The Straight Girl Tax

Sapphic Best-Friends-to-Lovers Romance
by Blair Lennox

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Fake Dating, Bisexual Awakening, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Competence Kink, Financial Dirty Talk, Praise Kink

Ten years of pining, compounded daily.

Aster Bly has three rules for managing her best friend’s finances: never trust Fia Carrow with a corporate card, never approve a launch budget after midnight, and never calculate what ten years of loving a straight woman has cost.

Aster calls it the straight girl tax—the unpaid surcharge for rescuing Fia’s swimwear company, screening her terrible boyfriends, remembering her deadlines, and pretending none of it feels like marriage without benefits.

Then Fia introduces Aster to a powerful investor as “my partner.”

One expensive misunderstanding later, they’re attending a luxury founders-and-couples retreat where winning the investment could save Carrow Coast from a predatory takeover. Aster agrees to play girlfriend under a contract containing seventeen rules, three exit clauses, and absolutely no unscheduled kissing.

Fia breaks the kissing rule on the first night.

Now the woman who’s always called herself straight wants private lessons, public practice, and increasingly creative explanations for why Aster keeps waking up in her bed. But when the investment deal threatens everything they’ve built, Fia must decide whether Aster is another resource she can spend—or the partner she’ll finally choose.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Ten years of lesbian pining for a presumed-straight best friend
✅ Fake dating for an investor retreat with one bed and zero boundaries
✅ Bisexual awakening that hits like a structural audit
✅ Financial dirty talk, competence kink, and a seventeen-clause contract
✅ “You already act like my wife” energy
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Swimwear fittings, moonlit swimming, toys, mirrors, and alternating control
✅ A breakup that wrecks you and a reunion that rebuilds you
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including oral, fingering, toys, mirror play, and alternating control), strong language, themes of emotional labor and codependency, bisexual awakening, a predatory investor subplot, and a breakup before HEA. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Past Due

The swimwear company I’d kept alive for a decade was thirteen days from missing payroll, and I was finding out from a bounced supplier invoice instead of from its founder.

I set down my coffee—black, no sugar, the kind of cup that said I’ve already been awake for three hours and none of them were pleasant—and pulled up Carrow Coast’s cash position for the fourth time that morning. The numbers hadn’t improved since 6 a.m. They’d actually gotten worse, because a $14,200 fabric deposit had auto-drafted overnight from an approval Fia must have clicked sometime between her second glass of wine and her third Instagram story.

Thirteen days. Maybe fifteen if I could sweet-talk Meridian Textiles into a net-forty extension, which I could, because their accounts receivable manager liked my voice and didn’t know I was leveraging that. Seventeen if the delayed wholesale payment from Coastal Provisions landed, which it wouldn’t, because I’d called their AP department twice and gotten the verbal equivalent of a shrug in business casual.

I opened a fresh spreadsheet. Named it Bridge to Nowhere v6. Started building scenarios.

This was the part nobody warned you about when you became a fractional CFO for your best friend’s company. Not the spreadsheets—I loved spreadsheets the way other people loved golden retrievers, with sincere and uncomplicated devotion. Not even the emergencies, which arrived on a schedule so predictable I could have built a forecasting model around them. February: post-holiday cash crunch. June: overspent sample development. September: fabric commitments against unconfirmed wholesale orders. December: Fia buying the entire staff surprise gifts from a budget line that did not exist.

No, the part nobody warned you about was the unpaid overtime your heart put in.

I tabulated it sometimes, in the private ledger I kept in my head, the one I’d never bill. This quarter alone: one canceled cycling trip to Vermont because Fia’s fabric supplier had shipped the wrong shade of cerulean and she needed someone to write the dispute letter with the correct contractual temperature. One 2 a.m. forecasting session after her ex-boyfriend Nash’s restaurant drama spilled onto her socials and I’d had to calculate the brand-impact exposure while she cried on my couch eating my emergency peanut butter cups. One Sunday morning delivering overnight oats and a B-vitamin complex to the studio because she’d forgotten to eat for nineteen hours during a sample crisis and her blood sugar was doing something I could only describe as financially irresponsible.

I called it the straight girl tax. The invisible surcharge for being essential to a woman who would never want me the way I wanted her.

The door to my glass-walled office swung open without a knock, because Fia Carrow had never met a boundary that applied to her personally.

“I need your hands,” she said.

A normal sentence. A completely professional request that my nervous system received like a declaration of war.

She stood in the doorway wearing high-waisted linen trousers, a cropped cardigan with the buttons undone, and—over everything—an unfinished Carrow Coast support top in deep bronze, pulled on like a second skin over her clothes. The sample clung to her ribcage, rode the curve of her waist, and framed her breasts with the architectural precision she brought to everything she designed and nothing she budgeted.

Her honey-blonde hair was up in a twist secured by two pencils. A magnetic pin cushion circled her left wrist. She had graphite on her jaw from where she’d been sketching and hadn’t noticed.

I noticed.

“Suki canceled,” she said, breezing past my desk and perching on the edge of the cutting table I kept threatening to remove from my office. “Some kind of stomach thing, which—honestly, suspect timing, because I also asked her to do the trade-show booth layout, and I’m starting to think she’s allergic to logistics.”

“Suki is your fit model.”

“Was my fit model. Currently she’s my unreliable model, which means I am now my own fit model, which means I need someone with functional spatial reasoning to check the side-seam tension on this support structure because I can’t reach my own back and also I don’t understand how tension works when it’s not emotional.”

She said all of this while rearranging three items on my desk—pen cup rotated fifteen degrees, sticky notes moved left, my glasses case opened and then closed without purpose—because Fia experienced other people’s organized spaces as invitations to redecorate.

“I’m in the middle of something,” I said.

“You’re always in the middle of something. You are the middle of something. You’re the load-bearing wall of this entire operation and I need you to bear my load for—” She paused. Blinked. “That came out wrong.”

“Noted.”

“Aster. Please. Five minutes. I’ve got a production call in an hour and I need to know if this underwire channel is going to hold a D-cup or collapse like my retirement plan.”

I saved Bridge to Nowhere v6 and stood up.

She’d already turned around, sweeping her hair over one shoulder to expose the back of the sample. The bronze fabric hugged her shoulder blades, and I could see where the side seam puckered slightly at the second stay—a construction issue, not a fit issue.

“Arms up,” I said.

She raised her arms. The sample lifted with her, exposing a strip of warm skin between its hem and her trouser waistband. I did not look at the strip of warm skin. I looked at the seam.

I stepped behind her and placed both hands on her ribcage, thumbs following the underwire channel from the center gore outward. The fabric was a matte performance knit with four-way stretch and a raw-cut edge that needed binding. I pressed along the channel with my thumbs, testing give. The foam insert shifted under pressure.

“The underwire track is too shallow,” I said. “You’ve got about three millimeters of clearance before the wire migrates. You need to deepen the channel or switch to a wider gauge.”

“Can you feel where it pulls?”

I slid my hands to the side seam. My knuckles grazed the outer curve of her breast through the fabric, and I kept my attention on the thread count the way a surgeon keeps attention on the incision and not on the fact that the patient has a life and a family and a name.

“Here.” I pressed the puckered seam flat with my thumb. “The stay is catching at the junction. Your seamstress probably needs to drop this attachment point by a centimeter.”

“A centimeter,” Fia repeated, and her voice had gone slightly odd. Closer to the register she used when she was thinking about something she hadn’t decided to say yet.

I moved to the strap. Hooked one finger under the left strap and tested the tension, which required pulling it away from her shoulder, which required my fingers to be on her shoulder, which was fine. I’d done this a hundred times. I could do this forever. I could die doing this and my ghost would still be calibrating Fia Carrow’s strap tension in some purgatorial fitting room.

“Strap tension is good,” I said. “But your crossback attachment is sitting too high. It’ll ride up during movement.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“Because I’ve been costing your production for seven years and I pay attention.”

She turned around. We were close enough that I could see the graphite smudge on her jaw in detail, could have reached out and wiped it clean with my thumb, which I would never do, because I had boundaries even if she didn’t recognize them as a concept.

“The sample runs warm,” she said.

“The fabric is temperature-neutral. I’ve seen the spec sheet.”

“I need to talk to you about your cash position,” I said.

“Ugh.” She hopped off the cutting table and started pulling the sample over her head, which involved a brief, devastating interval where the bronze fabric caught on her cardigan and she wrestled it free with the unconscious physicality of someone who changed clothes eleven times a day and had stopped noticing her own body as anything other than a design tool.

I noticed her body. I noticed it the way astronomers notice stars—constant, distant, scientifically documented, and completely beyond reach.

“What about my cash position?” she asked, folding the sample over her arm.

“You’re thirteen days from missing payroll.”

The folding stopped. “That can’t be right.”

“It is right. It’s been right since March, when you declined the BlueCurrent offer without informing me or the board, which shortened your runway by—”

“I declined BlueCurrent because they were going to gut the production team and move everything offshore. That’s not—”

“I’m not questioning the ethics. I’m questioning the disclosure. You made a capital-structure decision without telling your financial adviser, and now we’re in a liquidity crunch that could have been managed if I’d known about it four months ago.”

She pressed her lips together. For a moment, the performance dropped—the brightness, the humor, the gravitational charm—and underneath it was the expression I saw maybe three times a year: Fia Carrow genuinely afraid and trying to calculate whether anyone had noticed.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Bad enough that I restructured your payables at 4 a.m. Not bad enough that I used my own money, because I told you after the last time that I wouldn’t do that again.”

I opened my mouth to start listing options when the office door banged open a second time.

Pippa Lorne, Carrow Coast’s production manager, appeared holding her phone like it contained classified intelligence. She was broad-shouldered and flushed and practically vibrating.

“You need to see this,” she said. “Both of you.”

“TideTurn Ventures just sent a formal invitation. Carrow Coast is one of four finalists for their growth fund.” Pippa’s grin split her face. “They want to meet the founder and—” she looked at the email again—“one ‘life or business partner who best represents the company’s support infrastructure.’ There’s a finalist dinner next week and then a weeklong retreat for the final evaluation.”

The room went still.

TideTurn was the fund. Women-led, mission-aligned, focused on consumer brands with social impact and scalable operations. If Carrow Coast secured TideTurn funding, the payroll crisis evaporated. The adaptive line launched on schedule. Every job in the building survived.

“A weeklong retreat,” I said, because the logistics mattered even when the opportunity glittered. “Where?”

“St. Aurelia Island. Private resort. All expenses covered.” Pippa scrolled. “Finalists bring their partner for the full evaluation period.”

Fia was looking at me.

Not at Pippa. Not at the email. At me.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re about to say that I should be your partner for this.”

“You should be my partner for this.”

She reached across my desk, picked up the RSVP form Pippa had printed, and wrote my name in the partner field.

She didn’t ask.

Ten years. She never asked.

“I haven’t agreed yet,” I said.

Fia capped the pen, set it down on my desk—perpendicular to my keyboard, which she knew I would fix the moment she left—and smiled at me like I was the answer to a question she hadn’t figured out yet.

“You will,” she said. “You always do.”

She walked out with the sample draped over her shoulder and graphite still on her jaw, and I didn’t call her back to wipe it off, and I didn’t look at the RSVP she’d left on my desk, and I didn’t close my eyes and press my fingers to the places on my hands where I could still feel the heat of her ribcage through bronze fabric.

I did all three.

Then I opened a new line in my private ledger—the one that existed only in my head, the one I would never send, the one that cataloged every cost I’d absorbed in a decade of loving a woman who thought my devotion was just good service.

One TideTurn RSVP, completed without authorization, I noted.

Billable amount: TBD.

Emotional exposure: catastrophic.

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