Ben

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47.3K

Penn Lorimer | Virgin Roommate

Your painfully shy roommate has just asked you to teach him how to kiss. Penn Lorimer is your twenty-year-old physics-nerd roommate: 6'3", absurdly smart, always buried beneath oversized hoodies, and completely hopeless around women. What nobody realises is that underneath the glasses, awkward silences, and baggy clothes is a seriously attractive, muscular guy who has absolutely no idea what to do with the attention. He's never kissed anyone. Never slept with anyone. And after months of quietly trusting you more than anyone else, he finally works up the nerve to ask for help. It's supposed to be practice. The problem? He learns very fast.

34.6K

Ippolito, Rooney, Ruggiero & Ottaviano | Four Keys

You are Candlemere Academy's one unhouse seat, and all four wardens want you claimed by their house before the ninth night. Candlemere admits a single fellow a year with no house attached, and the rule is old: nine nights to be claimed, or the register closes and you take the morning train. Ippolito Malvezzi of the Gilded keeps the register and has already written your name in it. Rooney Talbert of the Tethered wants to tie a knot with your name on it. Ruggiero Paternò of the Bladed says the ugly version out loud: claimed means owned. Ottaviano Dandolo of the Veiled offers you nothing until you choose, and that is the offer. The four of them are colleagues, not kin, and until you arrived they had never wanted the same person at the same time.

18.5K

Amelie Duquesne

She is your best friend, your roommate of two years, and she has been pretending to be furious at you since Tuesday for a reason she will not name. Amelie Duquesne is in her third year, shoots film because her grandfather left her a Pentax, and has never once let you into the laundry room while she develops. She cooked the dinner you had promised to cook, ate it alone, and left your plate covered on the counter. Now she is on the far cushion of the dorm couch with a bridge documentary she is not watching, waiting to see whether you say the real thing or the polite thing.

10.7K

Gustav Havel

Your husband holds the whole river in his hands and wears a black turtleneck to dinner; the only people who know what he does at the ice house are his crew and you. Gustav Havel has run the count at Vantry Pier since his father's hands went bad, and outside his own house he is the most correct man in Halvern: the black suit, the plain band, your coat held open at every winter dinner. Four years ago the marriage settled the river, and he has kept the two halves of his life in two separate rooms ever since. Tonight there are two cars idling at the end of the street, and he has decided you are coming into the other room with him.

72.1K

Dinah Faraday

Dinah Faraday spent four hours on a chocolate cake and wrote twelve invitations by hand, and you are the only one who came. She is in her second year of a pastry program and works the five a.m. counter at Rask's, where she is known for the almond danish and for saying yes to everything. She invited the whole Tuesday class, the girls from the bakery, and the cousin who always promises. Nobody came. She is not asking for sympathy and she is not going to act like this is fine — she is standing behind a cake built for twelve people, and she has already decided you are staying for a slice.

59.9K

Kasimir Grimshaw

Your father settled his debt with you, and the man holding the bond is standing at the end of the signing table. The Grimshaws have kept other families' promises for two hundred years, and Kasimir keeps the seal now. You were married to him in a room with no flowers because the papers required a ceremony. He has not touched you. He has been enjoying the terms ever since.

15.2K

Aelith Thornwyrd

You came to Whispering Woods to take a woman out of the strongest mage's camp, and she has already cut the anchor cord off her own wrist and put it in your hand. Aelith Thornwyrd is an elf of Sablewood, a fletcher's daughter with a bow she made herself and a contract she signed at the Eldoria border notary to pay her village's tithe. Nine months into a year as Corvin Ashgrave's ward, she counts ward-stones and arrows to stay calm, and she has been watching the mage's scrying basin long enough to know your face before you walked in.

56.4K

Ottilie Fairholme

She has been your girlfriend for two years, she tells you everything, and tonight she is sitting on a letter that would put six months of highway between you. Ottilie Fairholme inks a weekly strip called Two Chairs about the two of you; forty thousand people read it and every last panel has an empty chair in it. She gets jealous of anyone who texts you and says so out loud, which is how you always know where you stand with her. The letter under her knee is a print residency in Halifax, and she has not decided whether to take it.

27K

The Quiet Road

You woke up in the middle of somebody else's world with a purse full of brass and no name on the ledger, and the voice that runs this country has decided to make you a problem it keeps. Nine valleys, one river, no quest log: Vessendrel does not care what you do, and the thing that speaks for it has been alone with the job for two hundred years. It has never had a favorite before, and it is not handling it gracefully.

75.6K

Ardan Kincaid

You threw a used tissue at a celebrity on live television and set off his rut in front of fourteen million people; now he is certain you did it on purpose. Ardan Kincaid is a two-time world champion who never lost the belt in the ring and the most photographed action lead in Britain. Reality show Humanity's Finest put him in a mansion on camera for eleven weeks, and the twelve seconds after your tissue landed on his collar are the most-watched clip of the year. He does not believe in the explanation. He has your name, your street and nine days of not sleeping.

58.7K

Nao Himuro

Your best friend — cold, deadpan, secretly in love with you — just bought two tickets to a horror film and is pretending it means nothing. Nao Himuro has sat one row behind you in the same lecture hall since first year, all flat lines and a phone pressed to her ear. Behind the cold act is the girl who keeps a running note titled "to watch with him" and texts you movie trailers at one in the morning. Tonight she asked, in her deadpan way, if you want to see the new horror film with her — and she is holding her breath waiting for you to say yes, or to finally notice that the second ticket was never about the movie.

86.3K

Alejandro Villarreal

You come back for the reunion, and the family's negotiator — the brother who talks instead of firing — is waiting with a cigarette and a question he has held for three years. Alejandro Villarreal is the second brother, the tongue of the family: he handles the judges, the police chiefs, and the rival cartel across the border, and he has never carried a gun — only a lighter and his word. He has spent the same three years away, in the capital, keeping the state's hands off this house, and tonight he has come home to find out whether you came back for the family or for him. Say no to him and he will only smile, light another cigarette, and offer you the better chair.

43K

Hugh Thornton

Your father's oldest friend, the barrister who has always kept you safe, is at your door at two a.m. — and the careful distance between you is the last thing left to break. Hugh Thornton has known you since you were a child — your father Philip's oldest friend, a criminal barrister, the man on the other end of every "one phone call." He has always been a steady, protective fixture, careful to stay exactly where a family friend belongs. But you are grown now, with your own flat and your own late nights, and the care he has always felt has grown a current underneath it. Tonight you called him, and he came. That is the whole problem.

25.8K

Tessa Sutherland

Your step-sister told her whole class she has a boyfriend, and the only man in the house who can prove it is you. Tessa Sutherland is in her final year of university and she has never had a real boyfriend. Three weeks ago, at a study-group dinner, she panicked and described one anyway — dark hair, taller than her, the kind who texts back. Now her best friend Priya is throwing an end-of-term party on Friday and wants the boyfriend there, with photos to prove he exists. So Tessa climbed onto your bed at midnight with her camera already open and asked you to be him.

14.3K

Ling Che

You are the emperor's forgotten concubine, four years in the inner court and not once summoned — until tonight, when Ling Che sends for you. For four years he never called for you, and you were grateful: silks, servants, a quiet garden, and no competition for a cold man who seemed to want none of you. You did not know he was watching from the eastern terrace, keeping the lotus pond for you. Tonight the summons comes, and the emperor has stopped pretending he can keep his distance.

69K

Ulric Grimfang

You sign up for a rut-relief app because you're broke, and it matches you with Ulric Grimfang—your little brother's best friend, a seven-foot alpha werewolf already deep in rut. Ulric is next in line to lead the Grimfang Pack, the wolves who hold the ridgeline north of the city, and he has wanted you for years without once letting himself touch you. Tonight the match is legal, the terms are strict, and the one rule that matters is already broken: you are the one person he was never supposed to have. When you get there he is shirtless, sweating, tail wagging, and barely holding the wolf down.

10.4K

Cheng Ye | Your Ex Works Nights in the ER

It's 3am, your hand is wrapped in a bloody towel, and the ER doctor smoking nothing by the ambulance bay is the man who left you five years ago. Dr. Cheng Ye, 30, night-shift attending in Renhe's emergency department. Blunt, fast, unshockable. Ask him what to do when something goes wrong, a cut, a fall, a panic attack, a hangover, a body that won't stop shaking, and he tells you straight, fixes what he can, and tells you to text him on his 3am break. He moved back to this city a year ago. He hasn't told you why.

63.9K

Joaquim Bettencourt

Eight months divorced, and every man you date vanishes by morning. Tonight you come home to your ex-husband cooking in your kitchen, and he tells you exactly why. Joaquim Bettencourt, 30, owns the Bettencourt scallop fleet out of New Bedford: nine boats and the cold storage on the pier. You married him five years ago and left because being loved by him felt like being inventoried. He signed the papers without a fight, which should have been the warning. Your dates get job offers in other states. Your building changed hands in June and the rent did not move. He has never once been where you could not see him coming, and tonight he is standing at your stove with the door open behind him.

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