Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I matched with a hopeless teammate in a game. Two hours of insults later, we had each other's WeChat. Two hours after that, we were standing face to face outside a parking garage, and I realized the tall man who’d humiliatingly out-muscled me over a username was the same person who could ruin my life with a raised eyebrow. "You're—you're 'Invincible Explosive Dragon Warrior'?" I asked, pretending to be scary, though my whole body wanted to bolt. He looked down at me, a blade of a smile at...
I remember the first time I walked into Geoffrey Calhoun's life like a storm that smelled faintly of citrus and ink. "Geoffrey?" I said, sliding into the VIP alcove as if I belonged there, smiling the way I was trained to smile. He glanced up from his coffee, expression flat as slate. "Pleasure." "Pleasure," I echoed, because manners are props and I can use props. "I'm Mia Wallin." "Nice to meet you," he said, and his voice could have turned a room colder. He stirred his cup without...
I never expected the first clue would be his ears. "Cruz, the awards are next," someone said from the stage, and I clapped until my palms tingled. He stood there in black suit and white shirt, jaw cut like a clean line of marble, and I imagined — idiotic, unspooling fantasies — what his apartment would look like, whether he made coffee like a man who could also write annual reports. He looked toward our row. His eyes slid over me — and his ears went pink. I froze. A pink at the ear...
I still can't decide whether the supermarket was unlucky or honest fate. Either way, our hands met over a single box of razors. "Buying that? New man already on the horizon?" he said. "Mind your own business," I snapped. He smiled cold and slow. "This is my lifelong business," Dmitri said, the way he always used dramatic words like furniture. People nearby glanced. I felt my cheeks heat. I tightened my grip on the box. There was one box left. He tugged like we were playing...
December came like a verdict. "Ivy, your brother's plane—" the stranger's voice on the phone sounded like a thing I had never met before. It was hollow and polite and cruel. I ran. I ran because there was nowhere else to run. When I pushed open the front door, the house smelled like boiled cabbage and old grief. Dad sat at the dining table with his back to me, shoulders hunched like he had been carved that way. Mom’s hands were pressed into her face, the kind of face I had never seen...
I become a zombie on a Tuesday and keep a rule. "I only bite men who are one point eight meters tall or taller," I tell the cracked mirror in a ruined clothing shop and spit on my teeth. Someone behind me snorts. "You're serious about that?" "Do I look like I'm joking?" I pull a ruined white dress around my shoulders and smooth the stain where coffee used to be. My hair is a wreck. My teeth are sharp enough to frighten a child. Still, I have standards. The city is gone. Glass hangs...
I was in the makeup chair when Daxton Burgess called. "You're back from Shanghai?" I asked into the speaker, letting my voice be soft enough to keep the room calm. "Uh… Ariel, I'm sorry," he said after a pause. "I may not be able to get back for a while." Outside, Kylee Conti and Hank Acosta argued about how to tie the balloons. Kylee's laughter threaded through the studio like a ribbon. Hank's curses sounded like little fireworks. "How long?" I asked. "Maybe… longer than I...
"I light one more," I told myself, and the flame took the last square of paper. The smoke filled the room like a stubborn memory. I coughed, waved my hand, and kept feeding the little fires until the stack was nothing but warmth and ash. "You're really doing this?" my maid had asked in the doorway, but she wasn't there anymore. No one was. I kept burning until I couldn't see. When I opened my eyes again, someone said, "Report." "I brought her," a voice answered. It was polite and...
I woke to sunlight stabbing my eyes and a panic that felt like a stomach punch. "Where am I?" I croaked, fingers fumbling for the blanket, for my phone, for anything that belonged to me. A tie lay across the bed, a dark smear of last night’s confusion. My head throbbed like someone was hammering inside. I sat up, heart hammering, and the alarm started to ring in my pocket — a classmate calling, an unmannerly reminder of the noon reunion awaiting me. "Chiyo? You coming or what?" Her...
I never meant to fall in love for real. I signed up to be a public girlfriend for two years because they said it would help him, and because I was a fan before I was anything else. I thought I could keep being the cheerful, unpaid assistant to his star. Then one night, the host asked about marriage on live television, and the moment the question hit me, something inside me cracked. "I'm done," I told myself. I typed the statement, closed my laptop, and left. Two days later, he was on my...
I married Jordan Wolff and he flew away on our wedding night. "I'll come back, Kristina! I swear I'll come back," he shouted as his breakthrough ripped a hole through the hall and the roof, and then the sky swallowed him. He left me on the bridal bed, staring up at the gash in the ceiling and at scattered star-piercings of cold light, feeling every second of his promise as a small stone in my chest. "Do you mean it?" I asked the empty air, but the only answer was wind and dust. Half a...
"I can't believe we're actually at a music festival in Washington," Jana said, her voice bubbling. "Of all places." "I booked the trip, so shut up and dance," I told her, lifting my water bottle like a tiny trophy. "You're huge," Bella said, laughing as she poked my belly through the loose shirt. "When did you become a superhero?" "I am not huge," I said, smiling. "I'm heroic." The lights were bright, the crowd was loud, and my two best friends—Jana Pedersen and Bella Arellano—kept...
"I want to sleep with you, Graham." He looked at me like I had said something impossible. "Lenore," he said softly, "you can want anything. But not because of someone else." I heard the words and they made a cold place open inside me. I had been married to Lincoln Lawson for two years. Our life together was a secret that lived in darkness—curtains closed, lights off, like people who were afraid of being seen. He loved someone else. Everyone knew, or almost everyone. They had gone to...
I woke up thinking I was still in a dream with my favorite singer in the Maldives. Then the doorbell ruined the fantasy. I shuffled to the door in my pajamas and opened it. Standing there was Julian Liang, looking like a walking magazine cover, and a little boy tucked under his arm. "Surprise!" Julian said, grin wide and pleading at the same time. My brain short-circuited. "What is this—" Julian crouched, lifted the boy up so he was eye level with me. "Say it." The kid puffed out...
1 I stood at the corridor corner, frozen. In front of me, under the weak red bulb that made the fake blood on the walls look authentic, a man and a woman were kissing like the world had ended for everyone else. If you ignored that we were in a live haunted house, that one of them was my boyfriend, and that the other was my best friend, it might have been a moving scene. "Does it feel good?" I said in a voice that wasn't my own, low and cold. They were so wrapped up in each other they...
I died with city lights in my eyes and rain on my face. One moment there was the scream of brakes and the metallic taste of fear, the next there was nothing—then everything: a small mountain village, dust, the smell of wood smoke, and a girl’s body that wasn’t mine. "Where am I?" I whispered to myself, because whispering felt safe. "You’re here," someone in the crowd said, all rough voices and more worry than kindness. I watched myself—no, I watched the girl whose life I had somehow...
I remember the night he stopped being mine in the small, clear way that happens when something solid gets a hairline crack and you keep looking at it until it splits. "Why are you looking at her like that?" I caught him by the stairwell, the school's graduation gala spilling gold and glitter beyond the door. I pressed my hand to his tie because I couldn't think of anything else to anchor myself with. He smirked down at me, the way he always did when everything was banal and he had decided...
I never thought the day I agreed to be someone’s “godmom” would wreck my calm life and rearrange my heart. “It’s settled,” Blythe Ibarra said when she first grabbed my hand at the office pantry. Her voice was loud and proud, like she’d decided the weather for the day. “You sure you don’t mean god-aunt?” I tried to joke. “Young people and labels.” Blythe waved me off. “Just be there. My son will come by tonight. He needs a godmom. You’re perfect.” “I don’t even have kids,” I said,...
I never imagined a stupid dare could change the whole shape of my life. "Hailey, you have to do it," Leighton said, eyes bright like she'd swallowed three sodas and a secret. She curled a strand of hair around a finger, doing that dramatic thing friends do when they want you to be their entertainment. "I am not confessing to Greyson Barrett," I said, which was true and also foolishly theatrical. "He's not that scary," Emilia said, smirking. "He's just tall, handsome, and runs half the...
"I tracked him for five years and failed. Five years later I found him in a KTV room full of hired models." "I can't believe this," I said, staring at the man who had lived in my head for half a decade. "It's Grayson Hawkins," Jewel said behind me, voice small and fierce. "You mean, the Grayson?" "He is," I said. "He always was." I had money now. Not by luck, not by a lottery. "My family has hidden savings," my father Ernst told me weeks before, shrugging like it was nothing. "I...
