Knot Your Average Neighbor

Sapphic Kink-Positive Romance
by Blair Lennox

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Fake Dating, Neighbors to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Touch Starved, Consent-Forward Kink, Praise Kink

She bought a house for a fresh start. Her neighbor came with rope.

Emilia Hart’s divorce settlement included a pristine little house, a newly hyphenless name, and one sacred rule: no more chaos.

Then Mara Velez moves next door.

Mara is loud, tattooed, devastatingly gorgeous, and runs a private rope-art studio out of her garage—complete with women arriving at all hours, beautiful knots hanging in her windows, and a neighborhood association determined to shut her down.

When Emilia needs a girlfriend to secure her law firm partnership, Mara makes an offer: she’ll play the adoring neighbor at every cocktail party if Emilia uses her legal muscle to stop the HOA from destroying her business.

Public hand-holding. Strategic flirting. Absolutely no kissing that feels real.

But behind closed doors, Mara teaches Emilia that letting go isn’t the same as losing control. And when their arrangement becomes something neither woman can neatly define, Emilia must decide: the safe life she’s always performed—or the messy, gorgeous woman willing to tie her up and whisper that she’s already enough.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance with a fake dating twist
✅ Consent-forward kink exploration (rope, praise, structured surrender)
✅ “Touch starved heroine meets woman who asks before every touch”
✅ Grumpy/sunshine with a divorced lawyer and a rope artist
✅ Slow burn that IGNITES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ HOA villain you’ll love to hate
✅ Found family in a suburban queer community
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), rope bondage, power exchange dynamics, strong language, references to emotional abuse in a prior relationship, and depictions of anxiety. Consent is negotiated, ongoing, and central to the story. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Welcome to Maple Grove

I had a system.

Boxes marked by room in blue painter’s tape. Sub-categories in black Sharpie. A numbered unpacking sequence taped to the inside of the front door, prioritized by necessity: kitchen first, bathroom second, bedroom third, everything else when I got to it. I’d built the schedule in a spreadsheet two weeks ago, cross-referenced it with the moving company’s estimated arrival windows, and printed three copies in case I lost one.

Victoria would have called it compulsive. Victoria would have been wrong. Victoria was wrong about most things, as it turned out, but she said them with such elegant certainty that it took me seven years to notice.

The moving truck backed into the driveway of 14 Winding Creek Lane at 8:47 AM on a Saturday in late April, thirteen minutes ahead of schedule. The house was a 1940s Cape Cod with original hardwood floors, a deep front porch, crown molding in the living room, and a fenced backyard with a maple tree old enough to have opinions.

This was the first home I’d chosen entirely for myself.

I chose this house because the porch had a swing and the backyard had a fence and the neighborhood was forty-five minutes from the city and nobody here knew who I used to be married to. Clean start. Quiet life. A place where I could learn to be a person again instead of a performance.

“Ma’am? Where do you want the sofa?”

I directed the movers with the calm efficiency I used in depositions. Living room, against the east wall, no not that wall, the one with the built-in shelves. The dining table centered under the overhead light. The bed frame upstairs, first door on the right.

By noon, the truck was empty and the movers were gone and I was standing in my kitchen surrounded by labeled boxes, drinking water from a glass I’d packed in the KITCHEN — PRIORITY 1 box, and feeling something I couldn’t quite name.

I opened the kitchen window because the house smelled like cardboard and cleaning products and I wanted air that tasted like something other than transition.

That’s when I heard the music.

It drifted from next door—something warm and bass-heavy, Latin, unhurried. A guitar line that curled like smoke. Underneath it, laughter. Women’s voices, several of them.

The house at 16 Winding Creek was a Craftsman bungalow, painted sage green with cream trim, and its detached garage had been transformed into something I couldn’t immediately categorize. String lights were threaded across the opening in a lazy zigzag, and through them I could see coils of rope hung on pegboard hooks like a painter’s palette.

Then she came around the corner of the garage.

She was carrying a bundle of jute rope over one shoulder and a power drill in the other hand. Tank top, olive green, fitted. Canvas coveralls unzipped to the waist. Tattoo sleeves on both arms. She had the kind of body that made the word “compact” sound like a compliment.

Then she turned and looked directly at my kitchen window.

She grinned. It was the kind of grin that should have come with a warning label.

I could have closed the window. I could have pretended I didn’t see her. Instead, I set down my water glass and went outside.

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The Drawer — A scene TOO HOT for retailers

Mara gives Emilia a drawer. Then a shelf. Then half the closet. And when the last box is unpacked and the door is locked and neither of them has anywhere else to be… Mara shows Emilia exactly what “welcome home” sounds like when it’s whispered against rope-marked skin.

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