Enemies to Lovers

By Aster Glenn Gray

Handcuffed together. Only one bed. Which will win: Megan and Sarah's sizzling sexual attraction, or their compulsion to correct each other's atrocious fandom opinions?

Shy library science student by day, fanfic writer by night, Megan is thrilled when she discovers her new crush Sarah shares her favorite fandom. Smart, gorgeous, and brashly confident in her thoughts on fandom, Sarah is Megan's dream girl… until Megan realizes that Sarah is also her Tumblr nemesis, who called Megan's popular ongoing fic "the cancer that is killing fandom." Clearly, they must never speak again.

But when a writing club exercise leaves them handcuffed together, they have no choice but to duke out their differences, until they reach an agreement on the most important question of all: is hatesex as insanely hot in real life as it is in fic? (Yes. Yes, it is, at least in this steamy f/f novelette.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aster Glenn Gray
• Release date: Apr 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215564806

Aster Glenn Gray

Aster Glenn Gray writes historical romances and fairy tale retellings. (And maybe other things too. She is still a work in progress.) When she is not writing, she spends much of her time haunting libraries and contemplating whether it is time for another hot chocolate.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Megan leaned against the bar, nibbling a parmesan-garlic fry and plotting her escape from this graduate student shindig. You’ve gotta go, her fandom friend Katie had told her, when Megan mentioned that the Graduate Student Union was throwing Winter Holiday Bash 2015. "You’ve been complaining to me for ages that you don’t know anyone in Bloomville but Sarah from writing club, and you only ever see her at writing club. So get off Tumblr, go to this party, and meet someone! And even if you don’t meet anyone, you won’t have to cook dinner."

The allure of not cooking dinner had propelled Megan out of the house. But a girl couldn’t live by hors d’oeuvres alone, and Megan felt distinctly out of place. The dim light, the crowd of bodies, the loud quotations from Foucault rising above the hubbub of talk... She just wanted to go home.

But she had promised Katie to give it a whole half hour, and so far she’d only been here—she checked her watch—twenty-eight minutes.

She wished she’d brought her phone. At least then she could check Tumblr. But of course the whole reason she’d left her phone behind was to get away from Tumblr and escape temptation to weigh in on round one thousand of the woobie Mishka wars.

Megan shoved another fry in her mouth. Megan’s nemesis Fireswamp had been so fucking annoying since the season four trailer for Paranoid came out. In the trailer, Mishka took out an M16 operative, and Fireswamp seemed to think that assassination conclusively proved that woobie Mishka interpretations were wrong. As if exploring potential interpretations untapped by the original source wasn’t half the point of fanfic!

And Paranoid left so much potential angst on the table. The show was so damn frustrating, offering just the briefest hints of the torture and brainwashing that had transformed Michael the hotshot CIA operative into Mishka, badass KGB assassin bent on killing his former best friend and colleague Jack. God. What kind of monster could look at that brainwashing chair and not want to wrap Mishka up in blankets and give him a bowl of soup?

Fireswamp, apparently. As far as Fireswamp was concerned, woobie Mishka interpretations were—to quote her anti-rec of Megan’s fic, Starlight—the cancer that’s killing fandom. 

No, no, no. Megan was supposed to be distracting herself, not composing yet another mental screed she would never post about the cathartic nature of woobie fics where the canonical traumatized badass broke down and cried and received endless comfort and cuddles. Maybe it wasn’t realistic that he’d be quite so helpless as Megan made him in Starlight, but sometimes realism wasn’t the point.

She really should just unfollow Fireswamp. Enough time had passed since Fireswamp wrote that nasty review of Starlight that probably no one would notice or think it was connected.

Megan propelled herself abruptly away from the bar, as if she could propel herself away from thoughts about Paranoid as well. She’d swing by the bruschetta buffet one last time. Maybe one last circuit around the room would help her find a fellow library science student, and then she’d have someone to talk to.

The buffet occupied a tall bar table in a quiet corner of the room. Megan loaded up a croute with the chopped mushroom bruschetta and checked her watch again. Thirty seconds until she could go.

Megan? Megan, is that you?

Megan’s bite of bruschetta nearly went down her windpipe. It was Sarah from writing club, and Jesus Christ, she cleaned up nicely. Not that she didn’t look amazing in her usual jeans and t-shirt, but now she wore a tightly nipped 1940s-style blue dress that emphasized her usually camouflaged curves.

Sarah, blurted Megan. She dragged her eyes up from Sarah’s fabulous chest to her face and nearly swooned again: Sarah wore bright red lipstick.

I didn’t realize you were a grad student! Sarah said. Oh my God, I’m so happy. I thought everyone else in writing club was an undergrad, you know, so I’ve been keeping the whole grad student thing on the down low, but I’m sooooo glad to see you here! What are you studying?

In the heat of the room Megan could smell the lush smooth scent of Sarah’s lipstick, as well as a faint hint of... Was that cinnamon? Was cinnamon a perfume now? Or, oh God, maybe she’d been baking. Swoon.

And she was a good writer, too. A little shaky on SPAG sometimes, but no one was perfect, and she could pack so much emotion into—

I’m studying biochemistry, Sarah said.

Oh! Megan said, dragging her brain together. Sarah had asked for Megan’s field of study, not a meditation on why Sarah was her dream girl. Um, I’m in library science, Megan said. Yeah.

Oh, that’s so great! said Sarah, which was probably the first time in the history of forever that anyone said that about Megan’s career choices. Everyone else was all library science? You realize that’s a dying field, right? I love books. As you know. Do you have a favorite book? Then Sarah smacked a hand to her cheek. "Oh my God, that’s such a bad question! I bet you’re standing there all, ‘Only like six hundred, Jesus.’"

Megan had to laugh. You’re right, she said. "The first five hundred times people asked it, it was a big problem for me, but I’ve actually come up with