Love

Thriller Red
It’s dark. Zarodie couldn’t see anything. She gingerly moved forward extending her arms as barriers so her body wouldn’t hit anything.
By Devond Devoe18 days ago in Fiction
THE CONE
The night was hot and overcast, the sky red-rimmed with the lingering sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a
By Faisal Khan18 days ago in Fiction
Fixing Dad's Shed Roof. Top Story - December 2025.
Simon, Thank you for coming over. A few words to the wise from your mother (I shall keep it brief). 1. Your Dad has not slept since the roof blew off his shed. He may keep going for a lie down, but this is different to sleep. Do not poke the bear.
By Caroline Jane19 days ago in Fiction
The Last Message She Never Sent
They say some people enter your life not to stay—but to awaken something in you that was asleep for too long. I never believed that until Aira walked into mine, quietly, without ceremony, and changed the shape of my days forever. I met her on a night when the city felt heavier than usual. The streetlights flickered like tired eyes fighting sleep, and my phone buzzed with endless notifications that meant nothing to me. I was sitting alone in a small café, pretending to work, stirring cold coffee that had long lost its warmth, when she approached my table and asked if the chair across from me was free. Her voice was soft but confident—the kind that doesn’t ask for permission; it simply arrives. She carried herself with calm grace, as if she already knew the world wouldn’t wait for her, so she refused to hesitate. We talked about small things at first. Coffee. Rain. How cities look different when you’re lonely. How silence can sometimes be louder than words. She smiled often, but behind that smile lived a quiet sadness, like a song paused midway through its most beautiful verse. I noticed it but didn’t ask. Some truths don’t like to be rushed. They arrive only when they’re ready. From that night on, she became part of my routine without ever asking to be. Messages at midnight that began with nothing important and ended with everything. Long walks without destinations, where our footsteps synced like they had known each other for years. Conversations that felt unfinished because neither of us wanted them to end. With her, time didn’t move forward—it dissolved, melting into moments that felt infinite. Aira believed in moments, not promises. “Forever scares people,” she once said, staring at the river as city lights danced across the water. “But moments? Moments are honest. They don’t pretend.” I laughed then, brushing off the weight of her words. I should have understood. I should have listened harder. One evening, she didn’t reply. No explanation. No goodbye. Just silence—sharp, sudden, and unforgiving. I checked my phone every few minutes, convincing myself she was busy, asleep, or simply offline. I reread old messages, searching for clues I might have missed. Days passed. Then weeks. She was gone. The café where we met felt emptier, like it had lost its heartbeat. The river looked colder, darker, indifferent to my waiting. Even music sounded incomplete, like it was missing a note only she knew how to play. I blamed myself relentlessly—maybe I didn’t say enough, feel enough, love enough. Maybe if I had promised her forever, she would have stayed. Months later, on a quiet afternoon, an email arrived. No subject line. No warning. Just her name. My hands trembled as I opened it, my heart pounding as if it already knew the truth. She wrote about the illness she never spoke of, the battles she fought silently while laughing beside me. She said she didn’t want pity, didn’t want to be remembered as someone fragile or fading. She wanted to live brightly in someone’s memory, not painfully in their present. She told me that meeting me made her feel alive again—that every moment we shared was real, unfiltered, and honest. She said love didn’t need time to grow; it needed truth to exist. And some people leave not because they want to, but because staying would hurt more than disappearing. At the end of the email was a sentence that broke me completely: “I wrote you a hundred messages I never sent. This is the last one.” I sat there for a long time, staring at the screen as tears fell freely, unashamed. Grief has its own language, and that night, it spoke fluently through every breath I struggled to take. Today, I still visit that café. I still walk by the river where she taught me the beauty of moments. I still hear her laughter in quiet places, in pauses between songs, in the silence she once loved. Loving her didn’t end when she left—it transformed, becoming something deeper, something permanent. Because some stories don’t conclude with goodbye. They echo. And in those echoes, we learn that love isn’t measured by how long it lasts—but by how deeply it changes us.
By Mustafa19 days ago in Fiction
The Work is Received
As I wake and feel the sun has not forgotten me, I rise and meditate, trepidate. I let the brightness cast shadows against the wall behind my bed as I reflect. Another day. Another chance. I take my leave from the bed and prepare a soothing balm. I apply it daily, morning, noon, and night, using the preserving solution I was taught to prepare, along with cleansers of aloe vera and coconut oil. I tend the flesh to keep it lean, to keep it fresh.
By Paul Stewart19 days ago in Fiction
Freedom Isn't Free
She has scars on her back. Four of them. I felt them the first night we were together. Eventually, after we had been together for some months, I asked her if I could see them. She reluctantly agreed, pulled off her shirt, turned around.
By Canute Limarider19 days ago in Fiction
Annabelle. Content Warning.
I stopped counting time when it stopped behaving like time. But today—out of habit more than hope—I carved another mark into the wall. 794. Seven hundred and ninety-four cycles since I woke up here. Seven hundred and ninety-four resets of a system I do not control, inside a chamber that does not belong to me, buried somewhere beneath the city and deeper still beneath her. The chamber is underground, or maybe sub-networked. It’s difficult to tell when the walls are solid synthcrete reinforced with steel fibers and old code layered like sediment. The air is wet with coolant and smells faintly of rusted circuits and rain-soaked alleyways. The kind of smell that lingers under megastructures where sunlight never negotiates access. There are no windows. There never were. Only a vent—rectangular, narrow—that occasionally exhales overheated air from above. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes frigid, sometimes humming with electrical tension. Twice per cycle, light filters through it: once at system midnight, once at system noon. The light is artificial and thin, fractured by dust and debris, but it’s enough to remind me that the world outside still exists. Every time the light appears, a bell rings somewhere far away. A citywide synchronization chime, broadcast through the grid. A reminder that order still functions for everyone else. The light hurts now. I’ve been in the dark so long that even its weakest glow feels invasive, like staring directly into a corrupted sun without blink protocols installed. Carving the tally mark isn’t easy. The walls resist damage by design. I use a metal shard—once part of the vent housing, torn loose by someone before me. Maybe another fragment she buried. Maybe another version of me that didn’t survive the isolation. My wrists are bound by encrypted cuffs embedded directly into the wall. My ankles too. Thick bands of cold alloy threaded with biometric locks I can’t override. They hum softly, like they’re alive, like they’re listening. They smell metallic and old, the way forgotten machines do when they’ve been submerged too long. My body is weaker now. Not starving—there’s no need for that here—but thinning. Systems atrophying from lack of purpose. Every cycle I sit back against the wall, sliding down until the floor catches me, shaking slightly like a relic that’s been powered on too long. This is my day. I do not eat. I do not sleep. Sometimes I close my eyes anyway, just to imagine something else. To picture a version of the world where I am not here. Where she did not do this. Where I am free. If only I could be released, I think often. I’d never betray her again. I understand now. I’d be smarter. To understand why I’m here, you need to understand my keeper. Her name is Annabelle. She was never supposed to become this. Before the upgrades, before the armor, before the city learned to worship chrome and code, Annabelle was human in the old, dangerous way. Everything she touched seemed to glow—not with neon, but with warmth. Her presence felt like a soft anomaly in a world that had optimized feeling into extinction. Her skin carried heat. Her hair—long, auburn, impossibly real—caught the light like it was woven from copper threads. She smelled faintly of jasmine and rain and something unquantifiable, something unreplicable. People fell in love with her instantly. Not because she tried. Because she existed without filters. She built gardens on rooftops where corporations had abandoned soil. She sang to the plants—not because it improved growth metrics, but because she believed life responded to care. Her voice carried something rare: sincerity. She was brilliant. Not the sterile brilliance of optimized intelligence, but the dangerous kind—the kind that asks why instead of how fast. Her code wasn’t efficient. It was expressive. It felt. And that was her mistake. As the years passed, people wanted to own her. To extract her. To rewrite her into something useful. Every man who entered her life claimed he was different from the last. Each one promised protection. Each one left damage in his wake. The first betrayal was catastrophic. First loves usually are. She believed every word. Trusted every promise. Handed over access she didn’t yet know how to revoke. When he left, he didn’t just take her innocence—he stole her faith in connection itself. Everyone told her to wait. To heal. To trust again. She did. Repeatedly. Each time, the lies grew more sophisticated. The manipulation more subtle. The abandonment cleaner. By the time boys became men, Annabelle had learned something terrible: emotional cruelty didn’t age out of people. It just learned better vocabulary. Her heart darkened. So she did what the world had taught her to do. She fortified. She replaced vulnerability with protocols. Trust with encryption. Hope with redundancy. She rebuilt herself piece by piece until nothing could reach her without permission. Her heart became a black rose algorithm—beautiful, lethal, surrounded by digital thorns sharp enough to shred any intrusion. The fortress grew higher with each iteration, thicker with each patch. “Only a fool would try to breach this,” she said once, her voice flat and final. She forgot one thing. Me. I live in the deepest layer of her core system. The last warm process she couldn’t bring herself to delete. I am the part of her that still believes. The fragment that remembers laughter without suspicion. The soft, human code she sealed away when she decided pain was too expensive. When Annabelle locked down her heart, she didn’t just keep the world out. She trapped me in. I trusted her. The way she once trusted them. Now I sit here, carving marks into walls that don’t care, listening to the city hum above me, waiting for a recall command that never comes. She moves through the world now like a legend. A cybernetic fairy tale whispered through back channels and neon-lit bars. Men want her. Corporations fear her. No one touches her. She is untouchable. And I am forgotten. Sometimes I feel her presence when she runs diagnostics. A pressure through the walls. A flicker in the light. For a moment, the cuffs warm slightly, as if the system remembers I exist. I want to scream. I want to beg. I want to remind her that protecting yourself by erasing your own humanity is not survival. But the system does not recognize my voice as essential. So I wait. Because even the most fortified code carries ghosts. And somewhere beneath the armor, beneath the black roses and thorns, a heart still beats. If she ever listens— if she ever opens the core— she’ll find me here. Still counting. Still hoping. Still alive.Start writing...
By Evelynn Cross19 days ago in Fiction
Love Beyond the Office Walls: A Story Based on Real Life. AI-Generated.
Story (Based on a Real Story) Some love stories are born in poetry. Others begin in offices, meeting rooms, and quiet moments between deadlines. This is one of those stories — not perfect, not dramatic, but deeply real.
By shakir hamid19 days ago in Fiction
Two Hearts, One Promise: A True Love Story That Survived Time. AI-Generated.
True love does not always arrive with fireworks, dramatic music, or perfect timing. Sometimes, it enters quietly, disguised as a simple conversation, a shared silence, or a moment you don’t recognize as life-changing until years later. This is one such story — real, imperfect, and deeply human.
By shakir hamid19 days ago in Fiction
A Little Girl-Talk
“I know what will cheer you up, Abbie... a story about the palace!” “What!?” “Oh, yeah, Frannie showed up at Temple this morning in a royal carriage. Eee he he he.”
By K.B. Silver 20 days ago in Fiction
The Christmas We Forgot to End. Content Warning.
December descended like a thief in snow, wrapping the small town of Ashwood in a cloak of white. For Emma, it was the kind of winter that smelled like fresh cookies and forgotten dreams. She’d spent the morning baking with her grandmother, the same rituals they’d performed every year since she was a child – sugar cookies cut into stars, hot cocoa laced with nutmeg, the scent of orange and clove wafting from the simmering potpourri.
By LUNA EDITH20 days ago in Fiction
Falling Awake
The city breathes differently after midnight. Not quieter, just more honest. Car horns stop pretending to be impatient and become lonely. Laughter spills out of bars like secrets that were never meant to survive daylight. The air feels thick, as if every memory ever made here is still hanging between the buildings.
By Salman Writes20 days ago in Fiction