Baseline

Adrian and Melissa have been best friends since they were four years old. They share a postcode, a history, and an intellectual frequency that has weathered twenty years of school, university, and adult life. They don't date; they just exist in each other's orbit, fixing cars, bleeding radiators, and showing up when it matters.When Melissa buys a crumbling Grade II listed cottage, Adrian brings his toolbox and his weekends. The renovation is a logical equation: his engineering brain, her organisational mind, and a shared tolerance for dust and hard labour.But the attic is a pressure cooker. Forty degrees, no ventilation, and a century of grime. When a stack of old timber collapses, pinning them together in the dark, the platonic distance they have maintained for two decades evaporates. Stripped of clothes by the heat, trapped under debris, and forced to confront the raw, undeniable reality of their bodies, they begin to ask dangerous questions.Why have all their partners been variants of each other?What if the safety they have always relied on is not a barrier, but a foundation?Baseline is a slow‑burn, neurodivergent‑friendly romance about two people who spent twenty years looking for each other in other rooms. Expect explicit consent, sensory detail, competence porn, and a love story that starts with a fallen roof and ends with a family.Includes autistic‑coded protagonists, explicit verbal and non‑verbal consent, close proximity (attic collapse), ordinary bodies, body positivity, childhood friends to lovers, pregnancy epilogue, and a house that finally becomes a home.The foundation was solid all along.Wordcount 19,895