Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke to a sound I didn't recognize: a short, clean electronic chime that kept repeating. "Do you hear that?" I whispered in the dark. "Mm?" Marcus Castle's voice floated up from below. "Sleep." "I heard a sound." I tried to keep my voice light. "A computer?" "It's probably the oven timer. Don't worry." He laughed, like he always laughed when he wanted to make me stop worrying. I swung my legs off the bed and padded across the carpet. The laptop on his desk was alive with little...
I still remember the first time someone hinted at the fact that I didn't belong. "Bea, you and your brother don't look alike," Corinne said once, voice small and careful. I was twelve, and the sentence landed in me like a stone. I didn't know then how deep that stone would cut. "Don't be ridiculous," I wanted to say, but I didn't know the words for it. Instead I shrugged and kept my head down. You always believe the house you grow up in is your whole world until something breaks the...
On my wedding night I climbed his shoulder and asked, breathless, "What do you think, Gideon?" Gideon Olsson bowed his head in the candlelight and answered softly, "Lesly, it is I who am fortunate." I laughed then, loud and pleased, and almost wept. "Gideon, give me a foot massage," I teased. "Do you remember how you used to soothe my feet when I was a silly girl sold like a trinket?" He knelt like he always had, hands cool against my skin, and for a half-beat the house we had built...
They call the app CaptureHouse. I called it trouble. "I don't want to do this anymore," I said the first time I deleted it. "You mean forever?" Drew Pierce asked, pouring a can of soda into a paper cup like nothing heavy was happening. He sat across from me in a sparse room that smelled faintly of oil and canned coffee. "I mean for a while," I corrected. "I need to be a mother. I need to watch him grow." Drew smiled, but it was the smile of someone who had learned to hide how much...
I had a habit of buying things nobody else wanted and seeing what stories they coughed up. "I said, leave the stool by the door," I told Cash. "And put the scales on the table. Carefully." Cash Bolton—my valet, my shadow, the only man who saw me when I dawdled—looked at me with those steady eyes of his and bowed. "Yes, sir. The scales are ready." We were at the old village on the eastern edge of the district, where the road still remembered wheels and the plum trees still blushed at...
I remember the gray morning over the Silva manor like a bruise. The house smelled of old money and colder things: silence, and someone else’s plans. “My sister, Helena,” Hans Brantley said, voice husky with the nicotine of a thousand excuses. “Whether you agree or not, today you marry Armando Vasseur’s man. You don’t have a choice.” I sat hold-straight on the leather couch like a statue carved to hold back too many storms. I did not cry. I did not beg. I kept my back straight and my eyes...
I didn't open my eyes because of light. I opened them because my cheeks hurt from someone else's face, and the candle made my throat taste like old wine. "Where am I?" I croaked. My mouth was dry; the world tilted. I sat up and saw jars—big brown jars full of something that smelled like rotten fruit and anger. A man's shadow moved by the jars. He smelled of the same rot. "You finally woke," he said, voice ragged with drink. "Don't try to be clever." The hand that pushed me back had a...
I found out Mark got married when I was scrolling through my phone on a rainy Monday and saw a photo of a red marriage certificate in his social feed. "You're kidding," I told Kenzie, my voice too loud for the tiny rented living room. "He posted it." "Post what?" Kenzie asked, already half laughing, half furious. "The one that says he and Megan are married." "Which of course he would do," Kenzie said. "Show off." "I still can't believe he did it two weeks after we signed the...
I still remember the voice the first time he asked me out like a dare. "Will you come with me?" Cruz asked, the rasp of his voice lazy and amused. People laughed behind him. "Qi—" someone started. "Cut it out," Louis Serra called, grinning. He pushed at Cruz's shoulder, and the joke turned into a dare and the dare landed on me. "I'll go." I said it before my heart could tell me not to, and the room slipped sideways into something warm and dangerous. Cruz smoked as he...
"I am a messenger," I said, and the room listened as if I had said a spell. "You're a lot more than a messenger," he answered, and his voice made my bones feel like they might warm. I remember being shoved into that huge house, the black hood ripped away, and the first face I saw was too young for an emperor and too sharp for a child. "Who are you?" I asked before I knew manners. "Calhoun," he said, narrowed eyes bright with a tiny laugh. "Stay. You'll be useful." "I was useful when...
I found her because I was bored. "I want to eat here," the post read, playful and small, "@Francisco Donnelly, take me." It was eight years old. I kept scrolling. "I remember this." "Same," someone commented, with heart emojis. I breathed in, slow. I should not have opened that account. But I did. I clicked the little profile, and a string of old pictures fell into my lap—milk tea, hand-held cameras, a man smiling like sun through glass. "I didn't know," I said aloud to...
I remember the wind chime the way a scar remembers a touch. "Why are you crying now?" Fisher asked, leaning over me like a storm about to break. I kept my chin down, watching the silver little bells sway in the window. Their sound was thin, like a laugh from far away. Each tinkle felt like the shape of my life, knocked hollow. "You said my name," I said, but I didn't look at him. He bent lower, his breath warm on my shoulder. "Esperanza," he murmured. "Tell me." My nails drew...
"I don't hear you answering, Antonia! Antonia, are you even alive?" someone kept calling. I opened my eyes to sunlight that smelled of smoke and damp straw. My head felt like it had been stamped on. I touched the back of my skull and my fingers came away with a smear of dried blood and a strip of coarse cloth tied around a wound. "This can't be the office," I said to myself before I remembered my mouth couldn't say it out loud because no one else was in the small room. The room looked...
I crawled out of a wasteland on the third day and tasted the sun like a threat. "Are you alive?" a voice asked, and for a second I thought the world had decided to answer me back. I blinked and the town looked like something stitched together from other people's lives—tall houses, odd round holes, nests with awnings. The air smelled less like rot and more like... waiting. "I—" I fumbled for words. "I don't know where I am." "You look like you crawled from the pit," the man at the...
"I want you dead," I spat, and the room smelled of perfume and champagne. "Evie, girl, calm down," Ludmila said, smooth smile dripping like sugar. "You always overreact." I sat in my bridal gown in a mirrored makeup room and watched my hands tremble. Lace, cheap crystals, a crown they'd put on me because they loved a pretty picture. Outside, the ballroom was full of people who'd be glad to applaud me into a life I didn't want. "Who told you Sawyer is no longer your groom?" my father,...
"I saw him on the news." "The new CEO? In town already?" "I can't believe it. Bowen Warren came back." When the plaza screen showed his silhouette, the crowd lilted with the kind of curiosity reserved for storms. He was taller than I'd remembered, a gray suit cut like it belonged to a sculptor's measurements. I turned my face away. "I thought you weren't watching," Harper said, nudging me. "I'm not," I lied. "I'm—I'm fine." Harper Bauer's thumb tapped a rhythm on my palm...
I never meant to be a stubborn disaster. I never meant to spend nights eating and sleeping in a loop, waking up only to eat again. But when you are trying to rewrite an ending written by someone else, you pick your bad habits like old tools and hold them tight. "It’s late," Tucker said, squinting when he found me roaming the courtyard. "You need sleep." "I don't need much," I said, though I did. "Menacing the moon with you sounds better than the bed." He laughed. "Menace the moon? Is...
I have woken up in other people's beds more times than I can count. "Sleep," Valentin Archer said the very first thing to me the first time he found me in that place where the moonlight never seemed to reach. "Sleep," he said every night after. "Sleep," he said like a prayer, like a command, like a lullaby that would bend my life into quiet curves until it broke. I don't like being told what to do. I especially don't like being told to sleep when I'm wide awake. "Sleep," he told me...
I woke to a voice as sharp as broken glass. “You’re seven months pregnant and you don’t even know?” My brain felt like it had been struck by lightning. Pregnant? Me? With my body that doctors had told me was infertile? The odds had been a joke in my head until the paper on the desk told a different truth. The clinic door burst open. People flooded in. “My daughter is carrying someone else’s child? Get an abortion now!” my father barked, his palm slapping the table with the force of...
I was only supposed to babysit a pet. "You sure you can handle him?" Grey asked before he left, looking at me like I was about to babysit a thousand-dollar watch. "I can," I lied. "He reads. He drinks coffee. He has a daily feeding schedule with six meals and a face mask every other day." Grey handed me a thick notebook that looked like a thesis. "And his IQ is like a nine-year-old. So whatever you see is normal." "Okay," I said, but my mouth went dry when I saw the title: HEDGEHOG...
