Lovesick Fool Plot Twists Short Stories & Novels

For three years, Julian Hart has been Larkmoor's idea of the perfect husband. 7:00 a.m. — He gets up to make breakfast. Vivienne Sterling eats only whole-wheat sandwiches, so he goes out early for the freshest ingredients. 9:00 a.m. — He ties her shoelaces and sees her off. 10:30 a.m. — He cleans their mansion, waters the plants, and straightens her study. 3:00 p.m. — He organizes her walk-in closet and jewelry and irons her clothes. ... 10:00 p.m. — The bath he's prepared is at precisely the right temperature when she arrives home on schedule. As Julian helps her out of her coat, he catches the faint smell of tobacco on it.

Joe Kane played five years in the NFL as a team captain. And for five years, I waited for him in our home in Kansas City. He said the season was too busy, the away games too brutal—no place for family to tag along. So I stayed quiet. I kept the house running, waiting for him to come back after every road trip. Until the day I was cleaning and found a box buried at the very bottom of his nightstand drawer. The moment I opened it, photos spilled everywhere. On top was a family travel application. Applicant: Natalie Reed. In the photo, Natalie stood beside him, wearing his jersey number, with red fireworks over Arrowhead Stadium behind her—grinning more boldly than she had on championship night. On the back, in Joe's handwriting: You're my lucky four-leaf clover through the long season. I laughed. I looked around our empty house—and couldn't find a single photo of us together. His social media was all games, training, teammates. No me. Not one. That night, I sat in the living room, listening to the second hand tick, and opened the notes app on my phone. Created a countdown. 30 days. Starting today, I wouldn't pick him up from the airport anymore. No more messages that vanished into silence. No more breakfasts no one ate. I quietly packed everything, ready to leave him.

For ten years, he remained tangled up with her, and everyone in their circle laughed at him for being her forever backup plan. She had once said, “The housekeeper’s son? He’s fun to mess around with, but marry him? Not a chance.” No one noticed him standing just outside the door. With his fists clenched and his eyes burning red, he turned and walked away. That very day, he married someone else.

For the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, the system in my mind warned me. [Warning! The lovesick part of your brain is highly active! If you refuse to leave John Miller, you’ll die an hour later!] I looked at my husband. He was scolding me for the sake of his secretary, who was his first love. I once burned down all of my award-winning drawings just because he disliked them. I calmly gave the system in my brain an order. “Since the cause of the malfunction is the lovesick portion of my brain, I hereby grant you the highest authority to remove it. Do the surgery now!” An hour later, John stopped me at the door of the ward. His eyes were bloodshot. “Grace Stone, what are you trying to pull?” I raised my head and watched him coldly and calmly. “Mister, you blocked the light. Based on an analysis, this constitutes an illegal detention. Do you need my help calling the cops?”

My boss had a new boyfriend called Eugene Larson. The first day he came to the office, he put on a great show of exerting his dominance. He deleted my number from my boss's phone right in front of me. Eugene waved his phone in front of me while playing innocently. "You can talk to me about anything you need to communicate to Tina, Mr. Sanders. I'll help you pass the message to her. I don't have much sense of security, so please don't mind this. It's to avoid any misunderstanding between us." I was hoping my boss, Tina Kayden, would be able to say something fair on my behalf, but all she did was stare at Eugene approvingly and adoringly throughout the conversation. She turned to me and said, "This is a pretty good plan, Mr. Sanders. Do take good care of Eugene from now on." As there was no way for me to reject her, I was forced to add Eugene's contact to my phone. However, the moment he had my number, he flooded my phone with messages. [Mr. Sanders, is the client you're meeting tomorrow with the surname Charleston a man or a woman?] [Where are you having the meeting tomorrow? Wear something casual tomorrow. It would be best if you avoid washing your face and hair. Otherwise, I would think you're trying to seduce my wife.] [I believe your relationship with Tina is innocent. You're not allowed to betray me because I'm treating you like my buddy!] [By the way, you have an extra duty from now on. You need to remind Tina every 30 minutes to send me a message telling me that she loves me.] As I read these ridiculous messages, I laughed in anger. I put my phone on silent mode and flung it to the side before going to bed. The next morning, I woke up to dozens of missed calls on my phone.

In our third year of marriage, Jillian Holt changed the name she had saved my number under. It wasn't "Dear" anymore. It was "7:00 pm to 7:30 pm". She said she set aside only half an hour a day for personal matters. If I messaged her a minute early, she wouldn't reply. If the text was even a minute late, she wouldn't reply either. Once, I had a fever of 102.2°F and was hooked up to an IV at the hospital. I called her seven times. At 7:00 pm, she called me back right on time. "You have 29 minutes left. Get to the point." I asked hoarsely if she could come pick me up. She glanced at her schedule. "29 minutes isn't enough for a round trip. Get a cab yourself." I had always thought she was just too busy with work, so I never dared waste a second of that half hour each night. I would write down what I wanted to say ahead of time and keep my complaints brief. Then, one night at 1:00 am, a clap of thunder woke me up. No one was beside me. In the living room, Jillian was leaning against the couch, revising a proposal for her project manager, Jesse Cohen. On the screen, Jesse chuckled. "Ms. Holt, it's already 1:00 am. Am I taking up too much of your time?" Jillian let out a soft laugh. "When have I ever kept track of the time when you needed me?" Standing behind the door, I suddenly remembered knocking on her study door three hours earlier. I was doubled over with stomach pain. She had said, "You've used up your time for today." I returned to my room and turned off the alarm I had set on my phone for 6:59 pm every day. At 7:00 pm the next day, Jillian didn't get a message from me for the first time.

Everyone in Hemsouth City knew Joe Kingston as the ultimate trust fund kid. Tall, handsome, and wild, he lived exactly how he pleased. At the height of his partying days overseas, an urgent telegram from his father summoned him home. It contained only one cold, uncompromising line: "Come home immediately. You're marrying Fiona Spencer." Fiona was one of the youngest and most promising officers in the military. Cool, disciplined, and fiercely self-controlled, she couldn't have been more different from him. He lived for a good time. She preferred peace and quiet. He did whatever he wanted and had gotten himself into more trouble than he could count. She followed every rule to the letter and treated military discipline as absolute. He was wild and free, changing girlfriends as often as he changed clothes. She was famously uninterested in men and had supposedly never even held a male soldier's hand. Just the thought of marrying someone that uptight made him feel suffocated. So Joe pulled every trick he could think of to sabotage the marriage before it ever happened.

I've been with Dominic Hayes, a gang leader, for ten years. But on the day he goes clean and leaves the underworld behind, his men address someone else as his woman. The hands that once held guns and spilled blood now gently slip a crystal shoe onto another woman's foot. He says, "Violet, she's not like you. You were willing to follow me through chaos without needing a title, but she can't do that." That day, I don't look back. What Dominic doesn't know is that I'm the only daughter of an underground mafia king. When my family found out I was running wild, they quietly prepared a good man for me. All that's left is for me to say yes.

My wife, Jolene Stephens, and I both cheated. The difference was that she chose to betray me while I had been made to cheat. She got me blackout drunk the same night her affair with Leon Homes came to light. Then, she stripped me naked and left me in a hotel room with a stranger. She posed my unconscious body in degrading positions and took photos to create evidence of my "affair." Both our cheating photos were exposed consecutively, and the public outrage against her little lover was offset. A huge wave of nausea rolled over me, making me dry-heave over the sink. My body was covered in red marks. The thought of what the stranger had done to me drove me to fits of terror. My wife watched as I scrubbed my skin until it split and bled before saying quietly, "I didn't have a choice. Leon's from a conservative family. It would destroy him if word got out that he was a homewrecker." The internet tore me apart overnight. My grandfather, Bruce Tillman, the only kin I had left, suffered a heart attack after seeing the news and was rushed into the emergency room. I had to protect her just to protect myself. So, I repeated the lie she needed me to tell under a wall of flashing cameras and microphones. "Neither of us cheated. Ms. Stephens and I had already separated long ago."

Every time I go out with my wife of three years, Jillian Luke, and my best friend, Shawn Lynch, the two of them get mistaken for a couple. At the mall, a sales clerk hands them a complimentary gift for couples. At a restaurant, the server asks if they'd like to join a couples' event. On trips, strangers tell them what a good match they are, then shove a phone into my hands and ask me to take their picture. At first, I do feel awkward about it. Jillian never explains. Every time, Shawn is the one who smooths things over with a smile. "Maybe the two of us just look a little like a couple. Don't overthink it." He says it so lightly that I tell myself, again and again, not to take it to heart. This goes on until Thanksgiving dinner, where Jillian says she'll officially take me to meet her parents. I've spent three whole months preparing. But the moment we walk in the door, Jillian's mom, Carol Simpson, grabs hold of Shawn, smiling from ear to ear. "Look at these two, everyone. They look so much like a married couple." The relatives join in on the teasing. "Just how many times have Jillian and Shawn kissed? They look more alike every day." The whole room is laughing. I stand where I am and look at Jillian. All she does is reach out and straighten Shawn's slightly crooked tie. She doesn't object, and she doesn't deny it. At that moment, I finally understand that it's not that she can't be bothered to explain. It's that in her heart, the one she truly wants to marry has never been me.

“Strip off her clothes!” It never occurred to Gwen White that her husband would order a bunch of men to strip her! Throughout the ten years of crushing on him and two years of marriage, Gwen loved Jared Crawford madly, but he despised and hated her to her bones. That said, when Gwen decided to leave Jared for good, he personally brought her back from the depths of hell and begged her to start all over again...

I used to think the Moon Goddess had given me three mates to choose from. Cyrus Vance was sharp-tongued, but he was always the first to come running when I got hurt. Draven Locke was quiet, but he would guard my door late into the night. Knox Hollis was gentle. He once promised to stay by my side for the rest of his life. They were the strongest warriors of the Frostmoon pack. And I was the Alpha's only daughter. From the day I was born, they protected and spoiled me as if I were their most precious treasure. Then Nara came into our lives. She had no family or allies, and she brought along a pup everyone shunned. All she had to do was show up, and suddenly, I was invisible. They said that aside from being the Alpha's daughter, I had nothing going for me. Nara, on the other hand, was strong and independent, and far more worth following. Cyrus stopped watching over me. Instead, he started protecting Nara, even treating me coldly for the first time because of her. Draven stopped coming to my door, too. To protect Nara and her pup, he volunteered for a near-suicidal mission in rogue territory. And Knox was the one who changed the most. He stopped answering when I called for him, and then, right to my face, he announced his decision. "I'm going to mark Nara." He said I had a father, a pack, and countless wolves to choose from. He said I wouldn't really lose anything. If that was how they felt, I would give them what they wanted. The night before the marking ceremony Cyrus had planned for Nara, I went to my father's office. "I'm willing to form a mating alliance with the Northern Snow Wolf Pack."

When the heatwave apocalypse hit, the world turned into a literal oven. It was 140 degrees outside. The water dried up, and the power grid went completely dead. We had no choice but to make a run for the underground bunkers. Luckily, my boyfriend, Hudson, awakened ice powers. He is a man of few words, but he caters to my every whim. One day, I was being my usual spoiled self, begging him to waste his precious energy to make me some ice cream, when a sudden memory flooded my brain. It was a plotline. I realized I was living in a romance novel, and I was nothing but the useless, high-maintenance side character. All beauty, zero survival skills, and a constant burden to Hudson. According to the plot, he would eventually leave me behind, and I would die a gruesome death at the hands of some wasteland raiders. Meanwhile, Hudson would meet the REAL female lead—a woman as strong and capable as him. Terrified, I decided to pull away and stop weighing him down. But I didn't expect that the moment I distanced myself, Hudson would snatch the back of my neck, kissing me with a vicious, uncharted possessiveness. "Are you bored of me? Trying to shake me off?" he growled against my lips. "I'll never let that happen."

Five years ago, I threw Jase Prescott out of my mansion like a dog. Five years later, he'd become a renowned professor, while I'd been told my illness was incurable. He swirled the red wine in his glass, his gaze icy. "Why aren't you out making the big bucks, Audrey? What made you switch careers and start drinking with men for money?" Bitterness rose in my throat. I forced a smile. "Can't be helped. I'm buried in debt. Jase, would you be generous enough to lend me a hundred thousand?" He splashed the red wine across my face. "Same old story." His voice was as sharp as a blade. "You're still rotten with greed." Looking at the way he hated me to the core, I finally breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God. He had no idea that the heart beating in his chest was mine.

As the upcoming tour approached, the dance troupe suddenly revoked my position as the lead dancer. Anxious to get an explanation in person, I lost my footing due to my distracted state and tumbled down the stairs. While enduring the sharp pain and preparing to call for emergency services, a notification popped up on my phone screen: “Redwood Dance Troupe: Welcome our new lead dancer, Averil Wells, and our generous sponsor, Julian Ford." The accompanying photo featured two smiling faces—my husband of seven years, whom I had secretly married, and his pampered mistress. Julian had his arm wrapped around Averil's waist as he placed a gentle kiss on her cheek. Meanwhile, Averil clung to Julian's neck, her face radiating shyness and delight.

In the underground casino, my ex-fiancé Don Dante Castellano threw the card in my face. His arm was around Sabrina—his first love—and his eyes were ice as they shoved me toward the table. "Your father owed mine a life. The thing in your belly isn't mine." He pressed the card flat against my cheek. "The daughter pays the father's debt. Tonight you're the living chip on that table." The paternity test was fake. The child was his. I knew. He didn't believe me. That night, with a gun pointed at my head, I took off all my clothes in front of everyone. Two years passed. Two years later, in Vegas, he saw me again. I was in a red silk dress with a gold chain around my neck, the other end of the chain held by a yellow-toothed gambler. "This bitch is cheap. Bark for me, and all these chips are yours." I picked up the chips, practiced. "Woof. Woof." Sabrina pressed her face into his chest, covering her nose. "Dante. This is disgusting. Let's go." He didn't go. The veins rose along his temple. He was staring at the bruises on my knees. Then he kicked the gambler across the room. He bent down and took hold of my chin. Hard. "Sienna. Money, and you'll do anything at all?" He was close enough that I could smell him. Soap. Two years, and still the same soap. I closed my eyes, opened them, pulled my mouth into a smile for him. "That's right, boss. Pay up and I'll cooperate with whatever position you want. Care to buy a round?"

When Penelope Lawson opened her eyes, her brother was already drugged. "Penny… I'm so hot..." Her brother—a man who was usually ice-cold and completely untouchable—was driven out of his mind by the aphrodisiac. Throwing all restraint to the wind, his ragged breath brushed against her neck as his lips pressed desperately against her skin. In her past life, she would have let the mistake happen. But this time, she shoved him off with all her strength and immediately dialed his first love’s number. Because in her last life, every single tragedy began on this exact night. A night when she had allowed herself to fall for the brother who shared none of her blood.

When I woke up, my right hand was clutching a pair of men's Calvin Klein underwear. Two letters were embroidered in gold thread on the inside of the waistband: J.C. A push notification popped up right on cue. Number three on TikTok's trending page: Dalton University's hockey captain loses five pairs of underwear in one week; roommate reveals the victim has been forced to go commando. In the video, Chase Jacobson's roommate, Tyler Brooks, held an empty drawer up to the camera and tearfully demanded justice. And under my pillow, a suspicious little bundle bulged. I slowly reached over. One pair, two, three, four. Plus the one in my hand: five. The underwear thief the whole school was hunting... turned out to be me.

Five years after their breakup, Lauren Scott signed a master-servant contract with Yale Sutton, the ex-boyfriend who had been penniless when they were together. Yale would pay off her debts, and in return, Lauren had to fulfill his every demand. "Lauren, take off one piece of clothing, and I'll knock a million off your debt." Yale spoke slowly, his voice dripping with mockery. Around the private room, the men hooted and cheered while the women laughed and made teasing remarks. Lauren gritted her teeth. "Fine. Just don't go back on your word, Mr. Sutton." Without a moment's hesitation, she unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall to the floor, baring her porcelain-white skin and most of her full, rounded breasts. The room fell silent for a moment before whistles erupted from every direction.

Hannah Neate hated having her picture taken more than anything. When her company held a press conference, she forbade any reporter from bringing a camera inside. I had been married to her for three years, but we never had a single wedding photo. She had an effortlessly frigid personality and would not waste her time getting her photo taken. She believed that it was a poor use of energy and time. One day, I saw a photo of her and a man in a photo booth at the mall. It was displayed as a couple’s photo template at the center of the wall. They were nestled close together. The man’s gaze was doting, and she was smiling sweetly. I tore the photo down and threw it onto her desk. She merely glanced at it and said lightly, “Dwade was just being playful. He insisted on dragging me there. Why are you upset? It’s just a photo.” I laughed exasperatedly. I had spent three years trying to get a photo with her, but another man got one in just three minutes, like it was nothing but a game to him. I took off my wedding ring and placed it on top of that photo. Since that was the case, I might as well disappear from her life for good.