[Revised]

"What happened back there, guys?" Saffron asked, his voice unnaturally calm and controlled.

"These two—assholes—left me back there to rot!" Zara ripped the balaclava from her head and jabbed an accusatory finger in the air, pointing first at Orion then at Aurora. Her words dripped with repugnance and betrayal.

The tension in the air was almost tangible.

"How could you? The money from this shit is yours too!" Zara gestured to the backpack. Her eyes stung so she pinched the bridge of her nose. The anxiety from the escape still hadn't left her—it was as if she was still back at the house.

"Well, what did you expect us to do, Zara?" Orion said, "Sit on the couch and wait for your ass? It was all on you! We didn't ask you to go take that stuff!"

"You didn't ask but are you getting the money from it? Are you?" Zara yelled back, outraged, "I was thisclose to getting caught and it's all your fault!"

Orion responded with a crease in his forehead and a click of his decorated lighter. The umpteenth cigarette had somehow appeared in his mouth, the end of its filter now a deep orange. As the street-smart member of the group, he was perfectly aware of how well prescription medicine sold under the counter, but still had the audacity to be sarcastic. Through the sheer force of willpower, Zara didn't rip the cigarette from his lips and burn a hole in his skin.

"Come on Zara," Aurora said quietly, resting her head on her hand, "the guy had a gun. If we showed ourselves or attempted to wrestle it off him in any way, someone would've gotten seriously hurt." She pulled her gloves off and rested them on her lap, unable to meet Zara's frigid glare.

"Are you kidding me?" Zara let out a forced laugh, "I bet that guy didn't even know how to use the goddamn gun!"

Everybody was so quick to throw her under the bus when she only did what anyone would've done in her position; Saffron wouldn't have advised her to lasso them in if he knew that they weren't as greedy as her. Carpe momentum; she seized the moment and got out of it with a bigger reward and her body parts unscathed. As the risk-taker she was, they should've known better than to leave her behind.

"We couldn't take that chance—"

"Oh, shut up Aurora. I know you. I saw you. You didn't think twice before running away like the little bitch you are."

"Don't talk to me like that," Aurora retaliated, her voice low and filled with venom.

"What are you going to do, huh? Come on, hit me bitch. Hit me." She shoved Aurora against the door, hard.

Aurora immediately fought back, swinging a punch at Zara but missing her as Saffron aggressively manoeuvred the car over to the side of the road and hit the brakes. With a yelp, Aurora collided with Zara, who banged her head against the car window.

"The three of you, out of the car."

No one budged. Orion even threw up the hand wielding his cigarette, as if his silence excluded him from the problem the three had all been involved in.

"Out of the car. Now!" Saffron thundered and the three of them scrambled outside.

"None of you are getting back in until this is resolved. Like civilised individuals." He didn't bother to leave the driver's seat, instead locking the doors after they were shut.

Orion, Zara, and Aurora all looked at each other, but then they all turned away.

"Alright, I'm sorry," Orion conceded, shrugging a shoulder.

Orion apologising? Has hell frozen over? Zara wrapped her arms around her midriff. Anger receded away, leaving shock in its wake. Once again, the cold started pecking at her flesh, the worn-out sweater she wore doing nothing to warm her up.

"You're right," Orion said, almost with resignation, "We should've been there for you. But I couldn't afford to get caught. You think they would've been as lenient with me as they would've been with you? Nah, fam. Not after juvie."

Zara tossed her head. A hair-tendril had gotten in her eye. "You didn't even bother—didn't even try to buy me time to get in and out. A distraction. Something, anything! I didn't think twice before hauling your ass out of danger that one time at the mall, didn't I?"

On the countless occasions in which they had shop-lifted, only once did things go downhill. Orion had gotten snagged by a pair of security guards, but Zara helped him escape by kicking one in ribs and punching the other in the face. Needless to say, they could never show their face there again.

Orion inclined his head in agreement, shoving his hands into his pockets. Aurora raked a hand through her hair and crossed her arms over her chest.

"You too, Aurora. I thought you guys were my friends, we're meant to cover each other, no matter what dumb stuff we get ourselves into." Zara's voice cracked, so she turned away, tightening the hold around herself. Unable to deal with them anymore, she dragged herself to the car and knocked on the window.

"That was unfair of you." Saffron turned in his seat as she stepped in.

Zara pulled the door shut and scooted over to her seat. "What?"

Saffron inhaled sharply and tapped his phone against the dashboard. "You...weren't right."He peered at her tentatively through the rearview mirror.

Her brows furrowed together. This was his nice way of putting it, to say that she was a stubborn, confrontational bitch that had once again made the wrong move and placed the blame on others. Instead of saying something that could jeopardise their six-year-long friendship, Zara opted instead to jab at the empty bag of chips that lay crushed underneath her boot.

Saffron sucked his teeth. "You're so stubborn, Zara."

"Whatever," she mumbled, jabbing the bag one last time before focusing her attention on her boots. As she tugged at the knotted laces, she added, "Stick to your desk job and leave the field work to those who know what the fuck they're doing."

With a grunt, she pulled off the boot. She dropped it to one side and lifted her head, meeting Saffron's glare with her own, challenging stare. After a few moments of prolonged eye-contact, he opened his mouth to say something, only to close it once Orion and Aurora simultaneously knocked on the windows. They rejoined the pair in the car, enveloped in the smell of cigarette smoke and repressed irritation.

"Let's go home," Saffron muttered, giving Zara one last pointed look before switching on the engine.

-:-

Half an hour of uncomfortable quietude later, Aurora and Orion hopped out, leaving the pair once again alone in the car.

As soon as they took off again, Zara immediately climbed over into the front seat, with the intent to talk business. It was more a matter of apologising to her friend for her earlier comment—which had tumbled out in a moment of irrational defiance—but there was also that other thing she wanted to talk about. The thing that had bothered her from the beginning of their heist and continued to bother her now.

"I'll drop you off at yours," Saffron stated, his voice hollow. Zara tucked her hands in between her legs and stared straight ahead, at the red and yellow lights of the surrounding vehicles. She hadn't expected her words to cut so deep, but his closed-off behaviour proved otherwise. Either that, or he was just pretending to be moody to teach her a lesson.

"Can I—" She paused to chew her lip. "Can I stay over at yours? I don't think Grandpa is home tonight." The words came all in one breath; she started picking at her sweater to mask her embarrassment. Why am I being so stupid? She thought to herself, pulling out thread after thread and watching as at the holes in her top grew larger in both number and size.

A minute passed, then another, but Saffron didn't say a thing. For a moment, Zara thought that, in a fairy-tale style turn of events, her question had turned him into stone. The way he sat there, unmoving, both hands on the steering wheel and his back ruler-straight, could fool anyone. But then he blinked, and the surrealistic moment passed.

His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed; Zara captured each and every one of his imperceptible movements with her peripheral vision. When another minute of silence passed, Zara gave up on waiting for a response. They were only a couple of streets away from her apartment building.

An intersection from their destination, Saffron swerved around the corner and into a different street, namely one that lead away from her home. "What are you doing!" Zara shrieked, too overwhelmed by surprise to control the volume of her voice or her hands. They grabbed the sleeve of his windbreaker and wrenched his arm away; Saffron yelled out a curse as the car divagated into the opposite lane, but thanks to his honed reflexes, he regained control of the vehicle, narrowly avoiding colliding with a caravan. Its klaxon responded with outrage, as did the ones of all the cars in a six foot radius.

When the blaring subsided and her head stopped spinning, Zara released him, her fingers shaking. Her life still flashed across her eyes as she then grappled onto the roof handle, the only object of comfort in a car owned by someone she could now comfortably label as a psychopath. "Are you fucking crazy?" Zara asked in what was barely a whisper, struggling to look at the guy who almost got both of them killed.

"Yes," he replied, the corners of his lips curling upward. His cheeks swelled, and even though her gaze was blurry, Zara could tell that he was fighting the urge to laugh. It was no use; moments later, he erupted like a papier-mâché volcano.

"You are crazy..." Zara stared at the guy with disbelief, her lower lip quivering in the aftermath of a near heart-attack. She couldn't say that she hadn't been warned against guys that were too nice and too chivalrous—Saffron, the embodiment of both traits, had proven to her that humanity was doomed.

"No, I'm not," Saffron sputtered between breaths, his laughter showing no sign of subsiding in the near future, "but I'm no fucking white collar, that's for sure." Then, the volcano erupted all over again.

"You bastard!" Zara went to throw a punch at his arm, but after that episode, she settled with waving her fists in the air instead. "We could've died!"

"Yeah, but, we didn't," he said, his face pinker than the usual.

"But we could've." Doomsday thinking aside, her body was too tired and feeble to sustain another argument. Zara chuckled and shook her head, disbelieving the situation she was in. "I shouldn't have underestimated you. God have mercy on my soul." This time, she didn't refrain from punching him in the arm.

"I thought you knew me better than that," he said, a smile forever carved into his face, "but I guess I was wrong."

Zara stuck her tongue out and Saffron reached over to tuck a strand of her hair behind an ear. She smiled at the contact, albeit it caused her shoulders to hike up reflexively; it was so much better to see him like this, it made her heart swell up with happiness. He could light up the darkest of days and Zara was so grateful that a girl like her could have a friend like him. When she was younger, she had never thought that such thing would have been possible.

After searching for an empty parking space, Saffron finally managed squeeze between a pickup truck and a station wagon. He killed the engine. With a deep breath, he rolled his shoulders back and cracked his knuckles.

"Imagine if you did that shit under a cop's radar," Zara said almost absentmindedly, closing her eyes. Saffron's street was decisively more quiet than her own. There were no hooligans running about, causing mayhem until early in the morning, no shoot-outs, police sirens, nothing. The only sound one could hear was the one of the passing cars—but even that was sporadic, and with sound-proof windows, sleep was never a problem. Zara started to doze off, but a hand on her shoulder shook her back to her senses.

"Come on, let's get out of here." Saffron undid his seatbelt then Zara's before pocketing his keys and stepping outside. Zara didn't realise how warm the car was until the crisp autumnal air slapped her in the face—it was best they started making their way before she caught the flu. After stashing the bags in the trunk, they made their way to Saffron's apartment building. "Just so you know, I didn't think about packing a change of clothes."

The ones she wore on heists doubled up as her everyday wear, as they were all different shades of black and grey, and she was too poor to afford brands. It didn't matter too much; over the years, Zara had perfected the classic homeless-woman look, it was like second nature to her now.

"You can just borrow one of my shirts," Saffron said without skipping a beat, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. At 6'3'', his shirts were so big they swallowed Zara whole.

He pulled out a bunch of keys from his jeans pocket and fumbled through them. After several failed attempts, he stuck the right key in the lock and pushed the door open. "The elevator is broken. Again. So we're going to have to take the stairs."

Oh God. He lived on the seventh floor.

"I don't think I can make it," Zara complained, dragging her feet as she followed Saffron—who was already at the top of the first flight of stairs.

"Tough luck, because last one who makes it up is a rotten egg!" He winked before zapping up the stairs, his long legs transporting him at a speed no mere mortal should've been capable of sustaining.

Zara wasn't one to back down from a challenge. Even if she knew her overexerted body would fail her not even halfway down the track, she took Saffron on anyway.

She ended up being a rotten egg.

-:-