One Kiss Past Straight

A Sapphic Best-Friends-to-Lovers Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Five Years of Pining, Three-Date Deal, First Time with a Woman, Workplace Romance, Wedding Romance, Coming Out, Praise Kink, Curvy Heroine

She asked her lesbian best friend for one kiss. Her best friend wanted three dates.

Marla Pearson has kissed plenty of men. None of them ever made her forget her own name.

Divorced, thirty-five, and finally back on the apps, Marla has one tiny problem: every time she touches herself, she’s thinking about her best friend. Denise Brooks — sleeves rolled, citrus knife in hand, openly, gloriously lesbian, and completely off-limits for eight years.

So Marla does the reasonable thing. She asks for one kiss. Just to know.

Denise has been in love with Marla for five years. She is not going to be anyone’s experiment. Her counteroffer: three real dates. Rules on an index card. Every date goes further than the last. And at the end, Marla has to choose — out loud.

Date one, they keep their clothes on. Barely.
Date two, the clothes come off.
Date three, there are no rules at all.

But they’re also catering a six-week wedding circus for Marla’s cousin, with two businesses riding on it — and the hardest thing Marla will ever do isn’t sleeping with a woman. It’s saying who she is in front of everyone she loves.

The deal was three dates. Denise wants forever.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A divorced caterer’s bisexual awakening — with the one woman who’s been in front of her the whole time
✅ Five years of silent pining from a deadpan lesbian mixologist who names every disaster like a cocktail
✅ A three-date deal with rules on a recipe card: clothes on, clothes off, no rules
✅ Workplace heat: a catering kitchen, a cocktail van named Loretta, and a lot of “behind”
✅ Curvy heroine, praise kink, body worship, first time with a woman, toys, and strap-on scenes both ways
✅ A wedding-series disaster comedy: escaped doves, a bowling-alley shower, a heat wave and a blackout
✅ Coming out to family, a hard grovel, and a public declaration into a microphone
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat — graphic, explicit, and funny
✅ HEA guaranteed

Buy on Amazon

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including oral, fingering, toys, strap-on play both ways, and light restraint), strong language, a recently finalized divorce, sexuality questioning and coming out to family, a past relationship in which a partner was kept hidden, brief family tension, and a guest’s allergic reaction at a catered event. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: SOS

Marla

The man across the table had been talking about protein for eleven minutes, and Marla Pearson had started timing him the way she timed a braise.

“—because most people think of macros as a diet thing,” Greg said, “when really it’s a lifestyle architecture.”

“Architecture,” Marla repeated.

“Framework. Scaffolding.” He made a little box in the air with both hands, as if she might need a visual. “You build the day around the protein, and everything else is, like, décor.”

She nodded. She had been nodding for so long her neck was developing opinions.

The tapas bar was the kind of place that charged nineteen dollars for four slices of chorizo fanned out on a slate like a hand of cards. Marla knew exactly what the chorizo cost wholesale. She knew what the slate cost. She knew the kitchen was overcooking the patatas bravas because she could smell the oil from here, tired and a little burnt at the edges, and it was taking every ounce of her self-control not to walk back there and fix it.

Instead she sat with her ankles crossed under the table in the one good sundress she owned, the green one with the little white flowers, and let a forty-four-year-old account manager explain food to her.

“I ordered us the octopus,” Greg said. “You’ll love it. Very lean.”

“I actually don’t eat—”

“Trust me.”

She had not eaten octopus since a trip to Lisbon in her twenties when she’d watched a fisherman beat one against a rock for ten minutes to tenderize it and had decided, in a moment of clarity, that the octopus was smarter than her and deserved better. She had told Greg this. Twenty minutes ago. It had been her one anecdote.

Eight weeks. Her divorce had been final for eight weeks. She’d waited the full eight because her cousin Bernice had said two months was a respectable grieving period for a marriage that ended with both parties signing papers at a kitchen table and then splitting a pizza. Marla had counted the days on the calendar by the fridge, and on day fifty-six she’d downloaded the app, uploaded a photo where the lighting did something merciful to her jawline, and said yes to the first man who could spell restaurant.

That was Greg.

“My ex-wife’s lawyer,” Greg said, apropos of the octopus, “is a shark. Like, clinically.”

Marla picked up her phone.

She did it under the table, the way she’d check tickets during service without letting a client see her do it. Her thumb found the thread at the top of her messages without looking. It was always at the top. It had been at the top for eight years.

SOS. Code Walk-In.

She sent it and set the phone face down on her thigh and picked up her wine.

Code Walk-In had been invented at a bridal shower six years ago, when a mother of the bride had cornered Marla by the dessert table to talk about her colon. Denise had watched the whole thing from behind the bar for four minutes and then walked over, deadpan, and said, Pearson, your walk-in’s making a noise, and steered her out through the service door by the elbow. Marla had laughed so hard in the loading dock she’d had to sit down on an upturned milk crate.

They’d used it maybe a dozen times since. On clients. On a drunk groomsman. Once, memorably, on Patrick’s boss at a Christmas party. It was the only emergency code in her life that had never once gone unanswered.

Her thigh buzzed.

12 min.

That was all. No question mark, no you okay, no lol. Just the number, the way Denise quoted a drink ticket.

Marla put her phone back on the table and felt her whole body unclench a notch.

“—which is why I don’t do carbs after four,” Greg said.

“That’s so interesting,” Marla said, and meant eleven minutes.

At minute ten, the octopus arrived.

At minute twelve, the door opened.

Marla didn’t turn around. She didn’t have to. Something in the room changed register, the way a kitchen changes when the chef walks in. The hostess straightened. A woman at the bar looked up from her phone and then kept looking.

Denise Brooks crossed the dining room like it owed her money.

Black button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Dark jeans, work boots with a scuff of something citrus-colored on the left toe. Her auburn hair was tucked behind one ear and her truck keys were already in her hand, swinging on one long finger. She’d come straight from a gig. Marla could tell from the flush on her cheekbones and the watch — the old leather one — pushed up her forearm to keep it dry.

She stopped at their table and didn’t look at Greg at all.

“Pearson,” she said. “Your walk-in’s dead.”

Marla set her fork down. “No.”

“Hector called me when he couldn’t get you. Compressor’s gone. You’ve got forty pounds of short rib sitting at fifty-one degrees.” Denise glanced at her watch. “Fifty-two.”

“Oh my God,” Marla said, and it was not entirely acting, because the image of forty pounds of short rib creeping toward the danger zone was genuinely upsetting even as fiction.

Greg looked between them. “Sorry — who are—”

“Denise.” She finally looked at him. It was the look she gave a drink that had come out of the shaker wrong. Not hostile. Just assessing, cool and total, and finding it not up to standard. “You’re Greg.”

“I— yeah.”

“That’s octopus.”

“It’s very lean,” Greg said, a little defensively.

“She doesn’t eat octopus,” Denise said, and lifted Marla’s cardigan off the back of her chair, and held it open.

It wasn’t even cold. It was June. But Marla stood up and turned around and slid her arms into the sleeves Denise was holding, and Denise settled it on her shoulders and let her hands rest there for exactly one second — and then one of them slid down, warm through the dress, and settled at the small of Marla’s back.

Just resting. Just steering. Denise had done it a thousand times, in a hundred crowded kitchens, behind you, behind you, coming through.

Marla’s entire spine lit up like a gas range catching.

She actually stumbled. Her clog caught the chair leg. Denise’s hand pressed a little firmer, a little lower, and kept her upright without comment.

“I’m so sorry,” Marla said to Greg, and she was, a little, for the octopus. “Kitchen emergency.”

“Can I at least—” Greg started.

“She’ll text you,” Denise said, which was a lie so smooth Marla almost believed it, and walked her out of the restaurant with that hand burning a hole through green cotton the entire way.

They made it to the truck before Marla lost it.

She got as far as the passenger door and then folded over, one hand braced on the hot metal, laughing so hard no sound came out. Denise leaned on the tailgate with her arms crossed and watched her with the corner of her mouth fighting a losing battle.

“Lifestyle architecture,” Marla wheezed.

“I heard him from the host stand.”

“You did not.”

“‘Protein is the load-bearing wall.'” Denise’s voice was perfectly flat. “I almost left you there. Out of respect for his vision.”

Marla slid down the side of the truck until she was sitting on the running board with tears on her face. Denise’s truck was an old silver Tacoma with a Sidecar decal on the tailgate and a permanent smell of orange peel and black tea in the cab, and she’d never been so happy to see it in her life.

“Get in,” Denise said. “You’re crying on my tires.”

Inside, the air conditioning roared to life. Denise pulled out of the lot with one hand, the other resting on the gearshift, and Marla leaned her head back against the seat and laughed until her stomach hurt, and then laughed some more at the memory of Greg’s little air box.

“He ordered for me,” she said. “He ordered for me twice.”

“I’m naming a drink after him.”

“What’s in it?”

“Egg white. Nothing else.” Denise downshifted at the light. “The Load-Bearing Wall.”

Marla laughed again, weaker now, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and turned her head on the seat to look at Denise.

And that was the mistake.

It was nothing. It was Denise driving. Marla had watched Denise drive a thousand times, on supply runs and late-night drives home from events and one six-hour trip to a wedding in Vermont where they’d shared a motel bed with a lumpy center ridge and argued about the thermostat until two in the morning. It was not new information that Denise had good forearms. Everyone knew Denise had good forearms. Denise’s forearms were basically public record.

But the streetlights were sliding over her, orange and then dark and then orange, and her sleeve was rolled to the elbow and the watch sat against the knob of her wrist bone, and her hand was loose on the gearshift, long fingers, short nails, a tiny nick on the knuckle of her index finger from a channel knife. The tendons in her forearm moved when she shifted. Her mouth was still curled up on one side from laughing.

Marla looked at her mouth.

Just looked. The chip in her lower front tooth that she’d had since a softball took it out at fifteen. The fuller bottom lip. The way she pressed her lips together when she was trying not to smile, which she was doing now, because Marla was staring.

“What,” Denise said, eyes on the road.

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing your face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You have several. That one’s the ‘I’m about to ask Hector to work a double’ face.”

Marla looked out the windshield. Her heart was doing something complicated. Her hand, where it lay on her thigh, still remembered the pressure of Denise’s palm at the small of her back, which was ridiculous, because it was her back and not her hand, and bodies didn’t work like that.

Except apparently hers did now.

“Thank you,” she said. “For coming.”

“Always.” Denise said it simply, the way she said twelve minutes. Then, after a beat: “Tuesday. The tasting. You still want to run the crudo?”

Work. Good. Work was solid ground.

“Yes. Bernice loves it. Cal loves it because it’s not fried. Lorna—” Marla made a face.

“Lorna called me,” Denise said. “To ask if Sidecar could do a signature drink with edible glitter.”

“She did not.”

“She said ‘shimmer element.’ I said I’d look into it. I will not be looking into it.”

Marla laughed, but it came out thinner this time. Because the wedding wasn’t a joke. Bernice’s wedding was six weeks of events — a tasting, an engagement party, a couples shower at a bowling alley, a rehearsal dinner, a hundred-and-forty-person reception at Palmer Glasshouse — and it was the biggest contract Second Plate had ever landed without Patrick’s name on the paperwork.

Without Patrick’s money behind it, either.

She’d bought him out six months ago. It had been the right thing. It had also taken almost every dollar she had, and Second Plate had been limping since on thin reserves and a lot of prayer. Two slow months. That was what her spreadsheet said, in a cell she’d colored red and then colored back to white because she couldn’t stand to look at it. Two slow months and she’d be calling the bank.

And if the Glasshouse manager — a cool, precise woman named Simone Kell who had not smiled once in their first meeting — liked what she saw over those six weeks, Second Plate would land on the Glasshouse’s preferred-vendor list. That meant weddings every weekend. That meant breathing.

Denise’s stakes were worse. The bank was holding back the last piece of Sidecar’s expansion loan until she could prove Loretta — the lovingly restored 1978 step van Denise had rebuilt into a cocktail bar with her own two hands — could handle a big event without anything catching fire. Bernice’s wedding was the proof. If it went wrong, Denise went back to hotel beverage management, and Marla had seen what that job had done to her. The fluorescent lights. The corporate specs. The way her voice had gone flat and careful.

“We’re going to kill it,” Marla said.

“We’re going to kill it,” Denise agreed. Then: “No glitter.”

“No glitter.”

They pulled up outside Marla’s bungalow. The porch light was on, moths drunk in its halo. Denise put the truck in park but didn’t turn it off.

“You okay?” she asked. “Actually?”

It was the question under all the jokes. Denise always got to it eventually.

“I’m fine.” Marla undid her seatbelt. “It was just a bad date. I’ll do another one.”

“You don’t have to do another one.”

“I kind of do. That’s the whole—” She waved a hand. “I’m thirty-five. I’m divorced. I’m supposed to put myself out there. Bernice made me a list.”

“Bernice makes everyone a list.”

“This one has bullet points.”

Denise’s mouth tipped. She looked at Marla across the dark cab, and her eyes did something Marla couldn’t read, some flicker and settle, and then she looked back out the windshield.

“Go to bed, Pearson.”

“Going.” Marla reached for the door handle. Stopped. Leaned across the console — the way she had a thousand times, the most ordinary thing in the world — and hugged her.

Denise smelled like orange peel and cedar and the outdoors. Her shoulder was solid under Marla’s cheek. Her hand came up, automatic, and landed between Marla’s shoulder blades, warm through the cardigan.

Marla held on one second too long.

She knew it was one second too long because she counted it, and because Denise went very still in the middle of it, and because when Marla finally let go and sat back, Denise was already looking at the dashboard, rolling the leather watch around her wrist with her thumb.

“Night,” Marla said.

“Night.”

She got out. She walked up the steps. The screen door squeaked the way it always squeaked. She didn’t look back, because she knew Denise would wait until she was inside with the deadbolt turned, the way Denise always did, and if she looked back she’d have to see her sitting there in the dark truck watching her go.

She turned the deadbolt. Outside, the engine revved and pulled away.

Marla leaned her back against the door and stood there in the dark hallway with her heart going like a stand mixer on high.

She did the responsible thing.

She took off the green dress and hung it up properly. She washed her face. She put on her sleep tank and a pair of soft cotton shorts. She poured a glass of water and got into bed — the new bed, the one she’d bought in March after Patrick took the old one, queen-sized and too big and so far only ever slept in by her — and she opened the app.

Because Bernice’s list said don’t let one bad date stop you, and Bernice was a bookkeeper and therefore always right about things with bullet points.

She swiped.

A man holding a fish. Left.

A man in sunglasses on a boat. Left.

A man who looked perfectly nice, dark hair, crinkles at his eyes, a golden retriever on his lap. His profile said he was a physical therapist and liked cooking. He was, objectively, attractive. He was exactly what Bernice’s list would call a solid candidate.

Marla looked at him for a long time and felt absolutely nothing.

Not dislike. Not even boredom. Just a smooth, blank wall. Like looking at a photograph of a very nice kitchen she didn’t need to cook in.

She swiped left. And the next. And the next. They blurred. Beards and hiking photos and gym mirrors and one man posing with what she was fairly sure was a rented tiger. None of them made her feel anything at all.

She closed the app and opened her camera roll, meaning to look at the photos she’d taken of last week’s plating so she could send the good ones to Bernice for the tasting menu.

The first photo was Denise.

Last Saturday. The Hendricks anniversary party. Marla had been shooting the grazing table and had turned around and caught Denise mid-laugh, head tipped back, cutting a lemon on the Sidecar counter. Sleeves rolled. Watch pushed up. Late afternoon light coming through the van window and turning her hair to copper wire. She was laughing at something Marla had said — Marla couldn’t remember what — and her eyes were almost closed, and her hand was steady on the knife even while the rest of her shook with it.

Marla had taken the photo because it was a good photo. Because the light was pretty. Because it was good content for Sidecar’s Instagram.

She had not sent it to Denise. She had not posted it anywhere.

She had looked at it, she realized now, maybe fifteen times in the last week.

Marla lay in the dark with the phone lit up above her face and looked at Denise’s hands.

The knife. The lemon. The long fingers wrapped around the peel. The same hand that had rested at the small of her back tonight and made her stumble over a chair.

Her stomach dropped. Low. Slow. The warm, heavy slide of it, the one she’d almost forgotten her body could do.

Oh, she thought, very clearly. Oh, no.

She put the phone face-down on the comforter.

She was tired. She was keyed up from the date and the laughing and the adrenaline. Plenty of people got — worked up — after a strange night. It didn’t mean anything. It was just her body. Her body had been a quiet, well-behaved roommate for most of her marriage, and now it was eight weeks into divorce and apparently throwing a party.

That was fine. That was healthy, even. Bernice had sent her an article.

Marla slid her hand down her stomach, under the waistband of her shorts, and closed her eyes, and made herself think about the physical therapist.

Crinkles. Nice smile. Dog. She tried to imagine him leaning over her, his weight, his hands.

The image wouldn’t hold. It kept sliding off, like a sauce that wouldn’t emulsify. His face kept going soft and blurred at the edges, and what came up underneath it instead—

A hand at the small of her back.

Long fingers. Short nails. A watch on a narrow wrist.

Marla’s breath caught.

She tried again. Firmly. A man. Any man. Patrick, even — twelve years, she knew every inch of Patrick, it should have been easy—

Pearson, said a low, dry voice in her head, and her hips lifted off the bed.

She lay there with her hand frozen between her legs and her heart pounding and understood that she had a choice. She could get up. Drink her water. Go to sleep. Pretend this was a weird side effect of a bad date and a big contract and nothing more.

Or she could stop pretending for five minutes, in the dark, alone, where nobody would ever know.

Marla let go.

She let the image come. Denise in the truck, the streetlights sliding over her, turning to look at Marla across the cab. But in the fantasy she didn’t look back at the dashboard. She reached across the console. She put that hand — that exact hand — on Marla’s thigh, and slid it up under the hem of the green dress, slow, her eyes steady, the corner of her mouth curling.

Is this what you wanted? the fantasy said, in that flat, amused voice. You were staring, Pearson.

“Yes,” Marla whispered to her empty bedroom, and her cheeks burned, and she pushed her fingers down.

She was already wet. That shocked her more than anything — how wet she was, slick and hot and swollen, as if her body had been waiting all night for her to catch up. Her fingers were cold. They were always cold. She shivered at the first touch and felt herself clench around nothing.

She dragged her fingertips up through the wetness and found her clit and circled it, and her breath came out ragged.

Usually she did this fast. Efficient. A task. Get there, get it done, go to sleep. It was the way she’d done it for twelve years, quietly, on the nights Patrick fell asleep first.

But Denise wouldn’t do it fast.

Marla knew that the way she knew how Denise built a drink — tasting as she went, adjusting, never rushing the shake. Denise would be slow. Deliberate. Mean about it, a little. She’d make Marla wait.

So Marla slowed down.

She pressed two fingers flat against her clit and rocked them in a lazy circle, the way she imagined that hand would, and it was so much slower than she’d ever touched herself that it almost felt like someone else’s hand. Her fingers warmed. Her thighs fell open. In her head, Denise leaned closer across the console, her breath against Marla’s ear, and said, Slower, and Marla obeyed, and the pleasure crawled up her spine like heat up a copper pan.

She dragged her other hand up under her tank and cupped her own breast. Her nipple was already hard, aching. She pinched it and gasped out loud, and then she imagined it was Denise pinching it — those fingers, that knuckle with the tiny nick — and her hips jerked up off the mattress.

“Oh—”

She slid two fingers inside herself. Deep, easy, she was that wet. The stretch made her moan. She curled them the way she liked and pressed the heel of her palm against her clit and ground up into her own hand, and in the fantasy it was Denise’s hand, Denise’s weight on the seat beside her, Denise’s mouth at her throat, murmuring things Marla had never let herself imagine anyone saying to her.

Look at you. Look how wet you got for me.

“Oh my God,” Marla said to the ceiling.

She was loud. She was never loud. She bit her lip and it didn’t help. The sounds came out of her anyway, little broken noises, her own wetness slick and obscene around her fingers, the bed creaking under her hips. She fucked herself slow and deep and rubbed her clit in tight, mean little circles and thought about Denise’s mouth. The chipped tooth. The lower lip. What it would feel like on her neck. On her breast. On—

On her.

Between her.

Denise’s auburn head between her thighs. Denise’s hands holding her open. Denise looking up at her with those amber-flecked eyes and that crooked, not-quite smile, and then—

Marla came so hard she saw white.

It hit her all at once, her back arching off the bed, her thighs slamming shut around her own hand, her inner walls clenching hard and rhythmic around her fingers. She cried out — really cried out, a raw, wrecked sound — and the name came with it before she could stop it.

“Denise—”

Out loud. To the empty room.

She kept rubbing through it because she couldn’t stop, and a second, smaller wave rolled through her on the heels of the first, and she whimpered and turned her face into the pillow and shook.

It went on and on. Longer than she’d ever had. Aftershocks that made her hips twitch, little pulses of pleasure every time she moved her fingers. When she finally pulled her hand free, she was soaked to the wrist.

Marla lay there, panting, staring at the ceiling fan turning slowly in the dark.

For a long, golden minute, she felt nothing but good. Loose. Warm. Her whole body humming like a kitchen after a perfect service, every burner off, every station wiped down.

Then her brain came back online.

You said her name.

Horror arrived first, hot and prickling. She put her clean hand over her face.

She had just — to Denise. To Denise. Her best friend. Her best friend for eight years, who had sat on her kitchen floor at two in the morning when Patrick moved out and eaten cold lo mein out of the carton with her and never once said I told you so, even though Marla was fairly sure she’d thought it. Denise, who was gay, openly and gorgeously and without apology, who had dated a series of intimidatingly beautiful women Marla had always found reasons to dislike.

Oh.

Relief came next, which made no sense at all. It swept in underneath the horror like a wave coming in under a pier. Because it hadn’t been random. That was the thing. She hadn’t lain here thinking about women in some vague, theoretical way. She hadn’t been fantasizing about a stranger, or an actress, or a type.

It had been her.

Every nerve in Marla’s body had known exactly what it wanted. For the first time in — years, maybe, maybe ever — she hadn’t had to reach for anything. It had been right there, waiting for her to stop redirecting it.

And that was the part that let the terror in, finally, cold and clear.

Because it wasn’t new, was it.

The small of her back in the restaurant. The one second too long in the truck. The photo she’d looked at fifteen times. The way she’d hated every single woman Denise had ever brought to a party — the architect, the sommelier, the one with the motorcycle — and told herself it was because they weren’t good enough for her friend.

She’d been staring at this for years with her eyes half closed.

Marla sat up. Her hair was coming loose from its clip. Her thighs were sticky. She reached for her water glass with a hand that was shaking and drank the whole thing in one go.

Then she picked up her phone.

The screen was still on the photo. Denise laughing, the lemon, the light. Marla looked at it and her stomach dropped again, slow and warm, and she almost laughed at herself, a little hysterically.

She swiped back to the messages. The thread. 12 min. at the bottom, gray and tidy.

Her thumb hovered.

Can I ask you something weird?

She typed it. Looked at it. Felt her heart climb up into her throat and sit there.

What was the next text? I think I’m attracted to you? I just came so hard thinking about your hands that I think I pulled something? Are you busy for the rest of my life?

She deleted it. Letter by letter. Until the box was empty and the cursor blinked at her, patient and judgmental.

Marla dropped the phone on the comforter and flopped back against the pillows and put her forearm over her eyes.

Tomorrow, she told herself. You’ll think about it tomorrow. You’ll be rational. You’ll make a list.

The phone buzzed against her hip.

She almost didn’t look. She knew who it was. There was only one person who’d text her at eleven forty at night.

She looked.

Denise: You typed something. I saw the dots, Pearson.

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The night after the bowling-alley equipment room. Denise made Marla a very specific promise across twenty-four lanes: her bed, her strap, and that ridiculous lavender shirt coming off one pink rhinestone at a time. Marla texted back that she was holding her to exactly. Denise doesn’t skip a single step. Told from Denise’s POV.

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