More Than Just Friends

Jessica Harrison is twenty-five, a primary school teacher, and standing in her kitchen in fox pyjamas when the text comes through.

Her boyfriend and his brother have forgotten about a stag do. They are, apparently, already on a train to Amsterdam. The weekend in Whitby that Jess has been planning for two months, the campsite on the clifftop, the big tent, the cool box full of cheap wine, is suddenly not happening.

Except Katie doesn't think so.

Katie Hall. Five foot nine. Blonde. Twenty-five. Jess's best friend since Mrs Pemberton sat them next to each other in Year Three and Katie announced, with a missing front tooth and a tangled ponytail, that they were going to be best friends and that was that. Eighteen years of sleepovers and birthdays and sixth-form heartbreak and Sunday hangovers. Eighteen years of a laugh that lives somewhere in Jess's chest and won't come out no matter how hard she tries to pretend it isn't there.

Katie picks up on the second ring.

Sod them. You and me. Done.

And by one o'clock that afternoon, Jess is in the car with three bottles of prosecco in the boot, a clipboard on the dashboard, and a feeling in her stomach she has been refusing to name since she was about fifteen years old.

More Than Just Friends is a warm, funny, devastatingly filthy story about the weekend two best friends accidentally end up alone together on the Yorkshire coast, and finally, after the better part of two decades, stop pretending. About a clifftop tent and a golden sunset and one bottle too many. About the particular terror of admitting a thing out loud that you have spent your entire adult life telling yourself isn't there. About fish and chips on a harbour wall, a hand that stays a little too long on the small of a back, and a game of truth or dare that neither of them is drunk enough to blame it on.

It is a best-friends-to-lovers story. It is a first-time story. It is a story about eighteen years of waiting, and the single summer weekend when the waiting finally, finally stops.

Two tents were booked. Only one of them is going to get slept in.

A sapphic romance. Funny, tender, filthy, and aching in all the right places.