He held her hand in his own, his finger dancing in circles across her soft skin, "you know that place between sleep and awake;" he whispered, "that place where you can still remember dreaming?" His grip tightened around her small frame, his eyes boring into hers, "that's where i will always love you... that's where i will always be waiting." © tilmorning.

→ finished ← Claustrophobic and agoraphobic, Alaska Gouramie doesn't leave the house much. She whiles her days away nurturing her goldfish, Gordon. Her life is passing her by. Elver Harrison James is scared of fish. He won't go near the pond at the bottom of his garden. He will do anything to stay away from those water-loving freaks. Alaska's mother forces her to leave the house. It's just a trip to the park, no big deal. Until Alaska falls in the pond. And Elver is the only one around. Teen Fiction #118

Because some of us fail at love. | WATTPAD PICKS 3/2/18 |

"Go ahead," I said, backing up against the pink wall of the shop. "Do something other than glare at me." I waited. One, two, three seconds... and nothing. I raised my chin at him. "You're boring me, mute boy." He stepped closer. Leaned toward me as his gaze burned into mine. Then... ❀ ❀ ❀ After three months in juvenile detention, it's time for Romy Pereira to help out with her family's flower shop. And it's not all bad... until they hire Jack Michel to work beside her. He doesn't speak, communicating with glares and scowls instead of words, and seems to be more interested in literal rocks than other human beings. And with an ex-convict mother, her friends drifting away, and the flower shop falling apart, the last thing Romy wants to deal with is Jack's attitude. She'll forever praise the day he screws up big time and gets himself fired, but until that day comes, it's mostly one cold-hearted girl, her silent (but still infuriating) coworker, and a whole lot flowers. [word count: 100k] [originally written in 2014-2015; re-write completed 2020-2021] ❀ Rankings ❀ #1 in #badgirl #1 in #goodboy #1 in #flowershop #1 in #sociopath

EDITORS' PICK (November 2019) || COMPLETE Nick Buckingham is three things if nothing else: salty, antisocial, and the quintessential gay theatre nerd. He's content to drift through the rest of senior year throwing himself into productions to avoid his peers - until it arrives. As an anonymous classmate begins courting Nick via text, he's suddenly desperate to figure out just who this dashing secret admirer is--even if it means actually socialising. He'll be fine--so long as he keeps his wits about him and doesn't fall for this probably-catfisher. Can't be too hard, right?

Charlie doesn't speak, so he paints.

Book 2 in the Burning Series: the sequel to Dust. The world is changing. There used to be men, and there used to be monsters. The line between the two is blurred now. Long ago, the earth spun in a constant cycle. There was life. There was hope. It is no longer such. Humanity cowers beneath glass domes in the midst of the desert, afraid of radiation that no longer pollutes the air. But there are darker things hiding in the wilderness now. Wild things. Cursed things. Burning things. Yet, not all is lost. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down sometimes. But what happens when you can't stand again?

All the earth is torn asunder. There used to be grass, and the sun used to be golden. Children played outside, climbing trees with smiles on their faces and grass stains on their knees. People worried about a million things that would soon be irrelevant, continuing without a clue of the disaster to come. Centuries later, what little is left of humanity survives in a society constructed beneath the surface of a glass dome, the world outside converted to little more than a desert wasteland. Survival is a routine rather than an effort, and all rules are surpassed by only one: if you want to survive, you never leave the dome. There's nothing alive out there. The radiation that soaks the earth makes sure of that. Until one day, someone finds a bloody, dust-covered handprint on the outside of the glass. Nothing will ever be the same again. Book 1 of the Burning Series Highest ranking: #13 in Adventure on 03/04/16

Peyton has had a rough go of things. A distant father, a drunk mother. The usual sort of sob story. When Peyton finds out that her dad is getting remarried and that she's going to have to take a road trip across the country with her brother and her boyfriend to be there on his wedding day, she thinks that things couldn't possibly get any worse. Until her boyfriend cheats on her a few weeks before their departure date with none other than her best friend. The sob story continues. Now, Peyton is forced to travel across America with a foreign stranger, her grumpy brother, his very un-grumpy girlfriend, and a dog who's just trying his best. She's convinced that this will be the worst summer of her life but if it were that depressing, there wouldn't be a story written about it. Things take a twist for the better... and then for the worst... and for the better again (basically, it's a very twisty ride) as she finds ways to make this road trip memorable for everybody.

My name is Julie Quinn and I've been a New Yorker all my life. Life was good. I was swamped with work doing a job that I loved and I was dating the best boyfriend I'd ever had the pleasure to. I have always been a strong-willed and independent woman - or as my best friend puts it "control freak" - and even more after the accident, but what happened on the eve of my 30th birthday was enough to bring down Wonder Woman.