My Sister’s Best Friend

Sapphic Age-Gap Romance
by Blair Lennox

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friend’s Sister, Age Gap (9 years), Bisexual Awakening, Forced Proximity, Forbidden Romance, Praise Kink, Slow Burn, Secret Relationship, Coming Out

She’s off-limits, nine years older, and sleeping in the next room. Sadie was supposed to survive two months of wedding planning. She lasted a week.

Sadie Collins has been in love with Renee Talbot since she was nineteen years old.

Not a crush. Not hero worship. The kind of want that makes her avoid eye contact at family dinners and date men who bore her just to prove she’s normal.

When Emily’s apartment floods mid-wedding-planning chaos, Renee moves into Sadie’s spare room. Two months. Shared coffee. Shared couch. Shared everything except the one thing Sadie actually wants.

Renee knows. She’s always known. She also knows that touching her best friend’s little sister — the one who blushes every time Renee walks into a room — would blow up a twenty-year friendship and a family that treats her like one of their own.

But Sadie isn’t nineteen anymore. And the way she looks at Renee across the kitchen counter at midnight isn’t something either of them can keep pretending doesn’t exist.

One kiss. One night. One catastrophically bad idea that neither of them wants to stop.

The only problem? Emily can never find out.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friend’s little sister — forbidden, taboo-adjacent, maximum guilt
✅ 9-year age gap with competence-is-the-hottest-thing energy
✅ Sapphic bi awakening — she dated men. Then Renee moved in.
✅ Forced proximity in a shared apartment with very thin walls
✅ Praise kink and slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Secret relationship with a sisterhood on the line
✅ Coming out arc that earns every moment
✅ Dual POV — two women falling from both sides of the line
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including oral, fingering, strap-on use, praise kink, and escalating intimacy), strong language, 9-year age gap, sister’s best friend relationship, bisexual awakening, secret relationship, brief reference to past emotional abuse. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One

The thing about being hopelessly, devastatingly attracted to someone you can never have is that it doesn’t get easier with practice. You’d think six years would build some kind of tolerance. A callus over the nerve. Instead, every single time Renee Talbot walked into a room, my entire circulatory system staged a coup against my brain, and my brain — fully aware of how pathetic this was — just stood there and let it happen.

Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. The same dining room I’d grown up in, same mismatched plates my mom refused to replace, same meatloaf recipe she swore she’d improved but hadn’t. I was setting the table when the front door opened and Emily’s voice rang through the hallway — loud, theatrical, already mid-sentence about something Mark had done at Home Depot that apparently qualified as an international incident.

Then Renee.

She came in behind Emily, and my hand tightened on the fork I was placing because — honestly, what was the point of even trying. Fitted charcoal blazer over a white t-shirt. Dark hair loose around her shoulders, still a little damp at the ends like she’d showered twenty minutes ago and hadn’t bothered with a blow dryer. Jeans that sat on her hips in a way that made me want to trace the line of the waistband with my fingertip.

I placed the fork. Straightened it. Placed the next one.

“Sadie!” Emily swept into the dining room and hugged me like she hadn’t seen me in months instead of four days. She smelled like her aggressive vanilla perfume and the spearmint gum she was always chewing. “Mom’s meatloaf smells actually edible this time. Don’t tell her I said that.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Renee appeared in the doorway behind her, and I did the thing I always did — met her eyes for exactly one second, smiled in a way I hoped read as friendly and not I’ve been thinking about your hands since Tuesday, then looked away.

“Hey, Scout.”

That goddamn nickname. She’d called me that since I was fifteen, back when I used to trail behind her and Emily like a lost puppy, desperate to be included in whatever older-girl drama they had going on. At fifteen, it had been flattering. At nineteen, when I’d realized with dawning, nauseating clarity that my feelings for Renee had nothing to do with wanting to be her friend and everything to do with wanting her mouth on mine, it had become a special form of torture. Scout. Cute. Harmless. Firmly in the little sister category.

“Hey, Renee.” I went back to setting the table. “How was the drive?”

“Fine. Your sister made me stop twice for gas station snacks even though the drive is thirty-five minutes.”

“I was hungry,” Emily said, already on her way to the kitchen. “Mark! Come carry the salad bowl, I’m not your servant!”

Mark appeared from the living room where he’d been watching football with my dad — tall, affable, holding a beer he’d barely touched. He kissed Emily’s cheek on his way past, and she swatted him with an oven mitt. They were sweet together. Chaotic, but sweet. He was the kind of guy who’d remember to pick up the dry cleaning but forget his own birthday, and Emily was the kind of woman who needed someone she could organize without resistance. They worked.

Renee sat down across from me. Directly across. Close enough that when she stretched her legs under the table, the toe of her boot grazed my ankle.

I didn’t flinch. Six years of practice.

“You look tired,” she said, studying me with those blue-gray eyes that always seemed to see too much. “Long week?”

“Client from hell. They wanted the copy ‘punchier but also more professional but also fun but not too fun.’ I’m pretty sure ‘punchier’ isn’t even a real brief note.”

She laughed — low, warm, the corner of her mouth pulling up in a way that carved a dimple into her left cheek. I cataloged it automatically. The dimple. The faint scar on her left thumb from a hiking trip she and Emily took in college. The way her hair fell across her collarbone when she tilted her head.

Stop it. Stop it.

“You should push back more,” she said. “You’re too good to let clients run you in circles.”

The compliment landed in my chest like a small, controlled detonation. Renee said things like that sometimes — offhanded observations about my talent or my potential that she probably forgot thirty seconds later and I carried around for weeks.

“I push back,” I lied.

“You compromise.” She pointed her water glass at me. “There’s a difference.”

My mom emerged from the kitchen with the meatloaf — triumphant, oven mitts raised like she’d slain a dragon — and the table filled up fast. Dad at the head, Mom to his right, Emily and Mark on one side, Renee and me on the other. There’d been a time when Renee sat next to Emily, but somewhere in the last year, the seating had shifted and nobody questioned it. I tried not to read into the fact that she’d chosen the chair next to mine. She was closer to the bread basket. That was probably the whole reason.

Dinner conversation orbited the wedding. Everything orbited the wedding now. Emily was five months out and had crossed the threshold from excited into slightly unhinged — she talked about centerpiece options with the intensity of a war strategist, and my dad nodded along with the glazed-over expression of a man who’d learned early in his marriage that the correct response to any flower-related question was “whatever you think, sweetheart.”

“I’m between peonies and garden roses,” Emily said, waving her fork. “Peonies are more romantic but garden roses are more versatile and Elise — that’s the florist, Dad, I’ve told you this — Elise says garden roses hold up better in heat.”

“What month is the wedding again?” Dad asked.

“September, Dad. September. I’ve told you nine hundred times.”

“September’s nice,” he said. “Good weather.”

Mom squeezed his arm. “He’s been marking the calendar, don’t let him pretend.”

Mark said something about the budget for flowers, and Emily launched into a spirited defense of the peony surcharge, and I let the noise wash over me because Renee’s knee had settled against mine under the table, and she hadn’t moved it.

It was accidental. Obviously. She was tall, the table was narrow, there wasn’t a lot of legroom. But her knee was warm through her jeans and my skirt, and every cell in my body was oriented toward that single point of contact like a compass needle swinging north.

I ate my meatloaf. I contributed to the conversation at appropriate intervals. I laughed at Mark’s jokes and fielded my mom’s questions about work and didn’t once let my expression betray the fact that my sister’s best friend’s knee against mine was the most physical contact I’d had with another human being in four months that made me feel anything.

Tyler hadn’t made me feel anything. Tyler, my most recent ex, who was objectively attractive and kind and good in bed in the way that men could be good in bed — competent, attentive, fine. I’d spent a year and a half with Tyler and never once felt the voltage that Renee’s accidental knee-touch was sending through me right now. I’d assumed that was normal. That the breathless, skin-on-fire thing was a myth invented by romance novelists and people who hadn’t learned to manage their expectations.

Sitting across from Renee at my parents’ dinner table, feeling my heartbeat in my throat because her leg was touching mine, I was starting to suspect I’d been wrong about that.

“Oh!” Emily set down her wine glass with the force of someone who’d just remembered she was holding a live grenade. “I forgot to tell you guys the disaster.”

“What disaster?” Mom’s hand went to her chest. Mom’s hand always went to her chest.

“Our apartment flooded.”

The table went quiet.

“A pipe burst in the upstairs unit,” Mark explained, calmer than Emily, who was already gesturing wildly. “Flooded our bathroom and part of the bedroom. The building’s insurance is covering it, but the contractor says six to eight weeks minimum for repairs.”

“Six to eight weeks?” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“Mark’s parents’ place. His mom already set up the guest room and stocked the fridge.” Emily rolled her eyes fondly. “Carol thinks if she feeds Mark enough pot roast he’ll move back in permanently.”

“She’s not wrong,” Mark said.

“But here’s the thing.” Emily turned to me, and something in her expression — the too-bright eyes, the head tilt she used when she was about to ask for a favor she already assumed I’d say yes to — made my stomach drop. “Wedding planning. We’ve got five months of stuff to finalize and all my binders and samples are at Mark’s parents’ now, which is forty minutes from Renee and forty minutes from you, and we can’t do planning sessions there because Carol rearranges my mood boards when I’m not looking.”

“She’s trying to be helpful,” Mark offered.

“She moved my color swatches into rainbow order, Mark. By hue. That’s not helpful, that’s anarchy.”

I could see where this was going. I could see it coming like a freight train, and I was standing on the tracks with my shoes nailed to the railroad ties.

“So here’s my thought.” Emily shifted her gaze between me and Renee. “Sadie, your spare room is empty. You’ve got that big dining table. Renee—” She turned to Renee with the dazzling, conspiratorial grin she’d used to talk people into things since she was six years old. “What if you crash at Sadie’s for the next couple months? That way you and I can do planning sessions there without the forty-minute drive, Sadie’s already local, and we basically turn her apartment into wedding command central.”

The room rearranged itself around me. I could feel my parents’ eyes, warm and expectant. Mark’s mild, supportive nod. Emily’s assumption — absolute, unshakeable — that this was a great idea and everyone would obviously agree.

Renee’s knee was still against mine.

I looked at her. She was already looking at me, and for one fraction of a second, I saw something behind the composure — a flicker, fast and unreadable. Hesitation. Recognition. The faintest tightening around her eyes that might have been oh no or might have been oh God and I couldn’t tell the difference because she buried it immediately, smoothly, the way she buried everything.

“I don’t want to impose,” Renee said, and her voice was perfectly even. “Sadie might have plans, or—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Emily flapped a hand. “Sadie never has plans.”

“Thanks, Em.”

“You know what I mean. You’re not seeing anyone, you work from home half the week anyway — it’s perfect. Right?” She looked at me. Waiting. Already certain.

Every rational thought I had was screaming. Two months. Renee in my apartment. Renee in my shower. Renee making coffee in my kitchen in the morning, hair messy, face soft with sleep. Renee on the other side of a thin wall every single night.

I would not survive this. I knew it with a certainty that sat in my chest like a stone. Whatever careful, functional system I’d built to manage my feelings for Renee Talbot — the controlled exposure, the measured distance, the ruthless internal redirection every time my thoughts wandered somewhere dangerous — none of it would hold up to living together. Not a chance.

But Emily was looking at me with her bright, expectant face, and my parents were nodding along, and Renee was sitting next to me with her knee still pressed against mine and her expression carefully, studiously blank, and the only honest answer was no, absolutely not, because I’ve been in love with your best friend for six years and if she moves into my apartment I will do something catastrophically stupid.

I couldn’t say that. Obviously.

“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

Emily clapped. “See? Perfect! This is going to be so fun. Girls’ nights, planning sessions, wine—” She pointed at Renee. “You’re in charge of the wine.”

“Naturally.” Renee’s voice was smooth. Light. But under the table, her knee pulled away from mine, and the absence of that pressure felt louder than anything she could have said.

The rest of dinner blurred. I remember dessert — my mom’s overbaked brownies, which she insisted were “fudgy on purpose.” I remember Mark and my dad debating something about yard maintenance. I remember Emily pulling out her phone to show Renee the updated vendor spreadsheet and the two of them huddled together, dark heads bent over a glowing screen, and the familiar knife-twist of watching them in their private world that I’d never been part of and was never supposed to want inside of.

I remember Renee’s hand reaching for the brownie plate at the same moment mine did, our fingers grazing. Her pulling back first. The look she gave me — apologetic, maybe, or cautious, or something I couldn’t name because every look from Renee felt like a code I didn’t have the key to.

“When should I move in?” Renee asked Emily, not me. Smart. This was Emily’s plan, Emily’s logistics, Emily’s wedding. Routing the question through Emily kept it impersonal. Business between friends.

“This weekend? The sooner the better. I’ll bring the binders over Saturday.”

“Works for me.” Renee looked at me then. Direct. The blue-gray of her eyes catching the overhead light. “That work for you, Scout?”

Scout. Little sister. Kid she’d known since I was in braces and an oversized soccer jersey.

I held her gaze. “Works for me.”

She nodded. Looked away. Picked up her water glass and drank, and I watched the line of her throat as she swallowed and thought, very clearly and very uselessly: I am so fucked.

I sat in my car in my parents’ driveway for nine minutes after everyone else had left. I know because I watched the dashboard clock while my hands strangled the steering wheel and my brain ran through every possible version of the next two months.

Best case: Renee moved in, we planned the wedding, she was a considerate roommate who respected boundaries, and I white-knuckled my way through eight weeks of proximity without doing or saying anything humiliating. We’d come out the other side with Emily’s wedding planned, Renee back in her own place, and my dignity technically intact.

Worst case: everything I’d spent six years burying came crawling out of the ground the first time I heard her laugh through a thin wall at midnight, and I ruined my relationship with my sister, destroyed a twenty-year friendship, and outed myself as the kind of person who fell in love with someone she was never supposed to want.

The middle cases were the dangerous ones. The ones where nothing dramatic happened but the proximity just wore at me — slowly, daily, in a thousand small erosions. Her coffee mug next to mine in the dish rack. Her jacket on the hook by the door. The sound of her voice on a phone call drifting through the apartment while I pretended to work and replayed every syllable.

I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel.

Two months. I could survive two months.

I said it out loud, like that would make it true. “Two months.”

The dashboard clock ticked to 8:47.

I started the car and drove home to the apartment that, in five days, I would be sharing with the woman I’d been in love with since I was nineteen years old. The woman my sister trusted more than anyone in the world. The woman who called me Scout and thought of me as a kid and had no idea — or at least, I prayed she had no idea — that every fantasy I’d had for the last six years started and ended with her name.

I turned the radio up loud enough to drown out my own thoughts.

It didn’t work.

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The Bridesmaid Dress — Set four months after the wedding. Sadie finds the sage green bridesmaid dress in the back of the closet. Renee comes home from a run. The zipper goes down. A scene TOO HOT for Amazon.

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