Download Chereads APP
Chereads App StoreGoogle Play
Chereads

A Certain Hunger

A Woman Without a Mask

At 28, Clara Hayes has mastered the art of wearing masks. To her colleagues, she’s the perpetually cheerful graphic designer who never misses a deadline. To her overbearing mother, she’s the dutiful daughter hiding her anxiety behind polished smiles. To the world, she’s a woman who “has it all together”—except she’s crumbling inside. Clara’s life unravels during a corporate presentation where a panic attack strips her façade raw. Humiliated and exhausted, she flees to a quiet coastal town, renting a cottage owned by an eccentric, free-spirited potter named Marisol. There, Clara stumbles upon a dusty journal in the attic, its pages filled with haunting sketches and anonymous confessions from a woman who once lived there decades earlier. The entries mirror Clara’s own suffocating duality: “I paint myself in colors the world approves of, but my soul is a grayscale.” As Clara tentatively befriends Marisol and a reclusive widower, Eli, who runs the town’s crumbling bookstore, she begins confronting the lies she’s told herself for years. Through their unconventional guidance—and the journal’s cryptic wisdom—she starts shedding her masks one by one. But vulnerability comes at a cost: her corporate career teeters, her mother’s disapproval intensifies, and a buried trauma from her teenage years resurfaces, threatening to drown her newfound courage. When Clara’s raw, unfiltered artwork—created in secret—goes viral, she faces a choice: return to the safety of her old illusions or step into the terrifying freedom of living unapologetically. But the journal hides a final secret, linking Clara’s journey to the cottage’s mysterious past, forcing her to question whether true authenticity is a rebellion… or a homecoming.
Daoist5CDTxH · 1.7K Views

A spy's life is a lie

I had always thought that life and I were best friends, that luck would always be on my side, that I was the epitome of perfection itself but little did naive, little me know. Life is unfair, luck can be bad and perfection is easily shattered but I payed for it, I learned that information the hard and cruel way. Life betrayed me and took away my parents, perfection turned on me and disappeared before my eyes and luck? My luck went from bad to worse to worst. Have you ever had people in your life that stand by you, support you and give you good advice? If you have then you understand that those people become incredibly important people in your life that it's like they've become melded in you, they become part of your personality, your rock and you begin to admire them and believe that you would have never achieved what you have if not for them. You place them on a pedestal in your head, one far higher than yourself. Now imagine that those people turn their backs on you and betray you and you find out that all their "good" advice were just merely the worst possible advice one could ever receive wrapped up in a pretty pink ribbon. You find out that they are two faced snakes who came into your life just to deceive and destroy. The pain from that is simply indescribable, like if you were on top of a building and it begins crumbles from the ground up sending you falling down but this time instead of falling to your death, you fall down a dark well and begin to wonder a dark path of depression, guilt, self hate and depreciation and regret and I promise you that is a fate far worse than death. I loved watching Spy movies as a kid, I'd even dream about them. I always thought it looked so cool seeing the main character fly through the air and do awesome tricks and defeat the bad guy but everyone else around me disagreed. They all said that spies were bad people and were never to be trusted but I didn't listen, I only trusted what I knew. But when my childhood dream that became my reality was handed to me on a silver platter, I finally understood that all that glitters is not gold. The main character always loses everyone and everything and ends up alone and being a spy is far from the fantasy I'd imagined. A spy's life is nothing but a big lie and false documents made to deceive, infiltrate and annihilate the lives of others. I give you three pieces of advice to carry with you on this damned journey called life. Never, ever under no circumstances must you ever trust a spy they are wolves in sheep's clothing. TRUST NO ONE. Keep a good eye on your pillars, attack before they can make their move. Everything comes with a price some as just more horrid that others. ***** Author here, I hope you enjoyed reading the synopsis, it was really fun to write but for more elaboration; This story is about the adventures of Andrea and her three best friends but it focuses more on Andrea, as she's the main charcter but there are some chapters whers the POV will changeand focus on her friends ot those around her. Andrea, having growing up in a loving family, finds it hard to believe that all she has grown to believe is a lie. She discovers that truly everything is not as it seems as it seems in her world of undercover spies.
Sommy_Rea · 11.8K Views

Born of fire and hunger

In the greater part of human kind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and affect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate : Tanith Lee There are moments in life when you don't know what to do. Some of these moments can be good, like when a father holds his first newborn baby for the first time and realises he has no idea what to do. Or when somoene who has worked his entire life without stop finally retires and doesn't know what to do with his free time cause he's never had any. An then there's me, somoene about to have possibly the first of many so called "worst day of my life" as I stare at what is most likely a death sentence. You see for contexe, the world I am in is a little strange. Before you make any assumptions, this isn't an isekai where I get whisked off to some fantasy world to fixe some other peoples problems. At least not completely. The world I am in is strange in the fact that about 75 years ago, give or take one or two, a massive portion of the population vanished without a trace. Freaky I know, but not as freaky as when they came back and brought with them "magic". The laws of physics seemed useless and easy to ignore for these people. They could do incredible things. Flying through the air at unimaginable speeds, shooting fire from their fingers, moving mountains with their power. Even freezing time was within their reach. It was safe to say at this point that the world was going to change forever. Now listening to all this you'd probably say, wait Lucien isn't this awesome? Magic powers and all you have to do is dissapear for a while, isn't that a pretty good trade of? And normally you'd be right, but of the approximately 100 million who dissapeared, only 13 million came back. Not very good odds. Those that came back told stories of what they had to do. The trials they had to pass. Now this isn't some tower climbing story like you probably read in those webnovels. Every trial was unique to the person. Some where easy and some landed you in the 83 million that didn't come back. And naturally like any good fantasy story, the great dissapearance, as we came to call it, didn't happen just once. And so my story begins here, in the middle of the road, 75 years after the first great disappearance, staring into dead space. I would guess that the people who saw me would find me weird, after all I was staring at nothing. But I couldn't be bothered with them right now, and the reason was that I was indeed staring at something. Something that would change my fate forever. [Congratulations challenger] [You have been selected for the trial] [You will be transported in 30 seconds] ... Fuck. Author : this novel does have a system but it's not a leveling system, so if that's what you're looking for, this might not be for you.
Aidan_Rafferty · 3.1K Views
Related Topics
More