If I have to suffer, it may as well be at your hands. Your pretty hands. ▍ AN ORIGINAL ╱ small town romance! In Graceland, strength looks like keeping your head down and your heart walled off. Sawyer Driscoll knows this well. As a young father, small-town lawyer, and volunteer firefighter, he's the one people rely on. The one who never falls apart. But after the death of his grandfather, the man who helped raise him and taught him how to be steady, something in Sawyer began to quietly rot. He doesn't speak of the migraines that creep in like storm fronts or the way loss has hollowed out more than just his home. He doesn't ask for help. Not until Calla Amos steps in. Calla has always been the kind of woman who stays-the kind who tends to the wounds no one else will look at. But even healers have their breaking points. After leaving her nursing job just a few miles out of town, she's returned to Graceland with quieter eyes and scars she doesn't name. Taking a job as Sawyer's nanny isn't part of some grand plan. It's a means of survival. A chance to feel useful, to keep going. What begins as an arrangement born of convenience slowly becomes something more... a shared quiet, a fragile trust, the slow thaw between two people who've learned to expect the worst. But grief lingers, and so does shame. And sometimes, love doesn't bloom right away. Sometimes it festers. Sometimes it has to rot before anything good can grow. ❪ f!oc & m!oc ❫ PEARLJARS © 2024 BOOK TWO of FOUR written by april COVER INSPO: @aastratta ❤︎

The Hunger Games (Finnick Odair)

𝙒𝙍𝙄𝙏𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙃𝙀𝙇𝙋. i get by with a little help from my friends! lowercase intended.

Strange house we must keep and fill. House that eats, and pleads, and kills. ▍ AN ORIGINAL STORY ╱ historical romantic melodrama! Cape Iris was swathed in lilacs and lilies. A small land of pure fragrance. A honey scene of air soft dandelion tuffs encased by a large pool of Himalayan salt and ivory sand beaches. The Chevaliers ruled that place. (The Chevaliers ruled the world.) Whispers were harsh, tones full of lead at the mention of the Chevaliers wealth. They were gold emblemed, star-studded, but there was something about them. Something the world raised their necks, clearing the ears, eager to know. What do you know about the Chevaliers? Nothing. No one knows a thing. Some said the father had multiple wives. Some said the mother had a lobotomy. Some said the son had a drug problem. Some said the daughter murdered the Lowry boy. But everyone talks. So does money. And the Chevalier's had a lot of it. But no one could pay Killian Alcott, esteemed writer, enough to keep his fingers off the typewriter and his prying eyes away from the Chevalier's that dreaded Summer of 1954. But there was one Chevalier in particular that left an impression. Call it a mark. A wound within flesh. A narrowed confession only spoken between two. And that single impression doomed the Chevalier name. Isn't that the best part of a story? The tragedy. ❪ m!oc & m!oc ❫ ❪ f!oc & m!oc ❫ 𓊝 written by april PEARLJARS © 2024 COVER by the amazing @morstern ❤︎

"I don't want to exist, I want to live. I want even the darkest pieces inside her. I want to kiss the sorrow off her skin. Isn't that what love is? Isn't that what this beautifully constructed torture feels like? But I want the same from her. The power-hungry part of me wants something in return. I want her to love even the most monstrous parts of me. I want her to love me for the madman I am."