When a late bloomer goes viral for coming out, she decides to use her newfound fame to get her first kiss—with the help of a sexy bartender—in this “funny, smart, and spicy” romance (Abby Jimenez).
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Gabriella Gamez’s Kiss Me, Maybe, which is out May 6th 2025.
Librarian Angela Gutierrez has never been kissed. But after posting a video about her late bloomer status and ace identity, she’s finally ready to get some firsts out of the way. Using her new influencer status to come up with a scavenger hunt idea in which the winner earns her first kiss, Angela realizes she may need some help to pull off the event.
Enter Krystal Ramirez, hot bartender and Angela’s unrequited crush of five years. Despite vowing that romantic love isn’t for her, Krystal seems awfully determined to help Angela pull off the scavenger hunt and find true love.
There’s just one problem: the connection between Angela and Krystal is getting stronger and stronger the more they hang out, until Angela isn’t sure she wants to go through with the scavenger hunt after all. But Krystal is convinced that she isn’t capable of love and before long, Angela realizes she’s falling head over heels for a woman who may never love her back.
Chapter One
The last time I went viral on TikTok was from an accidental thirst trap. This time, it’s so much worse.
By no means am I an influencer or anything of the sort, so you can imagine my surprise when a lip-syncing video of me in my pajamas did numbers—especially when it was the first video of mine to ever do so. Perhaps it was the consequence of using a trending sound coupled with the fact that my sleep tank was apparently tight enough to inspire the imagination and ultimately caused thousands of strangers online to have the sort of reaction only someone like me couldn’t understand. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from the more indecent parts of my comment section.
I may be asexual but I’m not a prude. I’m familiar with sex, even if only in the abstract sense. When I look back at that video, I don’t see the sexualized woman they see. I could understand how people found me cute or pretty or sexy, but what I couldn’t understand was the number of men incapable of keeping their disgusting imaginations to themselves. Most of all, I couldn’t understand why their overblown sex drives were now my problem.
Even my boss thought it was my problem, according to the lecture she gave me last week.
“What’s so inappropriate about it?” I was this close to crying in Erika’s office, and maybe I would’ve been if she and Marcela hadn’t made it clear from the beginning of the meeting that I was in no danger of losing my job. “It’s a lip-syncing video for god’s sake. I’m barely dancing, and you can only see the upper half of my body. Sorry if I didn’t know my flat boobs were so boner-inducing.”
There was a long, awkward pause where Erika cleared her throat and Marcela’s stunned expression quickly morphed into a stern look I rarely see from my best friend. That’s when it dawned on me that I’d actually used the phrase “boner-inducing” in front of my boss. If I wasn’t in danger of losing my job, well, at least I could prove that the day was still young.
“I don’t think your, um, chest is the problem,” Marcela said, pulling up the video on her phone. And thus began a worthy contender for most humiliating moment of my life: my best friend and boss explaining detail by detail what strangers on the internet found so titillating about a video that should’ve stayed in the drafts. “It’s everything in concert together. Scantily covered, conventionally attractive woman on the internet pretty much does it for every lowlife, cis straight man. The hip roll might’ve been the final nail in the coffin.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to argue the “scantily covered” bit of her description, but I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. I’m flat enough to wear most shirts without a bra, have no cleavage to speak of, and the black tank top I was wearing in the video is thick enough to hide my nipples in even the coldest temperatures, but none of that ultimately matters when your workplace’s reputation is on the line. As much as it sucked, what’s considered “appropriate” wasn’t up to me.
“The hip roll certainly wasn’t great, but it’s the strap falling off your left shoulder that got me a call from a board member.” Erika broke eye contact in favor of staring down at the keyboard on her desk, her discomfort a physical tension in the air I could feel. “I’m very sorry, Angela, but regardless of whether or not you see how this video looks, it has to come down.”
It’s not that I was angry about having to delete the video. If anything, it was a relief to not be bombarded by sexually explicit comments and messages from men that I neither asked for nor wanted, even if that meant giving up the largely positive reception from people who hadn’t sexualized me at all.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I was a little disappointed. While the attention from men was unwelcome, and even creepy at times, the attention from queer women had been…unexpected. While their numbers weren’t nearly as overwhelming compared to the men’s, they still came in at a steady pace.
At first, it was hard to discern whether the wows and fire emojis and “looking respectfully” comments were purely innocent praise, or something deeper, but a closer look into those accounts told me I was, in fact, also desired by the sapphic community.
And I didn’t mind one bit.
“It’s a shame you had to take down the video,” Marcela had told me after the meeting, during our lunch break. In the Whataburger parking lot, she didn’t have the awkward job of talking to me as an authority figure. “Otherwise, you could’ve moderated the comment section and capitalized on the moment.”
“Asexual thirst trapper does have a paradoxical sort of ring to it.” I tapped my chin, pretending to think. “It might have been a nice side hustle. How much money do you think I could’ve made?”
“Don’t even go there.” She threw a fry in my lap. “Erika will have a heart attack if you put her through this a second time, and then we’ll get stuck with a micromanaging branch manager who’ll move our desks apart.”
“As if that’ll stop us from yapping.” I smirked at her, picking up the fry and popping it into my mouth. “Is it bad that I kind of loved the attention? Not from the ones who took it too far, but…” I sighed. “I don’t know. I hate dating apps, but how else am I supposed to find women to date? That video was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a dating pool.”
A few of them had even slid into my DMs with compliments that turned to friendly conversation. Even if it was through small talk, it was a relief to finally tell people other than my parents or Marcela I was an asexual lesbian, maybe even more so than coming out the first time. Maybe because I’d reached another first: I was being welcomed into the community I belonged to, and perhaps even on track to building my own.
“You’ve never been on a dating app.” Marcela rolled her eyes at me.
“Correction: I hate the idea of dating apps.”
“What about a lesbian bar?” Marcela asked. “I can help research if there any in town that are good.”
“As if we’ll go anywhere that isn’t Havana Bar,” I huffed, ignoring the knowing look she gave me. We both knew why I wouldn’t go anywhere else, and it was all thanks to the beautiful, bisexual bartender I can never seem to get out of my head.
“Krystal could probably give us some good options,” Marcela pointed out. “If you stopped pining over each other for longer than ten minutes, I mean.”
“We do not pine.” She doesn’t, at least. Me? Pining is all I know how to do when it comes to Krystal Ramirez.
“You could always try asking her out,” Marcela suggested, and not for the first time. “You never know. She might say yes.”
“Too real.” I shook my head, and she sighed. “I’m not ready to be rejected in person, especially not without options, which brings me back to the dating pool.”
“You’ve shot my suggestions down and it’s not like you can date a TikTok comment section that doesn’t exist anymore, so I’m all ears,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
I didn’t have one, but I was starting to.
When I got home, I didn’t really think about what I was doing, only that I was overcome with the need to do something. I hadn’t planned on making a follow-up to the video I’d deleted, but I wasn’t content to leave it at that, either.
Which brings me to now, in the aftermath of hitting Post for a second time without thinking it through. I played the video back, watching the number of views climb with a lump in my throat.
