The Plus-One Problem

A Fake-Dating Sapphic Wedding Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Dating, One Bed, Bisexual Awakening, Second Chance, Destination Wedding, Vineyard Romance, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Photographer Romance, Romantic Comedy

She invented a girlfriend to survive one wedding. Then she said a real name.

Seven rules. One weekend. One bed. Zero chance.

Tamsin Halloran has one goal for her cousin’s Napa wedding: don’t be the family tragedy.

Her boyfriend of seven years just got engaged to someone else, and the whole family saw it online. So when her mother calls to ask, very gently, whether she’ll be bringing anyone, the most careful woman in Boston does the least careful thing of her life.

She says she has a girlfriend.

Then she says a name. Romy Kostas. The bride’s best friend. The photographer she almost kissed on a Providence rooftop ten years ago, right before she ran for a train that didn’t exist.

Romy agrees to play along for one weekend. Tamsin writes seven rules in a shared doc. No kissing unless necessary. Nobody finds out. Nobody catches feelings. It all ends Sunday at checkout.

Then the bride merges their rooms into the honeymoon suite. One bed. One copper tub. One grandmother with a martini ordering them to kiss.

Rule Four lasts six hours.

Romy can do fake. What she can’t do is be somebody’s beautiful weekend secret. And Tamsin is running out of rules to hide behind.

The Plus-One Problem is a high-heat sapphic romantic comedy with fake dating, one bed, a bisexual awakening, a second chance ten years in the making, dual first-person POV, and no third-act breakup. HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A spreadsheet heroine who writes the fake relationship up as a seven-rule Protocol, with version history
✅ A photographer who has been at the same end of the bar at every family event for ten years
✅ Fake dating, a merged room block, and one king bed with a pillow wall that lasts one night
✅ A Providence rooftop, a train that didn’t exist, and a second chance ten years in the making
✅ A late bisexual awakening, written with heat and respect
✅ Praise kink in both directions, and a heroine who learns to say exactly what she wants out loud
✅ A Napa vineyard wedding with a barrel cave, a stone press house, and a grandmother with a secret
✅ 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, toys, and a strap-on), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes a recent breakup and an ex’s engagement, a parent’s past infidelity discussed in backstory, family pressure and gossip around coming out later in life, and minor injuries. 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: Tamsin

At nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, I was assigning colors to my cousin’s wedding.

Blue for travel. Green for bridesmaid duties. Yellow for family, because yellow means proceed with caution. Gray for what the Solane Estate welcome packet called “unstructured time,” of which there were forty-five minutes, on Saturday, between hair and photographs. I had already allocated them to hiding.

The spreadsheet had four tabs. Flights, Itinerary, Wardrobe by Event, and a fourth labeled Contingencies, which covered lost luggage, a rental car downgrade, and my Aunt Patrice.

The gown was hanging on the back of my bedroom door in its garment bag: deep sapphire, altered twice. Birdie’s only instruction to the wedding party had been “any jewel tone that makes you feel dangerous,” and I had responded by ordering six dresses, building a scoring matrix, and returning five.

I want to be clear that I was content. My apartment in the South End was quiet in the specific way I paid extra for. There was a glass of Sancerre at my elbow that I’d poured ninety minutes ago and drunk a third of. I had a strength class at six, a variance report due Thursday, and nine days before I got on a plane to Napa to watch Birdie marry a trauma surgeon under a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. Everything had a cell. Every cell had a color.

Then my phone lit up, face-up on the desk, because I am not the kind of person who is afraid of her own phone.

colin.pruitt shared a post.

I looked at the banner for the length of one breath. Then I picked the phone up, because I’m also not the kind of person who leaves a line item unreviewed.

It was a good photograph. I’ll give him that. Boston Harbor at sunset, his hand, and resting on his hand a smaller one wearing a ring. Oval, halo setting. The kind of ring that photographs well and catches on sweaters. The caption said: She said yes. Easiest question I’ve ever asked.

Her name was Kelsey. She worked at his firm, in a department with “people” in the title. I’d met her twice at his holiday parties. The second time, she’d watched me decline a second crab cake and told me she admired my restraint.

There were already forty-one comments. I read them, because I’m thorough. So happy for you two!! from his sister, who had once knitted me a scarf. FINALLY from his college roommate, which was an interesting word to use about a relationship younger than my phone. And from Colin’s mother, who had mailed me a birthday card every year for seven years, a row of six champagne bottles and My heart is so full.

I wondered what it had been before.

Easiest question I’ve ever asked.

I set the phone down. I squared it against the edge of the desk.

Five months ago, Colin had stood in this apartment, in the kitchen where I’d chosen the backsplash, and ended seven years in under fifteen minutes. He wasn’t cruel about it. Colin was never cruel; it was the main thing people said about him. He’d held a mug I’d given him and told me he had been trying for a long time to figure out whether I was happy, and that he’d finally accepted he was never going to be able to tell.

You’re too careful to actually know, Tamsin.

I had asked him to clarify. I remember that. I’d asked whether he meant too careful for him to know me, or too careful to know myself, because those were different complaints and I wanted to address the correct one. He’d looked at me like I’d just proved something. Then he’d gone to stay with his brother, and I’d made an inventory of his belongings by room.

It ran to two pages, with a column for disputed items. There weren’t any. He took it without reading it, said, “See, this is what I mean,” and left me holding the pen.

So. Five months. I ran it the way I’d run anything. A ring like that is a six-week lead if it’s custom, two if it isn’t. Add the planning; Colin once took three weeks to choose a couch. Which meant that within roughly one fiscal quarter of leaving my kitchen, the man who couldn’t tell if I was happy had become entirely certain about somebody else.

I did the math because the math was available. Then I checked myself for heartbreak, the way you’d pat your pockets for your keys.

Nothing.

That was the part I couldn’t put in a cell. I didn’t want him back. I’d spent seven years with a kind man. We’d had a shared calendar and a meal-prep routine and sex on Wednesdays and Sundays, during which I came roughly sixty percent of the time and considered that a strong hit rate. And what I felt now, looking at his hand under another woman’s hand, was the mild professional embarrassment of a forecast that had come in wrong.

What I did feel arrived a second later, cold and exact.

Colin’s mother followed my mother. My mother followed everyone. Aunt Patrice had notifications turned on for people she didn’t like. By morning every Halloran on the eastern seaboard would have seen that ring, and in nine days I would walk into a vineyard full of them, alone, in a bridesmaid’s dress, and they would all be so nice to me.

I picked up the wine and drank the remaining two-thirds.

The phone rang before I’d set down the glass.

Mom.

Of course.

“Are you sitting down?” my mother said.

“I’m at my desk.”

“Is that sitting?”

“It’s a desk, Mom. It comes with a chair.”

Lorraine Halloran exhaled the way she did before delivering a casserole to the bereaved. Behind her I could hear the kitchen in Milton: the dishwasher, the little television she kept on for company, my father not saying anything in another room.

“I’ve seen it,” I said, to save us both the runway.

“Seen what?”

“Mom.”

“Patrice sent it to me. I didn’t go looking. I want you to know I did not go looking.” A pause, heavy with restraint. “She’s very young-looking, isn’t she. The girl.”

“She’s thirty.”

“Well. She photographs young.” My mother said this as though it were a defect of character, which was her version of loyalty, and I loved her for it a little. “And a halo, on an oval. I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re saying several things.”

“I’m saying your grandmother’s ring is an emerald cut and nobody ever had to draw a circle around it. Anyway. That’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling about the seating.”

“For Birdie’s wedding.”

“For our side. Birdie gave me the Halloran tables. She said, ‘Auntie Lo, do whatever you want with them, I trust you,’ which I think was a joke, but I’ve done it anyway.” Paper rustled. My mother built seating charts out of index cards on the dining room table, like a general planning a landing. “So. Table two. Your father and me. Nana Jo, God help us. Nell and Marcus. You. And then I have a chair.”

“A chair.”

“An empty one. I had you down as a two for a year, and now you’re a one, and a one leaves a hole. It looks like someone died, Tamsin. People’s eyes go right to it.”

“Move me to another table.”

“Which one? The Cleveland cousins are already a nine. Patrice has the Dohertys.”

“Then take the chair away.”

“Then everybody spreads out and there’s a gap where the chair was, which is worse. I tried it. I laid the whole table out with the salt shakers.”

“Put Nana Jo’s purse on it.”

“Don’t think she won’t.” Rustle. “And Nell tells me she and Marcus want to practice their first dance at the reception. Quietly, in a corner, to get a feel for the floor. So that will be going on. Right beside you.” A delicate pause. “So I’ve had a thought. Do you remember Dr. Feeney?”

“No.”

“Patrice’s podiatrist.”

I closed my eyes. “Why is Aunt Patrice’s podiatrist invited to Birdie’s wedding?”

“He’s a family friend at this point. He did both her feet. He sent a fruit basket when your father had his knee done.”

“He’s a foot doctor.”

“It’s the same leg, Tamsin. And he’s lovely. He’s very tall, and he’s divorced, but amicably. He has a boat.”

“Mom.”

“I am not setting you up. I’m filling a chair. If the two of you happen to have a conversation—”

“About what? Bunions?”

“About anything, sweetheart. That’s my whole point. So you have someone to talk to. So you’re not just sitting there.”

“I’ve sat at tables by myself before. I’m good at it.”

“I know you are. You’ve been fine by yourself since you were six years old. That’s the part that keeps me up.” She said it lightly, the way she said most true things, and kept moving before I could look at it. “And your grandmother is no help. She asked me at lunch on Sunday whether you’d gone off men or just off that one. In front of the waiter.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you were concentrating on your career.”

“For how long?”

“I didn’t give her a timeline. She ordered another martini and said, ‘Well, somebody in this family ought to enjoy herself.’ I don’t know what that means and I didn’t ask.”

She took a breath. When she spoke again, her voice had gone soft and careful around the edges, like she was carrying it across a room with both hands.

“Nobody thinks you did anything wrong,” she said. “I need you to hear that. Seven years, and he walks out, and now this. Nobody blames you. Everyone’s going to be so kind about it. I’ve already spoken to Patrice and she’s promised not to say a word. I just can’t stand the thought of you stuck between your sister and her fiancé with the whole room looking over to see how you’re holding up.”

I knew that voice. I knew it better than I knew my own.

I’d first heard it when I was nineteen, the spring my father’s affair came out. It didn’t come out at home. It came out at the St. Agatha’s parish auction, in the hall, in front of two hundred people, when the other woman’s husband stood up in the middle of the raffle and said it to the room. My mother was holding the ticket drum. She didn’t drop it. She smiled, and she finished calling the numbers, and for a full year afterward every woman in Milton spoke to her in exactly this tone. How are you holding up, Lorraine. Soft. Careful. Carried with both hands.

I watched what it did to her. I took notes. I built an entire adult life engineered so that nobody would ever have cause to use that voice on me. It had held for thirteen years. And now here it was, coming through my own phone, from her, with love.

“You’ve always been my sensible one,” she said. “You’ll meet someone sensible. In the meantime, Dr. Feeney is a perfectly pleasant—”

I had stopped listening. Not on purpose.

My second monitor still had an email open. Birdie had forwarded it to the entire wedding party at 6:04 that evening, subject line ROOM BLOCK FINAL!!! find your people!!!, and under her row of exclamation points was the estate’s tidy list of who was sleeping where.

Vine Wing 12 — T. Halloran.

And eight lines above that:

Harvest Wing 3 — R. Kostas.

Harvest Wing was across a courtyard from Vine Wing. Ninety seconds on foot, by my estimate. I had looked at the property map. I’d had no reason to look at the property map.

I had read that line eleven times since 6:04. I knew because at some point I’d started counting, which really should have told me something.

“—and he doesn’t drink, so he can walk Nana Jo back to her room, which solves that—”

“Don’t seat me with the podiatrist.”

“Tamsin. It’s one dinner.”

“I don’t need the chair filled.” My pulse was doing something stupid. I could feel it in my wrists. “I’m bringing someone.”

The index cards stopped.

“You’re bringing—who? Since when are you seeing someone?” Hope and alarm were wrestling for the receiver. “Is it someone from work? Is it that Patrick? The one with the—”

“I’m bringing my girlfriend.”

Silence.

Not a long one, at first. A stalled one. In Milton, the dishwasher changed cycles.

“Your girlfriend,” my mother said.

“Yes.”

“As in a—”

“As in.”

“A woman.”

“That’s generally how it works, yes.”

“Don’t be smart with me. I’m absorbing.” A chair scraped; she’d sat down. “Does your father know?”

“Nobody knows. You’re the first.”

I’d meant it as a dodge. It landed as a gift. I heard her take it, a small catch of breath on the line. My mother had learned the biggest fact of her own marriage from a stranger in the middle of a raffle. Being told anything first was not a small thing to her.

“Tamsin.” Very quiet. “Who?”

I should tell you that I had options. There was an entire universe of sane responses available to me. I’m kidding. I’m tired. Colin got engaged and I drank wine on an empty stomach. I could have invented a Sarah. Nobody can disprove a Sarah.

But I was looking at the screen. I was looking at one initial and six letters, and my mouth, which has never once in my life done anything without clearance, opened.

“Romy.”

This time the silence went on so long I checked that the call hadn’t dropped.

It hadn’t.

“Birdie’s Romy?”

The call lasted four more minutes. I contributed perhaps nine words.

How long? A while. Does Birdie know? Not yet, so please don’t. Tamsin, I wouldn’t dream. She would. She’d dream in a group text. Is she good to you? That one I hadn’t prepared for. Yes, I said, and it came out sounding true, which it had no right to. Then a pause, and my mother, who once described a modernist church as “certainly a choice,” said, “Well. She’s very striking,” in that identical tone, and told me she had to go redo table two.

Not angry. Not crying. Rearranging. Somehow that was worse.

I put the phone face-down. Then, because that felt like cowardice, face-up.

I waited for the horror. I’m good at horror; I can usually produce it on schedule. I had just lied to my mother about my relationship status, my sexuality, and a specific, named, findable woman who happened to be best woman at the wedding I’d lied about. This was a multi-vehicle accident. Any second now I’d feel it.

What I felt instead was my shoulders coming down from around my ears.

My girlfriend. I had said it out loud and the words hadn’t snagged on anything. They’d come out like they’d been waiting right behind my teeth for years, listening for a door.

I tried it again, out loud, on the empty kitchen. “My girlfriend.” The refrigerator hummed. Nothing fell down.

That was what scared me. Not the lie. The relief.

I got up. I rinsed my glass, dried it, put it away. I wiped a counter that was already clean. And the whole time Providence was playing behind my eyes, the way it did about four times a year when I was too tired to stop it.

May, ten years ago. I was twenty-two and three days out of college, and Birdie had ordered me down for her MFA graduation party because, she said, I ought to see what fun looked like before I started my job on Monday. The party was on the roof of the triple-decker she rented in Fox Point. Somebody had strung lights between the chimney and a clothesline pole. The tar paper was still warm at midnight. I’d worn a blue sundress, because it was the only thing I owned that wasn’t for interviews.

Birdie’s roommate was a photographer. Twenty-five, a camera strap across her chest like a bandolier, dark hair down to the middle of her back, and a laugh you could hear from the street. She found me by the cooler, where I was reading the nutritional label on a wine spritzer, and said, “You’re the cousin who does math.”

“Finance.”

“That’s math in a blazer.” She took the bottle out of my hand, read the label herself, made a face, and gave me her beer instead. “I’m Romy. Come stand somewhere better.”

I stood somewhere better for five hours.

I couldn’t tell you now most of what we talked about. I can tell you she listened with her whole face. I can tell you her eyes were green in the middle and gold at the rim, and that she kept looking at my mouth while I talked, openly, like that was allowed. She told me she took pictures of strangers’ hands on the bus, because hands don’t know how to pose. I told her I alphabetized my spices, and she said, “Straight A to Z, or by cuisine?” as though the answer mattered. Nobody had ever asked me a follow-up question before. At one point she asked me what I wanted. Not for a career. “When nobody’s grading it,” she said. “What does the cousin who does math want?”

“A 401(k) match,” I said.

She laughed so hard she had to put a hand on my arm. “Jesus Christ. Okay. And after that?”

I didn’t have an after that. I was twenty-two. Nobody had ever asked for one.

She didn’t let me off, either. She waited, one shoulder against the chimney brick, her beer hanging from two fingers, like she had all night and planned to spend it on this.

“I want to be somebody nobody has to worry about,” I said finally.

“That’s not a want. That’s a job description.” She tipped her head, studying me. “Work on it, math girl. I’m going to ask you again.”

She was joking. I kept it anyway.

Around two, when the party had thinned to a dozen people and somebody put on something slow, she held out her hand. I took it. She danced me backward toward the dark end of the roof with her thigh between mine.

I’d been touched before. I’d had a college boyfriend and a reasonable number of orgasms, most of them my own work. I knew what being turned on felt like. It was pleasant. It was a manageable weather system.

This wasn’t that. This was her palm flat and hot on the bare skin between my shoulder blades, and her hips rolling into mine slow on the beat, and every time her thigh pressed up I felt it in my teeth.

“You’re allowed to breathe,” she said, low, right at my ear, and her lips brushed the shell of it on the last word. I made a noise. A small, cracked, needy one, out loud, that I had never heard out of my own throat. She heard it too. I felt her smile against my temple. Then her hand slid down my spine to the dip above my ass and pressed me in, hard, onto her thigh, and kept me there.

I was wet. I mean soaked, through cotton underwear, on a roof, in front of people, for a woman I’d met at eleven p.m. My nipples ached against my dress. I wanted to grind down on her leg like an animal until something in me broke open, and I did not have a single file to put that in.

At three we were sitting on the low wall at the roof’s edge, knees touching. She’d stopped talking. She tucked my hair behind my ear and left her fingers there, at the hinge of my jaw, and looked at my mouth one more time, and leaned in.

And I leaned in too.

That’s the piece I have never been able to audit away. Nobody talked me into anything. I tilted my face up and felt her breath on my lips, beer and spearmint, close enough that the kiss had basically already started.

“I have a train,” I said.

Against her mouth, nearly. I felt her go still.

“A train,” Romy said.

“To Boston. I should—it’s late. I have a train.”

There was no train. The first one out of Providence was the 6:10. I sat in that station for three hours with my knees pressed together and my heart going like I’d robbed something. On Monday I started my job. Three years later I met Colin. And for ten years I told myself it had been the beer and the heat.

I had been dripping for a woman on a rooftop, and I’d spent a decade calling it humidity.

I’d seen her since. Four times, always across a room at something of Birdie’s: a thirtieth birthday, a gallery opening, the engagement party last fall, where I’d stood beside Colin and she’d stood beside the bar in a green silk shirt open to the third button, with a thin gold chain that disappeared down into it. I had spent most of a toast not following that chain. We’d said hi. I am extremely good at hi.

And tonight, when my mother asked who, hers was the name my mouth had ready.

I went back to the desk and picked up my phone.

I had her number. Birdie had put the wedding party in a group chat called BRIDES’ BRIGADE (no boys) (except Dez), and Romy was in there with a 917 area code, sending wine-glass emojis and photos of shoes. I had never once texted her directly. I opened a new message.

Hi Romy! It’s Tamsin Halloran, Birdie’s cousin. Hope you’re well!

I sounded like a dental reminder. Delete.

Quick logistical question about the wedding.

It was not quick, and it was not logistical. Delete.

Funny story.

It wasn’t. Delete.

Draft six was just I’m so sorry, which was at least accurate. Draft seven read I told my mother we’re dating. Thoughts? and I stared at it until I felt faint. Draft eight was Do you remember me?, which was the only real question in the bunch, and which I deleted fastest. Draft nine was three paragraphs long, and somewhere in the second one I realized I had put a header in a text message.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

It was 10:51. My mother had known for an hour and a half. Statistically, so did Aunt Patrice. If Romy Kostas was going to learn that she was my girlfriend, she should learn it from me, and I had maybe until morning before she learned it from a woman with opinions about her earrings.

I thought about the roof. Her fingers in my hair. The way she’d said a train, slowly, like she was tasting how bad a lie it was.

She’d known. Of course she had. She’d let me go anyway.

Draft eleven, I didn’t edit.

This is going to sound deranged, but can you pretend to be my girlfriend for a weekend?

My thumb hovered. Every cell in my body that had ever filled out a form in triplicate told me to put the phone in a drawer, call my mother back, and eat dinner next to a podiatrist.

I hit send.

Delivered.

I stood very still in my quiet, expensive apartment, holding the phone in both hands like something that might go off.

Read 10:53 PM.

And then, at the bottom of the screen, three dots.

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One. Definitely One. — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Eight months after the wedding, back in the Harvest Suite with one bed and no pillow wall. Tamsin packed her own basket this time, wrote an agenda on an index card, and asked for the one thing she has never allowed anyone: not knowing what comes next.

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