Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
1. "I can't believe you did this," I hissed into my phone, my words low because the man in my bed was still asleep. "Did what?" Helena sounded as groggy as I felt. "Bi, you sound awful." I turned my head and watched Drew Chaney sleep. His jaw relaxed, one side of his face pressed slightly into the pillow, a lock of dark hair grazing his forehead. A faint bruise marred the pale curve of his shoulder. My fingers traced the air where those marks were, because I knew they matched the outline...
"I can't breathe," I gasped, and then I ran. "Haley, slow down!" Jensen Reid cried, her small hands tugging at my sleeve as we pushed through the crowd. My hair pin pricked me, rain slicked my dress, but I did not stop. I wanted the first floor, the street, the noise, anything but the palace rooms that smelled like duty. "You're being ridiculous," Jensen panted. "If Mother finds out—" "I told you, Mother won't find out. She won't even notice," I lied in the same breath and snatched a...
I did not go to meet Reed Caldwell to beg him back. I went because I found out, by accident and sweating, that the man I was promised to had two plans at once: one plan for me, one plan to burn everything down. "I won't stand with a conspirator," I told myself as I wrapped the letter I meant to deliver. The idea of Reed carving his way into rebellion and pulling everyone I loved into the fire made my stomach knot. The garden room smelled of old paper and plum wine when I stepped inside....
I got the call at two a.m. The rain hit the window like a drum. My phone lit up with his name: Edwin Cain. "Claudia, my stomach hurts. Can you come?" "Now?" I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I was tired, but when he sounded small, I left without thinking. The hospital smelled like antiseptic and rain. I stepped into the night shift room and knocked. The door opened. Light. A bed. Two people. "Edwin?" I said. He looked up, startled. His face was wet with sleep or pain; I couldn't...
I was in line for a swab when I realized the tester in full protective gear was my ex. "Is this really necessary?" I said, half to the man in the suit, half to myself. "Open," Jackson said, and his voice was the same soft, practiced thing I used to love and hate. "Breathe." "Too deep!" I whimpered like a child. "Please be gentle." "Is it deep?" Jackson smiled with just his eyes visible above the mask and then—like he had done a thousand times before—he pushed the swab farther and...
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 died on the winter solstice. "I am not cold," I told the snow, though my hands had no heat left to make the lie feel true. They wrapped me in a straw mat and tried to carry me out before anyone noticed. The palace banners were being set for a ceremony for a favored consort; the city was busy. No one wanted the trouble of a grieving family or a scandal. So they bundled me like trash. "Stop," I thought, but thought is not a hand and the straw smell was the only thing I could...
"I called a car. It brought my boss." "You're late," he said. I stared at Max Pfeiffer sitting in the back of the Rolls, under the starry ceiling, as if the world had paused. "…" He raised one eyebrow. "Are you actually late, Juliana?" "I—" I swallowed. "I guess." He laughed soft, like a bell. "Then you owe me breakfast, not a fine." That morning started like any other: my phone scared me, my heart raced, and my fingers hit the app too late. I had no idea the car would be his....
I was seven the first time I swore I would never get close to Christine Alvarez. "Calvin," my little king's voice in the courtyard, "this one is mine." "Whose?" I asked, though I already knew. She lay in a stroller, half a year old, large dark eyes like two coins fixed on me. "That girl," I said, and I reached out because what else did a seven-year-old king do when someone tiny looked at him like that? She peed in my arms. "Ugh!" I gagged, but I held her anyway, like a gentleman...
I was waiting in the dark, the apartment quiet except for the faint hum of the tablet on my lap. "Why didn't you turn the light on?" Cedar Liang's voice came through the doorway, casual, as if he had every right to step into my silence. I had been listening to two recordings—two tiny minutes each—on a voice app I shouldn't have opened. I had told myself I'd only listen once. I had told myself I'd be brave. I had told myself it was okay to know. But the fingers holding the tablet were...
I sat at the exam desk, the new English paper crisp under my palm, and the wall clock pointed to three in the afternoon. My whole body trembled. "Is something wrong?" the female proctor asked. I stared at the bald invigilator near the front with his wide mouth and yellow teeth. The shape of his grin was a sight I knew too well. I knew the exact second the world would tilt again. "I'll be fine," I said. I was not fine. I swallowed, let calm sink in, and then I planned. Two hours. Two...
I spat river water into the mud and sat up with a gasp. "You're awake!" my mother cried. Her voice shook like a bell. "Where am I?" I said. My head thudded. My lungs burned. "Down by the river," she said. "You almost—" "Shh," she hushed me, but everyone around talked at once. "She tried to run away!" someone said. "She and that slant-eyed boy were seen near the boat!" another voice cut in. "She went crazy for a man, what a shame," a woman snorted. I blinked. I remembered...
I am Kinley Barrett, owner of a small modeling agency that used to barely register on any map of the fashion world. "Kinley, you sure about signing him?" Bonnie Arnold asked the first day Erik walked into my office wearing a flight jacket and an expression like he was boarding a plane out of bother. "I am sure," I said, folding my hands. "He leaves the room different. We'll make him a star." He was impossible, in the way saints are impossible: aloof, precise, always like someone who...
They told me to decide in sixty seconds. "Welcome to the Phoenix Game," a cold, tiled voice said. "You have one minute to decide whether to begin." I stared at the faucet in my tiny bathroom and watched not water but dark, sluggish blood pour into the sink. "I—I don't understand," I whispered. My voice sounded thin in that tiny room. Then the mirror did something worse than lie. "Do you accept?" the voice ticked. I leaned forward. My reflection—my face—blinked. For a breath of...
"I can't be real," I said out loud, though the room already smelled like smoke and lavender and the impossible. "You're very real," the man said, and his voice made the lamp-light lean toward him like it wanted to hear better. When I first woke I thought my stomach ached from a dream. "Is it—" I started, reaching down. "Don't," the man said, and the word pressed against my teeth like a lid. My hand hit cool scales. "What the—" "Hold still and breathe," he told me. "Talk...
I fell in love with a shadow. When I told my eldest brother — the one who would sit the throne — he only turned a page of his document and asked, "When you say 'fell in love,' what do you mean by 'fell'?" He wasn't thinking like the women of court. He didn't ask whether I had run after a boy at a festival or sniffed at some trivial flirtation. He didn't ask the dark guard's name. He only looked toward the high hall's shadow and said, "Send her," as if choosing a toy for a child, and the...
I never thought the hallway light would go dim enough to make my heart jump. The elevator sighed open and he stood there—long limbs pressed into a long coat, taller than I remembered, silhouette like someone who had learned to take up space. For a moment my fingers forgot the keys in my hand. "You're home early," I said before I could think to be sharp. "Hi, Kaitlyn," he said. His voice had dropped, a low thing that belonged to grown-up mornings and late-night meetings. "Long...
The night before my wedding, I learned a dangerous secret about people: their private thoughts sometimes leak like steam from boiling water, and for one strange hour I could hear them all. "This poor girl," the gentle house nurse kept thinking as she smoothed my hair. "She will never use what she learned in the village." I heard that voice and smiled; I did not understand what she meant yet. Then, after the ceremony, under the heavy red veil and the carved wooden bed where a prince...
I was wearing the white dress because he liked white dresses. "Hank, are you sure this is the right place?" I asked, clutching my phone like it was the map out of a maze. Hank Wallace glanced up from the messages in his hand, only the corner of his mouth moving. "Yes. We booked the next room. Come on." We had been together for a year. I had tracked him across campus for a year. For a year he had been that unruffled, distant god who looked as if feelings were an optional app he never...
I fell asleep on the crosswalk. No, that sounds wrong. I didn't fall asleep on purpose. One second my headlight swept across a single line of the street and the next I heard metal fold like paper and a sound like someone ripping my world in half. When I opened my eyes again, the sky over me was an impressionist painting—blurred, far away, and wrong. I reached for my chest and found nothing but the memory of a ring I had not yet received. "I should be alive," I said. But the voice...
