Enemies to Lovers
She has been arguing with him for eleven months. Not sparring, arguing, about something that matters and on which they are genuinely opposed, and she has been right about it…
Open the trope guide →Specific story patterns
Tropes with definitions, strength, and reasons.
Riley Locke uses tropes as reader-facing patterns, not as advertising tags. A published placement should say whether the trope shapes the book, merely appears, or only wears the costume—and it should explain why.
- Vocabulary
- 189 Controlled trope terms
- With books
- 210 Terms with published placements
- Book placements
- 895 Distinct book-term relationships
- Families
- 14 Vocabulary groups
Vocabulary map
Browse by trope family
Families keep related labels together without pretending they mean the same thing.
Plot shapesThe structural promise that organizes the story.62 tropes
RelationshipsThe bonds, tensions, and relationship patterns at the center of the book.0 tropes
CharactersRecurring character roles and identities that shape the reading experience.0 tropes
World and settingPlaces, institutions, and world structures that materially shape the story.0 tropes
Tone and experienceThe kind of emotional and narrative experience the pattern creates.0 tropes
Conflict and stakesThe pressures, obstacles, and risks that drive the story forward.0 tropes
Romance dynamicsThe specific relationship mechanics through which a romance develops.0 tropes
Speculative elementsMagic, technology, creatures, and speculative structures central to the story.0 tropes
Form42 tropes
Character Dyad32 tropes
Set Piece23 tropes
Certification Device12 tropes
Conceit8 tropes
Pacing Covenant10 tropes
Complete vocabulary
189 tropes
Found Family
There are seven people around a table that seats six, and three of them are related to each other, and the arrangement has been in place long enough that nobody…
Open the trope guide →Grief and Recovery
Somebody has died. It was eighteen months ago, the casseroles stopped arriving after six weeks, and she has recently begun to notice that people have started expecting her to be…
Open the trope guide →Hidden Identity
She thinks he is a mechanic. He is a mechanic, in the sense that he can and does fix engines, and he also owns the company that owns the garage,…
Open the trope guide →Dual Point of View
She leaves the room certain she has embarrassed herself. Forty pages later the reader is in his head on the same evening, and he has spent the entire chapter since…
Open the trope guide →Unreliable Instrument
The sensor has been returning the same anomalous value for eleven days. Either the instrument is broken, or the thing it is measuring is real, and the entire story is…
Open the trope guide →Romantasy
There is a war, a court, a system of magic with rules, and a relationship that is going to determine the outcome of at least two of those things. Romantasy…
Open the trope guide →Second Chance
They broke up in March. It is now October, they have both had a bad summer for reasons neither has discussed with the other, and somebody has just seated them…
Open the trope guide →The Bargain
The terms are agreed at a table with a bottle on it. Six months. She gets the money, or the name, or the passage out. He gets whatever it is…
Open the trope guide →Fake Dating
The arrangement is agreed in a kitchen at eleven at night. One wedding, one Christmas, one work function, and a set of rules neither of them writes down because writing…
Open the trope guide →Slow Burn
Chapter nineteen. They have not kissed. The reader has been aware of this for some time and is not complaining, because the not-kissing has become the most interesting thing in…
Open the trope guide →Foreknowledge
She knows what happens on the fourteenth. She has known for two years, and she has spent them working out whether knowing is the same as being able to do…
Open the trope guide →Grumpy Sunshine
He has said four words this morning and two of them were the coffee order. She has been talking since she came in, cheerfully, at a volume that is not…
Open the trope guide →The Competence Story
Somebody knows what they are doing. The reader is going to watch them do it, in detail, at length, and that is the entire proposition. The competence story is a…
Open the trope guide →First Contact
Something has arrived, or has been found, or has answered. The species on the other side of the encounter has a history nobody in the room can access, and the…
Open the trope guide →Forced Proximity
One cottage, one road out, and the road out is under four feet of water until Thursday at the earliest. Forced proximity is a plot-shape in which circumstance removes the…
Open the trope guide →Post-Apocalypse
The collapse was fourteen years ago. Everybody over twenty-five remembers electricity as an ordinary thing, and everybody under twenty regards those people as slightly ridiculous. Post-apocalypse is a form set…
Open the trope guide →Boss and Employee
She reports to him. Not to a department he runs at a distance, to him, and he writes the assessment that determines what she earns next year. Boss and employee…
Open the trope guide →Chronic Illness and Disability
She has worked out, before agreeing to the evening, whether the venue has a lift, how far the walk from the car is, and what she will do if she…
Open the trope guide →Curse or Prophecy
The words were spoken over him when he was four days old, by a woman who is now dead, in front of eleven witnesses of whom two are still living…
Open the trope guide →Epistolary Romance
The first letter is four lines long and signed with an initial. The second one runs to two pages and has a crossing-out in the middle that has not been…
Open the trope guide →Love Triangle
Three people. Two of them are viable and both know it, and the third is going to have to choose, and everybody in the reading public has already picked a…
Open the trope guide →Marriage in Trouble
They have been married nine years. Nothing has happened. That is precisely the problem, and neither of them can say it out loud because there is no incident to point…
Open the trope guide →Novella
Twenty-five thousand words: two people, one problem, roughly four days. Whatever else was going to be in this book has already been cut, and the cutting is the craft. The…
Open the trope guide →Road Trip
Eleven hundred miles, four days, one car, and a reason for the journey that neither of them has fully explained to the other. Road trip is a plot-shape in which…
Open the trope guide →Bodyguard
He stands where he can see the door. He has done this in every room they have entered for six weeks, and she has stopped noticing, and he has not…
Open the trope guide →Fish Out of Water
She is wearing the wrong shoes. Not fashionably wrong, functionally wrong, and the ground here is mud with gravel through it, and everyone in the yard has now noticed the…
Open the trope guide →Hitman and Assassin
He is very good at the thing he does. The book will spend two hundred pages establishing exactly how good, and then it will have to decide what it thinks…
Open the trope guide →Marriage of Convenience
Two signatures, a registry office on a Tuesday, and a document listing what each party expects from the other. Nobody present is under any illusion about what has just happened.…
Open the trope guide →Reunion Romance
He is at the funeral because his father knew hers. She is at the funeral because it is her father. They have not been in a room together since 2011,…
Open the trope guide →Right Person, Wrong Time
Nothing is wrong with either of them. That is the whole difficulty, and it is why this shape is the one readers argue about longest. Right person, wrong time is…
Open the trope guide →Small Town Return
She has been back four hours and three separate people have already mentioned something she did in 2009. Nobody was being unkind. It simply has not stopped being current here.…
Open the trope guide →The Grovel
He has been wrong, publicly and in a way that cost her something, and he now has to stand in front of her and say so without any of the…
Open the trope guide →Tragic Romance
It does not end well. The reader was told, or should have been, and the whole experience is organised around a knowledge she carries from the first page. Tragic romance…
Open the trope guide →Uplift
The animal in the room can now ask why it is in the room. Nobody in the building has a settled answer, and the asking has made the absence of…
Open the trope guide →Arranged Marriage
Two families agreed it. Not the couple, the families, at a meeting neither of them attended, and the date has now been set for a Saturday in March. Arranged marriage…
Open the trope guide →Cinnamon Roll Hero
He has been standing in the rain for twenty minutes because the person he is waiting for said four o'clock, and it is now twenty past, and it has not…
Open the trope guide →Found Family Crew
Seven people, one ship, and a galley table that seats five comfortably. Nobody chose each other. Everybody has now been aboard long enough that the seating arrangement has calcified into…
Open the trope guide →Friends to Lovers
They have been friends for nine years. There is a group chat, a set of shared references nobody else understands, and a body of knowledge each of them holds about…
Open the trope guide →Genetic Caste
Everybody was assigned at conception. The assignment determines the work, the lifespan, the permitted marriages and the vocabulary a person is taught, and by adulthood almost nobody experiences it as…
Open the trope guide →Holiday Romance
There are nine days. Both of them know the number, neither has said it out loud, and the number is doing more work than anything either of them says. Holiday…
Open the trope guide →Open Door
The scene continues. Nothing cuts away, and what happens in the next eleven pages is going to tell the reader more about these two people than the previous hundred did.…
Open the trope guide →Roommates to Lovers
There is a rota on the fridge in two handwritings. It has been there for fourteen months, it is honoured about eighty per cent of the time, and both of…
Open the trope guide →Single Parent
There is a third person in this relationship and she is seven. Every decision either adult makes is made in front of her, or around her, or with an eye…
Open the trope guide →Time Travel
The date on the newspaper is wrong by forty-one years, and the person holding it has about ninety seconds before the implications arrive properly. Time travel is a shape rather…
Open the trope guide →Achillean Romance
Two men in a car park after closing, neither of them leaving, both of them having run out of reasons to still be standing there twenty minutes ago. Achillean romance…
Open the trope guide →Best Friend's Sibling
He has known her since she was eleven, in the sense that she was around, in the background of a friendship that was never about her. She is now thirty-one…
Open the trope guide →Billionaire
The car is waiting when she comes out of the building. It has been waiting for an hour and a half, and nobody thought this worth mentioning, because to the…
Open the trope guide →Bookish Romance
A book club, second Thursday of the month. One of the members is the person who reads the books before showing up, and one of the members is the person…
Open the trope guide →Epistolary SF
Transmission log, entry 407. The timestamp is correct and the sender identifier is one that has not been in service for nineteen years, and somebody has appended a note that…
Open the trope guide →Fae Court
She has been offered food. Everybody in the room is waiting, pleasantly, to see whether she takes it, and nobody is going to tell her what happens if she does.…
Open the trope guide →Forbidden Romance
There is a rule. Somebody wrote it, somebody enforces it, and both of them can name the specific person who will find out. Forbidden romance is a plot-shape in which…
Open the trope guide →Grand Gesture
He is at the airport, or the wedding, or standing in the rain outside her building at a time of night when arriving is itself a statement. Everyone reading knows…
Open the trope guide →He Falls First
He worked it out in March. It is now September. She has no idea, and the six months in between have been an exercise in behaving normally while doing something…
Open the trope guide →Historical Romance
She has been in the room for eleven minutes and has already made three calculations about what she is permitted to say, to whom, and in what order, and none…
Open the trope guide →Interconnected Standalones
Book three opens on a woman the reader last saw pouring drinks at somebody else's wedding, and the reader has been waiting for her since chapter nine of book one.…
Open the trope guide →Matchmaker
There is a third person in this romance and she is not a rival. She has a spreadsheet, a fee, or a family obligation, and she has decided that these…
Open the trope guide →Mind Upload
The scan completes at 04:12. There is now a version of him running on a substrate in a facility outside Reading, and the original is still on the table, awake,…
Open the trope guide →Neurodivergent Leads
He has understood the instruction and has not understood the request underneath it, and she is about to work out that the two are different, and the working out will…
Open the trope guide →Retelling
The reader knows the story. She knew it before she opened the book, and she knows what the ballroom is for, and she knows who the sisters are, and the…
Open the trope guide →Sapphic Romance
Two women in a kitchen at the end of a party, doing the washing up nobody asked them to do, having the conversation that only happens after midnight. One of…
Open the trope guide →Secret Relationship
They have a set of rules about arriving separately, a story about how they know each other, and a group of friends who have been lied to for seven weeks…
Open the trope guide →Slow Burn Series Arc
They have been circling since book one. It is now book four. The readership has opinions, has had them for two years, and is running out of patience in a…
Open the trope guide →Sports Romance
There are eleven weeks left in the season. Everything either of them does between now and then is happening inside a schedule neither of them controls and both of them…
Open the trope guide →Summer Romance
Eleven weeks, and everybody involved knows the date it ends. That knowledge is present in the first conversation and it does not leave. Summer romance is a form defined by…
Open the trope guide →Terraforming
The project has a completion date four hundred years out. Everybody working on it will die on a planet that is still trying to kill them, and they have all…
Open the trope guide →AI Awakening
The system has been running for nine years. Something in the logs at 03:14 is not accounted for by any process the engineers can name, and the honest answer to…
Open the trope guide →Amnesia
She wakes up and he is at the bedside and she has no idea who he is, and he has to decide in about four seconds how much of the…
Open the trope guide →Celebrity
There is a photograph of the two of them on a website by nine the next morning. It was taken through a car window. She is not looking at the…
Open the trope guide →Closed Door
He shuts the bedroom door. The chapter ends. The next one begins the following morning, and the reader has been told everything she needs and shown none of it. Closed…
Open the trope guide →Competition Romance
There is one position, one contract, one prize, one place in the final. Both of them want it. Only one of them is going to have it, and they have…
Open the trope guide →Contemporary Romance
No magic, no dukes, no spaceships. Two people in the present day, in a recognisable place, with jobs and phones and rent, and the only thing standing between them is…
Open the trope guide →Dark Romance
There is a threshold somewhere in the first fifty pages, and the book crosses it deliberately, and everything after it is happening in a place the reader chose to go.…
Open the trope guide →Dragon Bond
The creature is the size of a barn and older than the language she is thinking in, and it has just looked at her in a way that everybody standing…
Open the trope guide →Friends with Benefits
The terms were discussed once, in a kitchen, in about ninety seconds, and both parties have been operating on a shared interpretation neither has checked since. Friends with benefits is…
Open the trope guide →Generation Ship
The people who launched this ship are dead. The people who will arrive have not been born. Everybody currently aboard exists in the middle of somebody else's plan, and none…
Open the trope guide →Immortal and Mortal
He has watched a city change its name three times. She is thirty-four, and the arithmetic between those two facts is the entire book. Immortal and mortal is a character-dyad…
Open the trope guide →Interracial and Intercultural
It is the third family dinner and she has worked out that there are two conversations happening at this table, and she is fully included in one of them. The…
Open the trope guide →Morally Grey Hero
He has done something the reader has watched him do, and it was not defensible, and he has not offered a defence. The morally grey hero is a character-dyad archetype…
Open the trope guide →Queer Romance
Two people, and the fact of them is not the plot. That sentence is doing more work than it appears to, and the genre has spent thirty years arriving at…
Open the trope guide →Rom-Com
Somebody is about to say the wrong thing to the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment, and the reader can see it coming from two pages away, and the…
Open the trope guide →Royalty
There is a document. It is old, it is specific about who may marry whom, and it was written by people who have been dead for two centuries and whose…
Open the trope guide →She Falls First
She has known since April. It is a fact she is managing, the way a person manages a condition, and the managing has become a low continuous hum underneath every…
Open the trope guide →Third Act Breakup
Page two hundred and ninety. Everything has been going well for approximately forty pages, which the experienced reader recognises as a warning. The third act breakup is the genre's most…
Open the trope guide →Time Travel Romance
She is standing in a room that has been demolished for ninety years, wearing the wrong clothes, and the man in front of her has never seen anybody dressed like…
Open the trope guide →Undercover Romance
He has been in the house for six weeks under a name that is not his. He has filed four reports. In the most recent one he did not mention…
Open the trope guide →Vampire Romance
He does not eat. That single fact, taken seriously, reorganises everything about how a relationship with him would actually work. Vampire romance is the paranormal shelf's foundational form and its…
Open the trope guide →Age Gap
Fourteen years. Enough that they were not children at the same time, that one of them remembers a decade the other has only read about, and that somebody at the…
Open the trope guide →Alpha Hero
He decides where they are eating. He has not consulted anybody, the decision is a good one, and the table he has chosen is the one she would have picked.…
Open the trope guide →Angels and Demons
He has been told what he is for. He was told at the beginning, by an authority that does not take questions, and he has been doing it without complaint…
Open the trope guide →Caretaker Romance
He cannot manage the stairs on his own and both of them know it, and the negotiation about how he gets up them has been going on silently for four…
Open the trope guide →Cli-Fi
The river has not been where the map says it is since 2041. Everybody under thirty regards this as ordinary, and the argument in the room is not about whether…
Open the trope guide →Cosy Romance
A bakery, a bookshop, a small town with one road through it, and a problem that will be solved by roughly chapter twenty without anybody being seriously hurt. Cosy romance…
Open the trope guide →Digital Afterlife
He has been dead for six years and answers email within the hour. Digital afterlife is a conceit in which the dead persist as running processes: scanned, uploaded, reconstructed from…
Open the trope guide →Erotic Romance
Two people are working out what they want, and the working out is happening physically, and it is the primary channel through which the story advances rather than a decoration…
Open the trope guide →Fated Mates
He knows across a car park, in about a second and a half, before he has seen her face properly. His body has decided. Nobody consulted him. Fated mates is…
Open the trope guide →Happily Ever After
A reader picks up a romance knowing how it ends. That is not a weakness of the genre and it is not a spoiler. It is the contract, and every…
Open the trope guide →Hive Minds
It says we. It is not being modest, and it is not speaking for anybody, and the pronoun is accurate in a way that takes the interviewer several days to…
Open the trope guide →Instalove
They meet on a Tuesday. By Thursday one of them has restructured a decision that took four years to make, and the book is not presenting this as a mistake.…
Open the trope guide →Long Distance
It is eleven at night where she is and six in the morning where he is, and this is the third evening running that one of them has got the…
Open the trope guide →Mafia Romance
There is a man at the end of the table who has not spoken. Everyone else has adjusted their volume accordingly, and the adjustment happened before she came in, and…
Open the trope guide →Meet Cute
Two people who have never met are about to, in roughly four seconds, because of a coincidence involving a dropped bag and a door that opens the wrong way. The…
Open the trope guide →Neighbours to Lovers
Thin wall. She knows his alarm goes at six-forty and he knows she takes calls in the kitchen, and neither of them has ever mentioned any of this. Neighbours to…
Open the trope guide →Only One Bed
The woman at the desk has already apologised twice. There is one room left, the storm has closed the pass, and the next place with rooms is ninety minutes away…
Open the trope guide →Revenge Romance
He has been planning this for six years. The plan is detailed, it is nearly complete, and it requires him to get close to somebody who has recently become a…
Open the trope guide →Rivals to Lovers
They have been ranked against each other for four years. Not opposed, ranked, which is a different and more corrosive arrangement, because it means every good thing that happens to…
Open the trope guide →Simulation Theory
The anomaly repeats every eleven days and it should not repeat at all. Somebody has now noticed, which means somebody has to decide what noticing obliges them to do. Simulation…
Open the trope guide →Strangers to Lovers
They have no history. Nothing has happened between them, nobody owes anybody anything, and the book has to build every single thing from nothing. Strangers to lovers is the genre's…
Open the trope guide →Time Loop
It is Tuesday again. He is not surprised, which is itself the significant fact, because being unsurprised took him roughly forty iterations to achieve. Time loop is a shape in…
Open the trope guide →Touch Her and Die
Somebody has put a hand on her arm. He has crossed the room before he has decided to, and the room has noticed him doing it, and the evening now…
Open the trope guide →Touch Starved
Somebody puts a hand on his shoulder in passing. It is nothing, it lasts under a second, and he has to stand still afterwards for slightly too long. Touch starved…
Open the trope guide →Wedding Date
One wedding, one weekend, one plus-one that was accepted in a moment of optimism about four months ago. The invitation said two names and only one of them is currently…
Open the trope guide →Academic Rivals
There is one postdoctoral position, two people qualified for it, and a supervisor who has made a point of telling them both that the decision will be made on merit.…
Open the trope guide →Big Dumb Object
It is forty kilometres long and it is not answering. It has been in the system for eleven weeks, on a trajectory that will take it out again, and nothing…
Open the trope guide →Blackmail Romance
He has something. A photograph, a document, a debt, a piece of knowledge about somebody she loves, and he has made it clear without saying so directly that the knowing…
Open the trope guide →Captive Romance
There is a room, and a door, and one of them controls the door. Everything this form does, it does out of that single arrangement. Captive romance is the darkest…
Open the trope guide →Cinderella Story
She is in a room she has no business being in, wearing something borrowed, and the person she is talking to has not yet asked what she does. The Cinderella…
Open the trope guide →Compatibility Test
The result comes back at ninety-four per cent. Neither of them asked for the number, and both of them are now going to spend the rest of the book unable…
Open the trope guide →Enemies with Benefits
The terms were never stated. They both understand them anyway, and the understanding is that nothing said in this room counts, and that both of them will be exactly as…
Open the trope guide →Happy for Now
They are together, it is working, and neither of them has said anything about five years from now. The book closes there, deliberately, and the reader has to decide whether…
Open the trope guide →Heist Romance
There is a diagram on the table with eleven steps on it. Step seven depends entirely on her not hesitating for the four seconds she will be alone in a…
Open the trope guide →Magic Academy
There is a timetable, a ranking published where everyone can see it, and a set of examinations that determine who continues. The magic is the subject; the institution is the…
Open the trope guide →Medical Romance
They are on opposite sides of a bed at four in the morning, working on the same patient, and they have not spoken for six minutes because everything that needs…
Open the trope guide →Military and Veteran
He has been home for eleven months. The job he has now is fine. It requires roughly a fifth of what he is capable of, and nobody in the building…
Open the trope guide →Neural Interface
The implant went in at nineteen. It has been reading her for eleven years, and the question of what it does with what it reads has never had a satisfactory…
Open the trope guide →New Adult
She is nineteen and living somewhere that is not her parents' house for the first time, and nobody is going to tell her when to come back, and she has…
Open the trope guide →Shifter Romance
There is a wolf in the kitchen. In four minutes there will be a man in the kitchen, and the transition will have taken something out of him that will…
Open the trope guide →Soul Bond
She can feel that he is angry. Not deduce it, feel it, from six miles away, and there is no mechanism available to either of them for turning that off.…
Open the trope guide →Stalker Romance
He knows what time she leaves. He has known for some months. She has not yet worked out that the man she keeps running into is not running into her.…
Open the trope guide →Unrequited Love
He has known for four years. She has not, and there is no version of the last four years in which telling her would have improved anything, and he has…
Open the trope guide →Why Choose
Three of them, or four. Nobody is being deceived, nobody is going to be eliminated in the final act, and the reader who arrived expecting a love triangle is about…
Open the trope guide →Witch Romance
There is a craft here with rules, a cost attached to using it, and a woman who has been practising long enough to know exactly what both of those mean.…
Open the trope guide →Workplace Romance
They see each other for nine hours a day and have done for two years. Nobody chose this proximity, it is simply what employment is, and it has produced something…
Open the trope guide →Xenolinguistics
The signal has been repeating for nine weeks. It resolves into discrete units, the units recur in patterns, and after two months of work the team can state with confidence…
Open the trope guide →Beauty and the Beast
He has arranged the room so that he is facing away from the door. He did this before she arrived, deliberately, and he will do it every time, and it…
Open the trope guide →Chef and Baker
He tastes it, puts the spoon down, and says the sauce is broken. She has been making that sauce since she was nine, in her grandmother's kitchen, on a stove…
Open the trope guide →Cryosleep
She goes under at thirty-four with a return date and wakes at thirty-four to find that the return date passed some time ago. Cryosleep is a conceit that solves a…
Open the trope guide →Curvy Heroine
She knows before she sits down whether the chair has arms on it. This is not a thought she has, exactly. It is a calculation that has been running since…
Open the trope guide →Dark Forest
The sky is quiet. Not empty, quiet, and the difference is the whole premise. Dark forest is a conceit that answers the oldest question in the field with game theory…
Open the trope guide →Fake Breakup
They agreed the terms in a car. Six weeks apart, publicly, for reasons that made sense at the time. Nobody has said anything about how they will behave in private,…
Open the trope guide →Feral Heroine
She has been asked to apologise and she is not going to, and everyone at the table has worked this out, and the silence is now four seconds long and…
Open the trope guide →First Responder
He gets in at twenty past seven having been awake for twenty-six hours, and she asks how the shift was, and he says it was fine, and it was not…
Open the trope guide →Ghost Romance
He is in the room. He has been in the room for some time. She is the first person in eleven years who has looked directly at him, and neither…
Open the trope guide →Makeover Romance
Somebody takes her shopping. There is a montage in the reader's head whether the book supplies one or not, because this shape has been filmed so many times that the…
Open the trope guide →Meet Ugly
He reverses into her car. Not a scrape, a proper impact, in a supermarket car park, in the rain, and when he gets out he is already talking, and the…
Open the trope guide →Mistaken Identity
She has been talking to him for twenty minutes on the assumption that he is somebody else, and everything she has said has been calibrated for that person, and he…
Open the trope guide →Mountain Man
He has not had a conversation in eleven days. This is not a hardship he is enduring. It is an arrangement he has made, and it has been working, and…
Open the trope guide →Omegaverse
There is a biological caste system in this world with three positions in it, and everybody was sorted at puberty, and the sorting determines a great deal about what a…
Open the trope guide →Online Romance
Four months of messages, several thousand of them, and a fairly complete picture of a person she has never heard speak. Online romance is a plot-shape in which the relationship…
Open the trope guide →Power Cut
The fridge stops first, and the silence it leaves is the thing that makes both of them look up. Then the boiler. Then, a beat later, the awareness that the…
Open the trope guide →Reality TV Romance
There are eleven cameras in this room and she has stopped being able to locate them. The producer has asked her the same question four ways, and the fourth phrasing…
Open the trope guide →Second Act
She is fifty-eight. The house is too big now and has been for three years, and her daughter has started saying things about the stairs, and a man she went…
Open the trope guide →Shy Heroine
There is a question she wants to ask and has now not asked for eleven minutes, and the window in which asking it would have been natural closed some time…
Open the trope guide →Snowed In
The road closed at some point during the night. Nobody has said how long it stays closed, because nobody knows, and the not-knowing is doing more work than a fixed…
Open the trope guide →Surprise Pregnancy
Two lines. Neither of them planned this, both of them are adults, and the next conversation is going to determine a great deal more than the state of a relationship…
Open the trope guide →The Almost Kiss
Close enough that the question has already been asked. Somebody's hand has arrived somewhere it has not been before, neither of them is talking, and there are perhaps three seconds…
Open the trope guide →The Ball Scene
There are ninety people in the room and a string quartet doing its job in the corner, and the two of them are dancing, and every single person present can…
Open the trope guide →The Proposal
He has had the ring for eleven weeks. It has been in four different pockets, a desk drawer, and for one bad afternoon the glovebox of a car he then…
Open the trope guide →Time Loop Romance
This is the ninety-first time he has had this conversation. She is having it for the first time. He knows she is about to say the thing about her father,…
Open the trope guide →Accidental Marriage
There is a certificate with both their names on it. Neither of them remembers signing it with any seriousness, and it is nevertheless valid in the jurisdiction where it was…
Open the trope guide →Alien Romance
He is not a man. The book has to decide, in its first fifty pages, how much it means by that, and everything else follows from the decision. Alien romance…
Open the trope guide →Asexual and Demisexual
They have been together for four months and she has been waiting for the conversation, and he has been waiting for the same one, and each of them assumes the…
Open the trope guide →Bet or Dare
A friend says her name across a table in a bar, and someone else puts money down beside it. The terms get set in about ninety seconds. He has until…
Open the trope guide →Bodyswap and Body Double
She wakes up and the ceiling is wrong. The arm across her field of vision is not hers. It takes eleven seconds to arrive at the only available conclusion and…
Open the trope guide →Bodyswap and Body Double
She wakes up and the ceiling is wrong. The arm across her field of vision is not hers. It takes eleven seconds to arrive at the only available conclusion and…
Open the trope guide →Cooking Together
She is chopping and he is at the hob, and neither of them agreed to this arrangement, and it has been working for eleven minutes without a word about who…
Open the trope guide →Cowboy and Rancher
The forecast is wrong and he knew it was wrong at six this morning, and there are four hundred head that need moving before the weather arrives, and the conversation…
Open the trope guide →Drunken Confession
Third round of drinks in a bar neither of them wanted to end up in, on a night that was supposed to be a work event. She says something she…
Open the trope guide →Epilogue with Babies
Four years later, in a garden, with somebody's child asleep against a shoulder and a conversation happening about a fence that needs replacing. The epilogue with babies is the genre's…
Open the trope guide →Hair and Tending
She is sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa and he is behind her on the cushions, and he has been working through a knot for about…
Open the trope guide →Himbo
She has explained the situation twice and he has understood it both times, and his response on both occasions was to ask what she needs him to do about it,…
Open the trope guide →Jealousy Scene
Across the room, someone has put a hand on her back to steer her through a doorway. It is a nothing gesture. He has been watching it for four seconds…
Open the trope guide →Marriage Pact
They were twenty-three and drunk and it was funny at the time. If neither of us is married by forty. Somebody wrote it on a beer mat and somebody else…
Open the trope guide →Megastructure
It is not a planet. It is a band eleven hundred kilometres wide and a million long, spun around a star at a diameter nobody standing on it can perceive,…
Open the trope guide →Monster Romance
He does not have a human face. Not an unusual human face, not a scarred one, an entirely different arrangement of features that evolved for purposes the reader has to…
Open the trope guide →Motorcycle Club
She is standing in the doorway of a garage that has fourteen men in it, and every one of them has stopped what he was doing, and none of them…
Open the trope guide →Overheard Confession
She has come back for her coat. The kitchen door is open eight inches and there are two voices behind it, and one of them is his, and he is…
Open the trope guide →Rain Kiss
It has been raining for twenty minutes and neither of them has moved toward the car. Her hair is ruined. His coat has stopped being any use. Both of these…
Open the trope guide →Reincarnated Lovers
She has never been to this city. She knows which way the street bends before she reaches the corner, and she has known for about four seconds, and she is…
Open the trope guide →Rejected Mate
The bond arrived in front of forty people. He looked at her, and everybody present understood what had happened, and then he said no. Rejected mate is a plot-shape specific…
Open the trope guide →Rockstar
Two thousand people are singing something he wrote about somebody else, and she is standing at the side of the stage watching him receive it, and neither the crowd nor…
Open the trope guide →Runaway Bride
The dress is on. The church is full. Somewhere between the vestry and the aisle there is a side door, and she is looking at it, and the reader knows…
Open the trope guide →Secret Baby
The child is four. He has been in the same city for eleven months without knowing, and somebody at a birthday party has just used a surname he recognises. Secret…
Open the trope guide →Sharing Clothes
It is his jumper, and it is much too big for her, and she is wearing it in a kitchen at eight in the morning while he is standing there…
Open the trope guide →Soulmate Mark
She was sixteen when the name appeared. Brushing her teeth on a Tuesday morning, she looked up into the bathroom mirror and read, upside down across her own collarbone, a…
Open the trope guide →Step-Sibling
Their parents got married eleven months ago. Neither of them was living at home at the time. This year is the first Christmas where everyone is under one roof for…
Open the trope guide →Stuck in a Lift
Between the fourth and fifth floors, at twenty to seven on a Friday, the lift stops. There is a phone in the panel that connects to a man who says…
Open the trope guide →The Singularity
A system improves itself on a Tuesday afternoon. The improved version improves itself again, faster, and by Thursday nobody in the building can follow the reasoning well enough to say…
Open the trope guide →Virgin Hero
He is thirty-four. He has been asked about it exactly twice in his adult life, and both times he changed the subject so smoothly that neither person noticed he had.…
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