Two Rooms, One Bad Idea

A Sapphic Vacation Fling Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Vacation Fling, Rebound That Becomes Real, Secret Relationship, Rules to Break, Forced Proximity, Shared Bathroom, Couples’ Trip, Greek Island Villa, Mutual Pining, Found Family, Asking for What You Want, Praise Kink, Instruction Kink, Voyeurism, Strap-On, Dual POV, Long Distance, Grand Gesture in a Thunderstorm, HEA

Two rooms. Six rules. One very loud bathroom door.

Nina Rios got dumped ten weeks ago. Paige Whitaker got dumped seven. Neither of them is skipping the couples’ villa trip she already paid for.

Twelve days on a Greek island with two happily married couples. A laminated itinerary that still lists Nina and Paige as Couple 4. One shared hall bathroom with a broken lock and an old latch that goes off like a gunshot every time somebody forgets to lift it.

Their friends have decided the two singles are fragile. They’re wrong. They’re bored, sunburned, and very, very aware of each other. Especially after the bathroom. Especially after the pool at one in the morning.

So they make rules. Nothing leaves the island. The group doesn’t find out. Everyone wakes up in her own bed. No ex talk. Either of them can call it. And absolutely no feelings. Obviously.

There’s just one condition, and it isn’t on the list: if Nina wants something, she has to climb the four stone steps to Paige’s door, knock, and ask for it. Out loud. For the woman who has spent five years remembering everyone’s dentist appointments and asking for nothing, it’s the hottest and most terrifying thing anyone has ever done to her.

By day four the rules are in Sharpie on the back of the itinerary. By day six, half of them are broken. And by the time the plane lands in Minneapolis, the only rule still standing is the one that could break both their hearts.

Two Rooms, One Bad Idea is a scorching ~75,000-word sapphic vacation fling romance with dual POV, a couples’ trip with no couple, a job offer in Copenhagen, a ceramic octopus that sees everything, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Two newly single women stuck sharing a hall bathroom on a Greek island couples’ trip
✅ Six secret rules in Sharpie, broken one at a time
✅ A heroine who has to knock, and ask, and say exactly what she wants out loud
✅ Edging, praise, “hands on the headboard,” a boat cabin, an outdoor shower and a very discreet violet vibrator
✅ A cooking class, a flour handprint and a friend group who finds out in the worst possible way
✅ A long-distance plan written on a legal pad, a thunderstorm grand gesture and a strap-on called the home version
✅ No cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ 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, a vibrator, a strap-on, edging and orgasm control, face-sitting, light power exchange, phone/video sex, solo masturbation, and sex in places where the characters risk being overheard or caught), voyeurism and exhibitionism between consenting adults, strong language, and alcohol. Also includes two recent breakups, a long-distance relationship, and friends who meddle. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

NINA

The itinerary was laminated, which told Nina Rios everything she needed to know about the next twelve days.

She held it against the ferry railing with both hands so the wind off the Aegean couldn’t take it, and read it for the fourth time since Piraeus. Celeste had mailed one to every guest in a padded envelope six weeks ago, with a sprig of dried lavender taped to the corner and a sticky note that said SO EXCITED!!! in purple gel pen. The lavender had not survived the flight. The lamination would survive the heat death of the universe.

VILLA THALIA — NERIA — THE ANNUAL!!!

Underneath, in a tasteful serif font, a schedule. Welcome dinner. Winery tour. Boat day. Cooking class. Couples’ dinner nights, one per couple, assigned. And at the bottom, a neat little roster:

Couple 1: Celeste & Patrick

Couple 2: Esme & Talia

Couple 4: Nina & Paige

There was no Couple 3. Nina had checked. Twice. Couple 3 had simply been deleted, and nobody had renumbered.

What had obviously happened, and what Nina could see as clearly as if she’d been standing behind Celeste’s chair, was this: the original roster had said Couple 3: Nina & Dani and Couple 4: Paige & Lena. Then both relationships had gone off a cliff within three weeks of each other, and Celeste, in a fit of love and efficiency, had opened the file, deleted the two exes, and let the remaining names slide together like spilled water finding the low spot.

So there it was. Ten weeks after Nina had carried the last box out of the Longfellow duplex she’d shared with Dani for four years, she had been demoted to fourth place in a couple she wasn’t in, with a woman she’d spoken to maybe nine times.

Nina was not angry. She was something adjacent to angry that felt more like hysteria filtered through jet lag.

The ferry shouldered through a swell. Salt spray hit her sunglasses. Around her, the upper deck was crowded with Greek grandmothers holding cake boxes, a pair of Dutch backpackers asleep on their packs, and a boy feeding chips to a gull with the focus of a surgeon.

“You’re reading it again.”

The voice came from her left, low and dry, and Nina turned with the itinerary still pressed flat to the rail.

Paige Whitaker stood two feet away with her forearms on the railing. Nina had known she was on this ferry because Paige had texted Same boat, I think. I’m the tall one looking seasick when they’d both realized their post-breakup budget flights landed within an hour of each other. Nina hadn’t found her in the crush at boarding. Now here she was: tall, broad through the shoulders, auburn hair scraped back into a knot the wind was slowly dismantling, a black T-shirt, black shorts, and the kind of fair skin that was going to freckle into a constellation by day three. She did not look seasick. She looked like a lighthouse that had decided to take a vacation.

“I’m studying it,” Nina said. “For the exam.”

“There’s an exam?”

“There’s always an exam with Celeste. You just don’t know it’s happening until she asks why you didn’t bring the hostess gift.”

Paige’s mouth tipped. It was a small movement, a quarter of a smile, and Nina was surprised by how much she wanted the other three-quarters. She’d sat across from Paige at maybe a dozen group dinners over the past three years. Paige was the quiet one at Lena’s elbow, the one who said something devastatingly funny about once an hour, so low that only the people on either side of her caught it. Nina had always been seated too far away. She’d spent more than one evening watching people laugh at Paige’s end of the table and wondering what she’d missed.

“Turn it over,” Paige said.

“I’ve turned it over.”

“Bottom of the second side.”

Nina looked. Couple 4: Nina & Paige.

“Yes,” Nina said. “I’ve seen it. I’m trying to decide if I’m allowed to have feelings about it.”

“I had several.” Paige produced her own itinerary from her back pocket. It was not laminated anymore. Somehow, between Minneapolis and here, she had peeled the plastic off the page. The paper underneath was soft and creased. “On the plane over Greenland.”

“You peeled it?”

“It took three hours. The guy next to me thought I was having a breakdown.”

“Were you?”

“Not yet.” Paige held the paper against the rail and began, with long, quick fingers, to fold it. Nina watched her crease a sharp diagonal, then another, turn it, tuck a corner under with the side of her thumbnail. “Are we Couple 4?”

The question came out mild, but she didn’t look up from the folding when she asked it, and Nina realized it wasn’t a joke. Not entirely. It was a test of the wind. Are you going to be weird about this? Are you going to make me be weird about this?

“I refuse to be Couple 4,” Nina said.

Paige looked up then. Grey eyes. Nina had thought they were blue. They were grey, the color of the water where the sun didn’t hit it.

“Good,” Paige said. “Me too.”

She finished the fold. It was a boat. A small, perfect paper boat with a sharp prow and Celeste’s tasteful serif font running along the hull. COUPLE 4: NINA & on one side, PAIGE tucked into the stern.

Paige held it over the railing between two fingers.

“Wait,” Nina said. “Is that littering?”

“It’s paper.”

“It’s paper with ink on it. There’s a turtle out there somewhere who’s going to choke on my name.”

Paige considered this with what looked like real seriousness. Then she reached over, took Nina’s laminated itinerary out of her hands, and slid her folded boat neatly into the curl of Nina’s fingers in its place.

“Then you keep it,” Paige said. “Evidence.”

Nina stared at the boat. Then at Paige, who was now examining the laminated page with professional interest, tilting it in the light.

“This is good lamination,” Paige said. “Commercial grade. She didn’t do this at home.”

“She went to FedEx.”

“She went to FedEx,” Paige agreed, almost tenderly. “God. I love her.”

“I love her too. I’m going to kill her.”

“Wait until after the boat day. It’s paid for.”

Nina laughed. It came up out of her stomach before she could shape it into something polite, a real laugh, loud enough that the boy with the chips looked over and the gull took the opportunity to steal one. She hadn’t laughed like that in a while. She hadn’t realized it until she heard it.

Paige was watching her with that quarter-smile again, a little wider now.

“So,” Paige said. “Ground rules.”

“We’ve been on this boat for two hours, and you already have ground rules.”

“I had them on the plane.”

“Over Greenland.”

“Over Greenland.” Paige leaned back on her heels, holding the rail at arm’s length, the wind flattening her shirt against her. Nina did not look at what the wind was doing to the shirt. She looked very hard at the island growing on the horizon: a gray-green hump of rock, a white town tumbling down one side of it like spilled sugar. “One. Nobody makes us talk about our breakups.”

“Seconded. Violently.”

“Two. We’re not a unit. If somebody asks Couple 4 to do something, they get two separate answers.”

“What if they’re the same answer?”

“Then they get it twice.”

“Three,” Nina said, because she’d been holding this one in since the airport, “nobody gets to look at me like I’m a sad little bird with a broken wing.”

Paige’s eyes moved over her, quick and assessing. It was not, Nina noted, a sad-little-bird look. It was something slower than that, and it stopped, briefly, at her mouth, and moved on.

“You don’t look like a bird,” Paige said.

“What do I look like?”

Paige seemed to actually think about it.

“Like someone who’s going to find out where the good bakery is before the rest of us get our shoes off.”

That was true, and annoying, and Nina had already found it. It was called Fournos Thalassa, on the harbor, and it opened at six. She’d read four reviews.

“Fine,” Nina said. “Four. If I start doing everyone’s dishes, you have to stop me.”

That one surprised Paige. Nina saw it land. “Why would you do everyone’s dishes?”

Because I always do everyone’s dishes. Because for five years someone else’s coffee mug ended up in my hand every single morning, and I never once watched it get there. Because I’m thirty-three and I just figured out that I’m tired.

“I’m a giver,” Nina said.

Paige held her gaze a second too long. Then she nodded, once, like a contractor accepting a spec.

“Okay. If you start doing everyone’s dishes, I’ll physically remove you from the kitchen.”

“Physically?”

“I’m very tall.”

“I’ve noticed.”

The ferry horn went off right over their heads, a blast so loud and so sudden that Nina flinched and Paige, without seeming to think about it, put a hand flat between her shoulder blades. Just for a second. Just long enough that Nina could feel the heat of her palm through her thin linen shirt, five fingers spread, steady as a wall.

Then it was gone, and Paige was pointing at the harbor, where a white car was flashing its headlights at the dock like a lighthouse that had never learned subtlety.

“That,” Paige said, “is Patrick.”

It was, in fact, Patrick, who came at them down the quay with his arms wide and a straw hat on that he’d clearly bought within the last hour, the price tag still dangling from the brim.

“The singles!” he shouted. “The singles have landed!”

“Oh, no,” Nina said under her breath.

“Rule three,” Paige murmured.

“That’s not the bird thing, that’s a whole new thing.”

Patrick hugged them both at once, which was a feat of engineering given Paige’s height. He smelled like sunscreen and ouzo. He was a large, gentle, pink man who worked in commercial insurance and whose deepest wish in life was for everybody around him to be having a nice time, preferably without him having to arrange it.

“How are you guys? How are you doing?” He held them at arm’s length and gave them each the look. The sad-little-bird look. Nina felt Paige go rigid beside her.

“We’re great, Pat,” Nina said. “We just had a ferry. Ferries are fun.”

“Love that. Love that energy.” He took Nina’s suitcase without asking and threw it into the trunk of a rented Fiat so small it looked like it had been folded by Paige. “The girls are up at the villa. Celeste’s been cooking since ten. There’s a whole thing. Don’t tell her I told you there’s a whole thing.”

The road up from the harbor switched back on itself six times. Patrick drove it with tremendous confidence and no apparent awareness that it was one lane wide. Nina sat in the back with Paige, their knees knocking every time he took a hairpin, the whole island tilting past the windows: white walls, blue shutters, bougainvillea like spilled wine, goats on a slope that seemed physically impossible for goats. Below them the sea went from turquoise to navy in a line so sharp it looked painted.

Every time the car swung left, Paige’s thigh pressed against hers. Every time it swung right, it went away again.

Nina started counting the left turns.

Villa Thalia sat alone on a shelf of rock above the coast road, white and square and low, with a pool so blue it looked fake and a long pergola-covered terrace hung with grapevines. Celeste came out of the front door at a run, barefoot in a white linen dress, dark curls piled up, and hit Nina like a soft, perfumed linebacker.

“You’re here! You’re here! Oh my God. How was the ferry? Was it awful? You look amazing. You look so rested.” She pulled back and held Nina’s face in both hands. Her eyes went shiny. “How are you, really?”

“Really,” Nina said, “I’m great.”

“You don’t have to be great.”

“I know. I’m great anyway. It’s a choice.”

Celeste nodded hard, the way she did when she was storing a piece of information to worry about later, and turned to Paige, and went up on her toes to hug her. “Paige. My tall girl. How’s your heart?”

“In my chest,” Paige said. “Mostly.”

Behind Celeste, Esme came out of the house with Talia trailing behind her. Esme Park was Nina’s oldest friend in the world, a tiny, sharp, beautiful pediatric nurse who had once driven four hours in an ice storm to bring Nina soup and a heating pad. She was also, Nina knew from long experience, about to do exactly the thing Nina had prayed on the ferry she wouldn’t do.

Esme hugged her hard and spoke into her ear. “Hi. I love you. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Thank you.”

“But we can talk about it whenever you want. Even at like three in the morning.”

“I know.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Es.”

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m done.” She pulled back, cupped Nina’s elbow, and lowered her voice. “Are you sleeping?”

Talia, who was Esme’s wife and Paige’s best friend from architecture school and the most sensible person Nina had ever met, put a hand on the back of Esme’s neck and gently steered her off Nina like a woman moving a cat off a laptop.

“Hi, Nina.” Talia kissed her cheek. “Welcome. I’m going to give you a drink and take my wife away.”

“I love you,” Nina told her.

“Everybody does.” Talia turned to Paige and the two of them did a thing that wasn’t quite a hug, a sort of forearm clasp and a shoulder bump, a greeting from people who’d pulled all-nighters building cardboard models of bridges together at twenty. “You okay?”

“Don’t,” Paige said.

“I’m asking if the ferry was okay.”

“The ferry was okay.”

“Great.” Talia’s eyes flicked from Paige to Nina and back again with the faint, analytical interest of someone noticing a load-bearing wall had moved six inches. Then she smiled and said, “There’s wine.”

There was a lot of wine. There was also a woman named Iona Markou, who owned the villa and arrived ten minutes later in a white pickup truck with a clipboard and the bearing of a ship’s captain, and who walked the six of them through the house as if they were new recruits and she had seen recruits like them come and go, and bury them, and come back.

“Pool,” Iona said, pointing. “No glass in the pool area. If I find glass, I keep the deposit. If I find glass in the pool, I keep the deposit and I keep you.”

“Ha,” said Patrick.

Iona looked at him.

“Sorry,” said Patrick.

“Quiet hours,” Iona went on, “eleven at night to eight in the morning. The neighbors are my aunt. She is ninety-one and she hears everything. If she calls me, I call you, and I am not polite at night.”

She led them through the cool, tiled ground floor, past a kitchen the size of Nina’s entire old apartment, up an internal stair to a roof terrace that looked straight down the coast to the town, and back down again. Celeste and Patrick had the main bedroom, which had its own bathroom and a wardrobe Patrick described, with genuine awe, as “a room.” Esme and Talia had the garden suite, which had its own bathroom and French doors onto a private patch of terrace and lemon trees.

“And our singles,” Celeste said, with the bright, careful voice of a woman who had rehearsed this part, “have the courtyard room and the upstairs room. They’re both gorgeous. I really thought about it. Nina, you’re down here—” she opened a blue door off a tiny tiled courtyard full of potted geraniums, “—so you’ve got your own little garden, and you’re close to the kitchen, and I know you like to be up early—”

Close to the kitchen. Nina smiled and said nothing. Paige, she noticed, was looking at her.

“—and Paige, you’re up here.” Up a short flight of stone stairs to a white room with a high bed and a pair of louvered doors thrown open to a balcony that hung over the pool like a diving board. “Because of the view, and because I know you need your space.”

“Thank you,” Paige said. She said it simply, and Nina saw Celeste’s whole face unclench with relief.

“You two share the hall bathroom,” Celeste said. “It’s right between you, on the landing. I hope that’s okay. I tried to see if there was a way to—but the house is the house. You can make a schedule!”

“We can make a schedule,” Nina said.

“We’ll make a laminated schedule,” Paige said, and Celeste laughed, delighted, not getting it at all, and Nina had to look at the floor.

Iona put a hand flat on the bathroom door. It was old, heavy wood painted the same chalky blue as all the shutters, and it hung slightly crooked in its frame.

“This door,” Iona said. “Listen.”

She opened it the normal way. The latch went off with a crack like a starter’s pistol, so sharp it bounced off the stairwell and down into the courtyard. Somewhere outside a bird left a tree.

“Jesus,” said Esme.

“It is the old latch,” Iona said. “It has done this since my grandmother. Now, see.” She closed it, put her palm under the handle, and lifted, raising the whole door a quarter inch on its hinges before she turned the knob. It swung open without a sound.

“Lift,” Iona said. “Always lift, after eleven. Otherwise my aunt calls me and she says, ‘Iona, someone in your house has a weak bladder,’ and I have to hear about it at church.” She tapped the inside of the frame. “Also, the lock is broken. My cousin comes Tuesday. Until then, you knock. Yes?”

“Yes,” Nina said.

“Yes,” Paige said.

Iona looked at the two of them, a long, flat, unimpressed look, the look of a woman who had rented this house to forty years of tourists and had learned exactly what a hall bathroom with a broken lock between two single women’s bedrooms meant, and had decided it was absolutely not her problem.

“Good,” she said, and left.

The whole thing turned out to be a whole thing.

Celeste had made spanakopita from scratch, and a lamb shoulder was slow-roasting for dinner, and there was a bowl of cherries on the terrace table so red they looked lacquered. There were also, Nina discovered after twenty minutes, at least four separate ongoing efforts to make her and Paige feel included, all of which were making her feel like a pair of rescue dogs at an adoption event.

Patrick wanted to know if they’d thought about trying the apps.

Esme wanted to know if Nina had eaten today, and when Nina said yes, wanted to know what.

Celeste wanted to make sure they both knew that it was okay if they cried at the welcome dinner because she was going to make a toast and it was going to be emotional.

Talia wanted nothing, and sat at the end of the table cracking pistachios with the quiet satisfaction of a woman watching other people’s car crashes from a safe distance.

Paige had vanished.

Nina sat with a glass of cold white wine sweating in her hand and a cherry pit in her cheek and smiled until her face hurt. She loved these people. She’d known Esme since they were eighteen and sharing a dorm room the size of a parking space. She’d been at Celeste and Patrick’s wedding. She’d held Talia’s hair the night Talia passed her licensing exam and celebrated on tequila. These were her people. And every one of them, she realized, was looking at her the way you looked at a dropped glass that hadn’t shattered yet. Waiting for the crack.

She didn’t know how to tell them she wasn’t going to crack. That the thing she’d felt, the morning she’d driven away from the duplex with the last of her books in the back seat, hadn’t been heartbreak. It had been the sensation of putting down a backpack after five years of hiking with it, and realizing her shoulders could go all the way up to her ears and all the way down again.

She was sad. She was. She was also lighter than she’d been since her twenties, and it felt obscene to say so, so she didn’t.

“I’m going to go rinse off,” she said, around four-thirty, standing up. “Ferry salt. I feel like a pretzel.”

“Of course! Go! Take your time!” Celeste said, as if Nina had announced she was going to go have a good cry. “There are new towels in the cupboard. I put lavender in.”

There was lavender in the towel cupboard. Of course there was.

Nina went up the stairs from the courtyard to the landing with her toiletry bag under one arm and a towel over her shoulder. Through the open stairwell window she could see the pool, glassy and blue and empty, and next to it, by one of the loungers, a pair of black slides kicked off on the stone. Paige’s. She must have gone down to swim. Or she was down on the rocks below the pool wall, getting away from it all, smart woman.

The house was quiet up here. Thick walls, the hum of cicadas, the distant clink of Celeste moving dishes. The bathroom door stood shut and crooked in its frame, chalky blue.

It wasn’t after eleven. Nina could have opened it the normal way and let the latch go off like a gunshot and nobody would have cared. But down on the terrace, someone would have heard it, and in ten minutes Esme would be gently knocking to ask if she was okay in there, and Nina could not do one more are you okay. Not right now. She just wanted five minutes with a locked door. Or an unlocked door. A shut door, at least.

She put her palm under the handle the way Iona had shown them.

She lifted.

The door rose a quarter inch on its old hinges and swung open in perfect, buttery silence, and Nina stepped inside and stopped.

The bathroom was all white tile and steam and late light. There was a deep stone basin, a window full of sea, and on the far side a walk-in shower with no curtain, only a low step and a half-wall of tile. The shower was off. The fan was roaring. The steam was still rolling off the glass in slow, heavy curls.

And Paige was stepping out of it.

She was naked, and she was wet, and she was looking at Nina.

The world did a very slow thing. Nina was aware of a lot of information arriving at once and none of it being processed in a useful order. Water. Water running down the long line of Paige’s throat, over her collarbones, which were sharp and freckled, down between her breasts, which were small and high, her nipples pink and drawn tight from the air of the fan. A spill of freckles across her shoulders like someone had flicked a paintbrush at her. The broad strong slope of her back in the mirror behind her. The flat plane of her stomach, a pale scar low on the left hip, and below that a trimmed triangle of dark auburn hair, a few shades darker than her head, with water beaded in it, catching the light from the window.

She was beautiful. Not pretty. Built. Like something designed with care.

And Paige did not grab the towel.

It was right there, on the hook beside the shower, an arm’s length away. Nina saw her see it. Saw her not reach for it. For one second, two, three, Paige Whitaker just stood there on the wet tile, dripping, completely naked, and let Nina look.

Then she reached over, unhurried, and took it off the hook, and held it loosely against her front with one hand, which covered approximately nothing important.

“You found,” Paige said, “the trick with the door.”

Nina’s mouth opened. Nothing intelligent came out. What came out was: “Your shoes are by the pool.”

“I took them off by the pool.”

“So I thought you were in the pool.”

“I was in the pool. Then I wanted to shower.” Paige tilted her head. Water dripped from the end of her hair, which was down now, dark red and heavy against her shoulders, much longer than Nina had realized. “Iona said knock.”

“Iona said knock after eleven.”

“I’m pretty sure Iona said knock in general.”

“It’s four-thirty.”

“Is it.” Paige glanced at the window, where the light had gone gold and slanted and syrupy. She didn’t seem in any hurry about this conversation. She seemed, in fact, to be enjoying it. “Huh.”

Nina realized she was still staring. She realized that she should not still be staring. She realized that her face was hot, and so was the back of her neck, and so was a place considerably south of either of those, a slow heavy pulse she hadn’t felt in a long time, not like this, not so suddenly and so stupidly, like a teenager in a locker room, like an idiot.

She also realized, with a strange, falling clarity, that Paige was staring back.

Nina was wearing a sleeveless linen shirt the color of a tangerine, sticking to her from the ferry and the heat, and a pair of cut-off shorts, and nothing much else. And Paige’s grey eyes were moving over her the way they had on the ferry, slow and specific, a long look that went down and took its time coming back up. It paused at her throat. At the open top button of her shirt. At her legs. At her mouth.

Neither of them said anything for long enough that the fan seemed very loud.

“I’ll,” Nina said. She gestured behind her, at the door, at the universe. “I’ll just.”

“Sure,” Paige said.

Nina backed up a step. Her heel hit the doorframe. She turned, which was a mistake, because the mirror over the basin caught both of them at once: Nina in her tangerine shirt, flushed to her hairline; Paige behind her, tall and wet and naked except for one white towel held like an afterthought, watching her go.

The corner of Paige’s mouth curled. All the way, this time. The whole smile. Slow and wicked and not at all reserved, and Nina was abruptly sure she had never once seen it at any of those dinners. That nobody had. That it was a different woman entirely, one who’d been folded up very small and very carefully at the edge of someone else’s life, and had just, for one second, come unfolded.

“Nina,” Paige said.

Nina stopped with her hand on the door.

“Next time,” Paige said, “you should probably knock.”

Nina went out. She shut the door behind her the normal way.

The latch went off like a gunshot, and the whole house heard it.

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First Snow — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

December in Longfellow. Paige is home for Christmas, the first real snow is coming down, and Nina is sitting on her kitchen counter in a grey sweater and Paige’s wool socks, exactly the way Paige once pictured it at three in the morning on a Greek island. Then Nina asks for something new. Out loud. And this time it’s Paige who has to say please.

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