Bedtime stories for your girlfriend

A bedtime story for an adult isn't a children's story told to an adult. It needs three things: nothing bad happens, something small turns out to matter, and the ending lands softly enough to be the last thought of the day. All three below follow those rules. Tell them from memory, read them off this page, or read them down the phone — they're written in short sentences on purpose, so they survive being retold badly at midnight.

Pick by mood: "The Last Bus Home" is the warm one, "The Wrong Names of Stars" is the whimsical one, and "Who Fell First" is the one for when she asks about the two of you growing old.

1. The Last Bus Home — the warm one, about 3 minutes

There was a conductor on the 11:40 night bus, the last one home, and his name was Dev. He knew every regular by their stop: the security guard who slept until the depot, the nurse who never did, and the girl from the bakery on Station Road, who always smelled like cardamom and always, always ran for the bus.

So Dev started holding it. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Once, a scandalous forty-five, while the driver looked at him in the mirror and Dev pretended to count tickets.

He never said anything to her, because what do you say — I delay public transport for you? And she never said anything to him. But on the nights she wasn't working, when the bus rolled past the dark bakery, there would be a small paper bag on her usual seat, left with the afternoon delivery man, with one bun inside and one word on the bag: Conductor.

This went on for a whole winter. The other regulars knew before either of them did. The nurse used to move seats so the one by the window stayed empty, "for the bakery," she said, as if a seat could be reserved for a smell.

Then in March the transport office did what transport offices do. Route revised. The 11:40 was cancelled, and the last bus became the 10:55, which was the driver's route, not Dev's.

On his final night, the girl from the bakery got on, and Dev gave her a ticket she didn't pay for, and neither of them managed a single one of the ten thousand sentences they'd saved up. She got off at Station Road. The doors closed. That, the nurse thought, was tragically that.

But the next evening, outside the bakery at closing time, there was a bicycle leaning on the lamppost. An old black bicycle, freshly oiled, with a wide wicker basket on the front, and Dev standing next to it, holding his conductor's bag like a man holding his own heart in a satchel.

"They cancelled the route," he said. "So I bought my own."

She looked at the bicycle. She looked at the basket. It was, she noted, exactly the size of a paper bag with one bun in it.

"One stop only," said Dev. "Door to door. Terrible service, honestly. Runs every single night."

It does, too. It has run every night for three years now. It has never once been on time, and nobody has ever complained.

2. The Wrong Names of Stars — the whimsical one, about 3 minutes

Mira knew none of the constellations, and refused to learn, because she had already named them herself. The saucepan with the dented lid. The slightly bent spoon. The cat going down the stairs sideways. The great winter triangle she called The Samosa, and no astronomer alive could have talked her out of it.

Unfortunately for everyone, the flat across the roof from hers belonged to an actual astronomer.

Ishaan worked nights at the observatory and drank his morning tea on the roof at the exact hour Mira drank her evening tea, because his days ran backwards. That is how he first heard her, on the phone with her sister, pointing at the sky with a teaspoon: "No, look for The Samosa. Orion? Who is Orion? I'm telling you it's a samosa."

He leaned over the parapet. "It's a hunter," he said. "It has been a hunter for three thousand years."

"Then he's holding a samosa," said Mira, and hung up on her sister to argue with him properly.

They argued all spring. He brought star charts to the roof; she corrected them in pencil. He explained that Cassiopeia was a queen on a throne; she established that it was clearly a W, standing for Wednesday, the day the vegetable man came. He said you can't just rename the universe. She said somebody had to, the old names were all hunters and queens and not one single kitchen implement, which told you everything about who'd been doing the naming.

What Mira didn't know was that astronomers, occasionally, get to name things for real. Ishaan's team spent that summer confirming a small, faint, previously uncatalogued star — the kind only the big telescope can see, the kind nobody famous fights over. There is paperwork for this. There is a committee. Ishaan filed the forms himself and never said a word.

He told her in November, on the roof, by handing her the certificate rolled up like a diploma. She unrolled it and read the official designation, the coordinates, the date. And then, at the bottom, the approved name on the register, permanent as anything human gets:

The Slightly Bent Spoon.

"It's the faintest one up there," said Ishaan. "You can't even see it without the telescope. But it's real, it's on the charts forever, and it's yours."

Mira looked at the sky for a long time. Every star she could see had a wrong name she'd given it. Somewhere past all of them was a star with a wrong name the universe had accepted.

"Show me," she said. So he did. And that is why, if you ever meet two people on a roof with one telescope and two cups of tea at entirely the wrong hours, you should leave them be. They are doing astronomy.

3. Who Fell First — for "tell me about us when we're old", about 4 minutes

For fifty years, Colonel Khanna and Mrs. Khanna had exactly one unresolved argument, and they kept it the way other couples keep wedding china: brought out on special occasions, handled with care, never actually settled.

The argument was: who fell in love first.

The Colonel's case was simple. He had seen her at her cousin's wedding in 1974, asked three separate aunties for an introduction, and been refused by all three. Clearly, he said, he fell first. A man does not survive three aunties for a woman he is merely fond of.

Mrs. Khanna's case was also simple. She had noticed him at that same wedding a full hour earlier — she could name the song that was playing — and had personally instructed all three aunties to refuse him, to see if he'd keep trying. "You fell first," she would tell him, "but I jumped. And I checked the depth beforehand, which is why I pushed you in first to see."

Fifty years. Anniversaries, arguments, one war, two children, a shop opened and sold, seven cities. The question survived everything, undecided on purpose, because some questions are not for answering. They are for asking again next year.

Then, at the fiftieth anniversary, their granddaughter — a lawyer, dangerously fond of evidence — produced two old diaries she'd found while clearing the Delhi house. His army diary from 1974. Her college diary, same year. "We settle this tonight," she announced, to cheering.

The room went quiet while she found the wedding date in both.

The Colonel's entry, in fountain pen, said: Met a girl at Bunty's wedding. I will marry her. Note: tell no one yet. Especially not her.

Mrs. Khanna's entry, in pencil, said: Met a boy at Bunty's wedding. I will marry him. Note: tell no one yet. Especially not him.

Same date. Same wedding. Same secret, kept in the same words, in two different hands, for fifty years and one evening.

The granddaughter looked up to declare a tie, but nobody was listening. The Colonel had taken his wife's hand — the one with the pencil callus, though only he knew to look for it — and Mrs. Khanna was smiling at him across half a century.

"A draw," she said, "settles nothing."

"Good," said the Colonel. "Same time next year?"

And that's the story. Some people fall first. The lucky ones fall at the same time, and spend fifty years arguing about it. Goodnight.

How to tell her a bedtime story (even badly)

• Slow is the whole trick. Tell it at about two-thirds of your normal talking speed. The pauses aren't dead air — they're where she gets drowsy.
• Long distance? These are built for the phone. Short sentences, no props, natural stopping points. Lie down, put the call on speaker, and read from this page — she'll hear pages turning in your voice, which is its own kind of nice.
• Don't check if she's asleep. If she goes quiet, keep going, slightly softer, to the end. Being talked to sleep is the point; being asked "are you asleep?" undoes it.
• Retelling from memory beats reading perfectly. If you forget the details, invent them. "The Slightly Bent Spoon" has survived worse narrators than you.

If she'd rather you read something with more weight, try love stories to read aloud to your girlfriend — ten-minute stories built for two. If you're the one who can't sleep, there's a list for that too. And if she'd like one in Hindi, our Hindi love stories are free and short enough for bedtime.