In your hands (GXG)

What happens when a girl who hates touch meets her match?
Mara lives by rules. Long sleeves. Gloves. Exit routes. No touch, no surprises, no getting close enough for anyone to become a problem.

Then Elena Ruiz sits beside her in art therapy like it's the most natural thing in the world.

Elena smells like soap and flowers and trouble. She works at her mom's flower shop, Rosa & Bloom, where she names the crooked-stem flowers that no one will buy and talks about plants like they're messy little saints. She's also the kind of girl who says exactly what she thinks, laughs at the worst possible moments, and somehow learns Mara's boundaries without turning them into a spectacle.

What starts as a school project turns into a quiet obsession built on almost-touch: a sleeve brushing a glove, a ribbon tied without skin contact, a flower left on a desk like a secret. But in a school that feeds on rumors and a home where Mara's mother treats love like something punishable, being seen together is enough to turn tenderness into a target.

Skin Deep is a sharp, darkly funny queer coming-of-age novel about the intimacy of restraint, the violence of other people's opinions, and the way a single person can make you feel safe... right before the world reminds you what safety costs.