Fishing for Feelings is a 29,000-word contemporary romance novella — friends to lovers, mutual pining, slow burn — set during one hazy summer in a Northeast college town in the early 2010s. Think punk clubs, vinyl records, late-night diners, and the patient, quiet work of building an aquarium from scratch. This is straight romance at its core, but it breathes: there are lesbian subplots, both twins get kissed, and sexuality gets explored without easy answers. For readers who want their love stories messy, their characters complicated, and their summers long.

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Jade is a Chinese American plant science student with mint-green hair and a carefully compartmentalized life: waitress by night, dutiful daughter to traditional parents by phone, and best friend to Kairi — the quiet Japanese American martial artist who shows up with soup when she's sick and helps build her aquarium without being asked.

She loves him. She's known it since April, since the afternoon the aquarium's soft green glow fell across both of them and he put his arm around her like it was the most natural thing in the world. But he's Japanese American, she's Chinese American, and between them sits the weight of WWII history — a weight her father would never forgive her for crossing.

So she says nothing. And neither does he.

Then the summer gets complicated. A mistaken identity at a punk club leads Jade to kiss Kairi's twin brother Rinri — and everything explodes. Kairi pulls away, hurt in ways he can't name. Jade spirals, kissing Demi (Rinri's girlfriend, who is her own kind of hurricane) and then Faye, a gentle journalism student who offers safety and no complications. Meanwhile Kairi disappears into something with Demi that was always going to end badly. Brothers come to blows. Friends become strangers. And through it all, that aquarium grows lush and green while everything else falls apart.

By the time summer ends, both of them are alone and out of places to hide. Jade had Faye. Kairi had Demi. They used those relationships like exits — and now the exits are closed.

Which leaves only one door: each other. But can two people who've hurt everyone around them — including each other — deserve a happy ending? And is Kairi brave enough to finally say the thing he's been swallowing since April?

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Fishing for Feelings is a slow-burn romance for readers tired of tidy love stories. Friends to lovers, yes — but also avant-garde in its willingness to let characters make terrible choices and still deserve love. The plants breathe. The aquarium breathes. The summer stretches long and full of mistakes. If you want a book that moves the way real feelings do — slowly, stubbornly, with wrong turns and too much waiting — this is it. Not a romance that rushes toward the kiss. A romance that earns it.

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• Fishing for Feelings. Part 1.

• Fishing for Feelings. Part 2.