The Cabin We Both Booked

A Sapphic Forced-Proximity Romance
by Aurora North

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Double-Booked Cabin, Forced Proximity, Strangers to Roommates to Lovers, House Rules, Thin Walls, Grumpy/Sunshine, Opposites Attract, Older Heroines, Storm Blackout, Only One Warm Room, Voyeurism, Dirty Talk, Instruction Kink, Toys & Strap-On, Switch Dynamic, Long Distance, Grovel, HEA

Two reservations. One cabin. Six weeks. Seven rules.

Naomi Sinclair booked Alder Cabin for silence.

Six weeks alone on a Vermont lake to finish the course that gets her out of corporate life for good. What she gets is a stranger’s boots in the mudroom, a stranger’s monitors on the dining table, and the stranger herself walking out of the bathroom in a towel, armed with an unplugged curling iron.

Bethany Webb has a documentary to finish, a director to fight, and a confirmation number every bit as valid as Naomi’s. She isn’t leaving. Neither is Naomi.

So they do the adult thing. They split the refund, write the house rules, and stick them to the fridge under a magnet shaped like a trout. Quiet hours. Assigned shelves. Closed doors stay closed. Nobody makes this weird.

Then Naomi finds out how thin the bedroom wall is. Bethany finds out what Naomi sounds like when she stops being quiet. And the rules start getting amended, in ink, in both their handwriting, one filthy clause at a time.

It’s only six weeks. It was only ever supposed to be the cabin. But checkout is at eleven, and neither of them has said what happens after.

The Cabin We Both Booked is a scorching sapphic forced-proximity romance with two grown women who know exactly what they want in bed and no idea how to ask for the rest. Thin walls, a hot tub in a hard frost, one blackout, dual first-person POV, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A double-booked lake cabin, one galley kitchen and a strip of blue painter’s tape down the dining table
✅ Seven house rules on the fridge, every one of them broken and amended in ink
✅ A buttoned-up data analyst who writes everything down, and a warm, loud documentary editor who never shuts up in bed
✅ Thin walls, a wand through the wall, and a woman who finally stops being quiet
✅ Two heroines in their late thirties and forties who know their bodies
✅ A storm blackout, one mattress in front of the woodstove, and a hot tub in a hard frost
✅ Toys, a strap-on, honey on a kitchen counter at one in the morning, and an edit suite rated for forty decibels
✅ A real grovel, a long-distance year done right, and an HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including mutual masturbation through a shared wall, voyeurism, oral, fingering, toys, a strap-on, food play, light restraint, edging, phone/video sex, and semi-public scenes), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes a heroine’s unstable childhood with frequent moves, references to a past relationship and a past parent’s death, a relationship rupture caused by a unilateral decision, and a long-distance separation. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Naomi

Check-in was at four. I reached the end of Alder Lane at 3:52 and sat in the car with the engine off for eight minutes, because the confirmation email said four and I have never in my life been the reason somebody had to make an exception.

Through the windshield: a gravel drive, a stand of bare birch, and beyond them a cabin the color of wet bark with a green metal roof. Past that, the lake. Tamarack Lake was smaller than the listing photos had implied and a great deal grayer, and it was exactly what I’d paid for. No neighbors in sight. No sound but the tick of the engine cooling.

Three hours from Boston. Forty-three days. I’d done the arithmetic on the turnpike the way other people sing along to the radio. Six modules of a course called Plain Numbers, one paid pilot, and a decision at the end about whether quitting a perfectly good job had been courage or a slow-motion clerical error. All of it depended on the one thing I hadn’t had in twelve years of open-plan offices, which was a room where nobody needed me to react to them.

Six weeks. Nobody to manage. I’d been looking forward to it the way some women look forward to weddings.

At 4:00 I got out of the car.

The lockbox was bolted beside the mudroom door. The code was 2580, straight down the middle of the keypad, which told me something about the owner’s attitude to security and nothing about why the box was already empty.

I looked at the empty box for a moment. Then I tried the door.

It opened.

There are three reasonable explanations for an unlocked rental with no key in the lockbox. The cleaner is still inside. The owner has left it open for you, which is a small-town thing to do. Or you have the wrong house. I checked the number on the post against the number on my phone, fourteen and fourteen, and stepped in, already composing the polite thing I’d say to the cleaner.

The mudroom was a bench, a boot tray and two brass hooks. Under the left hook sat a pair of women’s boots. Brown leather, well worn, laces loose, one fallen on its side as if its owner had stepped out of it mid-stride and kept walking.

Cleaners don’t take their boots off and leave them sprawled.

A coat hung on the hook above them, long gray wool with a scarf stuffed down one sleeve. I stood there with my bag on my shoulder and counted what I knew. One pair of boots. One coat. One woman, who had come in from the cold and been comfortable enough to stay.

“Hello?”

Nothing. But there was sound, now that I was listening for it: water moving through pipes somewhere deeper in the house. A shower.

I should have gone back out to the car. I know that. A sensible person calls the owner from the driveway. But I had a paid confirmation and a three-hour drive behind me and I had waited the eight minutes, and some stubborn, territorial part of me that I don’t often meet walked me through the inner door.

The cabin opened into one long room. Woodstove on the left, lit, a low orange glow behind the glass. A couch with a blanket thrown across it that had recently had a person under it. And the dining table, the one that had sold me on the place, six feet of old pine under a window facing the water, had been occupied like a small country.

Two monitors. A laptop, lid up, screen dark. A black drive tower the size of a toaster with a row of blue lights blinking in sequence. Headphones, the serious kind. Cables bound with green velcro ties, a notebook open face down, three pens, and a mug with a tea bag fossilizing in the bottom. Over the back of the chair hung a cardigan the color of oatmeal, one sleeve inside out.

On the kitchen counter stood an open jar of honey with the spoon still in it.

That was the detail that got me. Not the equipment. Equipment could be explained; perhaps the last guest was late leaving. But nobody leaves a spoon standing in the honey unless she means to come back to it. That spoon belonged to a woman who lived here.

I set my bag down on the floor, very quietly, the way you do in a house where you might be the intruder.

The water shut off.

In the silence I could hear a fan, and a drip, and the small wet sounds of a person stepping out onto a mat. Humming. Something tuneless and cheerful. It came from the hallway that ran off the far end of the room, a door at each end of it.

I had about fifteen seconds to decide who I was going to be, and I used them to line up her three pens parallel on the table, which is what my hands do when the rest of me is busy.

“Hello?” I said again. Louder. “Is someone here?”

The humming stopped.

Something clattered. A drawer, a muffled “shit,” a pause long enough for a person to consider her options. Then the right-hand door opened, and a woman came out of it holding a curling iron in front of her like a fencing foil.

She was wearing a towel.

I’d like to say I took in the important facts first. That she was about my age, a little older. That she was shorter than me by an inch. That she looked alarmed and not dangerous. I did get to those. But what my eyes did, before I’d had any say in it, was take a slow inventory from the floor up. Bare feet on the boards, toenails painted dark red. Strong calves. A white bath towel that started mid-thigh and was tucked under one arm in a fold that didn’t look structurally sound. Full breasts pressed high by the tuck. Shoulders flushed pink from the hot water. Light brown hair gone dark and slicked back off a face with a wide mouth, hazel eyes, and a crease between the brows.

And water. A bead of it sat in the hollow of her collarbone, trembled when she breathed, then slid down over the upper curve of her breast and vanished into the towel.

I watched it go. All the way.

Then I was angry. Briskly, comprehensively angry: with her for being here, and with myself, because a stranger was standing in my living room and the first clear thought I’d managed was that I knew what her skin would taste like right there. Soap and warm woman. I knew how the towel would come away if I hooked one finger into that fold. I’m thirty-seven. I have seen a woman in a towel. I have been the reason the towel hit the floor. There was no excuse for it.

“Who the hell are you?” she said.

“I was going to ask you that.”

“I asked first. I’m also armed.”

“That’s a curling iron.”

“It’s ceramic. It goes up to four hundred and ten degrees.”

“It isn’t plugged in.”

She glanced down at the cord trailing across the floor behind her like a tail. She looked back up. “You didn’t know that when I came out.”

“I did, actually. I could see the plug.”

For a second neither of us moved. Then one corner of her mouth went up, only the one, a crooked, unwilling thing, and she lowered the curling iron about six inches. Not all the way.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re not acting like a murderer. Murderers don’t correct you. So I’m going to guess cleaner, except that’s a very nice coat, or Ginny’s sent someone about the hot tub, in which case you could have knocked.”

“I’m not the cleaner. I’m the guest.”

“No, I’m the guest.”

“I have a reservation. Alder Cabin, fourteen Alder Lane, November first through December thirteenth. Check-in at four.” I looked at my watch, because I couldn’t keep looking at her. “It’s seven past.”

“That’s funny,” she said, in the voice of someone who didn’t find it funny at all, “because I have a reservation for Alder Cabin, fourteen Alder Lane, November first through December thirteenth. Ginny said I could come early, the cleaner was done by eleven. I got here at noon.” She shifted her weight. The towel shifted with it. “I’ve unpacked. I’ve had a nap and a shower. I’ve had lunch.”

“I noticed the honey.”

“What’s wrong with my honey?”

“Nothing. It looks very settled.”

She stared at me. I stared at a point slightly to the left of her ear, which was where I’d decided to keep my eyes for the remainder of this conversation and possibly my life.

“Phone,” she said.

“What?”

“Get your phone out. Show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

It was not a sentence I was equipped to hear from a wet woman in a towel. I think she realized it about half a second after it left her mouth, because the pink across her shoulders deepened a shade. She didn’t take it back. She turned and went into the room behind her, which gave me a view of the towel from the rear that I hadn’t asked for and would be some time forgetting, and came back with a phone in one hand and the curling iron still in the other.

We met in the middle of the living room, by the stove, like two people exchanging hostages.

Hers first. She held it up at arm’s length instead of handing it over. Your stay at Alder Cabin is confirmed. Booked through a rental site I’d heard of. Forty-three days, paid in full, guest name Bethany Webb.

I held up mine. You’re all set for Alder Cabin, Lakefront 2BR! Booked through a different site altogether, the one my sister swears by. Forty-three days. Paid in full. Naomi Sinclair.

She read it twice. I watched her do it; her lips moved very slightly on my name. Up close she smelled of something green and sharp, rosemary maybe, and under it clean hot skin, and there was a freckle on the slope of her left shoulder that I studied for longer than the email justified.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So neither of us is lying.”

“I hadn’t assumed you were lying.”

“You’d assumed I was a squatter.”

“I’d assumed you were the cleaner. Then I saw the boots.”

“What about my boots?”

“Cleaners don’t leave them like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like they live here.”

Something crossed her face that I couldn’t read. Then she laughed, one short breath through her nose, and finally let the curling iron drop to her side. “Well. This is a fucking disaster, isn’t it? I’m Bethany.”

“Naomi.” I didn’t offer a hand. Hers were full and I didn’t trust the towel. “Beth, do you have the owner’s—”

“Bethany.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s Bethany. The whole thing. I know it’s a lot of syllables, but I didn’t pick it and I’ve gotten attached.” She said it lightly, the way you say a thing you’ve had to say four hundred times. “Nobody’s called me Beth since a gym teacher in 1998, and she’s dead now.”

“Did you kill her with a curling iron?”

“Unplugged.” The half smile again. “Yes, I’ve got Ginny’s number. She’s going to cry. She has that kind of voice.”

“Then you should be the one to call.”

“Why me?”

“You’ve spoken to her. And you’re…” I made a gesture that was supposed to mean approachable and came out meaning naked under that.

Bethany Webb looked down at herself as though she’d forgotten. Then she looked back at me, and there was no embarrassment in it whatsoever. None. She had the complete, unhurried ease of a woman who has known for a long time what she looks like and has made her peace with other people noticing. She’d seen me notice. I was nearly certain of it. She simply didn’t mind.

“I’ll put her on speaker,” she said. She sat down on the arm of the couch, crossed one bare leg over the other so that the towel rode another two inches up her thigh, and dialed.

I stood by the woodstove and read the manufacturer’s plate on it. Jøtul. Norway. Do not burn treated wood.

Ginny Ellis did not cry, but she came close enough that I felt it down the line.

“Oh, no,” she said, for the third time. “Oh, no, no. Both of you? In the house? Right now?”

“Right now,” Bethany said. “She’s by the stove. She hasn’t taken her coat off and she’s cross with me.”

“I’m not cross with you,” I said. “I’m cross in general.”

“She’s cross in general, Ginny.”

On the other end, keys rattled, a laptop was dragged across a table, and a dog barked and was told to hush. Ginny had a voice that went with a lifetime of running things for other people: warm, hoarse, quick to take the blame before anyone could assign it.

“All right. All right, I can see it. I can see exactly what he’s done.” A long breath. “My nephew moved us onto a new booking system in September. Owen. He’s a good boy, he’s very good with computers, or that’s what he tells me. The old listing was meant to come down when the new one went up. It didn’t. So I’ve had the same cabin for rent twice since Labor Day, on two different websites, and neither one knew about the other, and I’ve been so pleased with myself for filling six weeks in the dead season that I never stopped to wonder how I’d managed it.”

“So both bookings are real,” I said.

“Both real. Both paid. I’ve got your money, Naomi, and I’ve got Bethany’s, and I’ve got one cabin.” Her voice wobbled. “I am so sorry. Nineteen years I’ve done this. I had a bat in the chimney in 2011 and I thought that was the worst phone call I’d ever have to make.”

“What are the options?”

Bethany glanced over at me. I don’t know what she’d expected. That I’d comfort the woman first, probably. It’s what a nicer person would have done, and she looked like someone who’d spent a lot of time around nicer people.

“I don’t know yet,” Ginny said. “That’s the honest answer. I’ll refund whoever wants refunding, in full, tonight. That isn’t a question. But you both drove a long way to have somewhere to be, and I won’t just hand you your money and wish you luck in November. Let me make some calls. There’s the motel on Route 9, there’s a place over toward the reservoir I can ring. Give me until nine tomorrow. I’ll have something proper for each of you by nine.”

“And tonight?” Bethany asked.

A pause.

“Tonight,” Ginny said carefully, “I’d be grateful if neither of you left. It’ll be black as a boot out there in half an hour, the clocks went back this morning, and the Route 9 turnoff’s a menace if you don’t know it. There’s two bedrooms. They’re both made up. There’s clean towels in the hall closet and a lasagna in the freezer I put there for whoever it was going to be.” She stopped. “Please. I’d sleep better. I know I’ve no right to ask.”

I looked at the window. She was right about the dark. At four there had been a lake out there. It had gone the color of slate since, and the glass had started handing the room back to me: the stove, the couch, a woman in a towel with one foot swinging, and me in my coat, standing very straight, like someone waiting to be shown out.

I could leave. I want to be exact about that, because later it would matter to me that I’d known it. I had a full tank and an apartment in Boston with my name on the lease. Three hours and I’d be in my own bed with a refund pending and a clean, reasonable grievance. Nobody was keeping me.

I just didn’t want to be the one who went.

“One night,” I said.

Bethany’s foot stopped swinging.

“One night’s fine,” she agreed, to the phone, but looking at me. “We’re both grown-ups. We’ll manage not to burn it down.”

“Oh, bless you. Bless you both. Nine o’clock. I’ll bring a coffee cake.”

“You don’t need to bring—”

But Ginny had gone, off to do damage control with a dog barking behind her. The line clicked, and then it was the two of us and the stove.

“She’s going to bring a coffee cake,” Bethany said.

“I gathered.”

“It’ll be good, too. That’s the worst part.” She uncrossed her legs and stood, one hand going to the tuck of the towel with a carelessness I found personally offensive. “I’m going to put clothes on.”

“That would help.”

It was out before I could inspect it. She paused in the mouth of the hallway and turned her head, and there was that crooked smile again, slower this time, and aimed.

“Would it,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Then she went into her room and shut the door, and I stood there with my face hot and my coat still buttoned and thought: one night.

She’d taken the big bedroom. Of course she had. She’d had four hours and no competition.

“I can move,” she said, when she came out. She was dressed now, if you could call it that: soft gray trousers and a fitted black sweater with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, damp hair twisted up and skewered with one of the pens I’d straightened. It didn’t help as much as I’d hoped. The sweater was honest about everything the towel had only suggested. “If you want it. I only took it because I thought the whole place was mine and I wanted somewhere to put the second monitor. I’m not going to plant a flag.”

“What’s the other one like?”

“Small. Faces east. You’d get the sun in your eyes at six-thirty.” She wrinkled her nose. “I looked at it and thought, absolutely not.”

I walked down the hall to see. It was eleven steps from her door to the other one. I counted without meaning to, the way I count stairs.

The room on the left was narrow and plain. A double bed under a quilt, a pine dresser, one chair, a window that would hold the whole sunrise. No desk. Bare walls. It looked like a room nobody had ever asked anything of.

I liked it so much it embarrassed me.

“This is fine,” I said.

“You’re sure? You haven’t even seen mine.”

“I don’t need to see yours.”

“It’s got a headboard and everything.”

“Good for it.”

She leaned in the doorway behind me. I could feel her there, a warmth at my back that had nothing to do with the stove. “You’re very easy about this,” she said, “for someone who’s cross in general.”

“It’s one night. I don’t have opinions about rooms I’m in for one night.”

That wasn’t true. I have strong opinions about rooms. I slept in a great many of them growing up, enough that I can tell you within a minute of walking into one which corner the bed belongs in and how fast I could get everything back into a bag. This room was correct. The bed was already in the right corner. I’d have picked it over hers if I’d arrived at noon with the whole house to choose from.

I didn’t say so. I never do. It’s a bad habit, wanting a thing and then behaving as though it had been assigned to me.

I brought in my suitcase from the car, and the cooler, and the box of books, and a second monitor of my own that I now had nowhere to put. It took four trips. On the third she appeared in the mudroom in her socks and lifted the cooler out of my arms without asking. I let her. Then I stood in the cold a moment longer with my hands empty, wondering why that had felt like losing a round.

In the kitchen she’d cleared half the fridge for me. The left half. She’d done it by stacking her own things on the right in a wobbling tower of yogurt and cheese and three kinds of mustard.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I’m not being nice. I’m being territorial in advance. That’s my side.” She pointed. “This is yours. If I find your oat milk fraternizing with my half-and-half, there’ll be words.”

“For one night.”

“For one night,” she agreed. She screwed the lid back onto the honey and licked her thumb where it had caught the rim, slowly, the pad of it dragging across her lower lip.

I looked at the oat milk.

We ate Ginny’s lasagna at opposite ends of the couch, because the table was hers and neither of us raised it. She asked what I did. I said data, and she said that wasn’t a job, that was a noun. I said I was building a course that taught managers how to read a chart without lying to themselves, and she said, “Oh, so you’re a missionary,” and I laughed. It came out of me before I could decide whether she’d earned it. She looked pleased in a way she tried to hide by reaching for her water.

She cut films, she said. Documentaries. Other people’s, mostly. She was here to finish one. She said it the way I’d said data, as though the full answer were longer and she wasn’t going to hand it to a stranger over frozen pasta. I respected that. I wanted the full answer anyway.

At nine she yawned and stretched both arms over her head, so that the black sweater rode up off an inch of soft, bare stomach, and said she was going to bed. I said that seemed wise. I had been looking at the inch.

“Bathroom’s between the rooms,” she said from the hallway. “There’s a door on your side and a door on mine. I found that out when I opened what I thought was a closet.” She tipped her head. “So. Knock, I suppose. Or sing.”

“I don’t sing.”

“No.” She considered me, top to bottom and in no hurry, the way I’d looked at her when she walked out in the towel. “I didn’t think you did. Goodnight, Sinclair.”

Nobody had called me by my surname since school. I should have minded.

“Goodnight,” I said. And then, because I’d been corrected once and I only need telling once: “Bethany.”

All three syllables. She stood there a second longer than the word required. Then her door closed.

I didn’t unpack.

I want that on the record too. I put the suitcase on the chair, zipped, and took out only what I needed: toothbrush, the tank top and shorts I sleep in, my glasses case. I lined them up on the dresser. I checked that the window latched and that the door to the hall latched. Then I stood in front of the other door, the one in the side wall that I’d taken for a closet, same as she had.

I opened it two inches.

Tile. A fogged mirror. A claw-foot tub with a shower ring above it, the curtain still beaded. The air that came through the gap was warm and damp and smelled of rosemary, and directly opposite me, eight feet away, stood a door identical to mine with a line of yellow lamplight along the bottom.

Two doors. One room. Each had a brass thumb-turn on the bathroom side, the old kind, and nothing at all on mine. Whoever was in there would have to remember to lock both. Whoever came out would have to remember to unlock both. I could already see how that was going to go.

I shut it. I brushed my teeth at the kitchen sink like a coward.

Then I lay down in the dark, in the correct corner of the correct room, and discovered what the listing hadn’t mentioned. The bathroom only ran half the depth of the house. Behind it the two bedrooms met back to back, and all that divided them was a single thickness of pine board. My headboard stood against it. So, from the sound of things, did hers. Every noise she made arrived as if through the body of a guitar.

Water first. The tap running, then shutting off. The knock of a toothbrush against the rim of a glass.

Then a drawer, opened and pushed shut with a hip; I’d have sworn to the hip. Bare feet crossing a floor. A click, and the thin line of light under the bathroom door on my side went out.

Then the humming. The same tuneless, contented thread of sound I’d heard through the shower, lower now, sleepier, the sound of a woman entirely at home. I lay still and listened to her hum her way across a room I had never seen, and I knew the precise moment she reached the bed, because the humming broke off into a sigh.

And the bed took her weight.

It was a small noise. A creak of slats, a long exhale of mattress, the rustle of someone turning onto her side and dragging a quilt up over a bare shoulder. I had no business being able to picture it. I pictured it anyway, in detail, down to the freckle. Whether she slept in anything. Whether her hair was still damp on the pillow. What that crooked mouth would do if I put my hand where the water had gone.

My body answered before I’d finished the thought. A slow, heavy pulse between my legs, my nipples tight against the cotton of the tank, and when I shifted my thighs I was wet. Slick, unmistakably. From a hum and a mattress. I recognized every part of it and consented to none of it. It’s the kind of ache you can either do something about or lie there and resent.

I lay there and resented it.

Eight inches of wall, if that. A stranger’s breathing, slowing toward sleep. My suitcase on the chair with the zip closed, ready, the way I like it.

Six weeks, the confirmation said.

I gave it until morning.

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October first, Burlington. Naomi moves in with one suitcase and gets a key with no ribbon on it. Then Bethany asks her to be loud in a building where everyone knows she lives there: a green velvet couch, an oval mirror over the dresser, and one new rule for the fridge.

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