Learning Curves

by Alison Cochrun

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A swoon-worthy sapphic romance following two women who are thrown together on a European adventure, from the Lambda Literary Award–winning author of the “sexy, insightful, and utterly charming” (BuzzFeed) Kiss Her Once for Me.

Thirty-five-year-old Seattleite Sadie Wells needs an escape. She’s desperate to escape her monotonous routines, the family business that has consumed her entire life, and the unexpected gay panic that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about herself. So when her injured sister offers Sadie her place on a tour along Portugal’s Camino de Santiago, she decides this is the perfect chance to get away from it all.

After three glasses of wine on the plane and some turbulence convince Sadie she won’t even survive the flight, she confesses all her secrets to her seatmate, Mal. The problem: the plane doesn’t crash, and it turns out Mal is on her Camino tour. Worst of all, Sadie learns that she is on a tour specifically for queer women, and that her two-hundred-mile trek will be a journey of self-discovery, whether she wants it to be or not.

Fascinated by the woman who drunkenly came out to her on the plane, Mal offers to help Sadie relive the queer adolescence she missed out on as they walk the Camino. As Sadie develops her newfound confidence, Mal grapples with a complicated loss and unexpected inheritance. But as their relationship blurs the lines between reality and practice, they both must decide if they will forever part at the end of the tour or chart a new course together.

With “funny, poignant” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) prose, Alison Cochrun explores the power of letting go of your past and realizing that it’s never too late to live as your authentic self.

Release date: September 2, 2025

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One

ONE SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Thursday, May 8, 2025
Sadie

Nothing good happens when I drink red wine, and I’m already on my second glass of Chateau Ste. Michelle when the man sitting across from me starts talking about cryptocurrency.

This is why I told my sister no more tech bros.

I’m not sure if he is for cryptocurrency or against it or simply trying to educate the ignorant masses, but I nod along to his lengthy diatribe while discreetly checking my phone under the table. Only thirty-eight more minutes.

In thirty-eight minutes, I will fake a dental emergency or a dead cat or an early-morning meeting. In thirty-eight minutes, I will use one of my innumerable standby excuses for bailing on a first date, and before too long, I’ll be in bed with a lavender face mask, watching HGTV and doomscrolling before falling asleep by nine o’clock.

In thirty-eight minutes, I’m allowed to call it. That’s the misguided agreement I made with my sister.

“And, of course, you know what an NTF is,” my date continues after a sip of his Imperial IPA. I just keep nodding and drinking my wine. So very, very misguided.

It was red wine that got me into this mess in the first place.

My sister, Vi, is a travel influencer who treats my house like a way station, but she kindly graced Mom and me with her presence over the holidays, in between her eastern Europe tour of Christmas markets and her spelunking trip to New Zealand. After sharing an entire crockpot of her homemade glühwein, Vi and Mom started grilling me about my love life, like they always do. My happiness—or, more accurately, my lack of abject misery—is guided by one simple rule: never discuss my love life with my family.

This used to be easily accomplished, because I had no love life to speak of. While my middle school friends were getting their first crushes, I was still playing Barbies with Vi; while my high school friends were getting their first boyfriends, I was maintaining a 4.0 and working six days a week at my Nan’s antique store. In college, there were casual flirtations that never went anywhere, and a few drunk kisses that I usually regretted even more than the hangover.

Then my Nan died, and my whole life changed, and there wasn’t any time to think about romance or relationships or what I even wanted. But that never stopped my mother from trying to set me up with every man under fifty who crossed her path. It never stopped my little sister from coercing me onto the dating apps.

Discussing my love life with them only reinforces their delusion that I want their help.

But thanks to fucking glühwein, I did discuss it. I drunkenly told them that I am giving up on romance once and for all, that I don’t want to date anymore, and that I am perfectly content by myself.

Not surprisingly, this drunken declaration did not go over well. My mother cried about never having grandchildren and my sister confidently vowed to find me the perfect man.

I burped brandy and cardamon as I told her the perfect man does not exist.

“That’s because you’re too picky,” Vi said. That’s what she always says. As if I should just settle for the first man who’s nice to his mom and doesn’t send unsolicited dick pics. As if I haven’t tried to develop feelings for all the men I’ve dated. Most of my friends from college have husbands now; several have kids; they all file joint taxes and have a built-in plus-one to weddings and an emergency contact who doesn’t frequently travel to remote locations with no cell service. Developing feelings for one of these men would be the path of least resistance.

“Maybe I don’t need a man to be fulfilled,” I told them. My certainty was, unfortunately, undermined by a drunk hiccup.

“Maybe you need to give your dates a fair try,” my mom insisted.

“Maybe you need to let me find you a man,” Vi said, rubbing her hands together in an ominous fashion.

Maybe you both need to let me live my life without your constant meddling. Is what I would have said, if I was ever honest with my family.

Thus, a glühwein-motivated arrangement began to take shape because Vi has the confidence of someone who has never been told no. A benefit of being a younger sibling, I think. She always had a safety net to catch her. When our parents fought, I was there to distract her with an art project and a Broadway musical soundtrack played at full volume. When my dad took off and my mom couldn’t get out of bed for nearly two years, I was the one who French braided Vi’s hair before soccer games and packed her school lunches. She always had me.

That’s how she turned her love of travel into a full-time job as a successful influencer under the handle cestlavi. It’s how she became a freelance writer at some of the biggest travel publications in the country. It’s how she bullied me into this agreement.

I would let my sister set me up on as many dates as she wanted before my thirty-fifth birthday. But if she couldn’t find the perfect man for me by then, both her and my mom had to accept that I’m happy on my own.

There were rules: I had to promise to keep an open mind about each man; I had to give each date at least an hour before dismissing him; and I had to kiss every man who initiated it, so I could find out if we had chemistry.

Vi called this the butterfly factor. As in, “What if you think he’s a dud, but then you kiss him and feel butterflies?” Because my sister is ridiculous.

While I was reluctant to sign up for five months of horrible, hops-flavored first kisses, I was even more reluctant to argue with my sister. So, thanks to familial pressure and the lubricating wonders of mulled wine, I agreed.

I went from going on one or two dates per year to going on four dates in the month of January alone, slotting in an hour wherever I could: after a twelve-hour workday; on a Saturday morning after spin class; between tearing out the old carpet in my bedroom and retiling the kitchen backsplash.

First, there was the marathon runner who insisted we hike Tiger Mountain so he could not-so-subtly assess my overall health, turning a first date into the Presidential Fitness Test of my middle school nightmares.

Then there was the guy who took me to a film festival in West Seattle to watch Full Metal Jacket and stuck his hand down my shirt during the scene where Vincent D’Onofrio dies, effectively ruining all nipple-play for the rest of my life.

And there was the Zillow executive who insisted we sit on the same side of the booth, like a serial killer. At minute fifty-two, he started stroking my love handles while telling me that he loved women “with a little something to hold on to.”

But for every walking red flag, there was a decent-enough man too. I’ve been on sixteen dates since Christmas, endured nine butterfly-less first kisses, and when the timer ran out on my obligated hour for each date, I found a polite, if abominably dishonest, reason to leave. Like I always do.

And at a certain point, when you can’t make it longer than an hour with sixteen different men, you start to wonder if maybe the problem isn’t with them at all…

But now my thirty-fifth birthday is in four days, so my sister pulled out the stops with the seventeenth man, who is currently taking another sip of beer.

Grant Foster owns a successful tech start-up, volunteers at an after-school program that teaches kids how to code, and eats dinner with his grandparents once a week. He has a border collie and an electric car; he’s financially stable; he goes to therapy and talks openly about going to therapy; and he’s conventionally handsome, with Chris Hemsworth’s physique, Chris Pine’s eyes, and Chris Evans’s smile. He’s the best parts of all the Chrises, and he’s the kind of man I should be attracted to, minus the current tangent into tech-mansplaining hell.

I don’t know even what my boxes are, but I know the man sitting across from me checks all of them, and I’m still counting down the minutes until this date is over. (Thirty-two. I check again while he’s explaining the difference between blockchains and Bitcoin mining.)

Part of me wants this date to fail. I want the clock to run out on my sister’s scheme, for another birthday to come and go without my life changing in any significant way, for my family to never again ask about why I haven’t met the one and finally abandon me to my self-chosen spinsterhood.

But there’s also a part of me that wants Grant to be that one. I want this to work, because that would be so much easier than the alternative: questioning the reason why it doesn’t work, why it never works.

“I’m boring you,” Grant says suddenly. I didn’t think he was paying any attention to me, so his abrupt recognition of my existence causes me to spill some of my wine. He must’ve caught me checking the time again. (Twenty-nine minutes.)

“I’m sorry. I tend to get tunnel vision when I’m talking about my passions.” He bashfully glances down at the scuffed table, and I feel a surge of compassion for the guy.

“It’s okay,” I reassure him. “Just wait until I get going on the intricacies of reupholstering a chair. Besides, I totally wanted to know more about non-fungus tickets.”

“Non-fungible tokens,” he corrects.

“Tokens, yes, right. I wanted to learn about those.”

He flashes me the Chris Evans smile. “No you didn’t.”

“No, I really didn’t,” I admit, and he laughs at himself. Most men never laugh at themselves. Grant rolls his broad, muscular, Chris Hemsworth shoulders, and they strain against the fabric of his Henley, and maybe this can work.

“I want to know more about you,” he says, leaning forward so he can hear me over the noise of the bar. “Tell me: Who is Sadie Wells?”

And shit. I want to go back to the lecture on fungus tokens, because I don’t have the faintest fucking idea how to answer that question.

I swallow hard and try to hide the stress hives breaking out along the backs of my hands. He’s not trying to trigger an existential identity crisis, but I’m nothing if not an overachiever.

“Who is Sadie Wells…?” I repeat as if I’m ruminating on my answer, not inwardly wishing I had a self-destruct button. Because somewhere around date nine back in March, when a marine biologist who looked like Jonathan Bailey didn’t stir anything in me, I started to realize I don’t really know myself at all.

“Who am I?” I take a long drink of red wine to stall. It’s a Thursday night, and the bar on Queen Anne Hill is crowded with thirtysomething, working professionals. Confident, successful people who probably know how to answer basic questions about themselves without breaking out in stress hives.

“Yeah,” Grant continues to prod. “I want to know the real you.”

It’s a noble goal, to be sure, but sixteen dates in four months have taught me that even I don’t know who Sadie Wells is. I check the time again. Twenty-seven minutes.

“Your sister mentioned you’re a small-business owner,” he says after another stretch of awkward silence.

“Yes!” I blurt, desperate for this conversational lifeline. “I run an antiques store.”

He eyes me over his pint glass. “Aren’t you a little young to work with antiques? Isn’t that sort of…”

“For old people? Uh, yeah. Mostly.”

“So how did you end up running it?”

At least this is a question I can answer, no identity crisis required. “My great-grandparents bought a Victorian house in Queen Anne when they came here from Ireland in the twenties, and my Nan inherited it. She was obsessed with preserving the original detailing of the house and hunting down antique furniture to match its history. When my grandad died when I was six, my Nan used his life insurance payout to convert the downstairs into an antique and recycled furniture store. And then when she died, she left both the house and the store to me.”

“Fascinating,” he says, and the handsome bastard seems to genuinely mean it. “Tell me more about the store.”

I’d rather not. “Uh, it’s not… very interesting.”

“I think everything about you is interesting,” he insists with a flirtatious grin. At least, I think his grin is of the flirtatious variety.

The problem is, I don’t know how to tell him more about the store without ripping my heart open for this stranger. I can’t tell him that when I was a kid, back when Nan and Grandad were alive, that old house felt warm and welcoming, their laughter always loud enough to drown out my parents’ screaming matches. But now that they’re both gone, it feels like living alongside ghosts, and no matter how many home renovation projects I do to my creaky house, nothing changes that.

But I can’t talk about this with an amalgamation of Chrises. Hell, I can’t even talk about it with my mom and sister.

“Tell me about your start-up?” I non sequitur, and Grant gets swept up in another passionate monologue about his work. I study his rugged stubble, his kind eyes, and I try, try, try to feel some level of attraction.

When that doesn’t work, I reach for my wineglass again.

“But I never want my job to be the only thing that defines me,” Grant is saying. “What are some of your hobbies?”

“Uh…” It’s another stumper. “I-I don’t really have time for hobbies.”

I used to have time for hobbies. I used to have interests and passions. Well, one passion.

I grew up breathing new life into old, well-loved items under Nan’s tutelage. At seven, she had me polishing brass lamps she found at flea markets for resale, and by nine, I could reupholster a chair. By eleven, I was converting old dressers into bathroom vanities and using a table saw unsupervised. I loved every minute of it.

It seemed like an act of magic, to take a discarded piece of furniture that no one wanted anymore and turn it into something beautiful. It was all I ever wanted to do with my life: give second chances to broken dressers or water-stained tables or ripped couches.

But when I was twelve, my dad took off, and my mom fell into a long, dark, depressive episode, so I had to take over her duties at the store too. I scoured the Seattle Times obituaries to get leads on upcoming estate sales, haggling with next of kin. I learned to use QuickBooks when other kids were using their Nintendo Game Boys, and when I got accepted to the University of Washington, there was no question about what I was going to study. I would major in business. To help Nan.

Only, before I even finished my undergrad degree, I lost my Nan too.

One day she was single-handedly hauling armoires up the stairs, and the next day she’d fainted behind the register after skipping breakfast. It turned out to be aggressive, stage-four breast cancer. She was gone within a month. And the house, the store, her entire legacy… She left it all to me.

I was only twenty-one when I inherited a business that was failing and a house that was falling apart.

There was a lot less time for furniture restoration projects after that. Less time for friends and dating and self-reflection. Less time for having any kind of life outside that dusty store.

Until this bet with Vi gave me sixteen hours of self-reflection while sitting across from men I didn’t want to kiss, and I started questioning absolutely everything.

“What about travel?” Grant prods. “I usually try to take two or three big trips every year. I think it’s important to travel abroad and to experience different viewpoints,” he pontificates. “I can’t believe how many Americans have never even left the country.”

Unfortunately, I am one of those Americans. “I would like to be able to travel,” I mumble. “Um, I’ve never really had time for that either. I’ve always been too busy running the store.”

I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a day off, let alone multiple days off in a row to take a vacation. I’ve had to settle for living vicariously through my sister’s adventures.

“Well, maybe I could convince you to take a trip someday,” Grant says. Forty minutes into our first date. A knot of anxiety forms in my stomach, and it gets worse when he reaches over to put his hand on top of mine. I flinch, and he definitely notices the hives.

“Uh, sorry, it’s a… a stress response,” I tell him before promptly reclaiming my hand and hiding it under the table.

Grant misconstrues this detail. “Are you nervous about this date? That’s so cute.”

He says it sweetly, but I feel infantilized all the same, and I want to correct him. I’m not nervous about this date; I’m petrified at the thought of going home and telling my mom and sister that yet another setup didn’t work out, when I don’t have the right words to explain why.

I still have nineteen minutes to go, but the words come out before I can stop them. “Actually, I’m so sorry, but I have an early-morning meeting and—”

“At your antiques store?” Grant frowns.

“Yes. It’s with my assistant manager, Jane. She’s a real person.” I probably shouldn’t have added that last part, but I plow on as I start gathering my purse and my coat. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” he says. He pulls a few twenties out of his wallet and leaves them on the table, signaling to our waiter that we’re leaving.

“You can stay,” I tell him.

“No, I can walk you to your car.”

“I-I didn’t drive here.”

“Then I’ll walk you outside,” he says with measured politeness, and that’s how I end up standing awkwardly outside the bar with him forty-six minutes into our date, on an evening that has no business being this cold this far into spring. I shiver.

“So,” he says, sliding his hands into the pockets of his peacoat. “I really like you, Sadie. But I get the impression you’re maybe not into it.”

And damn this man with his emotional maturity and direct communication style. There’s a reason why I prefer to lie and ghost; because otherwise I’ll lie and people-please. “No!” I squeak. “I’m not not into it. It’s just… this meeting! I’m stressed about this meeting! Really!”

He locks his Chris Pine eyes onto mine. “Then, do you think… may I kiss you goodnight?”

And despite everything, I want to kiss Grant and feel the butterflies Vi’s always talking about. I want to kiss him and feel all the things they sing about in love songs. I want this kiss to save me from ever having to find the right words for my mom and sister.

I want this kiss to save me from having to find the right words for myself.

So, I nod.

Grant leans in. He smells like eucalyptus and emotional intelligence, and when his mouth presses against mine, I will myself to feel something, feel anything.

Instead, I feel as empty as my house of ghosts.

“What could you possibly have found wrong with this guy?” my sister demands when she finds me sneaking another glass of pinot from the fridge exactly fifty-nine minutes after my date started.

“There was nothing wrong with him,” I start.

“Then what happened?” My mom is hot on Vi’s trail, and she flies into the kitchen wearing her bathrobe and nothing else. I get an unseemly flash of her crotch before she plants herself on a barstool beside the island. And this is why most grown adults don’t live with their families.

Or allow their families to live with them, as the case may be.

“He looked so handsome in those Instagram photos,” my mom says dreamily.

“He was,” I grumble into my wine.

“He was the perfect fucking man,” Vi snaps.

“But he wasn’t the perfect man for me.” And after seventeen dates, I’m starting to think there really is no perfect man for me. Because I’m maybe not attracted to men at all.

But if that were the case, wouldn’t I already know this about myself? Why didn’t I figure this shit out in college like every other self-respecting millennial?

Vi slams her chopsticks down onto the quartz countertop, because she’s decided to eat some suspicious leftover grocery store sushi. “Give it to us straight,” she demands, and it’s an interesting choice of words, given the circumstances. “Why didn’t it work with that sexy man? Did you talk about upholstery too much?”

“I talked about upholstery the right amount. It’s just—”

I wasn’t attracted to him.

I don’t think I’ve ever been attracted to a man.

I’m…

I’m what? I don’t have the slightest idea how to finish that thought. How do you figure out your sexuality in your thirties? There’s no GSA for grown-ass adults.

In four days, I will be thirty-five, and more than anything, my birthday feels like a horrible reminder of how little I’ve changed since I was twenty-one.

“Grant and I want different things in life,” I lie. And lie and lie and lie.

“What do you want, sweetheart?” my mom coaxes.

And shit. I walked right into that one. “Oh, you know…”

They don’t know, and I don’t know, and I feel like the walls are closing in. I’m stuck between a Grant and a hard place, with no hope for escape.

“This isn’t over.” My sister hobbles on her crutches to the fridge and pulls out an energy drink. At 8 p.m. “I still have a few more days to find you the perfect man. I’ll just double down on my efforts and—”

“No!” The word escapes from the deepest part of my gut, the part that goes hollow at the thought of going on any more dates with any more men ever again. I just don’t know how to explain this to my sister or my mom.

I feel like I need to have the right answer, the specific label… that I need to be certain. I feel like if I don’t have the perfect words to explain whatever this is to my family, they won’t listen.

And I need time to find those words.

So, I pivot. Hard. “No, don’t do that, Vi. I-I wouldn’t want you to overexert yourself. With your toe, I mean.” Totally saved it. “What did the doctor say about the X-ray results?”

My little sister unleashes a dramatic sigh and welcomes the attention. “Eight weeks! He said I’m going to be in this boot for eight weeks!” She gestures to the foot she has propped up on one of my stools. They’re midcentury modern barstools that I tracked down at an estate sale in Ravenna, and I just finished sanding and restaining them, but none of that matters to Vi. “Can you believe that? Eight weeks over a toe? Who even breaks their big toe while parasailing?”

“I would guess a lot of people.”

My mom twists a cloth napkin in her hands. “I wish you wouldn’t do such dangerous things, especially in foreign countries,” she laments, because Molly Wells is a collection of anxiety disorders in the shape of a woman held together by Wellbutrin and romance novel audiobooks.

Vi brushes off her concern. “The extreme adventures company seemed legit.”

“The one that was operated out of a rusted bus in Venezuela?”

“Yes.” Vi is oblivious to my sarcasm. “The doctor said I shouldn’t travel for two months. What am I supposed to do with myself for two whole months? Work in the store with you?”

“Your disgust is noted.”

Vi has always jumped on any excuse to be away from the store and the family responsibilities that come with it. As a kid, that meant karate and Girl Scouts and an elite soccer team. In high school, she went on summer volunteer trips to the Dominican Republic and did a semester in Tokyo her junior year. The day she graduated, she got on a plane to backpack Europe for ten weeks and didn’t call home once. It’s been that way ever since. She boomerangs home sometimes to catch up on sleep and laundry and her regularly scheduled judgments of my life choices.

Victoria Wells never overthinks. She just acts. Which is probably why she was able to casually come out as bisexual at nineteen between bites of my homemade cottage pie. Without angst. Without questioning. Without having a fucking existential crisis about it.

And that’s the other thing. Vi is bi. If I were queer, wouldn’t she sense it somehow? Wouldn’t she have tried to set me up with a woman at some point?

Vi exhales in horror. “I can’t be stuck here like you. I was supposed to leave for Portugal and Spain in four days! I worked so hard to make this trek happen and I’ve been looking forward to it for months, and now this!”

“You’re going to Portugal?” my mom asks nervously, as if Vi has announced a planned trip to an active war zone. “Why?”

“It’s the guided tour of the Camino de Santiago,” Vi snaps. “It’s been in the works for over a year now, and the tour company is paying me generously to do the trip and post about it. I pitched the story on the Camino to the Seattle Times, and they’re considering running it next month. In print. Plus, I had a whole daily blog planned, with affiliate links and sponsors.” She melodramatically presses the back of her hand to her forehead in anguish. “So much planned social media content. Wasted.”

Vi often cries over sponsored content, but it’s clear this opportunity is important to her. Her Instagram might be 80 percent bikini shots in front of various waterfalls, but that’s because she knows how to game the algorithm. She’s always wanted to be a travel writer, and she’s smart enough to know that bikini selfies are how to get there.

Besides, she looks fantastic in a bikini—like Nicola Coughlan in Bridgerton meets every Sports Illustrated cover model ever—and she never misses an opportunity to remind the world of this fact. It’s all part of being a travel influencer and midsize fashion icon.

“I can’t just bail. Writing for the Times would be a huge deal, and I don’t want to disappoint the tour company.” Vi wails like an injured otter before reaching for her can of legalized methamphetamine. Her long acrylic nails fumble with the tab for less than a second before she gives up and hands the can to me. I open it for her, and I’m immediately assaulted by the smell of blueberries and lighter fluid. The logo on the can says Bitch Fuel, with a slogan that unironically tells me to “fuel my inner boss bitch.”

But I don’t have an inner boss bitch. At best, I have an inner canary in a coal mine that I’ve been ignoring for far too long.

“I can’t believe I’m going to miss this trip!” Vi cries as I pass her the opened energy drink. “Can you imagine? All that sunshine and fresh air? Walking all day and drinking Portuguese wine every evening? Escaping it all for a while?”

And I can imagine it, actually.

“What if I do it for you?” I hear myself say.

Vi slurps her Bitch Fuel and belches subpa