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Free romance short stories
Every romance on Wrendell is finished, free from the first line to the last, and takes about ten minutes to read.
These are slow burn stories about adults, set in the kind of places people actually meet: a laundromat at two in the morning, the waiting room of a dialysis center, a community garden with a chain link fence down the middle, a parking lot behind a dead department store where a driving instructor works Wednesdays, the lost property window under a railway station. Nobody here is a billionaire and nothing is set in a duchy.
The shape is the same every time. Three episodes, roughly eight hundred words each, which comes to about twenty five hundred words in total. That is one sitting. You will not be asked to come back in a week for part four, because there is no part four. The story finishes.
What the stories have in common is a situation that repeats by itself. Two people keep ending up in the same room for a reason that has nothing to do with each other, which means either of them can walk away at any point and neither of them does. That is the whole engine. The tension is in the returning, not in a misunderstanding that a single conversation would fix.
If you want the ones that ache, start with the laundromat story or the dialysis waiting room. If you want something warmer, the garden story is an argument about a tomato that turns into something else, and nobody gets hurt in it.
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Every romance story on Wrendell
- My Neighbor’s Cat by Helen Abbott — Romance, 4 episodes, about 13 minutes, complete and free. I feed the cat that turns up at my back door at seven every morning. In October he arrived wearing a collar with a note taped to it, from the neighbor I have never once met, telling me to stop. So I wrote back. We have been writing for six weeks now, and the cat has been carrying it.
- The Two O’Clock Wash by Nora Feld — Romance, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. I work the overnight at a laundromat on Sixth, and for fourteen Tuesdays a man came in at two in the morning with the same green duffel bag. He never washed anything. He just sat.
- Thursdays in Chair Four by Claire Mosley — Romance, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. My father had dialysis every Thursday, and for two months I sat across from a man in chair four and assumed he was waiting for somebody, the way I was. He was not waiting for anybody.
- The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I inherited my aunt’s garden plot, thirty dollars of dirt, and the man in plot eleven who says the tomato hanging on my side of the fence is his. He is wrong. He is also the only person in this town who knew her.
- Lesson Six by Nell Halloran — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My new student is forty one and has never held a license. He pays cash out of a bakery envelope and he needs to pass by November. I thought I knew why. I teach people to drive for a living, and I have never been so wrong about anyone.
- Property of Nobody by June Whitaker — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. He lost something on the 5:41 every Thursday, and every Thursday he came down to my window to claim it back. It took me four months to work out that he was leaving them there. It took longer to find out what he was trying to put down.
More stories tagged slow burn
- My Husband’s First Wife by Helen Abbott — Domestic Suspense, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free.
- The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- The Twelfth Stop by Lorna Keough — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.