Filter

All Genres

All Scenarios

5 scenarios
Playing Pretendromance

Playing Pretend

Your ex is coming to the company retreat. With a new partner. And everyone in the department knows the whole story, because you told them the whole story. So you do the stupid thing: you ask the coworker who annoys you most to spend the weekend pretending to be yours. Ground rules on the drive up. Pet names by dinner. A dance you were supposed to fake. Three days of an audience that never blinks, one cabin with thin walls, and a growing problem neither of you will name out loud. Somewhere in there, one of you stopped performing. You are not certain which one.

28
Play Now
Holiday Homecomingromance

Holiday Homecoming

Your best friend's older brother was always off-limits: five years ahead of you, impossibly serious, and completely uninterested in the kid sleeping on the trundle bed. This year you both end up back at the Hartwell house for the holidays, a blizzard shuts the pass, and the brooding college boy you once had a crush on has turned into a man who keeps finding reasons to be in whatever room you are in. Ten days, one house full of family, and the question of what any of it means once the roads clear.

6
Play Now
Between the Linesromance

Between the Lines

Every Sunday you escape to Thornwood Books, three floors of crooked shelves on Oak Street where the radiators knock and nobody hurries you. And every Sunday she is there, in the bay window on the second floor, reading something with the cover bent back. You have never spoken. You know her tea order, the corner she claims, the way she laughs at a sentence and then looks around to see if anyone caught her. When the conversation finally happens, you learn she has been keeping the same watch on you. You also learn she has a name she stopped answering to four years ago, and a very good reason for it.

4
Play Now
Bitter Sweetromance

Bitter Sweet

Three years ago you wrote nine hundred words about a Sicilian restaurant in the West Village. Two of those words were about the chef's heritage rather than his cooking, and they are the two everybody quoted. He closed within the month and left the country. Now he is back with a new room and a new menu, and your editor has put you in it on opening night, and he has recognised you from the pass. He remembers the review. He can recite it. Over five courses he serves you personally, and somewhere between the second and the fourth you understand that you were wrong about the food, which is a professional problem, and that you are not indifferent to him, which is a worse one. Your review is due in three weeks. It will decide whether he gets a second chance, and everyone involved knows you cannot be objective about it any more.

4
Play Now
Snowbound Heartsromance

Snowbound Hearts

A blizzard has shut down O'Hare and thirty thousand people are not going home tonight. You are one of them, with somewhere you badly need to be and a phone at forty-five percent. The last free outlet at Gate B17 already has somebody sitting next to it, and neither of you is willing to be reasonable about this. Two days later the plough crews are still losing and you have told a stranger things you have never said out loud. Then the boards turn green.

3
Play Now