Roommates Don’t Do That

A Sapphic Roommates-to-Lovers Romance
by Aurora North

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Roommates to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Praise Kink, Friends to Lovers

She moved in as a friend. She stayed as everything else.

Lexie Ward is twenty-nine, queer, and almost content with her carefully constructed single life in Brooklyn. Tuesday nights mean puttanesca, Fiona Apple, and a second bedroom she uses as an office. She has a routine. She has boundaries. She has a specific, stupid weakness for straight women in crisis.

Jenna Price is twenty-seven, straight, and standing at Lexie’s door with a suitcase and a broken heart. Her boyfriend cheated. Her apartment is gone. She needs a place to land, and Lexie’s spare room is the only safe harbor she’s got.

Moving in is practical. The bed-sharing is accidental. The way Jenna starts looking at Lexie when they’re tangled together on the couch is not accidental at all.

What begins as comfort becomes curiosity. What begins as curiosity becomes a kiss that neither of them can take back. And what begins as “practice” becomes the most honest, devastating, consuming thing either of them has ever felt.

But Lexie has been here before — in love with a straight girl who leaves. And Jenna is still figuring out what she wants, which is terrifying when what she wants might cost her everything she thought she knew about herself.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Sapphic roommates-to-lovers with a bi-awakening that feels earned
✅ “She’s straight, she’s my best friend, this is a terrible idea” internal agony
✅ Forced proximity that turns a spare bedroom into ground zero
✅ Slow burn that detonates (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Dual-POV first person (Lexie + Jenna alternating chapters)
✅ A heroine who falls first and a love interest who falls harder
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, bisexual awakening, emotional infidelity themes, and depictions of a woman questioning her sexuality. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

The apartment smelled like garlic and olive oil, which meant the evening was going exactly according to plan.

I’d learned a long time ago that the secret to surviving New York wasn’t finding the right bar or the right group chat or the right therapist — though I had all three. It was building a weeknight routine so airtight that loneliness couldn’t slip through the cracks. Tuesday meant puttanesca. Tuesday meant the Fiona Apple deep cuts playlist. Tuesday meant my laptop open on the kitchen island with three Figma tabs and a half-finished wireframe for a meditation app that was never going to make anyone calmer but was absolutely going to make someone richer.

I stirred the sauce and took a sip of the Nero d’Avola I’d opened twenty minutes ago, even though I’d told myself I was saving it for the weekend. The apartment was quiet in that specific way I’d cultivated — not silent, because silence in a New York apartment just meant you were listening to your upstairs neighbor’s sex life or your downstairs neighbor’s true crime podcast. Quiet in the intentional way. Fiona crooning low through the Sonos. The hiss of the sauce reducing. The occasional ping of a Slack message I was choosing not to read.

I liked my apartment. I’d earned it — the exposed brick wall I’d initially thought was charming and now thought was a dust trap, the south-facing windows that turned the living room gold between four and six on clear days, the second bedroom I used as an office and sometimes a guest room and mostly a place to pile laundry I was pretending would fold itself. It was a two-bedroom in Prospect Heights that I could almost afford, and it was mine, and on Tuesday nights it felt like enough.

Almost.

I caught myself standing at the stove with the wooden spoon in one hand and my phone in the other, scrolling through nothing. Instagram stories of people I didn’t really know doing things I didn’t really care about. A college acquaintance’s engagement photos. A coworker’s cat. Three people at a rooftop bar who hadn’t invited me but would have if I’d been the kind of person who said yes to rooftop bars on Tuesdays.

I set the phone facedown and turned back to the sauce.

The loneliness wasn’t sharp. That was the thing about being twenty-nine and single in a city full of people — the loneliness didn’t announce itself. It just sat in the corner like a cat you’d stopped noticing. I had friends. I had a job I was good at. I had a therapist named Dana who charged me $200 an hour to tell me things I already knew. I was fine.

I was plating the pasta — one bowl, one place at the island, one glass of wine, one episode of the show I was watching that I kept forgetting the name of — when my phone buzzed.

Jenna Price.

Are you home?

I typed back one-handed: No I’m at the Met Gala. Yes I’m home. Why?

Three dots. Disappeared. Three dots again. Then a selfie — Jenna’s face filling the screen, mascara tracked down both cheeks, her nose red, her light-brown hair pulled into a knot that was losing its structural integrity. She looked like she’d been crying for hours. She looked wrecked.

Underneath the photo: I did something stupid… he did something worse.

My stomach dropped. I called her. She picked up on the first ring.

“Where are you?”

“Outside your building.” Her voice was thick and nasal and shaking. “Can I — Lex, can I come up?”

“I’m buzzing you in right now.”

I crossed the apartment in four steps and hit the button. Then I looked down at myself — ratty NYU T-shirt, no bra, pajama shorts with tacos on them — and decided it didn’t matter. Jenna had seen me in worse. Jenna had seen me in a bridesmaid’s dress at her cousin’s wedding in 2019, which was objectively the worst I’d ever looked in my life.

The knock came fast. She must have run up the stairs.

I opened the door and she was standing there with a rolling suitcase and a tote bag slung over one shoulder and the kind of expression I recognized from my own mirror — the face of someone holding it together only because there was still one more thing to do before they could collapse.

“He cheated on me,” she said.

I pulled her inside.

Here’s what I knew about Jenna Price before that night: we’d been friends for six years, since she’d spilled a vodka cranberry on me at a bar in the East Village and then spent twenty minutes apologizing while I told her the shirt was already ruined and she was making it weird. She was twenty-seven, worked in event planning, had the kind of warmth that made strangers tell her their problems in line at the grocery store. She’d been dating Tyler Brennan for three years, and I’d spent most of those three years smiling at him across dinner tables while privately thinking he had the emotional depth of a puddle.

She was also, for the record, straight. Capital-S, never-questioned-it, exclusively-dated-men straight. I’m noting this for reasons that will become relevant later and that I was not, at this point, thinking about.

“Start from the beginning,” I said, setting a glass of wine in front of her.

She was sitting on my couch with her shoes still on, which was how I knew it was bad. Jenna was pathologically polite. She was the kind of person who asked permission before using your phone charger. If she’d forgotten to take off her shoes, she was in crisis.

“I went home early.” She took the glass and didn’t drink. “I had a site visit cancel and I thought — I thought I’d surprise him. Cook dinner. I don’t know. Be a good girlfriend.” The last two words came out bitter, and I’d never heard Jenna sound bitter about anything. “His car was in the driveway. I figured he was working from home, so I went in quiet because I was going to — like, sneak up on him, be cute.” She laughed, and it was awful. “I was going to be cute.”

“What happened?”

“I heard them. From the hallway.”

She didn’t need to say more than that, but she did, because Jenna processed everything out loud. It was her coworker — not Mia, someone from the marketing side, a woman named Danielle that Jenna had met at the company holiday party and described as “nice.” They’d been in the bedroom. Jenna had stood in the hallway for what she said was ten seconds and what was probably much longer, listening, and then she’d walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table and waited for them to come out.

“Jesus, Jenna.”

“I know.” She finally took a drink. A big one. “She left. She was — she was mortified, I think. She kept saying she didn’t know, and honestly I believe her, because apparently he told her we broke up in May.”

“May? It’s October.”

“I know.”

“He’s been telling someone you broke up five months ago while you were still —”

“Living together. Sleeping in the same bed. Planning a trip to Vermont for Thanksgiving. I know.” She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “And then — after she left — he said the thing.”

I waited.

“He said it was my fault. That I made him feel trapped. That I was…” She pressed her lips together. “He said I was boring in bed. That he’d been thinking about it for months and he didn’t know how to tell me because I’d get emotional.”

“Jenna.”

“He said it like he was doing me a favor. Like he’d been suffering through having sex with me and this was — what, his reward for putting up with it?”

I set my wine down because I wanted both hands free in case I needed to physically restrain myself from going to Tyler Brennan’s apartment and committing a felony.

“That is a lie,” I said. “You know that, right? That is a thing a shitty person says to make their shittiness feel like someone else’s problem.”

“I know that. In my brain I know that.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “But he said it like he’d been rehearsing it. Like he’d been thinking it every time we — and I keep going back through every time in my head, trying to figure out which ones he was faking, and I can’t —”

She started crying again. Not the quiet, dignified kind — the messy, gasping, snot-involved kind that meant she was past the point of caring how she looked. I moved closer on the couch and put my arm around her, and she turned into me like a door on a hinge, pressing her face into my shoulder.

“I packed a bag,” she said into my shirt. “I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t sleep in that bed.”

“You’re not going back there tonight.”

“I don’t know where to go. Mia’s place is tiny, she’s got that studio, and my mom would just — she’d make it about her, you know? She’d find a way to make me feel worse while thinking she was helping.”

I rubbed her back. She was shaking.

“Jenna. You’re staying here.”

“I don’t want to be a burden —”

“Stop. You called me. You came here. You’re not a burden, you’re my friend and some guy just blew up your life. You’re staying.”

She pulled back enough to look at me. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed and she still had mascara on one cheek and she looked, in that moment, like someone who’d been walking through a storm and had just found a door.

“Can I stay for a while?” she asked. “Not just tonight. I mean — I need to figure out my situation. Find a place. I can pay you rent, I just —”

“We’ll figure it out tomorrow. Tonight you’re drinking this wine and eating some pasta and you’re going to sleep somewhere that isn’t Tyler Brennan’s apartment.”

She almost smiled. It didn’t quite land, but the attempt was there.

I made her a bowl of puttanesca and watched her eat most of it, which I took as a good sign. She talked for another hour — the full catalogue of grievances, the red flags she’d retrospectively identified, the birthday dinner where he’d been on his phone the whole time, the way he’d stopped kissing her hello. I listened and nodded and refilled her wine and said the things you say, which are mostly just variations of “he’s garbage” delivered with increasing specificity.

By eleven she was fading. The crying and the wine and the sheer metabolic expense of heartbreak had wrung her out. I brought her a pillow and the good throw blanket — the chunky one I’d impulse-bought from that Instagram ad — and she curled up on the couch in her jeans and the sweater she’d been wearing when she left Tyler’s apartment, which I realized she was going to associate with this night forever.

“Do you want something to sleep in?” I asked. “I’ve got T-shirts.”

“I’m okay.” Her eyes were already closing. “Lex?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for not saying ‘I told you so.’”

“I never told you so.”

“You thought it, though. About Tyler. You never liked him.”

I sat on the arm of the couch. “I thought you deserved better. That’s not the same thing.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the beginning of crying again, and then her breathing evened out, and she was asleep. Just like that. Between one breath and the next, like her body had decided it had done enough for one day and was clocking out.

I sat there for a minute, watching her.

Jenna’s face in sleep was open in a way it wasn’t when she was awake. Awake, she was always performing — smiling, nodding, making sure everyone around her was comfortable. Asleep, she was just a person. A person with mascara she hadn’t washed off and a crease between her eyebrows that even unconsciousness couldn’t fully smooth and one hand tucked under her chin like a kid.

I got up quietly and took the wine glasses to the kitchen and washed them by hand because the dishwasher was loud and I didn’t want to wake her. I wiped down the counter. I turned off the music. I stood in my kitchen in the taco shorts and the NYU shirt and I had a conversation with myself that I’d had before and had hoped I wouldn’t have to have again.

Don’t do this.

Not the helping. The helping was fine. The helping was what friends did. The opening your door at ten o’clock on a Tuesday when someone you loved showed up broken and needing a place to land — that was friendship, and I was good at friendship, and I wasn’t going to apologize for it.

But I knew myself. I knew the specific, stupid shape of my particular weakness, because I’d lived inside it before. Sophie Marchetti. Two years ago. Different couch, different apartment, same script: a straight girl in crisis lands in your life and you help her and she’s grateful and she’s warm and she’s right there, and one morning you wake up and realize you’ve fallen in love with someone who will never, ever love you back the same way. And then she figures it out, or you tell her, and it gets weird, and then it gets distant, and then she moves out, and then you don’t talk for six months, and then you run into her at a friend’s birthday party and she introduces you to her new boyfriend with a smile that has a wall behind it.

I was not doing that again.

Jenna was straight. Jenna was heartbroken. Jenna needed a friend and a place to stay and someone to tell her that Tyler Brennan was the reigning world champion of mediocre men. She did not need me developing feelings in the background like a darkroom photo slowly resolving into something I couldn’t take back.

I checked on her one more time — still asleep, still breathing, still wearing her shoes, which I gently pulled off and set by the door — and then I went to my room and closed the door and got into bed alone.

I was going to help her. I was going to be exactly what she needed. And I was going to keep my hands and my heart and my stupid, repeating-pattern, falls-for-straight-girls brain exactly where they belonged.

That was the plan.

I’ve always been terrible at plans.

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The Twin Bed — What Happens After Lights Out — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

It’s Thanksgiving in Portland. Jenna’s childhood bedroom. A twin bed that was never meant for two. Her mother is twenty feet down the hall, and Lexie just promised she can do better than Derek Palmieri. What follows is the quietest, filthiest, most tender night of their lives — and the moment the twin bed nearly gives up on them entirely.

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