My Straight Best Friend’s Bed

Sapphic Best Friends to Lovers Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, "Straight" Best Friend, Bi Awakening, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Secret Arrangement, Six Years of Pining, First Time with a Woman, Top Who Learns to Receive, Bakery Romance

She offered me half her bed. I already wanted all of her.

Robin Hale can fix anything. A flooded apartment. A botched delivery. Her best friend’s wildly optimistic bakery launch. The one thing she has never fixed is wanting Gemma Ruiz.

Six years of weekly dinners, emergency keys, and keeping her hands to herself, because Gemma is warm, gorgeous, and straight. Then a pipe bursts over Robin’s bed six weeks before Fold Bakehouse opens, and Gemma offers the only space she has: half of hers.

It takes two nights for the rules on the headboard to start breaking. One jealous question. One kiss Gemma asks for by name. One arrangement with a simple condition: what happens in this bed stays in this bed.

Except it isn’t staying anywhere. It’s in the bakery office after close. It’s in the shower at dawn. It’s in the way Gemma says yours in the dark and best friend in the daylight.

Robin has loved her quietly for six years. She is done being quiet. If Gemma wants all of her, she is going to have to say so out loud.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Six years of pining that pays off fast, with heat in nearly every chapter
✅ A "straight" best friend who wants her, not an experiment
✅ One bed, bed rules on a recipe card, and every rule getting crossed out
✅ A controlled, competent top who finally lets someone take care of her
✅ A bisexual awakening that is never played as confusion
✅ A bakery countdown, a nosy aunt in a tracksuit, and a found family that sees everything
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat, no cheating, and a loud, public, guaranteed HEA

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, toys including strap-on play, light restraint, edging), strong language, sexuality questioning and coming out, business and financial stress, and brief mention of a deceased parent. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Robin

“Whole answer,” Gemma says, and puts a spoon in my mouth.

It is 10:31 on a Thursday night. I know because I’m looking at the clock over the walk-in instead of at her. The clock is safer. The clock has never stood this close to me.

Guava. Cream cheese underneath it, lime, a pinch of salt she’d deny if I asked. It’s warm and loose and it is, without competition, the best thing anyone has fed me this year. Which is a problem, because Gemma Ruiz is eight inches away with her eyebrows up, and my one job in this building tonight is to have an opinion about custard.

“You’ve got—” she says, and before I can handle it myself, her thumb swipes the corner of my mouth.

She looks at the smear on her thumb. Shrugs. Sucks it clean.

Then she goes back to waiting for my verdict, as if nothing happened. Nothing did, for her.

10:32. The second hand on that clock has a stutter. Someone should look at it.

I swallow. “It’s incredible.”

“But.”

“I didn’t say but.”

“Your face said but. Your face has been saying but since I picked up the spoon.” She plants a fist on her hip. She’s floured to the elbow, and there’s a pink streak on the orange scarf tying back her hair. “Whole answer, Robin. Not the nice half.”

Six years. I have never once gotten away with the nice half.

“It won’t hold.” I take my glasses off, clean them on my shirt hem, put them back. “Right now, out of the pot, at this temperature, it’s perfect. Pipe it into a shell and park it in a display case at seven, and by nine it’s weeping. By ten you’re selling soup in a croissant.”

She stares at me. Then at the pot. Then she makes a noise like a tire going down and drops her forehead onto my shoulder.

“I hate it when you’re right about food you can’t even make.”

“I can make soup.”

“You can make soup,” she agrees, into my shirt.

I keep my hands at my sides. This is a skill. I’ve had a great deal of practice.

A few strands have escaped her scarf at the nape, damp from the ovens. I can see the top knob of her spine. I check the clock again. 10:34.

I met this woman over a broken vendor spreadsheet at a winter market fundraiser. She had powdered sugar on her coat and a boyfriend she mentioned in the first four minutes. I fixed the spreadsheet. Nothing else has been fixable since.

Fold Bakehouse is three-quarters of a bakery. The cream tile is up. The green cabinets are in. The brass menu rails are still in a box by the register, the front windows are papered over, and the door—coral, her choice, I held the ladder—has had its second coat for exactly five days. In six weeks that door opens to the public, and the woman leaning on me has put fourteen years and every dollar she owns behind it.

She straightens, hooks a stool with her foot, and sits on it backward with the pot in her lap.

“Okay. List.” She scrapes the spoon around the rim. “Reach-in fridge shows up tomorrow at eight. Hood guy Tuesday. Labels, which Marta says she’ll do, meaning Marta will do them while explaining everything wrong with my life. Test bake the week after. Health walkthrough in a month. And a loan payment on the first, whether I’ve sold one single croissant or not.”

She says it lightly. She also reaches over and wipes the same clean patch of bench twice while she says it. I learned a long time ago to read the rag and not the voice.

“You’re on schedule,” I tell her.

“Am I?”

“Four days ahead on tile. Two behind on equipment. It nets out.”

“You have that memorized.”

“I have it written down.”

“Of course you do.” The rag stops. Her shoulders come down half an inch. “Fine. The custard. More cornstarch and it’s paste. Gelatin, and my grandmother rises from her grave in Bayamón to slap me.”

“Then it doesn’t go in the case.”

“It’s the best thing on the menu.”

“So don’t cut it. Change where it lives. Fill to order. Or bake it inside something that does the holding for you.”

“Fill to order, with one person on the line, in a morning rush—”

“That is not a plan.”

“It’ll work.”

“Gemma Ruiz.”

“Fine.” She points the spoon at me. “It’s not a plan yet. Make it one.”

“It’s your custard.”

“It’s your brain. I’m borrowing it. I’ll bring it back.” She grins, quick and crooked, and the little crescent scar on her chin pulls white. “You’ll have a spreadsheet by Saturday. You won’t be able to stop yourself.”

That’s probably true. I don’t tell her so.

She hops off the stool to run water into the pot, and she says the next thing over her shoulder, the way she’d mention that the oven runs ten degrees hot.

“You know you’re the only one, right? Marta says I’m doing great. Devin doesn’t start for two weeks and is going to be polite at me for a month after that. My mother thinks I opened in July. You’re the only person who’s allowed to tell me no.”

The water runs. She hums something, badly.

I stand in the middle of her kitchen and take that like a sheet pan to the sternum. For her it’s a fact about logistics. For me it’s what I’ll be staring at my ceiling about at two in the morning.

“Somebody has to,” I say.

“Mm. Lucky me.”

I find my jacket. I’m rinsing the spoon—she’ll leave it in the sink otherwise, and by tomorrow there’ll be eleven—when her arms come around my waist from behind. Cheek between my shoulder blades. All of her against all of my back, warm through two layers of cotton, smelling like butter and burnt sugar and the coconut soap she buys by the gallon.

“Thank you for coming. Go home. You get up at a sick hour.”

“Five forty-five.”

“Sick.”

My hands are in the water. I leave them there. One. Two. Three. Four.

She lets go on four. She always lets go on four. I’ve collected enough data to be sure.

Outside, I sit in the car until the kitchen light goes off and the one upstairs comes on. I tell myself that’s about her safety.

Home is ten minutes away and exactly how I left it.

Keys in the bowl. Shoes on the rack. Planner squared to the corner of the desk, tomorrow’s page already ruled. I brush my teeth, wrap my hair, set my glasses on the nightstand beside the three library mysteries I’m rotating between, and get into a bed I made with hospital corners this morning.

My phone lights up.

Dana: so are you always this hard to pin down, or am I special?

Dana is a pediatric dentist. She has a rescue greyhound and a low, pleased laugh in the one voice memo she’s sent me. She has asked me to drinks twice, in complete sentences, with a day and a time attached. Any reasonable woman would answer her.

I turn the phone face down.

Then I lie in the dark with my hands folded on my stomach like a body at a viewing, and I pretend I’m not going to do what I’m going to do.

The drawer makes the same small sound it always makes.

I’d like it noted that I resist this more nights than I don’t. I have rules. Not when I’ve seen her that day. Not when she’s touched me. Tonight breaks both, and I get as far as thumb in her mouth before the rules quit mattering and I’m shoving my underwear down my thighs.

It’s always the same place. That’s the embarrassing part. Six years, and my imagination has never bothered to renovate.

The bakery, after close. Lights down except the one over the bench. Gemma in the apron and nothing else—strings knotted at the small of her back, bare shoulders, bare hips, the canvas bib covering not nearly enough of her breasts. She boosts herself onto the steel and lets her knees fall open. In the fantasy there is no health code.

Whole answer, she says.

I press the vibrator to my clit on its lowest setting and breathe out through my teeth.

In the fantasy I don’t look at the clock. I look at her. I start at her mouth, because I’ve never been allowed to. Then her throat. Then I tug the bib of the apron sideways and take her breast in my mouth—full, warm, the nipple drawn tight against my tongue—and suck until she arches off the steel and swears at the ceiling.

Only then do I get down on her clean floor and push the canvas up her thighs, and she’s already wet—I’ve decided she would be; I’ve decided she’d be slick and swollen and impatient about it—and she puts a floury hand in my hair and pulls me in.

I know how she’d taste. I don’t, obviously. But I’ve had six years to build it out of parts: the salt at the back of her neck when she hugs me after a twelve-hour shift, the sweetness she can never fully scrub off her hands. I’d lick her slowly, flat-tongued, from her entrance to her clit, over and over, until she stopped being able to form words. Gemma never stops talking. I have wanted to be the reason for a very long time.

My T-shirt is rucked up under my arms. I don’t remember doing that. My free hand is on my breast, rolling a nipple harder than I’d let anyone else, and my hips are lifting off the mattress in short, undignified pushes.

I click the setting up one.

I’m soaked. I can hear it when I slide two fingers down through myself, and the sound is filthy in my tidy bedroom.

I spread my knees wider. The sheet is cool under my heels. I circle my clit with the tip of the vibrator, slowly, the way I’d make her wait, and my stomach pulls tight every time it skims the spot I’m avoiding on purpose.

She wouldn’t be quiet. I’ve built that too—out of the groan she makes when a lamination shatters right, out of the laugh that goes breathless at the top. She’d say fuck. She’d say Robin. She’d say right there, don’t you dare move, and she’d grind her cunt against my mouth without an ounce of shame, because she has never been ashamed of wanting anything in her life.

I’d suck her clit until her thighs shook. I’d get two fingers into her and curl them and feel her clamp down, and I’d keep my eyes open for all of it—her head tipped back, the scarf slipping, that burn scar on her forearm flexing as she gripped the edge of the bench. I’d make her come like that, her heel digging into my spine. I’m good at this. It’s the one arena where I have never doubted it.

The second time I’d stand up and use my hand, so I could see all of her. Three fingers, because she’d ask for three. My thumb on her clit. Her forehead on my shoulder and her breath going ragged in my ear—más, más, don’t stop—and her cunt squeezing me so tightly I’d feel her pulse in it.

I’ve stopped being careful about noise. The hum goes muffled and wet when I press down, and I hear myself: one short, low sound through my nose. It’s the only kind I ever make.

That’s usually where I finish. Her legs trembling around my ears, me in charge of every second.

Tonight my brain goes off script.

Tonight she slides down off the bench, still catching her breath, and puts her palm flat on my chest. She walks me backward until my shoulders hit the cooler door. Your turn, she says, and it’s the voice from an hour ago—you’re the only one—and her hand goes down the front of my trousers, clumsy and completely sure of itself, and she looks right at me while she does it.

She’d find me drenched. She’d make a sound about it—surprised, pleased, a little smug. Robin Hale, she’d say, exactly the way I say her name, and she’d push inside me without waiting to be walked through it, and there’d be nothing for me to do but hold on to her shoulders.

I ration that version. It costs more than the others.

I push two fingers inside myself and pretend they’re shorter, blunter, a baker’s hands with the nails cut to nothing. I pretend she’s watching my face. I’d never allow that, in life. I can hardly stand it in my own head; even here, alone, in the dark, I want to turn away.

I don’t. I thumb the dial up until it buzzes in my teeth. I hold it hard against my clit and fuck myself on my own hand, fast, graceless, thighs starting to shake, and I let her look.

Look at you, fantasy Gemma says, low and delighted. Six years. You could’ve just said.

It tears through me. I twist my face into the pillow and come so hard my back leaves the bed, clenching around my fingers, thighs locked on my wrist, and I say her name into the cotton—both syllables, wrecked—where no one will ever hear it.

Then it’s over, and I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman lying crooked in a made bed with my underwear around one knee. My fingers are wet to the knuckle. The room smells like me. Beside my hip, face down, the phone still holds Dana’s unanswered question.

I give myself four seconds to hate it.

One: she’s your best friend. Two: she has only ever dated men. Three: she trusts you in her kitchen, in her books, at her mother’s table. Four: if she knew, she’d be kind about it, and that would be the worst part.

Then I do what I do. I file it. I switch the vibrator off, set it on the nightstand next to my glasses, and look up at a ceiling I can’t see until my pulse comes down.

Something hits my forehead.

Small. Cool. I assume sweat and wipe it away.

A second one lands on my eyebrow.

I put my glasses on.

There’s a stain on my bedroom ceiling the size of a serving platter. It was not there this morning; I would know. It’s the color of weak tea, and at its center the paint has blistered into a sagging, glistening belly. As I watch, a drop gathers at the lowest point and lets go.

I have time for three things. I get my underwear up. I grab the phone. I grab the laptop off the desk.

The ceiling comes down.

It isn’t dramatic, exactly. It’s a wet, tired sound, like a dropped mattress. A slab of drywall the size of a door folds onto the foot of my bed, and behind it comes the water—not a drip now, a steady clear rope of it, drumming onto my hospital corners.

“No,” I tell it. It’s not persuaded.

Then I move. Breaker for the bedroom circuit. Stockpot under the stream. Every towel I own along the baseboard. And I’m in the hallway in a T-shirt and briefs, pounding on 3C with a wet fist at 11:52 at night.

Caleb opens up in basketball shorts, takes one look at me, and reaches behind the door for a wrench. That’s the advantage of living across the hall from a plumber. He’s upstairs with a headlamp inside ninety seconds. Four minutes later the rope thins to a thread, then a drip, then quits.

He comes back down and stands in my bedroom doorway with his hands on his hips.

“Supply line on the toilet in 4B. Braided hose let go at the crimp. They’re in Tampa till Sunday, so that’s been running into your joists for—” He looks at the ceiling. He looks at the bed. “A while.”

“How long to fix?”

“The hose? Ten minutes. This?” He counts on his fingers. “Dry-out, a week with fans. Then they pull the wet board, probably that whole wall with it. Inspection. Insulation. Hang, mud, paint. New floor if it cups, and it’s gonna cup.” He shrugs. “Three weeks if you’re lucky. Five if you’re not.”

“I’m not usually lucky.”

“Then five. Take pictures before you touch anything else. And Robin, you can’t sleep in here. That’s not me being nice. That’s mold.”

I take forty-one pictures. I email them to myself with the date in the subject line. I pull up the policy, the loss-of-use rider, the claims number. I have an emergency fund for precisely this, and there’s a perfectly decent hotel two blocks from the hospital. I call the building’s after-hours line, get a recording, and leave the unit number, the time, and the word negligence, pronounced clearly.

I also send one text, because she’d never forgive me for hearing about it tomorrow.

Ceiling came down in my bedroom. Burst line upstairs. I’m fine. Handling it.

Three dots. Nothing. The dots vanish.

Eleven minutes later my front door bangs open without a knock.

“Handling it?“

Gemma is wearing pajama pants printed with tiny lemons, unlaced work boots, and a Blondie shirt so old it’s gone sheer at the seams. The scarf is off; her hair’s everywhere. She is very clearly not wearing a bra. I take that in the way I’d take in a fire exit—once, completely—and then I look at her face.

She crosses the living room and grabs mine in both hands. Turns it left. Turns it right.

“Are you hurt? Did it hit you?”

“It hit the duvet.”

“Do not be funny at me right now.” And she hugs me, hard, front to front, up on her toes, nothing between us but two worn T-shirts.

I can feel exactly how much of her there is. Soft, warm, unsupported, pressed just under my ribs. Half an hour ago I was—I stop that thought where it stands.

I hold my arms slightly away from my body, like a woman being searched.

“Hi, Caleb,” she says into my neck.

“Hey, Gemma.”

She lets go and stops in the bedroom doorway. Takes in the slab on the bed, the stockpot, the towels, the brown water sliding in a slow tongue toward the bookcase.

“Oh, Robin.” Soft. And then, in an entirely different voice: “Books. Bottom two shelves, now. Caleb, do you have boxes? Bags? Anything.”

“Got milk crates.”

“I love you. Go.”

And she’s on her knees on my wet floor, pulling paperbacks off the low shelf by the armload and stacking them on the desk. No discussion. She came to my home at midnight and went straight for the thing I’d grieve.

I stand there one second too long, watching her do it.

Then I see where she’s headed next.

The nightstand. The lamp, the glasses case, the three library mysteries. And six inches from the mysteries, in plain view, charcoal gray and unmistakable, right where I set it half an hour ago.

I cross that room faster than I have ever finished a 5K.

“I’ve got this side.”

Gemma, still kneeling, looks up at me. I’m planted squarely between her and the nightstand, in a T-shirt and briefs because pants have not yet made the triage list, with my arms a little out, like I’m guarding a goal.

“It’s a lamp and some paperbacks.”

“I’ve got it.”

“Robin.”

“There’s a system.”

“For your nightstand?”

“For everything. You know that.”

Her eyes narrow. She still has flour in one eyebrow. “Why are you being weird?”

“My ceiling is on my bed.”

She considers it. “Okay. Fair.” She turns back to the shelf.

I reach behind me without looking, close my hand around the thing, and drop it into my open suitcase under a pair of running shorts. My pulse is doing something a cardiologist would want to discuss.

“Also,” Gemma says, not turning around, “pants. Caleb’s a gentleman. I’ve been looking at your legs for five minutes and I’m starting to feel bad about mine.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your legs.”

“They’re short. You have those.” She waves a paperback at the general region of my thighs. “It’s rude, honestly. Put them away.”

I put on pants. My face is hot, and it has nothing to do with the ceiling. Gemma says things like that. She’s said them for six years—to me, to baristas, to her aunt’s friends. They have never once meant what I want them to.

It takes most of an hour. Caleb’s crates take the books. The desk, the dresser, and the bookcase get walked out to the living room, where it’s dry. Gemma hauls like someone who’s been shouldering fifty-pound flour sacks since she was eighteen, swearing cheerfully in two languages, and she never once asks what I want saved first. She just knows.

I pack the way I do everything. One suitcase. Two work outfits. Running shoes, running gear. Toiletries. Laptop, charger, planner. The three mysteries, because they’re due on the twelfth.

“Okay,” I say, zipping it. “There’s a Marriott by the hospital. I’ll get a room tonight and call the adjuster at eight.”

Gemma straightens up from the last crate.

“You’ll get nothing.”

“Gemma.”

“You are not sleeping at a Marriott.”

“It’s a perfectly good—”

“You’ve had a key to my apartment for four years.” She shoves her hair out of her eyes with her wrist. “For emergencies. That’s what you said when you made me get it cut. For emergencies, Gemma, be an adult. What exactly did you think the emergency was going to be?”

“A fire. At your place. Started by you.”

“This is the emergency, Robin.”

“Your couch is five feet long.”

“My couch is under forty flat-packed pastry boxes, so you’re not getting the couch anyway.” She hoists a crate of my books and walks it out the door, and she says it with her back to me, so I can’t tell whether she heard herself. “Bring the suitcase. I’m parked in the fire lane.”

Caleb, in the hall, raises his eyebrows at me. I decline to see it.

Here is the whole answer. I can afford the hotel. Insurance will cover most of it. I have a rider, a fund, a plan, and every reason on earth to tell her no. I am the only person who’s allowed to.

I pick up the suitcase.

I follow her taillights through ten minutes of streets I could drive asleep. I park behind the bakery and sit there with the engine off.

Temporary. Three weeks. Five. I’ve slept eight feet from her in a tent and eight inches from her through an entire movie, and I survived both.

Then she’s at the top of the stairs, holding the door open with her hip, a crate of my books in her arms, and I get out. I climb the back stairs with a bag in each hand, into an apartment that smells like her, where the compressor for the walk-in kicks on somewhere under my feet and hums up through the floorboards.

The couch is as advertised: a low shape buried under a cardboard skyline. More boxes on the counter, the chair, the windowsill. A black lace bra hangs off the bathroom doorknob. I see it, and then I stop seeing it.

“I could move the boxes,” I say.

“At quarter to two? So you can sleep with your knees in your ears?” Gemma toes off her boots and leaves them where they fall. “It’s a bed. We’ve shared a tent.”

“That was a four-person tent.”

“And you slept flat against the far wall like a plank. I remember. I thought you’d died.” She’s already walking. “Come on.”

Down a hall I’ve been in a hundred times and never once to the end.

Gemma pushes her bedroom door open with her hip.

Queen bed. Unmade. Four pillows that don’t match, a blanket kicked into a knot, an orange scarf tied around the bedpost.

“You get half,” she says. “I promise.”

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Item One — The Apron — A scene too hot for the retailers

Three weeks after the epilogue, Robin finds a recipe card on her desk. One apron. Zero anything else. One light, over the bench. It is the oldest fantasy on her list, the one from Chapter One, and Gemma has only one condition: Robin has to say every step of it out loud, in order. Including the ending she never told anyone.

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