"Not Sorry" is a novella of 20,200 words — a contemporary, coming-of-age steamy romance told entirely from a male point of view, set against the heat of a Montana summer in a small college town where everyone knows everyone and the two houses next door to each other share a garden gate that should have stayed closed. Built on the best friend's sister trope, this is a story about wanting what you are not supposed to want, and the particular torture of being in love with the girl living next door.

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Lenny has known Paco since they were seventeen. He has known Paco's sister, Carlotta, almost as long — she was just always there, in the background, part of the furniture of a friendship he would do anything to protect. He did not mean to fall in love with her. He is fairly sure it started on a dock, on a hot afternoon, when she handed him a soda and her arm brushed his and something in him recalibrated without asking permission.

That was a mistake. Because Carlotta is eighteen now, with short orange hair and bare feet and a grey hoodie she borrowed from him once and never gave back. She laughs too loud and feels too much and she is completely, categorically off limits. Lenny knows this. He reminds himself at noon, and again at dinner, and again at three in the morning when he cannot sleep and hates himself for the reason why.

He is not supposed to want her. Paco is his best friend — his person, the guy who trusted him with everything. There is no version of this that does not cost him everything. There is no version where nobody gets hurt. Lenny knows all of this, and he still cannot stop.

Because Carlotta, it turns out, has not been waiting for him to get over it. She has been waiting for him to make a move.

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If you have ever read a romance and wished, just once, that you could get inside the guy's head — really inside it, the want and the guilt and the moment he stops fighting — "Not Sorry" was written for you. This is not a story about a hero who has it together. It is a story about a young man undone slowly, completely, and without any clean exits, by a girl he was never supposed to look at twice. Tender, tense, and achingly real, "Not Sorry" is the best friend's sister story you will not stop thinking about.

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