Sapphic Romance by Heather Grey

After ten years of distance, only one wall separates them now.

Talia Hart is a free-spirited artist bartending her way through her troubles. She's collecting rejection emails, chasing women who never stay past sunrise, and keeping real intimacy safely out of reach since her ex shattered her world. Not that it's ever worked for anyone.

Natalie Bennett runs her life like a spreadsheet. Her love life runs on the same system, with the same exhausting results. Every partner follows the ideal script: a nice guy who mimics everything she's been told to want. But that means she's still waiting for the spark everyone talks about. She's watched enough romcoms to know exactly what it's supposed to feel like, and now she's wondering if she's broken or if she's just been asking the wrong question entirely.

Talia and Natalie were once inseparable. High school best friends who shared rain-soaked porches, movie nights, and the kind of easy closeness that felt like it could survive anything. Then college happened, and distance, and the slow drift that neither of them ever quite found the words to stop.

When a roommate emergency lands them under the same roof in Brooklyn, ten years of separation fall away. So does something Talia has been running from for a decade, and a question Natalie has never thought to ask herself.

In The Next Room is a slow-burn sapphic romance about the courage it takes to stop running from the person who's always felt like home.

A shy tech. A bold actress. And a secret that threatens to take center stage.

Rae Kim is happiest where no one's watching, hidden in oversized hoodies, behind the curtains, and in the backstage shadows. A college theater kid to her bones, she helps light the world onstage, quietly dreaming of the day she'll get to shape it herself. But from the wings, she sketches life around her instead of taking the leap to live inside it.

Delaney Rhodes was born for the spotlight, and she's thriving there…even if the rest of her life is also a performance. On campus, she's becoming the student everyone knows, the one who never misses a note or forgets a mark. She's spent years perfecting the art of seeming fearless while keeping the parts of herself that feel too messy, too risky to name, safely hidden.

Tech week for Rent is supposed to be exhausting, not life changing. But a few stolen glances and one inadvertent gesture turn into late-night escapes that become breathless moments on the theater rooftop, where the campus is quiet and the stakes of real life are beyond the fourth wall.

What Rae and Delaney feel is real. But sharing it with the world? Unthinkable, especially when Delaney's controlling ex threatens everything they've built without even knowing Delaney has moved on. Rae clings to her first taste of true love until a heart-shattering revelation turns it into the greatest betrayal.

They only have one chance to rewrite the script. Choose each other beyond the shadows, choose to step into the light, or lose everything, including each other.

In a world built on lighting cues, scripted lines, and fleeting moments, can they want enough to risk being seen—really seen—together?