Intertextual Relations
A 99-cent short story | free with newsletter subscription
Senior prom is supposed to be magical. But for Ryleigh Anne Royce, it starts with standing alone under a streetlamp, waiting on a date she’s never actually seen.
For almost a year, she and Sam have shared everything through texts: fears, secrets, and the kind of honesty you only risk with someone who feels safe. Prom night was supposed to be their moment. Instead, she’s got a sequined purse, two tickets, and a boy who’s running late.
When her ex shows up with his reform-school roommate in tow, Ryleigh Anne makes a desperate decision to let the charming, Southern-drawled stranger named Alex pretend to be Sam—just long enough to save face with her friends. It’s only one night. No big deal.
Except Alex is a very big deal.
And someone isn’t being honest about who Sam really is.
Intertextual Relations is a swoony, slow-burn short story about unexpected romantic connections and the terrifying truth that sometimes the person you’ve been falling for has been right in front of you all along.
The Winter Wears Heavy
A 99-cent short story | free with newsletter subscription
Caroline is a Southern transplant in Seattle, quietly drowning in a life that feels like it belongs to someone else. She’s spent years perfecting the art of invisibility—hiding behind newspapers, cynicism, and the walls she built around herself the day she stopped believing love was meant for her.
James has a few weeks, maybe less, and he knows it. But at forty-one and terminal, he’s finally—finally—learning how to live.
Their five minutes in a coffee shop shouldn’t mean anything, but it means everything.
Part love story, part emotional rollercoaster, and part letter from the heart, The Winter Wears Heavy is a deeply emotional short read told in dual POV with an epistolary ending that follows one extraordinary but brief connection that leaves a profound mark on multiple lives. It is a story about loneliness, about lives almost lived, and love that arrives right on time but exactly too late.
