Best Friend’s Sister

Sapphic Small-Town Romance
by Aurora North

Available everywhere ebooks are sold

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friend’s Sister, Bi Awakening, Small Town, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Found Family, Coming Out

She came home for Christmas. She stayed for the bookseller.

Elle Harrison is twenty-seven, a marketing director in Chicago, and one promotion away from a corner office in London. She has not been home to Juniper Falls in three years. She does not, until she walks into Mercer Books and Brew at five-thirty in the morning on the day after Christmas, know that she has been quietly lying to herself for a decade.

Sophie Mercer owns the bookstore on Main Street her father built. She is twenty-nine, soft-spoken, hopelessly competent, and has been in love with her best friend’s sister since she was seventeen years old. She has never said. She wasn’t ever going to say. And then Elle came home.

One pre-dawn knock on a bookstore window. One question — ask me again — that has been waiting for thirteen years. Twelve days at home that turn the rest of their lives. And the small, scary, gorgeous question both women are going to have to answer out loud: what do you do when the person you have always loved finally walks back into the room?

Best Friend’s Sister is a high-heat, slow-build sapphic romance about coming home, coming out, and choosing the bigger life out loud. Set in a small town in upstate New York, it’s a love letter to bookstores, lake cottages, the people who knew you before you knew yourself, and the women who waited.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friend’s sister sapphic romance with thirteen years of pining
✅ Small-town hometown bookstore setting (with a kitchen window over a lake)
✅ Bi awakening, coming out, and a heroine learning to choose herself
✅ Quiet bookseller x corporate burnout sapphic dynamic
✅ Slow burn that detonates (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Praise kink, mutual pining, and a wife who folds
✅ A wedding in a children’s section, a mutual proposal with the same ring, and a black-moment grovel that lands
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including praise kink and mild dom/sub dynamic), strong language, on-page coming out (positive), references to the death of a closeted family member from AIDS-era homophobia (off-page, decades earlier), brief mention of an ex-partner’s emotional manipulation (off-page), and a black moment built around a lie of omission. HEA guaranteed. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Three Hundred Miles

Elle

The last sign before Juniper Falls says POP. 4,211, and the paint has been peeling off the two for as long as I’ve been alive.

I pass it at 4:47 p.m. on the second-to-last Friday of December, and my stomach does the thing it always does when I see that sign, which is something between relief and dread and a kind of homesickness for a version of myself I don’t live inside anymore.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. Mae, my assistant in Chicago. I thumb the screen and the text blinks up, all caps as usual: DID YOU LEAVE YET BECAUSE WESLEY IS ASKING.

I dictate back without taking my eyes off the road. “Tell Wesley I’m three states away and my out-of-office is on until January second. Tell him I love him. Tell him I will not look at the deck until then. Period. Send.”

The car repeats my message back to me in the soft Australian woman voice I have been refusing to change because she is, at this point, the closest thing I have to a roommate. I confirm. The text whooshes off into nothing. I exhale.

Three states away. Five hundred and ninety-six miles. Eight hours and twelve minutes of driving. I have done it three times in the seven years since I moved to Chicago, and every single time, by the time I see the POP. 4,211 sign, my hands have gone a little soft on the wheel and my chest has started doing the small careful thing it does when I am about to walk back into a life I left.

Juniper Falls, New York. Population four thousand two hundred and eleven. Two stoplights. One coffee shop with a real espresso machine. One bookstore with an apartment above it. One blue-painted house on Birch Street that, until I was eighteen, was the only address I had ever called my own.

I am twenty-seven years old. I am a marketing director at an agency in the Loop. I have a corner office. I have a sublet on Wells Street that costs me three thousand a month and that I leave every morning at seven and get back to every night at nine. I have a dry cleaner who knows me by name. I have a barista who has my order ready before I get to the front of the line. I have, in the last eighteen months, gone on six dates with five different men and slept with two of them and not been particularly moved by either experience.

I have, also, one promotion currently in front of me — a senior director slot in the agency’s London office — that I am theoretically supposed to have an answer about by the end of January. The pay bump is extraordinary. The visa is already in motion. My mother, when I told her, said oh, honey in a voice she has not used since I was nineteen. My father said that’s wonderful, Elena and didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

I have not told anyone I have not decided yet.

I have especially not told Theo.

I shake my head, hard, and turn off Route 9 onto the long flat stretch of County 14 that will take me past the dairy and the Christmas tree farm and the old fairground and into town. The sky is the color of a bruise. There is a thin coat of snow on everything that has not been recently driven over.

I roll down the window even though it is twenty-six degrees, because I want to smell it. I want to know if it still smells the way it used to.

It does.

Cold, pine, the small distant smoke of someone’s woodstove. The faint stink of the dairy a mile back. Wet asphalt and the kind of wind that has nothing on it for fifty miles before it gets to your face.

I am ten years old smelling this. I am thirteen. I am sixteen running track on the high school field with my hair coming out of its ponytail. I am seventeen on a porch in summer with my best friend’s sister at the other end of the porch swing, both of us in cutoffs, both of us pretending we are not aware of the inch of skin between her thigh and mine.

I roll the window back up.

I do not know why I just thought of that.

The Christmas lights are up on Main Street.

Of course they are. They go up the day after Thanksgiving and they come down the second week of January, and in between, every storefront on the eight-block stretch of Main between the Methodist church and the war memorial is wrapped in white twinkle bulbs that the volunteer fire department puts up on a long ladder while the rest of the town stands around with hot cider, watching, like it is a parade.

I drive slow. I drive the speed limit, twenty-five, because the cop who patrols Main Street at this hour is named Rick and he was two years ahead of me at Juniper Falls High and he absolutely will pull me over for the satisfaction of leaning into my window and going well well well, Elle Harrison.

I pass Denise’s diner. The windows are fogged. There is a man at the counter eating a slice of pie. I pass Hollis’s hardware store, which has been Hollis’s hardware store since 1957 and which is now being run by a woman my mother’s age who I went to confirmation with and who terrifies me. I pass the empty storefront where the toy store used to be. I pass the corner where the post office is, with its small American flag flapping in the wet wind.

And then.

And then I pass Mercer Books and Brew.

It is on the right side of the street, in the middle of the second block, between Patel’s pharmacy and the storefront that used to be a tailor and is now a yoga studio that nobody goes to. The shop is in a narrow brick building three stories tall. The bottom floor is the shop. The top two floors are the apartment, which Sophie has lived in alone since she was twenty-three.

The lights are on.

Of course they are. It is four-fifty-two on a Friday. The shop closes at six. I can see, through the wide front windows, the warm yellow lamplight she keeps on year-round. I can see the dark outline of someone behind the front counter — not Sophie, somebody taller, probably Maggie — and I can see, in the back, the little stove she runs in the cafe corner, with two old armchairs around it, and the small clutch of people in the chairs who are, by the looks of them, about to be politely asked to please head home so this woman can close up.

I do not slow down.

I do not turn my head.

I drive past Mercer Books and Brew at exactly the speed limit, and I do not look at the windows, and I do not check the sidewalk for her, and I do not, for the record, hold my breath. I just — I just keep both hands on the wheel and I keep my eyes straight ahead, and I drive the four more blocks to the war memorial and I take the right turn onto Birch Street and I let myself exhale only when the bookstore is fully out of sight in my rearview.

I do not know why I just did that, either.

I tell myself it is because I am tired. Because I have been driving for nine hours. Because I am about to walk into my parents’ kitchen and be hugged by my mother for forty-five seconds and I need to be able to make small talk about the drive without my voice doing anything weird.

That is what I tell myself.

It is not, as it turns out, the actual reason.

My parents’ house is the third on the right on Birch.

It is blue, with white trim, and a wraparound porch that my dad rebuilt the summer I was eleven, and a wreath on the front door that my mother makes herself every December out of fresh greens she clips from the cedars in the side yard. There is a single candle in every front-facing window. There is a Subaru and a Ford in the driveway. The kitchen light is on, and through the bay window I can already see my mother moving around in it, doing the thing she does, which is pretending she has not been waiting for the sound of my car.

I park on the street.

I sit in the car for a minute.

I do this every time. I do not know if my parents have ever noticed. I sit in my car for a minute when I get here, with the engine off and the key still in the ignition, and I let my hands stop shaking and I check my face in the rearview — mascara still mostly where I put it this morning, hair fine, lipstick gone but who cares — and I do a small thing in my head, which is that I tell myself be the best version of you for them, Elena, just for the next twelve days, just be the best one.

Then I get out of the car.

The cold hits me like a small slap. I pull my coat tighter. My boots crunch on the gravel of the driveway. The porch light comes on — my dad has been listening, even if my mom has been pretending not to be — and the front door opens before I get to it.

“Elena Rose.”

My mother. In her good Friday-night jeans and a sweater I have not seen before, with the apron she has worn since I was eight tied around her waist, with her arms already opening before she has fully registered me as a real person and not a hallucination.

“Mom.”

“Get in here, baby. Get in here. You must be freezing. Bill, she’s here. Bill.“

I am inside in five seconds. Coat off, boots off, bag dropped at the foot of the stairs, my mother holding my face in both her hands and looking at me like she is reading a page in a very large book she has been waiting to get to. She is two inches shorter than me. She smells like the same lotion she has worn since I was a kid — something with rosemary in it. Her hands are dry and warm.

“You’re so thin.”

“Mom.”

“Are you eating.”

“Yes.”

“Real food.”

“Mom.”

“Salads do not count, Elena.”

My father appears in the doorway of the kitchen, holding a dish towel, in his after-work flannel and the beat-up jeans my mother has been trying to throw away for fifteen years. He is taller than my mother. Quieter. He has one of his small specific smiles on, the one he has only for me and my brother, and he says, “Hi, kid,” and I cross the foyer and I hug him, and he hugs me back hard, and he kisses the top of my head, and I am, for one second, eight years old.

“Long drive?”

“Long drive.”

“Smells like fresh snow on you.”

“It started outside Buffalo.”

“Mm.”

He pulls back. He looks at me. He says, very softly, just for me, “Glad you’re home, Harrison.”

I almost cry, then. Out of nowhere. I do not. I tighten my jaw and I hold the smile and I say, “Glad to be home, Dad,” and I follow my mother into the kitchen.

The kitchen is exactly as it has been since I was nine.

Same butter-yellow walls. Same farmhouse table with the small burn mark from the time my brother set a hot pan down without a trivet at sixteen. Same cabinets, painted white now instead of cream, but still the same cabinets. Same view out the window above the sink, of the back garden in winter — the maple, the empty perennial bed, the small stone bird bath that has frozen over and that my mother chips out with a screwdriver every January.

There are five places set at the table.

I notice, immediately. Five.

My mother is doing something at the stove. My father has gone back to the dish towel. My brother is not yet here, I assume. So one place is for me, one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Theo, and —

“Plates for five?” I say.

“Mercers are coming.”

Theo doesn’t look up from the potatoes. “Mom and Dad are doing a thing at the church. Sophie’s bringing pie.”

Something in my stomach does a small, quiet hop.

I set my beer down on the counter because I do not, for a second, trust myself to hold it.

“Sophie’s driving? From the store?”

“She’s closing up. Should be here any minute.”

Any minute.

I say, “Great,” and it comes out at the wrong volume, just slightly too bright, and my mother gives me a look I feel land without having to see it.

“Go wash up,” she says. “You look like you’ve been in a car.”

“I have been in a car.”

“Go wash up.”

I wash my face in the downstairs bathroom. I stare at myself in the mirror for longer than I mean to. Twenty-seven. Auburn hair a mess from the drive. Mascara half-gone. The freckle under my left eye I have always hated. I look like a woman who has been on the road for six hours and is about to sit down for a meal with the people who made her, which is what I am.

I think — in the way you think a thing without exactly thinking it —

Sophie.

Just the name. Just the one word.

I put my hand on the edge of the sink and I close my eyes and I tell myself, very firmly, that I am tired.

I dry my face on the small embroidered towel my mother has had since I was six.

I go back to the kitchen.

And, of course — of course, of course — because the universe is not subtle and it is not kind — the back door opens at exactly the moment I cross the threshold of the kitchen, and a gust of cold December comes in, and a woman comes in with it, holding a covered pie tin in two hands and laughing about something my father has said to her on the back porch.

Sophie Mercer.

Twenty-nine years old. Five-foot-eight. Dark hair pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck with a few pieces falling out around her face. A green sweater. Jeans. Brown boots with snow on the toes. A scarf still half-around her throat. The same crescent-moon tattoo on the inside of her left wrist she got at twenty-one and that I have been quietly noticing for eight years.

She is laughing.

She is laughing, and her cheeks are pink from the cold, and she has her mouth open mid-laugh, and she is mid-step into my parents’ kitchen with a homemade pie in her two hands, and she has not, yet, registered me.

And then she does.

She looks across the room. She sees me standing there in my socks in the doorway of the kitchen. Her eyes find mine, and her face does — it does this small thing, a hitch, a half-second flicker of something that I do not, in the moment, know how to name. She steadies. She smiles. Her whole face opens into the smile she has been giving me since I was thirteen. She says —

“Hi, Elle.”

Two words.

And I cannot — I cannot, for a half-second, get the response into my mouth. My throat does a thing. My stomach does the small quiet hop again, only louder this time, and I think — distantly, from far away, in the part of my brain that handles things I am trying very hard not to think about — oh, no.

Then she’s crossing the kitchen and handing my mother the pie and saying, “The oven timer lied to me, I’m so sorry,” and my mother is saying something back, and my dad is kissing the top of Sophie’s head the way he’s been kissing the top of Sophie’s head since she was nine, and Theo is calling her a menace, and my dad is laughing, and my mother is asking about the bookstore, and my brother is asking about hockey, and the kitchen has gone instantly back to the kind of warm chaos it is supposed to be.

I am, for the first second, the only one in the room not moving.

I make my legs work. I cross to the counter. I pick up my beer. I take a small sip.

Sophie unwinds her scarf. She drapes it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She unzips her coat and gives it to my dad, who hangs it on the hook by the door. She tucks her hair behind her ear. She turns to me.

“How was the drive.”

“Long.”

“Yeah?”

“Snow outside Buffalo.”

“Mm.”

She looks at me. Just looks. Two seconds of held eye contact, just enough to be a thing and not enough to be obvious. She smiles, soft, just at the corner of her mouth, and she says —

“Glad you made it.”

“Me too,” I say.

She turns back to the room. She crosses to the stove. She asks my mother what she can do.

I drink my beer.

I tell myself, be the best version of you for them, Elena, just for the next twelve days, just be the best one.

I do not know yet that I am, in this moment, in the entryway of my parents’ kitchen on the second-to-last Friday of December, looking at the woman I am going to spend the rest of my life with.

I do not know yet that, in twelve days, this woman is going to walk me into the bookstore she owns at five-thirty in the morning, kiss me against the front counter, and ask me the question I have been refusing to admit I have been waiting to be asked.

I do not know yet that the small, quiet hop in my stomach when I saw her in the kitchen tonight — the one I am, right now, as I sip my beer, telling myself was just hunger — is, in fact, the first conscious thing my body has ever done with the truth.

I do not know any of that yet.

What I know, in this moment, is that I have just driven nine hours, that I am very, very tired, that my mother is asking me about my flight, that my father is opening the wine, and that the woman who just walked into my parents’ kitchen with a homemade pie is, somehow, the only person in the room I am aware of.

I sip my beer.

I tell myself it is the flight.

It is not, as it turns out, the flight.

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The Wedding Night — A scene TOO HOT for the book itself

Sophie carries Elle three inches over the threshold of the apartment above the bookstore. The ivory satin dress comes off slowly. There is a bottle of champagne, a candle, and a wedding gift Sophie has been hiding in her bookstore desk drawer since August — picked specifically to match her wedding dress. Five orgasms, one teal silicone, and a sixty-three-page bound journal in dark green leather. The filthiest, most tender chapter in the book.

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