The distance didn't keep them apart. It gave them somewhere to hide.

Marin and Eli match on a dating app at JFK, two gates apart, and meet before his flight closes. Then she flies home to San Francisco, he flies home to Chicago, and they discover the peculiar intimacy of loving someone from far away, where a voice can feel like touch, a screen can become a bedroom, and imagination can make absence feel almost unbearable. Their connection grows through private conversations, confessions, photographs, and fantasies that grow bolder as the miles between them feel less like an obstacle and more like an invitation.

Distance gives them room to want each other without interruption, but also room to change. Desire becomes curiosity. Curiosity becomes permission. The boundaries between fantasy and experience begin to blur, and both discover appetites that are easier to explore when the person they love is somewhere else. What they share remains passionate and real, even as the lives unfolding beyond their screens become more complicated than either is willing to admit.

Because privacy and secrecy are different. Between telling someone what you want and telling them what you have done. Between being loved for the person someone imagines and being fully known for the person you have become.

Things We Did at a Distance is a steamy, unconventional contemporary romance from Omari Vale about intimacy without proximity, temptation without easy boundaries, and the intoxicating freedom of being wanted from afar. It explores appetite, experimentation, deception, emotional fidelity, and how people can be completely honest about their desires while staying carefully dishonest about themselves.

At its center is a question more dangerous than whether two people can survive the miles between them: what happens when the distance that protected their fantasies finally disappears?

Content note: This novel contains explicit adult sexual situations, group encounters, infidelity, emotional complexity, and depictions of consensual erotic exploration between adults. All sexual situations in the story are intended to be consensual.