"Painting Rainbows" by Sue Lilley (Short Story)

Genre:  Romance

Type of Short Story:  Short Story

Summary:  Soulmates since they were children, Mandy and Joel are grown up now and destined to be together. Until life hurls a curved ball in their direction. Can they find each other and live happily ever after? Or will life conspire to keep them apart?

Excerpt:

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she announced before she’d even sat down.

She’d dressed up. Did she think it would soften the blow? She looked like the bluebell fairy, all floaty skirts and wild purple hair. On anyone else, it could’ve been a thrift store costume. But Mandy was ethereal, sexy as hell yet somehow untouchable. Was she already withdrawing because she was leaving? He picked up a stick and poked around in the bonfire, trying to sound normal when all he wanted to do was beg.

“How come?”

“I haven’t been home all summer. I should go back for a duty visit before uni.”

“We could go together?”

“God, no!” she laughed, tucking the silky skirt beneath her as she kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the grass. “Can you imagine? My dad would have a fit if I turned up with you in tow.”

Odd they’d been so close all summer, yet they’d never once discussed the long connection of their families.

“He never approved of me, did he?” he remembered.

“I can’t imagine your folks would be any more approving.”

“They might. They’ve always wanted me to be happy.”

“You don’t think they’ve been indulging their only son? There’ll come a point when they’ll expect you to grow up and toe the party line. Don’t you want to do something useful with your life?”

“Plenty of time for that,” he insisted. “My priorities are different.”

“You mean all this arty nonsense?” she scoffed, which shocked him.

He’d meant his priority was her. She’d possessed his every waking hour as well as his dreams. He’d believed she felt the same. But something about her closed expression stopped him from saying so.

“It’s not nonsense,” he said, floundering around in the dark. “I know I’m good. I can do something with it.”

“Like what? Painting’s not real life, Joel. It’s a game. You’re chasing rainbows, putting off the moment when you have to face the future.”

“I thought my future would be with you.” He took her hand, desperate to feel the heat of her as his heart was clamped by icy dread, his beautiful dream slipping like sand through his fingers. “Real life seems less of a cage with you there beside me.”

“Nice line. How long have you been practising that one?”

He’d been sincere but he laughed along with the joke. He hardly recognised himself. He’d become so much putty in her hands but he couldn’t bear the thought of being without her...

Buy this book on Amazon US or Amazon UK.

"Go to bed" by Melissa “Brownie” Grant (Flash Fiction)

Genre:  Erotica

Type of Short Story:  Flash Fiction

Summary:  What do you get when you have a sleepless night, a bottle of rum and two good friends? These are the ingredients of a captivating night. Join Carla and Justin as these two friends show you the meaning of nightcap.

Excerpt:

Another sleepless night, Carla thought to herself as she turned onto her left side. She began to kick the bottom of her blanket, trying to tuck it under her feet, but it wasn't working. Now she was annoyed. Annoyed that her feet were still cold and at the fact she was still awake knowing that she had a big meeting tomorrow. Checking her alarm clock, she saw it was11:34. For many this would be considered an early night, but for Carla it was late. Finally, she gave up her pursuit of sleeping and decided to sit on her back porch. It was a nice night out.

Carla got out of her bed to search for some comfortable lounging clothes. After a few minutes, she came across her favorite sweats and tank top. She quickly slipped them on and headed downstairs to her back door. Before going outside, she grabbed her bottle of rum. Why not do a few shots while waiting on sleep?

Out on the back porch, the sound of crickets began to soothe her. Carla was happy that summer was coming.

“I see that you can’t sleep either,” a familiar voice said from over the fence.

“Huh?”

“Girl, stop playing.It’s me—Justine.” Justine popped her head over the fence. “Oh you brought out the good stuff, Captain Morgan.”

Carla chuckled, “Yeah, you wanna do a few shots with me? Maybe this will help both of us sleep.”

Justine’s footsteps joined the noise of the crickets as she made her way to Carla’s porch. Once Justine was seated, Carla handed her the bottle.

“You don’t want to take the first shot?”

“Nah, you can. I have another bottle just in case we run out.”

“Turnt on a Tuesday night.” Both Justine and Carla laughed.

“So, why are you up so late?” Carla took the bottle from Justine.

Before answering, Justine ran her fingers through her curly tresses. “Well, I was up doing this research paper. Now my mind won’t shut off. You?”

Carla took a swig of rum then spoke. “Got this big meeting with higher-ups tomorrow. This could make or break the company.” Carla downed another shot. “I see why some of the bigwigs do drugs. I can’t take this.”

“Girl, calm yourself. Just think of it this way—you’ll still have a job at the end of the day.”

Holding the bottle up, Carla acted as if she was giving a toast. “You’re right about that. But still,there’ll be others that may lose theirs. That’s the part that is eating away at me.”

Justine got up off the steps and sat adjacent to Carla. “Look, try your best not to make that happen. I know that you can.”

“I guess.” Carla handed the bottle to Justine. “It’s just when I took this position on, I thought that I could change the company around.But I see it’s just as much bullshit at the top as it is at the bottom.”

“You know what? You need this rum more than me.” Justine set the bottle in Carla’s lap. “You know what else you need?”

“What?” Carla gulped the rum.

“This.” Justine leaned over and kissed her. Carla pulled away, but Justine pulled her closer. After a few seconds, Carla gave in and kissed her back.

Suddenly Justine pulled away, “Wait, wait, wait, I thought we agreed not to do this again—I’m sorry.”

Breathing heavily, Carla nodded her head in agreement.

She sat and thought for a second then she said, “Aw, hell with it.” Carla straddled Justine’s lap then began to kiss her passionately once again.Her hand found its way up Justine’s shirt. She leaned back and gazed at Justine. “You sure you want to do this here?”

“Girl, shut up, you’re fucking up the mood.” Justine shoved her hand down Carla’s sweats and searched for Carla’s hot spot. Carla let out a low moan. “Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. You’re wet as shit, girl.”

Another moan left Carla’s lips as Justine continued to toy with her spot. With each flick of her finger, Carla became even wetter. Carla buried her face into Justine’s shoulder.

“That’s right, I need for you come for me.” Justine could feel Carla’s whole body tensing up as she began to search for her G-spot.

“Please, I can’t take it.” Carla’s words were muffled.

“Yes you can.” Justine found her spot. It was soft and moist. Justine couldn’t help but play with it. The more she toyed with it, the louder Carla’s moan became. As Justine kept feeling on Carla’s G-spot, a warm liquid began to trickle down her wrist and through her fingers. “You didn’t tell me you was a squirter.” This gave Justine more incentive to make her come. Justine was getting ready to remove her hand, but Carla grabbed it to keep it in place. Carla began to move her hips in motion with Justine’s strokes. The warm liquid began to run down Justine’s hand as Carla cried out that she was coming. Carla jumped off Justine’s lap and fell into the chair across from her.

“Don’t touch me.” Carla’s body began to shake. “My goodness, I needed that.”

Justine licked her fingers. “I know.” She laughed. “Now go to bed.”

Buy this story on Amazon.

"The Siege of Abigail Beson" by Tyler Smith (Novella)

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Type of Short Story:  Novella

Summary:  An isolated family in Virginia finds themselves under attack shortly after the end of the civil war.

Excerpt:

Another booming crash jarred Abby from sleep. Calmer this time, Abby rolled away from the window, hoping to hide her eyes from the intense brightness of the lightning.

Another explosive rumble. Something didn’t feel right. Abby turned back toward the window, her mind racing to figure out what new prank her brother had contrived.

There was no lightning. Why was there no lightning? Abby got up and walked to her window. The fog of sleep was clearing from her mind, so the next explosion finally registered as the firing of a gun.

Confused, she peered out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the source. The rain had stopped, but the cloud cover continued to hinder any illumination from the moon.

Why would there be gunfire? Abby asked herself silently. Lee signed the surrender when the Union was just miles from our door. At least, that’s what the last letter from Benjamin had said. That letter was two months ago. They hadn’t received any letters since. The post had been spotty throughout the war, and after the surrender it had stopped entirely. Had the war started again? She’d heard rumors of bandits and raiders exploiting the chaos of the war to wreak havoc in the west, but here? Just a few days ride from Richmond?
Read the complete story on Google Docs.  Support the story on Kickstarter.

"Leaves of The World Tree" by Adam Misner (Short Stories)

Genre:  Dark Fantasy

Type of Short Story:  Short Story Collection

Summary:  Leaves of the world tree is a collection of six short stories that take place in a wide variety of worlds, with varying degrees of fantasy and technology. The stories are stand-alone, making each is it's own adventure. Ranging from a bloody Viking battle to a necromancer love story, the collection is sure to give you a diverse dose of fantasy both high and low, urban and medieval.

Excerpt:

Like many Olafs before him, he was named Olaff. It was not a bad name by any means. He shared his name with four others born that year, and he would share it with seven the year after. Olaf was then, as it had been before, and would be for generations to come, a common name. It was as though his parents had expected him to be average. Growing up he never felt as though he were different from the other boys. He was not scrawny and smart, or muscular and dumb, nor better or worse at most things. He threw the axe at the tree and hit five times out of ten, and his spear landed smack in the middle of everyone else's. It was only when they taught him how to write his name that he realized he was unique. His mother, being the literate one, had spelled his name with an extra “f.”

Buy this collection on Amazon.

"Lost Lake House: A Novella" by Elisabeth Grace Foley (Novella)

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fairytale

Type of Short Story:  Novella

Summary:  All Dorothy Perkins wants is to have a good time. She’s wild about dancing, and can’t understand or accept her father’s strictness in forbidding it. Night after night she sneaks out to the Lost Lake House, a glamorous island nightclub rumored to be the front for more than just music and dancing…in spite of an increasingly uneasy feeling that she may be getting into something more than she can handle.

Marshall Kendrick knows the truth behind the Lost Lake House—and bitterly hates his job there. But fear and obligation have him trapped. When a twist of circumstances throws Dorothy and Marshall together one night, it may offer them both a chance at escaping the tangled web of fear and deceit each has woven…if only they are brave enough to take it.

Excerpt:

At eight-thirty Dorothy turned out the light in her bedroom and put on her hat and coat. If her room was dark and her father had not heard an outside door shut he never came to look in on her, but assumed she was asleep. She had learned his routine carefully, lying awake and listening on the nights she was at home. Still she had lately taken to rumpling up her bed and putting pillows under the coverlet, just in case—her conscience, recovering from the sulkiness that had set her on this path, was beginning to be jumpy. Then she climbed out the window onto the sloping back porch roof, slithered down an ivy-covered trellis and ran through the dark backyard to the side street. Their house was a big old-fashioned brick with a mansard roof, with the boughs of stately old oak trees brushing the upper story; situated at the corner of a block, its yard rimmed with hedges. There was an opening at the side for the path where the milkman and the grocer’s boy came to the back door, and Dorothy slipped through this and darted across the street in the dim light from the lamp on the next corner.

By quarter to nine she had reached the street corner where a group of girls and young men were waiting, milling about and laughing and teasing each other under the street lamp by a drugstore. Dorothy joined them, and they walked a few blocks to where some of the young men had cars waiting. They piled in and drove out the winding roads through the outskirts of town toward the lake, a little too fast once they were out of the part of the city more regularly patrolled by the police. Dorothy had at first been exhilarated by this ride, later a little alarmed by it, and then shamed into saying nothing by the nonchalant way in which the other girls took the whirling speed amid careless banter with the drivers. She laughed with the others, but kept a tight grip on the inner door-handle.

The dock for the Lost Lake ferry was at the bottom of a steep hill—cars were parked up above in an empty lot off the road that was supposed to be secret but which everyone knew about. Standing a little back from the dock, on the trodden gravelly shore, Dorothy stared across the water. On cloudy nights like this the lake and sky and island all melted into a uniform invisible black, so the blazing golden windows of the Lost Lake House seemed suspended in the middle of the lake like a floating fairy palace. The lighted ferryboat, which had left on one of its trips before her party reached the landing, inched across the lake like a little glowing caterpillar swimming toward it.

Dorothy shoved her hands deep in her coat pockets and suppressed a little shiver. It seemed they always arrived when the ferry was halfway across the lake to the island, and had to wait for its return. She could never entirely escape the chill of nervousness in her stomach while waiting, almost as bad as it had been the first time she crossed. It had not taken her long to hear the whispers about the Lost Lake House—that there was a hidden speakeasy inside—that there had been police raids before, and that it might happen again. Every time she had to wait in the half-dark by the ferry, near a little group of girls and men still teasing and laughing in half-whispers—by habit rather than fear with them—her jangling nerves expected at any moment the white glare of headlamps on police cars would pour down from the bank above and pin them in their blinding beams, branding them all as criminals and exposing their secret expeditions to the world. (Oh, wouldn’t her father be furious then!)

The ferry was coming back now, the strings of little Japanese lanterns that ornamented it bobbing above the black water. Dorothy’s breath came quicker as it always did at this moment, when the lighted ferryboat drew closer and the fear of the police began to recede. This was the moment—as the ferry bumped against the lower dock, and she followed the others down the wooden steps—the moment she tried to hug to herself, to savor the magic of as she stepped under the string of lanterns, fixed her eyes on the shining house across the lake, and felt the little lurch of the ferry carrying them out from the shore. She tried not to hear the chatter of the other passengers and the chug of the motor; she was busy making the Lost Lake House into fairyland.
Buy this story on Amazon or Kobo.