The Roommate Bet

A Sapphic Roommates-to-Lovers Romance · by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Length: 90,000 words · Standalone

Tropes: Roommates to Lovers · Bi Awakening · Friends to Lovers · Mutual Pining · Forced Proximity · Only One Bed · Slow Burn · Bet Romance · Practice Turns Real · College Romance

They made a bet. Loser writes the essay.

They made a bet.

Loser writes the essay. Loser reads it at the bar.

Whoever takes home a girl first, wins.

Chloe Vance has been Jade Miller’s roommate for eighteen months, her best friend for two years, and her audience for every sarcastic one-liner Jade has ever bothered to deliver. She is not the kind of girl who falls for her quiet, curvy, wire-rim-glasses-wearing, book-a-night-reading roommate.

She is the kind of girl who makes a drunken bet at a dyke bar at 1 AM and signs a napkin.

She is also the kind of girl who, when her roommate suggests they “practice” — for the bet, just for the bet, only for the bet, because kissing a girl is different and we should be sure we know what we’re doing — says yes without thinking about it.

Jade Miller has been in love with her best friend for two years.

Jade Miller wrote the napkin.

Jade Miller is not as drunk as Chloe thinks.

Eight weeks. One stranger to find. One bet to win.

One shared wall, one shared bed they keep “accidentally” sharing, and one essay that’s going to get read out loud in front of everyone they know — no matter who wins.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Two best-friend roommates who fall apart for each other inch by inch
Slow-burn dom energy, brat-tamer dynamic, and the words “use your words, baby”
A bi-awakening so slow the entire town saw it before either lead did
One Mara’s napkin that becomes the most romantic legal document in fiction
Lights-on, on-page, no-fade-to-black sapphic heat
A confession at an open mic that will wreck you in front of strangers
Mothers showing up. Aunts in book clubs. Found family that turns up in cardigans

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Content Note

Explicit on-page sapphic sex (multiple scenes), bi-awakening, alcohol use, references to a difficult mother-daughter relationship and one off-page line of past emotional abuse from a parent’s ex-partner. Standalone HEA. No cheating. No third-act breakup-by-misunderstanding. No men involved romantically.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: The Bet

The bar smells like spilled lime and other people’s cologne, and I am explaining, with diagrams, why the man I went out with on Tuesday could not find my clitoris with both hands and a tactical headlamp.

“Diagrams,” Jade says, flat, into her drink.

“Visual aids, J. Visual aids are important when you’re teaching.”

“He didn’t want a lesson, Chlo. He wanted a Yelp review.”

“Well he’s getting one. One star. Could not locate the establishment.”

Maren laughs into her beer so hard she has to set it down. Sloane, behind the bar, doesn’t even look up from the limes she’s cutting. “If I get one more anatomy seminar from you tonight, Vance, I’m cutting you off.”

“I’m being educational.”

“You’re being loud.”

It is January, and we are three drinks in — well, I’m three drinks in. Jade is pacing herself like she’s running a marathon. Maren is on her second beer. Sloane is on her shift, so really I’m the one drinking, but I am drinking with purpose, the purpose being to forget the fact that on Tuesday a thirty-one-year-old man named Brent spent forty-five minutes between my legs and emerged victorious only in the sense that he had not, technically, suffocated.

Jade has not laughed once.

Jade has been watching me with that face she does — the one where she’s listening to every single word and cataloging it for some purpose I will never be told, the one that makes me feel like there’s a quiz at the end and I haven’t been studying — and Jade is wearing the navy hoodie I keep meaning to steal and the wire-rim glasses she only puts on when she’s tired, and her hair is doing something to me right now that I am refusing to look at directly, the way you refuse to look at the sun.

She takes a slow sip of her drink. Sets it down. Looks at me.

“Maybe try a girl, Chloe.”

I freeze, mid-gesticulation.

“Excuse me?”

“Lower bar.”

Maren chokes on her beer. Actively chokes. Has to put a hand on the bar to steady herself. Sloane glances up from her limes — eyebrow, slow — and looks between Jade and me like she’s watching a tennis match in slow motion.

Jade does not look away from me.

And here is the thing.

I have lived with Jade Miller for eighteen months. I have seen her brush her teeth. I have seen her cry at a dog video — a commercial, not even a real video, a commercial, about a Subaru — and I have seen her forget to wear pants in our kitchen at two in the afternoon on a Sunday, and I have seen her eat cereal at one in the morning standing up at the counter with the box clutched in one hand like she’s worried someone’s going to take it from her.

I know what shampoo she uses. Olaplex No. 4. I know which side of the bed she sleeps on, because sometimes after I’ve had a bad week, after my mom calls or after I’ve gone on a date with a Brent, I sleep on the other side of it, and she lets me, and we never talk about it in the morning. I know she snores a little when she’s been crying. I know the exact face she makes the moment before she says something cruel, which is rare, and the exact face she makes the moment before she says something kind, which is rarer.

I know Jade Miller the way you know the wallpaper in your own apartment.

I do not know Jade Miller the way she is currently looking at me across this bar.

“Bet?” I hear myself say.

I did not decide to say it. My mouth said it. My mouth has gone rogue. My mouth is filing for emancipation from the rest of my body and I am in no position to argue.

Her mouth does something. Not a smile. Adjacent. “What are the terms?”

“First one to take a girl home from a bar wins.”

“Stranger,” Jade says, immediately. “Has to be a stranger.”

“Fine. Stranger.”

“Deadline.”

“Spring break.”

“Loser?”

“Loser writes — loser writes a five-hundred-word essay called Why I Was Wrong and reads it on Mara’s open mic.”

Sloane snorts. “I’ll book the slot now.”

Jade picks up a Mara’s napkin. Picks up a pen from behind her ear — Jade always has a pen behind her ear, it’s a thing, it’s part of her, it’s part of the whole I’m reading three books a week and you can’t stop me aesthetic she has going — and starts writing.

I watch her wrist.

I’m watching her wrist.

I have looked at this wrist eighty thousand times. Why am I watching her wrist?

She slides the napkin across the bar. I read the terms. I sign.

She signs underneath my name. Folds the napkin in half. Folds it again. Tucks it into her wallet.

“May the best woman win, Vance.”

She lifts her glass. Clinks it against mine. She is smiling at me. She has stopped being a quiz I might pass, and started being a quiz I am definitely going to fail.

We close down Mara’s. Jade puts her scarf around my neck without asking. She does this. She has always done this. She has a coat, she has a scarf, she sees me shivering, and the scarf goes around my neck. I have a closet full of scarves. I do not own a single scarf I have purchased myself.

The scarf smells like her. The Olaplex No. 4 and the lavender hand cream and something underneath that I have never been able to identify and have been too embarrassed to ask about, because what shampoo do you use is a normal question and what is the third smell on your skin and why am I thinking about it is not.

“You are very drunk,” Jade says.

“I am medium drunk.”

I trip on a piece of sidewalk that has done me no harm, ever, in my entire life, and Jade’s hand closes around my elbow, and she holds me up, and she does not let go.

She does not let go for the next three blocks.

“So,” Jade says, mildly, like she’s commenting on the weather. “Spring break.”

“Eight weeks.”

“Mm.”

“What does mm mean, Miller —”

“You. I’m mm-ing you.”

I shut up. I shut up immediately. I shut up so completely and totally that a passing dog could have walked up to me and asked for directions and I would not have been able to provide them.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available everywhere — and the napkin only gets more ridiculous from here.

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🔥 Free Bonus Chapter: The Wall

A 5,000-word too-hot-for-Amazon scene set the night Chloe and Jade hang the napkin wall in their new Pilsen apartment. Just Chloe, Jade, the bed they brought from Mercer Street, and zero quiet. Mother on the couch is finally not a constraint. Lights on. Strap on.

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