Sleepless In Seattle Novels & Stories

ELION This city is beneath me. Everything else will be soon. It's only a matter of time. My jaw ticked once as I watched the bustle in the streets of Seattle, several floors beneath my office windows. Busy people moving in every direction: hurrying, rushing, sprinting, scrambling, running towards jobs and lives that would amount to nothing noteworthy I flicked the steel lighter in my hand, the flame burned the pad of my thumb for a moment before extinguishing it.

Everytime I go to bed, I end up having terrible nightmares and wake up sweaty, feeling numb then I hallucinate before I come back to consciousness. Last night was no different and I wake up grumpier. What the fuck is happening to me? ••• LILA “Why are you taking more than a hundred years to get dressed ?”Sebastian growls when he enters the room and my maid is still battling with my hair. Eugh! He’s so irritating ! Koko mumbled and I hold back my laugh. “Did I say something funny? Hurry the fuck up!” The maid flinched and I feel a bit bad for her.

Not that that would've helped! Last night I grabbed a tub of B&J's and sat in front of my TV and binged old romcoms, starting with The Wedding Planner. It just got worse from there. By the time I hit Sleepless in Seattle, I was about ready to call it quits on life when I got the call from Luke. "How are you feeling?" He demanded. He didn't seem like he was having a good time at all, in fact he sounded like he was freaking out! "I feel sick," which was the truth. I wasn't sure if it was the half gallon I was working on, or the anxiety that he was on a fucking date that was making me sick though.

IRIS. Who would have thought that the pursuit of truth came with sleeplessness stitched into its very lining? I hadn’t slept properly in days. Not the kind of sleep that restores, at least. Mine was shallow and brittle, a thin film of unconsciousness that shattered at the slightest thought. Every time I closed my eyes, my brain resumed its quiet, frantic arithmetic—names, timelines, phone records, headlines—arranging and rearranging them as though sheer persistence could force them into a confession.

Denver. I barely had enough sleep the night before. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of the ballroom again. Gold lights. Crowds. Selena was standing across the room, looking as if seven years had never passed. And every single time I reached her in my head— I woke up. By morning, exhaustion sat behind my eyes like a second pulse. I was already in my office when Alec wandered in. The sunlight spilling through the tall windows caught the edges of his curls as he stepped quietly into the room, still dressed in sleep clothes, one sock half-falling off his foot.

The city sparkled beyond Elena's window. From her living room, she could see the lights of Seattle stretching into the darkness—office buildings, apartments, the distant glow of the Space Needle. Normal life, continuing. People sleeping, dreaming, living their ordinary lives. Elena sat on her couch, the small recording device in her hands. Two in the morning. Sofia slept peacefully down the hall. Rosa had gone home hours ago. Alexander, respecting her need for space, hadn't called or texted all day.

Every year, the week before the statewide college entrance exams, I had my parents empty fifty rooms at our hotel and hold them for my classmates, free of charge. Then the scores came out, and our class president, Natalie Reed, had bombed hers. She led the whole class online and claimed our hotel had run construction in the middle of the night on purpose, just to keep her from getting into college. The post went viral. The hotel was reported until it was shut down. My parents lost every cent they had saved, and their hair went gray overnight. Through all of it, not one of the fifty classmates who had stayed in our hotel spoke up for us. Then I opened my eyes, and it was the week before

, Monza race weekend, and I was deep in it — quali review, then the paddock arrival videos, Duane walking in with his headphones on while a wall of tifosi screamed his name and he gave them exactly one nod, one, rationed like wartime sugar — when the front door of the suite opened forty minutes ahead of schedule. I closed the laptop so fast it clapped. Jill stood in the doorway of my room in her lab badge and her going-home hoodie, holding a Publix sub, looking at me sitting in the dark with a freshly slammed laptop and the guilty posture of a raccoon in a security light. "Insomnia," I said. "Uh-huh." "I was watching—" the pause was 0.4 seconds, and it was fatal— "a documentary." "About what

Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the phantom pressure of his mouth against mine, followed immediately by the freezing, clinical indifference of his voice telling me I was nothing more than an uncalculated escalation. I was trapped in a gilded cage with a ghost. Restless and suffocating, I walked back out into the main living pavilion. The space was dark now, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows revealing the sprawling, shimmering grid of Seattle at night—a sea of glittering white and amber lights reflecting off the black, rain-slicked harbor. The storm had cleared into a heavy, low-hanging mist, making the city look like a distant, unreachable illusion. I walked over to the kitchen island t

No time for a gentle wake-up when you're running an empire. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, my toes sinking into plush carpet. The floor-to-ceiling windows of my penthouse offered a view of Seattle that still, after all these years, took my breath away. The city twinkled in the pre-dawn darkness, full of promise and possibility. And problems. Always problems. Speaking of problems, my mind drifted to yesterday's bombshell. The fake engagement to Alex Russo. God, what a mess. How did a simple misunderstanding spiral so out of control? And why did I agree to go along with it?