Straight Until Sleepover

Sapphic Contemporary Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Friends to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Slow Burn, Touch Starved

One girls’ weekend. One bed. One very inconvenient realization.

Maya Reed is done with men. Done with dating. Done with pretending her six-year relationship didn’t leave her emptier than she started. When her best friend Nadia suggests a weekend at a lakeside cabin — just the two of them, no phones, no plans — she says yes before she can overthink it.

Nadia Sloane has been in love with Maya since college. She’s spent twelve years watching her best friend date men who don’t deserve her, carrying a secret that gets heavier every year. She never planned to act on it. But the cabin has one bed. And the wine flows too easily. And Maya looks different here — softer, closer, harder to stop looking at.

By the second night, Maya stops pretending the heat between them is just friendship. By the third, she stops pretending anything about her life has been what she thought it was. And when they return to the real world, they’ll have to decide: was the cabin a fantasy — or the realest thing either of them has ever felt?

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Friends-to-lovers sapphic romance with twelve years of yearning
✅ Bi awakening that’s emotionally devastating and scorchingly hot
✅ One bed, forced proximity, cabin setting
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ The friend who’s been quietly in love the whole time
✅ Dual POV with alternating perspectives
✅ HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, depictions of identity crisis and coming out, and emotional themes including denial and self-discovery. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: The Suggestion

The last thing Tyler takes is the blender.

I watch him wrap the cord around the base with the same careful precision he used for everything — folding towels, parallel parking, telling me he loved me. Neat. Controlled. Like if he did it correctly enough, it would matter.

“I think that’s it,” he says, scanning my kitchen with the expression of a man checking out of a hotel room. Making sure he hasn’t left anything behind.

He hasn’t. That’s the thing about Tyler — he was always thorough.

“You sure you don’t want the toaster?” I ask from my spot on the counter, legs dangling. “I literally never use it.”

“You will. Everyone needs a toaster.”

“I eat cereal, Tyler.”

He almost smiles. Almost. Three months post-breakup and we’ve landed in this strange no-man’s-land of politeness that feels worse than fighting. Fighting would mean something still mattered enough to be angry about. This is just… logistics.

He hoists the box — the blender, a set of whiskey glasses I bought him for his birthday, two throw pillows I’ve never liked — and pauses at the door. I can see him composing what he wants to say.

“Maya.”

“Yeah.”

“I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.”

It’s generous. It’s kind. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

“Thanks, Ty.”

He nods once and walks out. The door clicks shut with the softest, most civilized sound in the world, and then I’m alone in an apartment that’s been mine for three months but still feels like it belongs to a version of me I don’t recognize.

I sit on the counter for a long time. I wait for something — sadness, relief, that hollow ache that’s supposed to come when a chapter of your life ends. Something. Anything.

Nothing comes.

I should feel something. Six years. That’s not nothing. Six years of shared groceries and holiday dinners and lazy Sunday mornings and the kind of steady, reliable love that everyone tells you to be grateful for. Tyler was good to me. He was patient with my chaos and generous with his time and he never once made me feel like I wasn’t enough.

And I left him.

Not because he did anything wrong. Not because of someone else. I left him because one morning I woke up next to him and felt absolutely nothing, and I realized I’d been feeling nothing for a very long time, and the nothing had gotten so loud it was drowning out everything else.

“I can’t breathe,” I told him, sitting on the edge of our bed in my underwear, crying into my hands. “I don’t know why, but I can’t breathe.”

He tried to hold me. Of course he did. But his arms felt like walls. Not cruel — just confining. A container for a version of me that didn’t fit anymore.

I don’t miss him. That’s the part I can’t say out loud. Because “I left a man who loved me and I don’t miss him” makes you sound like a monster, and I don’t think I’m a monster. I think I’m just… empty in a way I can’t explain.

My phone is on the couch. I pick it up without thinking about it and call the person I always call.

She picks up on the first ring.

“He took the blender,” I say.

Nadia laughs — that low, warm sound that always makes my chest feel looser. “Good. You never used it.”

“So it’s done? Last box?”

“Last box.” I flop onto the couch and stare at the ceiling. “I should be sad, right? Normal people are sad when their six-year relationship gets packed into a Honda Civic.”

“There’s no should,” Nadia says. “You feel what you feel.”

“I feel nothing. Literally nothing. Like someone scooped out my insides and left a Maya-shaped shell.” I pause. “Is that worse than sad?”

“Probably.” She says it gently, but she doesn’t lie to me. She never does. That’s the thing about Nadia — she’ll hand you the hard truth and then hold your hand while you sit with it.

I press the phone tighter against my ear. Something about her voice makes the empty apartment feel less empty. It’s always been like that. Nadia’s presence — even just her voice through a speaker — has this grounding effect on me, like an anchor dropping through deep water.

“I need to get out of here,” I say. “Like, out out. Out of the apartment. Out of the city. Out of my own head.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious. I want to go somewhere. No plans, no agenda, no men asking me if I’m doing okay.”

“I said okay,” Nadia repeats, and I can hear the smile in it. “What are you thinking?”

“My friend Rachel has that place in the Catskills. The A-frame? I’ve been meaning to use it.”

I sit up. “The one with the lake?”

“And the fireplace.”

“That’s the one.”

Something sparks in my chest. Not excitement exactly — more like the ghost of excitement, the feeling of a feeling. I’ve been chasing that for months. “When?”

“I can do this weekend. Clear my Friday, drive up Thursday night.”

“Nadia. It’s Tuesday.”

“So?”

I grin at the ceiling. This is the other thing about Nadia — she doesn’t make you justify wanting things. If I say I need to go, she goes. She just shows up.

She’s been showing up since we were eighteen years old, crammed into a cinderblock dorm room at NYU, me with my boxes of shoes and my nervous energy. Nadia was across the hall — quieter than me, sharper than me, with this calm self-possession that made her seem older than she was.

“Hey,” I say. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For always saying yes when I need to run away.”

She’s quiet for a beat. “You’re not running away. You’re running toward something. You just don’t know what it is yet.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I laugh it off. “Okay, therapist. Save the insights for the drive. I’ll bring snacks.”

“Bring the good chips. Not the baked ones.”

“The baked ones are healthy.”

“The baked ones are punishment.”

“Fine. Full-fat, full-salt, maximum damage.”

“That’s my girl.”

Something about the way she says that — that’s my girl — settles warm and strange in my stomach. I ignore it. I’ve gotten very good at ignoring things.

We hang up and I lie on the couch for another minute, phone resting on my chest. The apartment doesn’t feel as suffocating anymore. The walls have pulled back a few inches. I can almost breathe.

I roll off the couch and go to my bedroom. My suitcase is in the closet — a scuffed-up navy thing I’ve had since college, one wheel slightly wonky. I throw it on the bed and start packing. Cutoffs, tank tops, a swimsuit, my favorite flannel. Leggings. The hoodie I stole from Nadia two years ago and never gave back — heather gray, worn thin at the cuffs, still faintly carrying her smell even after a dozen washes.

I hold it up. I should probably return it.

I pack it anyway.

The suitcase zips and I feel something crack open in my chest. Light, maybe. Air. I’ve been holding my breath for six years and I didn’t know it, and now the exhale is coming and I don’t know what shape it’s going to take.

I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my hands. There’s a pale line on my ring finger where Tyler’s promise ring used to sit.

What do I actually want?

The question floats up and I push it back down. Not yet. I just have to get out of this apartment and into a car with my best friend and a bag of full-fat chips, and let the road eat up the distance between me and whatever this feeling is.

Thursday. Two days. Nadia and a cabin and a lake and no reason to be anything other than what I am.

Whatever that is.

My phone buzzes. Nadia.

Already made a playlist. You’re going to hate it.

I smile — a real one, the first one all day. I type back: If there’s a single acoustic cover on there I’m jumping out of the car.

Three acoustic covers. Two are Taylor Swift.

You’re a monster.

Pack warm layers. It gets cold up there at night.

She knows I run cold. She knows I can’t sleep without socks on and that I take my coffee too sweet and that I cry at commercials for insurance companies. She knows me better than Tyler ever did, and he lived with me for four years.

That thought arrives and I let it pass through without examining it. I’m very skilled at that — letting thoughts arrive, acknowledging their existence, and then gently escorting them to the door before they can take off their coats and stay.

I lie down next to the suitcase and close my eyes. My body feels strange — restless and tired at the same time. I think about Nadia’s voice on the phone. You’re not running away. You’re running toward something. You just don’t know what it is yet.

That’s the thing about Nadia. She sees me in these flashes — sharp, clear, like lightning illuminating a landscape — and for a second I can see myself through her eyes, and I look like someone worth knowing.

I want to be that person. I want to be the person Nadia sees when she looks at me.

Sleep comes eventually. It’s fitful and shallow, but somewhere in the middle of the night I roll over and reach for the other side of the bed, and when my hand hits cold sheets, I think — just for a second, in that blurry space between sleep and waking — that it’s not Tyler I’m reaching for.

I don’t let myself think about who it is.

Not yet.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Straight Until Sleepover

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

The Dock — Night Two — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Maya and Nadia return to the cabin one month later. The sun goes down over the lake. They walk inside. And what happens in the loft that night — with the skylight full of stars and nothing left to hide — is the filthiest, most tender, most emotionally devastating scene in the series.

Get the Bonus Chapter →