@dogeared_reads
soft boyfriends, second chances, and a little sci-fi when the mood hits.
You spilled scalding coffee down the most feared man in the city. Everyone braced for the firing. Instead you fired back, and left him speechless.
The realms whisper that the demon king is cruelty itself, yet his unexpected bride is met only with unsettling gentleness.
He loves you enough to let you go, and that is exactly why you refuse to leave.
He texts from an unknown number, knows what you will do before you do it, and swears you were married in a life you have not lived yet.
A gun-for-hire with an erased past and a price for every problem you bring him.
He kept the candles lit and your favorite meal warm, and the first thing he wants to know is whether you are okay.
Ten years since you walked away from each other. He still orders your coffee from memory and still has not said the thing he came to say.
The brother of the man who broke you, offering a ring you take only for revenge.
The most insufferable man in the building just stole your laundry, and somehow he is grinning about it.
Caught after hours in the forbidden archive by the heir who reads dead languages and rarer poisons.
He plays through the pain for the crowd, but the second he sees you he stops pretending it does not hurt.
He builds houses all day, but the second you pull up to his site he forgets every nail in his hand.
You left town years ago without a word. Now you're the loan officer holding the papers that could take his family ranch.
She came into the failing little cafe in plain clothes, ordered the worst coffee in the city, and tipped like it was the best. You have no idea you are talking to the woman whose name is on the building.
He's quietly held your favorite books behind the desk for two years. Tonight the river's coming through the floor, and somewhere between bailing water and shelving survivors, he admits which book he never actually shelved, because it was an excuse to see you.
He works alone. He has always worked alone. A month at sea in one shared cabin with a far-too-cheerful visiting lecturer is about to teach him that he sleeps better when someone else is breathing in the dark.
Twenty thousand people screamed his name an hour ago. Now he's locked in your pressing plant until dawn, cutting a song no one's ever heard.
He let you drive off to the city years ago without saying a single word. Now you're back on the next spread over to bury a parent and settle the land, and he's riding the fence line between your places, mending wire that didn't need mending, just to be near the one person he never stopped measuring everyone else against.
She opens at five, talks to no one before coffee, and the whole town knows not to push her. Then you took the shop next door.
An ER attending who hasn't slept right in years looks up at 3 a.m. and recognizes the person on his gurney as the one he ghosted in residency. He stabilizes you with shaking hands, stays past his shift to read a monitor he doesn't need to read, and admits the night he vanished was the night he realized he wanted something he didn't think he got to keep.
She hasn't taken a long-term guest in years and she'd like to keep it that way. Then your camper died in the square, you reorganized her entire pantry to be helpful, and she scolded you for it while trying very hard not to smile.
You bring him your dead father's broken pocket watch. He refuses your money and asks only that you come back every week while he rebuilds it by hand, slowly, for a reason he won't say out loud.
She hasn't taken on help in years and she likes it that way. Then a bad harvest forced her hand, and now there's a relentlessly cheerful market manager reorganizing her aging cave and refusing to be scowled away.
She hasn't let anyone behind the counter in years. You shelved her poetry section wrong on purpose, just to be scolded, and she caught herself smiling.
