No Feelings

The rule was no feelings. Physical only. It was supposed to be simple.
neighbors to lovers · he falls first · dual timeline · angsty new adult · forced proximity · slow burn · heat level: 4/5

Nova moved to Portland to start over — new city, new apartment, new rules. The most important one: no feelings. She gave everything to the last person who told her she was too much. She is not making that mistake again.

The problem is her downstairs neighbor.

Callum Hale doesn't talk much. He comes home smelling like sawdust, keeps his apartment sparse, and runs in the dark before anyone else is awake. He is every kind of off-limits. Closed in a way that makes her want to know what's inside. Quiet in a way that fills itself with something she can't name and doesn't want to.

They make a rule. Physical only. No feelings. No past. Whatever happens between them stays in the space between apartments — walls so thin she can hear him breathe.

But Nova can hear him at night. Moving through his apartment like something is chasing him. She doesn't know about the sister. She doesn't know about the three seconds. She only knows the rule is already failing — and she is terrified of what happens when it breaks completely.

Dual-timeline structure: Nova narrates their present in warm, grounded first-person prose. Callum's chapters are fragments from his past — poetic, broken, devastating — slowly revealing the loss he has never spoken aloud. The two timelines collide at exactly the moment you cannot bear it.

Tropes: neighbors to lovers · physical arrangement · he falls first · forced proximity · dual timeline · slow burn · angsty new adult

Content warnings: Death of a sibling (off-page, past timeline), grief and survivor's guilt, car accident (past timeline, not graphically depicted), explicit sexual content, past emotionally manipulative relationship.

Book 1 of The Rules We Break. Can be read as a complete standalone. HEA guaranteed. Five residents of the Bellwood. Five rules designed to keep love at arm's length. Five rules that break.