The Girls’ Trip Clause

A Sapphic Fake-Dating Vacation Romance
by Riley Kendra

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Dating, Dare Kiss, Vacation Romance, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Sapphic Awakening, Late Bloomer, Best Friend’s Cousin, Practice Turns Real, Coming Out, Found Family, Romantic Comedy

A dare made it real. The rules were supposed to keep it fake.

Natalie Hayes is fine.

Nine days after ending five years with a boyfriend who cheated, she flies to Cabo for her best friend’s fortieth with a laminated, color-coded itinerary and a list on her phone. Don’t cry. Don’t look at his Instagram. Don’t make it weird. Don’t stare at Brooke’s cousin.

Then a dare at a beach-club fire pit: kiss the woman here you’d most want to be stranded with.

Natalie says the wrong name.

Priya Shah is a travel writer with sixty-one countries in her passport and toothbrushes in four of them, and in eight years she has never once let Natalie get away with a polite answer. She leaves her the whole distance. Natalie closes it. By breakfast the photo is on fourteen thousand phones, including her mother’s.

So they fake it. Priya invents an October. Brooke hands over a nonrefundable honeymoon casita with one bed and no couch. And Natalie writes the rules on hotel stationery: Touching only when someone’s watching. Kissing only when the act requires it. No sex. Underlined twice. It ends at the airport.

Priya adds one rule of her own. If you touch me when nobody’s looking, mean it.

Natalie breaks the first two in four hours.

But Priya has been somebody’s brave week before, twice, and she knows exactly how this ends: at a departures gate, with a very kind speech. And Natalie has spent thirty-three years making everyone comfortable. She’s never once done anything she couldn’t explain later.

Seven days in Cabo. Eight rules. One woman who always leaves, and one who has never been allowed to want anything.

The Girls’ Trip Clause is a high-heat sapphic fake-dating vacation rom-com with a late-bloomer awakening, a dare that photographs much too well, one honeymoon casita, dual first-person POV, no third-act breakup, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A dare kiss that runs fifteen seconds and ends up on her real-estate business account
✅ Eight rules on hotel stationery, crossed out and initialed one at a time
✅ One honeymoon casita, one bed, two towel swans and absolutely no couch
✅ A 33-year-old realtor who has staged her whole life, and finally stops
✅ A travel writer who has been somebody’s “wild week in Mexico” before, and won’t be again
✅ “If you touch me when nobody’s looking, mean it.”
✅ Cabanas, a catamaran, an outdoor shower, a roofless chapel, and a beige house in Austin that finally gets lived in
✅ No cheating, no third-act breakup, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat and an HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, fingering, mutual masturbation, overheard masturbation, semi-public scenes in a cabana, a boat cabin and a ruined chapel, phone sex, a vibrator, a blindfold and a strap-on), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes an ex who cheated (off page), a past panic attack, a parent who struggles with her daughter coming out, and a social-media outing by a friend. No cheating between the leads. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Natalie

Cabo objectives.

1. Do not cry at Brooke’s birthday.

2. Do not look at Garrett’s Instagram.

3. Do not make it weird.

I type the third one with my thumb while a man in cream linen lays a chilled towel across my free hand like he’s entering it into evidence. The lobby of Sol y Mar doesn’t have walls. It has columns, a ceiling woven out of something expensive, and beyond that the Pacific, showing off. The air is warm and wet and smells like salt and sunscreen, and at the back of my neck my blowout, which survived two flights and a customs line, is starting to reconsider its commitments.

Someone hands me a glass of cold hibiscus tea with the flower still drowning in it.

“Welcome home, Señorita Hayes,” says the man in linen. His name tag reads LUIS, and he says home like he means it, which is a thing I also do for a living.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.” I give him the smile. “I’m fine with my bag, really.”

He takes my bag.

I’m fine in general, for the record. Nine days ago a client texted me a photo from a happy hour I wasn’t at: my boyfriend of five years with a bartender in his lap and his hand somewhere a hand only goes on purpose. I finished the showing I was in the middle of. I got an offer out of it, actually, eleven over asking. Then I drove home, and Garrett told me it didn’t mean anything, and I stood there waiting for my heart to break. What came instead was relief. Wide and cold, like opening a door onto air conditioning. I ended five years in the voice I use for inspection reports. He left. I wiped down the counters.

Then I sat on my kitchen floor, which was spotless, I had just done it, and couldn’t get a whole breath into my body for twenty minutes.

Not because I’d lost him. Because I didn’t mind.

That part isn’t on the list. The list is for things I can control.

“Put it away or it goes in the fountain.”

Brooke Wallace turns forty on Monday and has been treating the occasion like a hostile takeover. She’s in a caftan the color of a traffic cone, sunglasses shoved up into her mother’s black curls, and she has her father’s complete lack of an indoor voice. Twelve years ago she sold me a case of wine I couldn’t afford and then helped me drink it. I’ve never been able to get rid of her.

“It’s a note,” I say. “A personal note.”

“It’s work.”

“It is not work.”

Morgan hooks her chin over my shoulder. Morgan is a nurse practitioner who has seen every terrible thing a human body can do and has come out the other side with no filter and a phone that is never not recording. “‘Do not make it weird,'” she reads. “Babe. You made a list about not making it weird.”

“That’s how I make it not weird.”

“That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.” She pans the phone up to the rafters. “Look at this ceiling. This ceiling has a skincare routine.”

Behind her, Elise is holding both passports and both customs forms, because Brooke married the kind of woman who holds the passports. Elise catches my eye, glances at my phone, and says nothing in a way that covers a lot of ground. She’s a family-law attorney. She bills for that look. Over at the front desk, Taryn is asking about the minibar with the focus of a woman who hasn’t slept past six since her son was born and intends to make this week pay for it.

I clock all four of them the way I’d clock a room at a showing. Who’s happy, who’s tired, who needs a drink put in her hand. Everyone’s good. Nobody needs anything from me. I stand there with my towel and my tea and don’t know what to do with my face.

There were supposed to be seven of us. Then Jo broke her ankle at her nephew’s trampoline party, and Dana stayed home to carry things for her, and one of their plane tickets went to—

“There she is!” Brooke bellows at the entrance, and a honeymooner by the orchids drops his towel.

I turn around with my hostess face already on.

I’ve had a week to prepare for this. I’ve known Priya Shah for eight years. I met her at Brooke and Elise’s wedding, where she wore a suit jacket with nothing under it and I became very interested in the centerpieces. I see her twice a year, at things. She’s Brooke’s cousin. She writes about places for the kind of magazines I read on planes. She is thirty-one years old, and in eight years she has never once let me get away with a polite answer.

She comes up the steps out of the white glare of the drive with a duffel on one shoulder and a camera slung across her body, and she is wearing a cobalt bikini top under a white linen shirt she hasn’t bothered to button.

“You flew in that?” Morgan says.

“Changed in the airport bathroom.” Priya lets the duffel drop. “I wasn’t going to waste the van ride.”

Deep brown skin, already catching the light. Black hair cut blunt at her jaw and doing whatever it wants. Rings stacked on three fingers. The thin scar through her left eyebrow that makes her look like she doubts you even when she doesn’t, and she usually does. A gold chain that runs down her sternum and disappears into the cobalt, and below that a long bare stretch of stomach, and a hip bone, and the knot of a tie at her side that one decent tug would—

4. Do not stare at Brooke’s cousin.

I add it without looking at the screen.

She hugs Brooke hard, kisses Elise on the cheek, lets Morgan film her doing a slow turn, squeezes Taryn’s arm. Then it’s my turn. She stops a polite two feet away and looks at me the way she looks at things she’s about to photograph. Like she’s waiting for it to quit posing.

“Hayes.”

“Priya. How was the flight?”

“You’re wearing a lanyard.”

I am. Clear sleeve, itinerary inside, laminated. “It’s practical.”

She hooks one finger under the cord and lifts the card off my chest to read it. She doesn’t touch me. The cord pulls tight across the back of my neck. “Blue is…”

“Meals.”

“Green.”

“Activities.”

“And the pink?”

“Free time.”

“You scheduled the free time.”

“I blocked it. That’s different.”

“Mm.” She tilts the card toward the light. “Thursday, four to five-thirty. Pink.” She checks a watch she isn’t wearing. “So this is you, right now. Free.”

“This is me standing in a lobby.”

“Strong start.”

She lets go. The card drops back against my breastbone, and I feel it land like a knuckle on a door.

The Mariposa Villa is three bedrooms wrapped around a pool, with a staircase up to a roof terrace, and Brooke hands out the rooms like a cruise director with a grudge.

“Me and my wife, ocean side, obviously. Morgan and Taryn, the two queens. And you two are in the king.”

“The king what,” I say.

“Bed, Natalie. It was Dana and Jo’s room. I’m not buying a fourth bedroom for somebody who booked six days ago. No offense, Pri.”

“Some taken,” Priya says.

“You’re adults. That mattress is the size of a parking space. You won’t even find each other.”

I haven’t shared a bed with anyone but Garrett in five years, and Garrett slept like a man laid out for a viewing. It’s fine. It’s a bed. I’ve staged four hundred of them.

The room is white linen and blond wood and one bed, exactly as advertised. The bathroom is the problem. Someone, an architect, a pervert, has divided it from the bedroom with a wall of glass that’s frosted in a single wide band, about knee to shoulder, and perfectly clear above and below.

“Who is that for?” I ask.

Priya considers it. “Tall people. Short people. Anyone with good ankles.” She tosses her duffel onto the left side of the bed without asking. That’s my side. I decide not to have a side. “I’m going to go rinse the airplane off. Unless you scheduled that.”

“It’s pink. Do what you want.”

“Careful, Hayes. That’s how it starts.”

The linen shirt comes off her shoulders on the way across the room and lands on a chair. I look at my suitcase. I hear the bikini top go, a small wet-sounding snap of elastic, and then the water comes on.

I unpack. I hang things by category: dresses, cover-ups, the one red thing with the tags still on that I packed as a joke with myself. I line my sandals up under the luggage rack. I do all of it facing the closet, like a woman with nothing behind her.

Then I’m out of things to hang.

There’s a ceiling fan. It has five blades. I count them twice.

Then I don’t.

The frosted band does its job, technically. Behind it she’s a blur, brown and moving, arms lifting, the long line of a back turning under the spray. It’s what the band leaves out that’s the trouble. Below it: her calves, water sheeting down them, her heels, a row of tiny numbers inked above one ankle bone. Above it: her shoulders, and black botanical lines curling over the left one, and her wet hair slicked back off her face, and her face tipped up into the water with her eyes closed and her lips parted.

She runs both hands back over her head. The blur changes shape when she does it, a curve pulled high and tight, the dark smudge of a nipple pressed for one second close to the glass. Soap slides down the inside of the band in a long white line. My brain fills in everything the frost is covering, helpfully, in detail, without my permission, and something low in my stomach turns over and stays turned.

I’m holding an empty hanger. I’ve been holding it for some time.

It’s aesthetic appreciation. She’s a striking person. I notice striking people; it’s practically my job. I notice crown molding. I noticed her at the wedding, and I noticed her in October, and both times I put it where I put all of it, in the drawer marked good for her.

My mouth is dry. That’s the travel.

She opens her eyes.

There’s a mirror over the vanity. I hadn’t accounted for the mirror. Her gaze comes up over the top of the frost and finds mine in it, direct and unhurried, and she doesn’t jump and she doesn’t cover a thing. The scarred eyebrow goes up. Water runs off her chin.

“See anything on your itinerary, Hayes?”

“I’m looking for the thermostat.”

“It’s behind you.”

It is. I turn around and set it to sixty-four.

“One rule,” Brooke says. “Three parts.”

She’s standing at the head of the table on the roof terrace with a margarita raised like a gavel. The sun is going down behind her in colors I’d tell a seller were too much. There are candles in hurricane glass, a whole grilled fish, and something with mango that Taryn has already claimed.

“No men.” The glass points at Morgan.

“The pool guy doesn’t count if I never learn his name.”

“No work.” The glass comes to me.

“I left my laptop in Austin.”

“You have a laminated card around your neck at dinner.”

I take it off and put it under my napkin.

“And no drama.” The glass makes a slow circuit of the table and comes right back to where it was.

“Me? I’m the least dramatic person here.”

“You’re nine days out of five years and you’ve cried zero times. You’re a pressure cooker in a nice dress.”

“I’m fine.”

“In my experience,” Elise says, boning her fish, “it’s never the one who’s yelling.”

“Thank you, counsel.” Brooke sits. “That’s the rule. No men, no work, no drama. I’m forty, I’m gorgeous, and I want six days where nobody needs anything from me but sunscreen.”

“No men, no work, no drama.” Priya is across from me in a black shirt with the sleeves rolled, turning a lime wedge over in her fingers. Her hair has dried into itself. She smells, faintly, across a whole table, like the resort’s soap, and I know what the soap looked like. “That sounds like a dare.”

“It’s a rule.”

“A rule’s just a dare with good posture.”

Brooke aims a fork at her. “You promised me.”

Priya lifts both hands, all innocence and silver rings.

I don’t know what she promised. I laugh anyway, harder than I mean to, the real one that comes out through my nose, and I hide it in my margarita. It’s my first drink of the day. It’s very good.

“You two’ll be fine in that room,” Taryn says, reaching past me for the salt. “Didn’t you chauffeur her around Austin for an entire weekend in October? You skipped my separation brunch.”

“I sent a cheese board.”

“It was a beautiful cheese board. I ate it alone in my car.”

“Brooke was slammed,” I say. “Priya had a deadline. Somebody had to drive.”

“She was an excellent driver,” Priya says. “She signaled in a parking lot.”

“That’s the law.”

“That is not the law.”

Two days. A taco truck on East Cesar Chavez, a honky-tonk at noon, the pool at Barton Springs where the water is sixty-eight degrees all year and I shrieked like a child going in. Priya had her camera up the whole weekend and never once told me to smile. I drove home Sunday night with my hair still wet and was so nice to Garrett for the next week that he asked if I’d dented his car.

I haven’t thought about why. I’m not going to start on a roof.

Luna Roja is two hundred yards down the sand, and we walk it barefoot with our shoes in our hands.

It’s a beach club the way the Pacific is a pool. Red lanterns strung between the palms, fire pits sunk in the sand with low couches around them, white cabanas along the back, a DJ working out of the hull of an old fishing boat. Brooke commandeers a fire pit. A server brings a bottle of tequila with no label and six short glasses, and I pour myself one and decide it’s going to last me the night.

“Dare,” Morgan announces. She’s cross-legged on a couch with the firelight under her chin, like a kid telling a ghost story. “Not Truth or Dare. Truth is for sophomores and depositions. Just Dare. You do it, or you take a shot of that.” She points at a second, smaller bottle the server left, in which something with legs is suspended. “And the group gets to say boo.“

“That’s it? Boo?”

“You’d be amazed how much it hurts.”

It turns out to be a good game, because Morgan is good at it. She makes Taryn ask the DJ for her wedding song and then dance to it alone, and by the second chorus Taryn has both arms over her head and four strangers dancing with her. She makes Elise do Brooke’s voice. Elise does two sentences of it, perfectly, without raising her own, and Brooke doesn’t speak for a full minute. She makes Brooke call her mother and announce she’s eloping with a waiter, and we all hear her mother say, “Brooke, you’re already married. Put Elise on.”

Then she gets to me.

“Natalie. Send your boss a voice memo. Ten seconds. Just you moaning.”

“That’s work. No work. I’m following the rule.”

“Booooo,” says the group.

“Fine. New one. Get a phone number off somebody at the bar.”

“No men.”

“I didn’t say a man.”

“You didn’t say not a man. The dare’s ambiguous. An ambiguous term gets construed against whoever drafted it.”

“Is that real?” Morgan asks Elise.

“Regrettably.”

“Boo.“

I sip my tequila, pleased with myself. It’s smoky and it goes down warm. It’s the second drink I’ve had today, and it’s going to be the last.

“That’s two.”

Priya is on my couch. I don’t know when that happened. She’s at the far end of it, turned sideways with one knee drawn up and her arm stretched along the back, and her fingers have come to rest about four inches from my bare shoulder. She says it low, under the music, for me.

“Two what?”

“Two you’ve talked your way out of. You’re good at it. You should’ve been a lawyer.”

“I negotiate for a living.”

“I know. In October I watched you get a woman to knock twelve dollars off a fifteen-dollar belt buckle. She thanked you.” She tips her head and studies me like a menu in a language she half speaks. “You’ve never done one thing you couldn’t explain later. Have you?”

It isn’t mean. It’s worse. It’s accurate, and she says it the way you’d tell someone she had a thread loose.

“That’s not a flaw.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“It sounded like you were saying it was.”

“I’m a travel writer. I describe the place. I don’t tell it to change.” Her fingers tap the cushion once, near my shoulder, not on it. I feel it anyway, all the way down my arm. “It’s a great place. Gorgeous. Very clean. I just wonder sometimes if anybody lives there.”

I open my mouth and nothing’s in it. Me. I can find something pleasant to say about a load-bearing wall in the middle of a kitchen.

She watches me not answer. Her eyes go to my mouth, only for a second, and then to the fire, and she takes a slow swallow of her drink, and I watch her throat move, and the four inches between her hand and my skin starts to feel like something I could measure in degrees.

“Natalie Hayes.”

Morgan is pointing at me with the bottle.

“No loopholes this time. Elise, tell her.”

“No loopholes,” Elise says, serene.

“No men, no work, no ambiguity. Ready?” Morgan grins. “Kiss the woman here you’d most want to be stranded with.”

A cheer goes up. It’s an easy one. It’s a gift, really, a layup, and Brooke is already leaning in over the fire with her cheek turned and her eyes squeezed shut. “Come on. Twelve years. Lay it on me, get it over with.”

Everyone’s waiting for me to say her name. I’m waiting for me to say her name.

But I actually think about it. That’s the mistake. For one second I take the question seriously: a strip of sand, nobody coming, no one to be pleasant for. Brooke would have us organized to death by sundown. And there’s the other thing, the picture that shows up all on its own. Water sheeting down a pair of calves. A face tipped up with its lips parted.

“Priya,” says my mouth.

The fire pops.

Brooke opens one eye.

“I’m sorry,” Morgan says. “Who?”

“She travels.” My voice has gone up half an octave. “Professionally. She’d know how to… there’d be skills. Survival. Foraging.”

“I got food poisoning from an airport salad in Denver,” Priya says. “But go on.”

Taryn has both hands clapped over her mouth. Elise is smiling into her glass, small and private, like a ruling has come down the way she expected. Brooke lowers her cheek, slowly, and looks at her cousin, and something goes between the two of them that I can’t read.

Priya sets her drink down in the sand.

She gets up. She comes around the end of the couch without hurrying, and the firelight climbs one side of her, the rolled sleeves, the chain, the scar, the open collar and the shadow under it. She stops in front of me, close enough that I have to tip my head back. Then she bends, one hand braced on the cushion beside my hip, and puts her mouth near my ear so nobody else gets it.

“You can tap out.” Her breath is warm on my neck. Every hair on my body stands up to meet it. “Say the word and I’ll make a joke, and Morgan goes after Taryn, and by breakfast no one remembers. I won’t think anything.”

It’s a kind offer. That’s what does it. It’s a door, held open, with a nice view of exactly where I’ve been standing my entire life, and I have walked through that door every time anyone has ever held it. I have a list. Number three is right there. Number four is right there.

She smells like soap and lime and woodsmoke.

“I don’t tap out.”

“You tapped out twice in the last hour.”

“Those were technicalities.”

The corner of her mouth moves. “Okay, Hayes.”

She straightens and gives me room, and that’s how I find out I’m standing up. I don’t remember deciding to. The sand is cool under my feet. She has two inches on me. Somebody, Morgan, says “Oh my God” very quietly, and Morgan has never said anything quietly, and I can hear the ocean and my own pulse and not one other thing.

Three seconds. A dare kiss is three seconds. A peck, a joke, a story for brunch. I’ve seen it done.

Priya doesn’t move. She’s leaving all of it to me, the whole distance, every inch, and her eyes are very dark and not laughing at all.

I step in.

Her mouth is an inch from mine, and I am about to make it so, so weird.

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Sunday morning in Cabo. The Luna de Miel couples’ massage, a bottle of warm almond oil, a table twenty-eight inches wide, and an attendant who promises she’ll be back in ten minutes. Natalie can work with ten minutes.

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