Releasing July 14, 2014

Bliss knows all about bad choices but has yet to make them herself. With an innocent heart, she searches for freedom and finds it in the delinquent down the hall.

Dusty is a foul-mouthed troublemaker, tear-maker and heartbreaker. The boy with summer sky-blue eyes knows to stay away, but he can't resist the girl who made his house a home.

She's his reason, but he might not catch her when she falls.

She loves him. He loves her crazy.

This is what happens when a love made of secrets is kept with rules instead of promises.

Chapter Ten

Buried beneath the blankets, I press the phone to my ear. Dusty doesn’t realize I’m back on, so I listen to him smoke: light, inhale, exhale, sigh, laugh. Hearing it is almost as good as actually seeing his lips around the end of a joint.

“I’m back,” I whisper.

"Beautiful, beautiful, baby Bliss. Baby, baby Bliss." He laughs, taking a hit.

My dad’s a juvenile court judge. Our dinner table talk usually consists of him complaining about the kids he sees coming in and out of his courtroom. It’s an epidemic, he says. Children Bliss’ age using drugs. And it always ends with, Bliss, never give into peer pressure. It starts with a little grass.

Maybe it is some kind sweeping epidemic, but weed doesn’t sway Dusty the way my dad claims it does other people. It soothes him. It makes him funny and honest and tolerable.

My dad doesn’t know everything.

"I thought about you all day,” Dusty says softly, lazily. "I miss your face. I miss your candy wrappers all over my room. I miss your cold toes on my legs under the covers."

"Oh, yeah?" I grip the phone tighter, pressing my knees together. The sound of his low voice sends chills up and down my arms. I bite my bottom lip and curl my toes.

“Come over,” he exhales.

I roll onto my side and turn my face into the hoodie’s hood, inhaling the faint sent of vanilla. I’m lit up, full of crazy butterflies and overriding happiness. This boy makes me smile bright.

"I'll take my mom's car. I'll come get you." He's only half-kidding. "Say yes."

"You'll drive high?"

"I'm not high." There's a moment of silence before he chokes on his laughter. "I'm so fucking high."

I revel in his tone, and his voice, and his silly, half-slurred words while I lie in the dark pretending he's close.

"I'm so hungry, Bliss baby. If you were here, I'd probably eat your elbow. I’d eat your—"

"Dusty,” I cut him off. “Tell me a secret."

"I love you," he says.

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Mary Elizabeth is an up and coming author who finds words in chaos, writing stories about the skeletons hanging in your closets. Known as The Realist, she is one half of The Elizabeths—a duo brave enough to never hide the truth. Born and raised in Southern California, she’s a wife, mother of four beautiful children, and dog tamer to one enthusiastic Pit Bull and a prissy Chihuahua. She’s a hairstylist by day but contemporary fiction, new adult author by night. Mary can often be found finger twirling her hair and chewing on a stick of licorice while writing and rewriting a sentence over and over until it’s perfect. She discovered her talent for tale-telling accidentally, but literature is in her stranglehold. And she’s not letting go until every story is told.

To follow Mary’s upcoming solo and collaborative projects, she can be found at her website http://www.maryelizabethlit.com/.

Brought together by their love of storytelling, Mary and Sarah Elizabeth are a pair of dedicated writers with complementary strengths who’ve cultivated a literary style that captures a Realist’s brutality with a Poet’s grace, uncovering the self-seeking side of tenderness and the undisguised truth of honesty. Inspired by the lyrics of a song, Dusty was born between emails and long G-chats before a single chapter was ever typed. A short story turned into a monster, and more than four years and several edits later, the first half of their collaboration, Innocents, will be released on July 14, 2014. And its conclusion, Delinquents, is set to release on October 23, 2014.

If you’d like to contact The Elizabeths, they can be located on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TheElizabethsDusty?ref=hl.

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Listener, messenger, secret keeper, Elizabeth, and TrueLove, Sarah works two jobs by day so that she's able to really work by night. She's written since she was old enough to hold a marker, and her writing bridges the sacred and profane, from first love to forbidden, with a longing for truth and a passion for hearts. She is currently based in Kansas City where her army is comprised of one little buffalo. Her best friends are girls named Moses and Bunny. Her hero is a boy named Bishop, and the one she loves has ocean eyes. In addition to Dusty, Sarah also has a collaborative novella, Light and Wine, due to be released on June 8th, and her solo work will be featured in the anthology Branded, this August.