say we’ll see when you mean yes!” Maddie turned to Jordan. “She means yes.”

“I heard.” Jordan was smiling — a real one this time, wider, crinkling the corners of her eyes. She looked at Rachel over Maddie’s head, and something passed between them. Not charged, not yet. Just warm. The simple recognition of one person seeing another person trying very hard.

“I can get you loaner gear to start,” Jordan said. “We’ve got a whole closet of hand-me-downs at the rink. No kid sits out because of equipment.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” Jordan held Rachel’s gaze. “That’s kind of the point.”

Rachel didn’t know what to do with that. With someone offering help and meaning it, no strings attached, no ledger being kept. She blinked and looked away.

“Come on, Maddie. We’ve still got a whole truck to unload.”

They unloaded the truck.

Jordan helped. Rachel stopped protesting after the third trip because Jordan simply ignored her objections with a cheerful efficiency that made arguing feel both pointless and faintly ridiculous. She carried boxes like they owed her money, stacking them in the right rooms based on Rachel’s labels without being asked, pausing only to fix the kitchen faucet with a wrench from her toolbox while Rachel was hauling Maddie’s bedframe upstairs.

“That drip was going to drive you crazy,” Jordan said, when Rachel came down and found the faucet silent for the first time since they’d walked in. She was leaning against the counter, wiping her hands on a rag, sleeves still rolled up, and Rachel’s gaze caught on her forearms — tanned, corded with lean muscle, a smudge of grease near her wrist.

She looked away quickly. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Took three minutes. The washer was shot.” Jordan tossed the rag over her shoulder. “Anything else leaking, sticking, or making weird noises, just knock on the wall. These old places have personality.”

“That’s a polite word for it.”

Jordan laughed. Low, easy, the kind of sound that settled into the room and made it feel less empty. “Yeah, well. It grows on you. Millhaven’s like that — rough around the edges, but it shows up when it counts.”

Maddie thundered down the stairs. “Mom, my room doesn’t have a closet!”

“It has a wardrobe, baby. We talked about this.”

“A wardrobe is just a closet that’s trying too hard.”

Jordan snorted. Rachel pressed her lips together to keep from smiling.

“I like this kid,” Jordan said.

“She’s a handful.”

“The best ones are.”

Something about the way she said it — simple, certain, like she’d coached enough kids to know it for a fact — made Rachel’s chest ache. Not in a bad way. In the way a muscle ached when it was used for the first time in a long time.

Jordan left around seven, after Rachel insisted she couldn’t stay for the pizza Maddie had been lobbying for all afternoon. “You’ve done enough. Seriously. Thank you.”

“Anytime.” Jordan paused on the porch, hands in her pockets. The light was fading, the sky going amber and violet over the tree line. “Tuesday. Five-thirty. Millhaven Ice Center. Tell Maddie I’ll have gear waiting.”

“Jordan—”

“It’s just hockey, Rachel.” That half-smile again. “Let her have some fun.”

She walked to her side of the duplex — twelve steps, Rachel counted without meaning to — and disappeared inside. A light came on in her kitchen window. Through the thin shared wall, Rachel heard music. Something acoustic, low and warm.

She stood on the porch in the cold, arms wrapped around herself, and watched the light in Jordan’s kitchen window for longer than she should have.

Pizza came. Maddie ate three slices and fell asleep on the mattress Rachel had wrestled onto her bed frame, still in her clothes, mouth open, hair tangled. Rachel stood in the doorway and watched her daughter breathe and felt the specific, crushing love of a parent who would burn the world to keep this small person safe.

She covered Maddie with a blanket — the sheets were in a box she hadn’t found yet — and went back downstairs.

The house was quiet. Boxes everywhere, stacked and labeled in her careful handwriting. KITCHEN — ESSENTIALS. BATHROOM. MADDIE — BOOKS. LIVING ROOM. She moved through them methodically, unpacking the coffee maker first (survival), then the bathroom box (toothbrushes, toilet paper, the basic infrastructure of human dignity), then Maddie’s school supplies for Monday.

In the bottom of the box labeled OFFICE/MISC, under a stack of manila folders and a broken stapler, she found it.

The journal.

It was cheap — a spiral-bound notebook from the campus bookstore, sky blue, the cover soft from years of handling. She’d kept it in a drawer in her old house, buried under instruction manuals and takeout menus. She hadn’t looked at it in years.

She sat on the kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, and opened it.

Her own handwriting stared back at her. Twenty years old, loopy and unself-conscious. The entries were mostly mundane — class notes, to-do lists, a pros-and-cons list about whether to double major. But there, toward the middle, in ink that had faded from blue to gray:

K stayed up late studying in my room again. She fell asleep on my bed and I didn’t wake her up. I just lay there watching her breathe and feeling like my chest was going to split open. I don’t know what this is. I don’t want to know what this is. If I name it, it becomes real, and if it’s real, then I have to do something about it, and I can’t.

I think about her hands.

I think about her all the time.

Rachel closed the journal. Pressed it against her chest. Her heart was doing something fast and unsteady.

K. Katherine. Kate. Her sophomore-year roommate who smelled like lavender and highlighted her textbooks in four different colors and laughed with her whole body. Kate, who Rachel had loved with a ferocity she’d buried so deep she’d almost convinced herself it had never existed.

She’d kissed Kate once. A party, junior year. Three drinks in, Kate’s mouth warm and soft and tasting like cheap beer, and Rachel’s hands shaking so badly she’d spilled her cup. They’d never talked about it. Kate transferred to Boston the next semester. Rachel met Kevin six months later and built a life around never thinking about why Kate’s name still made her stomach flip.

Through the shared wall, she heard Jordan’s music change. Something slower. A woman’s voice, low and sweet.

Rachel put the journal back in the box. Closed the flaps. Stood up, washed her hands, wiped down the counter, checked the locks on every door and window because she was Rachel Ames and that was what she did — she checked, she planned, she controlled every variable she could so the world couldn’t surprise her.

She went upstairs. Brushed her teeth. Lay down on her bare mattress in her new bedroom in her new house in her new town and stared at the ceiling.

Through the wall, the music played on.

I think about her hands.

Rachel pressed her face into the pillow.

It was going to be a long year.

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The morning after the epilogue, from Jordan’s POV. Rachel wakes up the way she deserves to. Rachel pins Jordan to the headboard. They come together face-to-face on their new couch. And then Maddie — in full hockey gear at 6:47 a.m. — interrupts an almost-proposal with a waffle ultimatum. ~5,800 words. Extra explicit. Free with your email.

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