Reads Over Novels & Stories

“Read it.” She doesn’t move for a second. Then she crouches, picks it up, and opens it again with fingers that are just a little too tight on the pages. I watch her read the way people watch a bomb being disarmed, careful, focused, knowing exactly when things are about to go wrong. She gets to Adrian Volkov’s name and freezes. There it is.

Daniel watched him read for approximately forty-five seconds before Adrian, without looking up, said: "You've stopped reading." "I'm observing," Daniel said. "What are you observing?" "You," Daniel said. "Specifically." Adrian turned a page. "I'm just reading." "I know," Daniel said. "That's what I'm observing." A pause. Adrian looked up, then, with the soft evening version of the attending look — less precise than its daytime counterpart, warmer at the edges, the management thoroughly offline for the evening. "And?"

She read it again. She sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling for a long moment. Then she looked back at the page and read it a third time because it needed to be read three times to be certain. Because what it said was not what she had expected to find and she was not a person who moved on unexpected findings without verifying them completely. It said the same thing all three times. She closed the book.

Me: Do you think he’ll throw me into the Buenos Aires river on our way back home? I send the text along with the laughing emoji. Not read. I send another one anyway, feeling bold. Me: I believe my master needs this exact sugary combo too. I hit send. Not r... Cancel that. Read. READ?! The status indicator changes instantly. He is reading them live. I hold my breath, my heart skipping a beat. “Now I see exactly why Mr. Banks is so obsessed with you,” Vandiver murmurs quietly. The sentence takes total control of my attention and breath.

LAUREN’S POV Standing there, my eyes filled with shock as I read through the email over and over again. The words blurred and sharpened, yet no matter how many times I read them, the message didn’t change. I scrolled up, scrolled down, even refreshed the screen like somehow the internet might have glitched and would replace those lines with something else, something better. But no, it remained the same. They can’t do this to me. No, this has to be a mistake.

It read in fine script: For your comfort--H.

"Tell me if there's anything I've got wrong." He read it standing beside the desk, which was how he read things when he was reading carefully, not sitting down, not leaning. Standing. She watched his face as he went through it and she watched him go very still about halfway through and then very controlled for the second half, the particular control of someone who is keeping their expression neutral because they know they are being observed and they do not want the observation to change what she decides. When he finished he looked at her. "Nothing is wrong," he said. "It's entirely accurate."

“That’s the version.” Max read through everything again, scanning quickly. “…okay. This is solid.” Sarah stepped closer. “Read it out loud.” Max handed the phone to Oliver. “Your voice matters here.” Oliver took it. Looked at the screen for a second. Then read. Clear. Measured. No rush. The words sat in the room differently when spoken. He finished. No one interrupted. Max broke it first. “Yeah… that holds.” Sarah nodded slowly. “It does.”

"I've done nothing wrong. I agree to call off the engagement." Mark froze, completely taken aback. Then, a robotic voice echoed in my head, ‘The Thought Sharing feature has now been activated. Please choose who you want to share it with.’ Thought Sharing? The person I picked could hear Alice's thoughts, too? I looked at Mark, still in shock, and calmly touched my face. ‘I choose Mark.’ Right then, Alice's inner voice rang out again, just in time. 'Can you believe it? With just a little trick, Helen has given up on Mark all by herself?'

Hands clammy and heart pounding through my chest as faint fear gets me right in the gut. He takes the letter silently, looking from my face to the paper with dead pan cool. He unfolds it and reads carefully, his eyes scanning the words in silence with no expression that gives me any clues as to what he is thinking. He only takes a minute to get through it, looking unchanged. Finally, a smile breaks over his face.