💌 Fifteen Minutes at a Time, a Romantic Short Story
The other night I watched Pride and Prejudice again, and it reminded me why I’ve always loved romance stories. Not the perfect, fairy tale ones, but the quiet kind, where feelings show up in small gestures we almost miss.
So I decided to write one.
“Fifteen Minutes at a Time” is about the kind of love we overlook — the quiet, ordinary kind that asks nothing grand, only that we keep showing up. It’s a story about learning to see the extraordinary in the familiar.
You can read the full story now on my blog (just below) and on Wattpad (click here to read on app).
And yes, I’m still working on Parenting Unpacked. But every now and then, I like to take a little detour. This one felt worth sharing.
I’d love to know what you think.
🥐 Fifteen Minutes at a Time
She almost didn’t go.
The rain had started before she was fully awake, the kind that makes staying in feel not just reasonable but virtuous. But three months ago, on a Tuesday bad enough that she’d rather not revisit, Emily had walked fifteen minutes in the cold and bought herself a croissant from the place by the river. It had been, improbably, the thing that held the day together. Not fixed. Held. And she’d gone back every morning since, because some things you don’t question.
She questioned very little about the mornings.
Including him.
Daniel was already there when she arrived, which shouldn’t have been possible since she’d never told him she was coming, and yet somehow hadn’t surprised her in weeks.
He didn’t say anything when she stepped under the bridge. Just made room against the wall the way you make room for something you were already expecting.
She stood beside him. Opened the paper bag. The croissant was warm.
Below them the Thames moved the way it always had, indifferent and permanent, the way things are when they’ve been there long enough to stop needing to prove it.
“You’re soaked,” he said.
“It’s raining.”
“It was raining when you left too.”
“I know.”
He looked at her the way he sometimes did. Brief, sideways. Like a question he’d decided not to ask yet.
She ate her croissant and watched the river.
They’d known each other two years. He was her best friend’s older brother, which meant she’d spent considerable effort at family dinners pretending not to notice him, which meant she’d noticed everything. The way he listened without filling the silence. The way he remembered things she’d said weeks later as though he’d been carrying them around. She’d filed all of it carefully under irrelevant.
The filing system had been under some strain lately.
Four months ago he’d started showing up here. She’d never invited him. He’d never explained. And somewhere in the accumulation of mornings, the rain and the coffee and the fifteen minutes of nothing in particular, she’d stopped pretending she didn’t look for him on the walk over.
She didn’t examine that.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, mostly to the river.
“About?”
“Love.” She said it the way you say a word you’ve been keeping at a distance. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
He was quiet. That was the thing about Daniel. He never rushed a sentence that wasn’t ready. She’d met no one else who could do that.
“I keep waiting to feel something enormous,” she said. “And instead I just feel ordinary things. All the time.” She looked at the bag in her hand. “I walk fifteen minutes every day for a croissant and that’s the best part of most days. Which probably tells you everything.”
“It tells me you know what you like.”
“It tells you something’s wrong with me.”
“Emily.” He said her name like he’d been not saying it for a while. “When did you last let yourself want something without building a case against it?”
She didn’t answer.
“The croissant,” he said. “You don’t argue yourself out of the croissant.”
“The croissant has never let me down.”
“Fair,” he said. Quietly. “Fair.”
The rain shifted. Not stopping. Just reconsidering.
“The thing about fireworks,” Daniel said, after a while, “is that you spend the whole time waiting for them to be over so you can go home.”
She looked at him.
He was watching the river. “Whereas a really good croissant, you’re just there. You’re not waiting for anything.”
She said nothing.
“That probably wasn’t what I meant to say.”
“I think it was exactly what you meant to say.”
He turned then and looked at her the way he did when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Fully. Like he’d been waiting for a moment that kept almost arriving.
She was always paying attention.
“You’ve told me about the croissant,” he said, “seventeen times.”
She stared at him. “You counted.”
He looked back at the river.
Her chest did something she had no name for.
The silence that followed had weight. The kind you feel from the inside.
She looked at his hand on the ledge. Two inches from hers. Maybe one.
“Daniel.”
“Mm.”
“Why do you come here?” She kept her eyes forward. “You don’t get anything. You just stand in the rain.”
A long pause.
“I get fifteen minutes,” he said.
She felt it move through her the way cold air moves through a room when someone finally opens a window. Not dramatic. Just a change in everything, all at once, that you couldn’t have explained a moment before it happened.
Her fingers moved across the ledge.
His hand turned over and found hers. Quietly. Like he’d been waiting for it the way you wait for something you were already certain of.
Neither of them spoke.
The river moved. The rain carried on. A bus crossed the bridge somewhere above them and shook the world slightly and then it was still.
She looked at what was left of the croissant.
“It’s soggy,” she said.
“Come back tomorrow.”
She looked at him. He was already looking at her.
“Okay,” she said.
No declaration. No lightning. Just his hand in hers and the river doing what it always did and somewhere in her chest, quiet and unhurried, something settling into place like it had always meant to be there.
She finished the croissant.
Still the best part of her day.
