Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"Yes," I said, and my voice trembled. "I do love him." "Lea," my mother—Isabelle Roux—squeezed my hand so hard I felt the bones. "Do you understand what this means?" "I do." I kept my eyes low. The hall smelled of lacquer and tea. The emperor's decree still hung in the air like a storm cloud. Hudson De Santis sat opposite, face as calm as a carved statue. My heart pounded like a drum. "Then tell me," Isabelle urged. "Do you want him to be your husband?" "I want him," I said. "If he...
I remember the campus in spring like a postcard. Trees were a riot of new green and the sky was clean as if someone had washed it. I was walking with Sawyer Benjamin, hand in hand, and the sunlight made his hair look like a halo. "Did you hear?" a girl behind us said, loud enough to ricochet off the quad. "What happened?" another answered, curious. "A girl from Bio set herself on fire in the square," the first girl said, voice buzzing with the wrong sort of excitement. "Why?" the other...
"I'll die in your bed one day," he said, sleepy and rough as if the sea had lived in his throat. "I hope not," I answered, folding a T-shirt over the crumpled white blouse and dropping the ruined shirt into the laundry basket. "Don't say things like that." "You always say that." Kenji Persson sat up on the couch, messy hair, eyes rimmed with red from last night's drinks. He sounded like a kid and like a danger at once. "I have work," I said. "I have a proposal due. Tonight I don't have...
"I won't get up," I said, and pulled a pillow over my head. "Get up, Addison! You're going to be late!" Valentina grabbed the bedframe and yanked. Her twin buns bobbed. "Really, stop burying your face." I peeled the pillow back and squinted at ceiling rafters I did not own. Silk draped the window, not the cheap blinds from my last apartment on Earth. My hair—"my" hair—hung long and black across the edge of the bed like a comet tail. I wanted to be anywhere but here. "You'll be fine,"...
"I need two people," I said to myself the night I realized my assistant had quit again. "Why two?" a voice in the room asked. "It wasn't talking to me," I answered my empty office. "It was just the spreadsheet." The startup life had taught me how to argue with silence. "Five applicants," I told my phone the next morning, checking the list. "Pick two." Then I met them. Four of them walked right back out when they saw the place. "You're not paying real salaries," one man said and...
I woke coughing saltwater into my palms, a bus full of people drowning in my throat. "Help—" I forced the word out like a last coin from a pocket. Someone kicked up under my feet, and I broke the surface. I woke fully then, heart sticking at the roof of my mouth. "No—" I whispered to the dark room, to nobody. "Joe, are you okay?" Lena's voice floated through the thin wall. "I'm fine," I lied, pressing my palms to my face until the world went dim. This was the dream that had...
I never thought a rabbit in a paper bag could start a war. "Ring the bell," Kathy said as if it were ordinary Tuesday business. "Who's there?" I called, wiping dirt from a vase I've already broken twice that week. "It's me. Your son's studio sent over dinner," Kathy Watts said through the door. "When did Aiden start ordering for me?" I asked, then opened the door. She stood there with a paper bag the size of a small child. "Your refrigerator space, dear," she said. "Aiden's...
I died once on a roof under a red sunset. Then I opened my eyes inside a carriage and a different life answered me. "Who is she?" someone cried. "Protect the lady!" I blinked and my hands were smaller. My waist hurt where a blade had kissed me. My name, whatever it was now, smelled of jasmine tea and horse sweat. I opened my mouth and the voice that came out was not the one I'd left behind. It was soft and bewildered. People around me knelt and prayed. They called me "Your Grace." "Who...
I woke on a couch I had sat on dozens of times in another life and felt like I had been squeezed through a white light, pressed flat and stitched back into myself. "I... where am I?" I whispered, because the old habit of talking soothed me. "You're at Global Entertainment," someone said behind a desk. "Do you remember your schedule?" I blinked. The name did not belong to the day I had died. It belonged to a different timeline I had woken into: a world six months earlier than the one...
When they pushed me into the shadowed corner behind the practice field, I did the stupid, brave thing: I sent a last, ridiculous voice message to my online boyfriend. I held the phone with shaking fingers. I shouted into the mic like a fool, voice low and oddly fierce. "My heart—my whole heart—if we can't meet this life, next life I'll find you for real!" I hit send. A beat later, a loud ping broke the air. Someone's phone. Big, fat, public. Then the voice came out of the...
I had never been the center of anything important at college. I took notes. I answered questions when asked. I tried not to be noticed. That afternoon, a stranger handed me three milk teas at the foot of the teaching building and my life tilted. "Hi, the delivery's here," he said through the rolled-down window. His voice was quiet and the car smelled faintly of coffee. He held the cup out. "I—I'm downstairs by the shared bikes," I replied into my phone and then ran to the road. "I'm here....
I had no plan to meet Sullivan Arnold again that afternoon. "He's my cousin's dentist," Cash Bradley said as he bounced on his heels in the clinic waiting room. "You asked me to come," I told him, tugging on his sleeve. "You didn't have to make it dramatic." He grinned. "But you came. You're my hero." The reception clock clicked. The nurse called a name and the door opened. A man in a white coat stepped out. "Sullivan?" I heard his voice before I saw his face. My heart did a...
I woke to a video on social media: Finn Devine holding another woman, jumping off a bungee platform, their screams braided together. I watched, and my face did not move. "You're scrolling like nothing's happened," Chandler Sandberg said from the kitchen doorway. "It was nothing to me," I said, and I meant it. When Finn called that night and said, "Get ready. I'll pick you up. There's something I need to tell you," my chest didn't slam, it didn't race. I folded my napkin, asked, "Okay,"...
I died with his knife in my ribcage and the taste of betrayal in my mouth. "Margot," he had whispered, "I've never loved you. Even your body disgusts me." "I will be grateful," I had said, staring at him with my last breath, "if you die with me and spare that bitch." He smiled like a gentleman as blood spattered his face. Brooks Lefevre, my husband of ten years, walked away from my body as if he had washed his hands. He left me for dead and used my family's ruin as his ladder into the...
"I’m a flower," I told him. He looked at me as if I’d said something normal. He tilted his head, the brown coat at his shoulders rustled, and for a second his face was blank as a sky without clouds. "You're a what?" he asked, carefully. "I’m a flower that’s about to wither," I said. "Can I be planted in your pot?" He blinked. I blinked back. The elevator hummed; our skin smelled like elevator air and the faint soap of his coat. I sat down right on top of him with a rubbish flourish...
I turned twenty-eight on a rainless Monday and made a small wish into the dark ceiling of my one-room apartment. "I wish for one different life," I whispered, "one strange trip. Just once." A light like a camera flash hit my eyelids and a soft voice answered, "Granted." "I—" My last thought was the shape of a glowing bubble, the size of a marble, humming at my breath. Then black. When I opened my eyes again, the bubble floated in front of me and said, "I am the Wish System. The...
"I woke up to light," I said, my voice like a rusty hinge. "Where am I?" "You in my bed," he said without turning, a low, smooth sound that set my head spinning in the gentlest way and the most dangerous way all at once. I blinked. The room smelled faintly of coffee and hotel soap. My hair spread like a dark fan over the pillow. My throat was dry. My body was ache-soft and oddly hollow inside. A napkin pressed to my nose tasted like metal. "Who are you?" I asked, thick and...
I came home that night like I always did—coat slung over an arm, keys jangling, the apartment hallway humming with the usual city softness. I pushed open our bedroom door. The bathroom light left a spill of pale gold; Chase Emerson was in the tub when I stepped inside, his broad back briefly outlined by steam. He climbed out, towel at his waist, and slid into bed without a word. "Chase?" I murmured, as if a name would make him soften. He kissed my throat. "Hmm," he said, soft and...
"I dreamed about being tied with silk," I said, blinking at the ceiling of my room. "It felt strange and close, like someone was leaning over me." "Again?" Leticia's voice was small and urgent in my ear. "Astrid, you need to listen." "No, I—" I swallowed. "It's just a dream." "It's not just a dream," she insisted. "Listen, I can't keep saying this without you believing me. I came back—I've come back to warn you." "You're not making this easy," I told her, because telling myself that...
I woke in the middle of the night with my head humming like a radio left on. The lamp light was a smear; my hands were small and hot as if I'd been holding a cup of boiling sugar. Augusto Cooper — my four-year-old, my clue to a life I couldn't quite stop loving — yanked my sleeve and said, "Mom, you need a hospital." "Go back to bed, sweetheart," I croaked, but he shook me like I was a puzzle stuck wrong. "Mom, you're burning." "Okay, okay," I said, surrendering to the steady truth. ...
