"I want to grow up" Did you say it when you were a kid? I know I did. Have you regretted growing up at some point in your life? Have you wished you could be a careless child once again? I know you have. Everyone has. The more you grow the bigger the challenges, the obstacles, the pain. Life gets serious. You get serious. You forget to smile at the morning sun shining down your face. You are too absorved by your problems to notice the beautiful world surrounding you. And when life gets hard, you wish more than anything to turn back in time and be that small child who did not know anything when he said "I want to grow up"

In Life Lines, she became Elite. In Love Lines, she became Assarion. In Dead Lines, she becomes...something quite different. Natalie Abernathy has been through a lot since the beginning of the school year. She never would've guessed dying and then being brought back would be one of them. After that fateful night in the corn field, life for Natalie has slowed to a crawl and turned uncertain. She's learning how to balance her normal lifewith her new Assarion one. However, not everything is working out how she would like. She can't remember everything about how she died and how she was brought back. Some of the details are gone but one thing she does know for certain. Caelus is hiding inside one of her friends. She just can't recall which one. Caelus is lurking in the shadows and no one knows why he hasn't put his plan to end the world and start anew into action yet. With the newly released monsters causing chaos and destruction all over the world, the Elite are forced to work together despite their differences. Enacting a tense peace between the two sides. With Homecoming and Halloween fast approaching, Natalie can't help but feel like everything is changing, the life she once knew and loved being drowned out by visions and a constant foreboding that the end to everything won't turn out how everyone would hope.

Last night I made the worst decision of my life, unbeknowest of the consequences. I can't change it. I can't take it back. That split second of doubt and uncertainty brought me where I am now. Alone. I have no idea what I'm doing. The power of seeing the future is something I never wanted and wish to give back. No one really knows how to help me except some ex-gypsy boy named...well, I don't know how to really pronounce it. And even then, I don't think he really knows what he's doing. He just pretends to it seems like. So here I am with a power I can't completely control and the boy I love on the other side, where I wanted to be. And I'll do whatever I have to to get there with him. But in order to do that, I have to learn things about myself and my family that I never wanted to. That I never imagined were true. But I'll do it if it means I can talk to him again. If it means I can be the person I want myself to be, the person my mother wanted me to be. ~ * ~ Natalie Abernathy has made her choice. Now she is forced to live with it. ~ * ~ Sequel to Life Lines

Natalie Abernathy was born into a world where the lines on your skin tell everyone who you are. They appear like tattoos and change with every choice you make, every person you meet. Only one line remains constant. Your love line. The only colored line on the human's skin, a blood red mixed in with the black. Natalie's world is consumed with The Sickness, the next stage in human evolution that can strike you when you are fourteen. Or doesn't. If you survive The Sickness, you become one of the Elite, faster, stronger, smarter than the humans who don't get The Sickness. The Elite's lines are colorful, beautiful in their own way. A mixture of deepest purples, the darkest blues, and dominate greens. They cover the black lines the Elite were given at birth, rewriting their destinies forever. As Natalie comes to find, the Elite aren't what they seem. The Sickness is not what it seems. Her heart is broken by the loss of her best friend Cecil McCourt, who succumbed to The Sickness days before their shared fifteenth birthday. Her friends surround her, trying to fill the void left by Cecil. Time moved on, carrying Natalie along with it. Now it's three years later, everyone's senior year. Days before school starts, Natalie befriends the new boy in town, Union Davidson. Cecil (now known as Cyrus) is quick to warn her away from him. At first she thinks it's a trick but as things start to happen, Natalie finds herself trapped between the thing she wants most in the world and something else quite darker than she imagined. © SCCourtney ~ * ~ Finalist in the Watty's 2012

"Cinderella had till midnight, I have twelve kisses to win back my prince's heart," John wants Metilda to end their marriage.He believes that he has fallen in love with another woman. Metilda agrees but she has one condition. John must kiss her every afternoon in-front of their son for twelve days. On the 12th kiss, something unexpected happens. highest rating so far #1

story #2 in the 'for the flawed' series. tw | abuse every night you held me. making me feel disgusting, because you were the s e c o n d to touch me. © 2014 flawed- (lowercase intended for stylistic purposes.) [Jan 16, 2015:: #2 in short story.]

Delaney Escott lives in a world where popularity reigns supreme. If you want to be noticed, social status is everything. The government is run by the Superiors: a very exclusive group of individuals who are virtually flawless. They are smarter than us and stronger than us, and to join their ranks is the highest honor. The Superiors pay an annual visit to the top schools in the nation and evaluate the students, choosing one boy and one girl - the most Popular in the school - to go the Capitol and train for Superiority. Delaney thinks that she's the only one indifferent to (and perhaps even suspicious of) the Superiors, until Caleb Payne, the most popular boy in school, approaches her with a request. He has a task for her, one that he believes she is uniquely capable of completing. And as she helps him, Delaney discovers that the government is hiding many secrets - and that the truth of the Superiors is far from what people believe it to be. [Watty Awards 2012 Winner, Science-Fiction: On the Rise]

She's everything he never thought he'd need. She's his dash of whiskey in a teacup..... Whiskey in a Teacup, is the story of one man's journey from the darkest of despair, to the discovery of light in the most unexpected of sources. Danny Delaney has the world ripped from beneath his feet, as a catalogue of painful encounters threaten to destroy him. Just as he begins to lose his grip, he meets a woman vastly different to anyone he has ever met before. Whiskey in a Teacup is a tale of betrayal, self discovery, and having the courage to take a leap of faith.

Under the big top of Jensen Three Ring Circus, magical performances abound and tantalize the senses, but when the glitz and glory closes for the night, even the circus world cannot escape madness. Acrobat Kate the Great lives and breathes for the tightropes, the trapeze, the aerial hoops. In the air she is a free spirit with boundless joy, but on the ground, she’s a prisoner of unspeakable brutality. As her life spins out of control, a one night dance with the devil lands Kate in Rosenton Home for the Criminally Insane. It is here she is determined to make amends with her sins and to find a cure for her insanity. Her ward mates – a charming farm boy from Texas with a bewitching power to calm Kate, an older Mexican woman obsessed with beauty, a fourteen-year old girl who refuses to eat, a bizarrely upbeat young woman with her eyes on the farm boy, a giant with striking green eyes who lets no one in, and a sixteen-year old young man who shows no emotions beyond pure coldness – are the thin threads between her and becoming engulfed by unseen demons.

Chandler was never good at expressing his emotions. He smiled when it was called for, but that was it. There was no declaration of love to his girlfriend. He wasn't even sure he wanted a girlfriend. All it took for him to open up was a boy in England. Lukas. There was something about him that made the feelings inside of Chandler spill out like a broken dam. But suddenly the letters stopped. Chandler had stopped writing back, and Lukas wasn't able to get a hold of him. Where was he? Had Lukas said something wrong? Did he not like talking to him anymore? Lukas never gave up writing to him, and on a Sunday in December, he recieved five letters from the boy.