Literary Stories

Ryan Baker left New York City to care for his two-year-old nephew, but renovating homes with his brother's hunky best friend in their small Pennsylvania town wasn't part of the plan. Neither was falling in love. ***** When a devastating accident leaves his nephew parentless, 26-year-old Ryan doesn't hesitate to abandon his unsuccessful art career in New York to travel 300 miles to Windber, Pennsylvania. But once he arrives, Ryan quickly realizes he's in over his head. He doesn't know how to change a diaper, take care of a two-story house, or deal with his dead brother's face plastered on signs advertising his home renovation business all over town. The one saving grace is his brother's business partner. Unlike Ryan, Darren Reynolds is a pro at bath time and knows exactly how to soothe the baby. Ryan had always looked up to him, even as kids, the quiet jock with a gentle smile. But suddenly they're living and parenting together. All of Ryan's teenage fantasies come rushing back and Ryan must decide if he wants to renovate his life for a straight guy.

Mara Ellison is a therapist, a mother, and a wife who believes in boundaries-until a twelve-year-old boy is mandated into her office after a violent incident at school. As his sessions reveal a life shaped by fear and listening, Mara is forced to make a report that begins to unravel the professional distance she depends on. As institutional pressure mounts and the lines between work and home blur, memories Mara has kept buried return in unexpected, unsettling ways. Ancient voices-echoes of endurance and inheritance-press in, asking what survival has cost her, and what it still demands. With clinical precision and quiet intensity, Quiet Fire explores abuse, dissociation, and the ethics of care, asking what happens when survival is mistaken for safety-and whether healing is ever neutral.

A soft, aching collection of poems and whispers about jealousy, insecurity, and the quiet longing to be as perfect as Lacy. These stories drift between envy and admiration, guilt and tenderness- Capturing the fragile hearts of those who feel too much, love too deeply, and compare themselves too often. Written for every soul who has ever looked at someone shining brighter and wondered why they couldn't be the same. Some poems will be soft, some will be painfully honest, some will be messy and unfinished, just like growing up beside someone you admire. This is how I tried to understand you. This is how I tried to survive you. ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ:✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ:✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ

On a rain-lashed night in 2003, a signal failure halts every train passing through Kochi Junction. Among the stranded crowd, six strangers briefly cross paths - a disillusioned teacher, a young nurse bound for the Gulf, a returning architect, a restless journalist, a weary migrant mechanic, and an aspiring coder chasing her first job. None exchange names. Yet that night of shared waiting becomes the quiet axis of their lives. Over the next two decades, their stories flow outward - across Kerala's backwaters and India's cities, into deserts, boardrooms, and faraway apartments - tracing how ordinary people carry fragments of one another through distance, failure, and rediscovery. From night schools under railway bridges to floating hospices on the Alappuzha backwaters, Monsoon Junction maps the fragile beauty of human connection in a world always in transit. Lyrical and deeply human, this multi-voiced saga explores the lives of those who arrive, depart, and sometimes return - finding that the hardest journeys are not measured in miles, but in forgiveness.

I joke with the people who read my prose that writing my erotic literary fiction is like baking lasagna. The plot and characterization and style are the meat, pasta, and cheese; the naughty bits are, of course, all sauce; and then I go and ruin everything by sneaking philosophical discourse, literary discussion, and other nonsense in there like broccoli bits. Well, this book is nothing but broccoli. If you're here, you must want broccoli. Bon appétit.

The old Amarante Hotel isn't much to look at - faded carpets, flickering hallway lights, and a coffee machine that only works when it feels like it. But for six new residents, it's the start of something quietly unexpected. Lena twirls her hair whenever she's lost in thought. Lila bites her lip when she's unsure what to say. Luca can't seem to stop winking at everyone he meets. Avery avoids eye contact but somehow notices every detail. Elias pinches the bridge of his nose whenever the noise gets to him, and Hana covers her mouth when she laughs a little too loud. They all came for different reasons - work, study, escape - but what they find is a rhythm they didn't expect. Morning coffee runs turn into shared breakfasts. Awkward silences become familiar pauses. Little by little, the hotel's echoing halls fill with the soft noise of people getting used to one another. There are no grand moments here - just small ones: the smell of toast from the shared kitchen, the rain tapping against the windows, the feeling of realizing that being yourself - quirks and all - is enough. At the Marigold, everyone's just trying to figure things out. Together. Warning: mentions of drinking some swearing

The story continues as the mysterious warden of Zig-Zig is eventually informed about Herschel's escape. Against every principle of his precious Dalmicir school, Lyeasrakardsul submits and asks the Knomes for help before finally receiving the dreaded p-wyrd. Herschel is arrested as a chicken thief and brought to the town Stagna where he has been prejudged as a p-e-r-v-e-r-t by popular opinion, and where he will have some of the most significant encounters in his life.

Some loves don't break you all at once. They fracture you slowly-beautifully-until you don't recognize the shape you've become. Four Steps to Discontinuity follows Julian, a boy who mistakes intensity for intimacy and devotion for destiny. When he meets Cambria, the connection feels consuming, sacred, and unavoidable. What begins as passion quickly blurs into obsession, control, and self-erasure-each moment pulling him further from who he was before her. As love turns volatile and silence grows louder than promises, Julian is forced to confront the truth: not all connections are meant to last, and some exist only to teach you how to let go. Told in raw, poetic language, this story explores desire, power, emotional dependency, and the painful beauty of healing. It is a descent into longing-and a slow, deliberate climb back to selfhood. This is not a love story. It's a survival story.

If hatred were taken from me, I would die of emptiness. It is the only thing that has never abandoned me......

Why do we keep trying? Yunmi notices a wall most people ignore. It isn't hidden or guarded. It's just a part of the street, part of daily life. People pass it, lean against it, and build around it. No one expects anything from it. Yunmi does. She believes things exist for a reason. That patience, effort, and persistence must eventually lead somewhere. So she returns to the wall again and again, convinced that if nothing happens, she simply hasn't done enough yet. The wall never reacts. It never resists. It never changes. As Yunmi gives more of herself to something that offers nothing back, she begins to face a quieter truth - not about the wall, but about herself. And about why we stay, long after nothing is answering.

Kept alive far past her time to fulfil a purpose long since fulfilled, Crest, an ancient Guardian of the Keep, is less than pleased when she is awoken to fight the Evil from the Sea. Again. Worse, she discovers that she has become a sort of patron spirit to the wolves of the Keep. Forced to play court in the same song and dance and furious at their blatant idolatry, Crest keeps the very wolves she's promised to protect at a frigid distance as she searches for a way to free herself from the cycle. But as Crest's searching takes her down darker and darker paths, one wolf, Swallow, sees the spray from the waves and brings a question to light: Will Crest turn her back on the Keep and all those who keep her bound, or in her efforts to free herself, will she let them die? Is it only the Keep who has forgotten the ways of old, or is Crest too set adrift? ·°‧ ༄༄༄◃✦▹༄༄༄ ‧°· "Sequel" to and set in the same world as Where the Star Weeps. !ONLY ON WATTPAD! If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been STOLEN and your device is susceptible to malware. All rights reserved. Absolutely NO feeding AI.

Grand-Prize Winner of the Wuthering Heights Reimagined Contest 🏆 A Southern gothic reimagining of Wuthering Heights. Content note: One weirdly erotic scene (not explicit) + some light cussin'. Cathy Earnshaw is engaged to a decent and thoroughly respectable man. The party at his family's South Carolina estate is everything she's dreamed of - champagne glasses glinting under string lights, Spanish moss drifting in the sultry breeze - until Heathcliff shows up. Four years he's been gone. They used to run wild in the woods behind her family home, drawing blood and making promises no one else would understand. Now he's returned, hardened and hollow. When he ruptures the smooth surface of her genteel world, Edgar and his friends don't know how to handle him. But Cathy does.

He built everything in silence - a business worth millions, factories, a university, hundreds of lives resting on his decisions. He never spoke about it. And she never knew. She waited, believing silence was temporary. Believing distance had an explanation. Then the messages stopped. While she was counting days and fighting her own quiet battles, corruption was dismantling his world - carefully, legally, without mercy. He disappeared not by choice, but because everything he had built was being taken at once. She learned who he truly was only when it was already too late to ask questions. This is a story about waiting that turns into fear, about silence that hurts more than truth, about feelings that begin as anxiety and slowly become something deeper - something dangerously close to love. Sometimes love doesn't start with a touch. Sometimes it starts with silence .Based on true events

What if the greatest distance you needed to cross was the one between the person you are and the person you long to become? In I DREAM OF ME, Michel N. Christophe delivers a soul-stirring, unflinchingly honest portrait of a man unraveling the tangled threads of identity, family, and self-worth. Haunted by a vivid dream of wealth that brings only emptiness, Samuel-son, brother, husband, and doctor-finds himself estranged from his life, cut off from the rituals, relationships, and desires that once defined him. Through a mosaic of memories, encounters, and revelations-ranging from the quiet tenderness of his wife, Elise, to the bruising honesty of his mother, from the sunlit serenity of Caribbean shores to the isolating chill of Montreal-Samuel embarks on a deeply personal quest. He confronts the ghosts of his upbringing, the limits of duty, the wounds of old betrayals, and the quiet heroism of choosing faith over fear. With wit, vulnerability, and a rare emotional clarity, Christophe explores the heart of modern manhood: the longing for belonging, the courage to want, and the power of forgiveness. I DREAM OF ME is the story of a family built on contradictions, of love found in the ruins of disappointment, and of one man's determination to claim his life-one choice, one truth, one dream at a time. For those who live by faith as much as by hope, and for anyone who's ever wondered if it's possible to come home to yourself. "I Dream of Me" is a deeply introspective journey through the tangled web of identity, family, and self-realization. Spanning continents and generations, the novel follows Samuel-a Caribbean-born physician navigating a life split between the sun-soaked islands of his youth and the cold, isolating landscapes of Canada. Haunted by the echoes of a troubled family legacy, Samuel struggles to reconcile his inherited fears and disappointments with his longing for love, belonging, and personal purpose.

The Dreamer awakes, the shadow goes by; the tale I have told you, that tale is a lie... Portals to magical worlds, corvids that speak the meaning of life, and more await one who sits and listens to this sharing of tales between two anachronistic raconteurs, one of whom may or may not be Geoffrey Chaucer. Reader, remember this: the tales are pure fictions. Fantasies. Except when they are not.

When her therapy app accidentally sends Riley's private confessions to a random British expat - and his to her - what began as a glitch quickly evolves into the kind of intimacy that can only exist between strangers. A slow-burn contemporary romance. * * * When a company health initiative forces Riley Markle to download a trendy mental health app, she fills out the onboarding survey without much thought, expecting to get paired with a virtual gym buddy who'll send thumbs-up emojis twice a week. Instead, she gets paired with Joe, a lonely British expat whose wellness concern of Compulsive Behaviors is flagged by the AI system as a perfect match for Riley. Riley resolves to complete her month of check-ins and be done with it - until a glitch in the app sends both her and Joe's embarrassing therapy videos to each other instead of their therapist. Soon, Riley and Joe are talking late into the night, exchanging thirst-trap videos of their weekend routines by day, and thinking about each other constantly. Both are smitten, both are broken, and neither of them knows how to do this without destroying each other. The plan: Limit all communication to the app until after Day 30, then see where things go. But plans change. * * * 🏆 High Rankings: #1 in LITERARY #1 in QUICKREAD #1 in NEWENGLAND #3 in EPISTOLARY #14 in SHORTCHAPTERS (out of 38,000 stories) #87 in ROMCOM (out of 35,000 stories) #147 in ROMANTIC (out of 86,000 stories) Updated November 2025

A teen is stunned to discover he's half-vampire. Will being asexual-aromantic thwart bloodlust, or are there other emotions strong enough to trigger murder? ******* Natsu anxiously follows his mentally-ill mother's rules, forcing himself to be an emotionless loner and suppressing his peculiar body constitution. But when he finds camaraderie with an abused yet purehearted boy, he rebels and experiences emotions he didn't know existed. Then tragedies disrupt Natsu's improving life and tear him away from the people he cares about. A mysterious "family friend" drags him halfway across the world to reveal an unsettling secret: Natsu is half-vampire, those expected to murder a human they fall for. Can he brave this new life when his friend has left a dangerous, unconventional mark on his heart? *Two time Wattpad Editor's Pick Jan 2018 & Oct 2020*

Nora Keane never believed in inevitability-until the lighthouse chose her. When an anonymous list appears in her mailbox, Nora dismisses it as coincidence. But days later, stranded at sea near the forbidden island where her father vanished years earlier, she learns the truth: the lighthouse does not warn ships away. It selects. And when its beam locks onto her alone, Nora is taken somewhere else entirely. She wakes in Driftfall, a vast city that exists beyond time, sustained by a brutal logic. Driftfall survives by redistributing strain-load-onto the people it pulls from the world. Those who can endure pressure, ambiguity, and moral compromise are put to work holding the system together. Those who can't disappear. As Nora rises within Driftfall's hierarchy, she discovers her father was taken before her-and nearly destroyed the city trying to escape. Nora soon learns escape is possible, but only at the cost of countless lives. Faced with a choice between freedom and responsibility, she refuses both. Instead, Nora commits to staying-becoming a problem the system cannot solve. Black Beacon is a literary speculative novel about systems that survive by hiding their damage, the cost of being useful, and what happens when refusal becomes a form of resistance.

Written for the moments that exist between gestures, for the pauses that carry more meaning than speech. At its center is a woman, not defined by action or plot, but by presence. She is rendered slowly, through attention, through silence, through the quiet way the world seems to rearrange itself around her.

Fourteen years after EoE cuts to credits. Shinji and Asuka have painfully, clumsily built something like a life together in post-Impact Tokyo-4. They thought they were done with all of this. Then the First Ancestral Race-still out there, still watching-sees that Earth's experiment went off-script. They're sending the Horsemen: cosmic exterminators on a scale that makes the Angels look like child's play. Misato Katsuragi, now Commander of HERZ (the successor to NERV), has a desperate gambit: Project Omega. One final Evangelion, powered by the LCL sea of dissolved souls from Third Impact and armored with Chaos Material-a substance extracted from an eldritch rift that tore open beneath Terminal Dogma during Third Impact. But nothing is what it appears. Ghosts haunt every decision. A darkness is growing at HERZ's heart that could make it as dangerous as NERV ever was. Time is running out, secrets are multiplying, and Omega needs a pilot.