"LOOK, HE'LL COME AROUND, ALL RIGHT?" JOHN B ASSURED HIS FRIENDS. They were at the Wreck, discussing the plans for the gold, but it all felt wrong, doing it without JJ with them. "It's...He's doing a JJ thing."

"You think he'll go home?" Kie questioned curiously.

Pope shook his head as he leaned against the window and stared out at the ocean, watching as the waves crashed onto the sand. "There's about a zero percent chance that JJ goes home."

"You okay?" the Routledge boy asked his girlfriend who was kind of staring at nothing, zoned out. It seemed like something was bothering her, but he couldn't tell what.

"Yeah," she nodded before looking back up at him. "Are you?"

He shrugged, staring down at the table with a small smile. "I mean, I'm in one piece, so..."

"Okay. It's too dangerous to pawn this thing off piecemeal. So, our best bet is to go down there and get the rest of it. Bring it all up at once. Put it in a safe or a vault or something. I don't know. Just until we can find someone who won't rip us off. I can go figure it out tonight, I can get it done, and we can be out there as early as tomorrow morning," the Heyward boy told them, changing the subject back to the task at hand.

"All right, let's do it," John B said, "Let's go."

Sarah turned to him with raised eyebrows, and she reminded him of something, a reason that he couldn't go tomorrow morning. "What about that thing with my dad?"

"Shit," the brunette boy muttered.

The other three furrowed their eyebrows, and Bree asked, "What thing?"

"I have to go fishing with Ward," he explained, and all of their jaws dropped in disbelief. He made it seem like it was something really important, but it was four-hundred million freaking dollars in gold for fuck's sake.

Pope leaned on the table and rolled his eyes while Kie quizzed, "You can't get 400 mil because you're gonna go kill fish?"

"Look, I have to go, okay? He saved me, all right? If it weren't for Ward, I'd be in foster care," the Routledge boy sighed despite their protests against it. "So...I have to go. Plus, it'll be better to do it at night. Right?"

"Fine. Fine, go fishing," Pope relented after they realized that he had a point.

Kie added, "And at least JJ will probably have washed up by then."

After they were done at the restaurant, Bree decided that it was time to head home and face her mother. Ever since Midsummer's, she had just been sneaking through the window the get clothes or only coming when she knew that Allison wasn't going to be there.

"Where have you been?" The Callaway girl winced when she heard that voice as soon as she opened the door and stepped inside the house. She looked up to see her mother sitting at the kitchen counter, facing her.

The younger girl ran a hand through her hair and sighed, "Mom, let me explain."

"Explain what?" the woman exclaimed, standing up so that her heels clicked on the ground when she took a couple of steps forward. "Why you completely abandoned and humiliated me at Midsummers? Why you haven't been home in days?"

"I'm so sorry," Bree apologized, and she was, honestly. She was a coward for not doing this sooner.

Allison took another step toward her daughter. "You could've been dead for all I knew. No one had heard from you, and you've been hanging out with those filthy Pogues. So, you could've been buried in Mexico."

"Mom!" the girl scolded, her jaw dropping at how rude her mother was being. "I get that you were worried, but those are my friends. You can't talk about them like that."

"Well, your 'friends' are criminals. One of them held Topper at gunpoint," the older female stated as if the younger didn't know about it.

Bree scoffed in disbelief before rolling her eyes at the woman's dramatics. "He was protecting his friend. Topper was going to drown John B. He wasn't actually going to shoot him."

"How do you know that?" Allison questioned.

"Because I know him," the brunette girl answered, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration. "They're good people, Mom. They would never hurt me or anyone I care about. I swear."

The woman was still not convinced. She reached over and put a gentle hand on her daughter's cheek in comfort. "Sweetie, did they threaten you? You can tell me, you know."

"Oh, my God," Bree groaned, pulling away from her mother and pushing past her so that she could walk up the stairs. She really couldn't deal with this right now. She thought she could, but she couldn't.

Allison called after her as she ascended the stairs angrily, "Gabby! Gabrielle Callaway, we are not done talking about this!"

"I am," the girl yelled back before slamming her bedroom door closed behind her, shutting out all of the yelling along with all of her Kook problems. She just needed some time to herself, time to relax because she hadn't had that in what felt like forever.

《✵》

BREE WAS SITTING ON HER BED WITH A BOOK. Music was flowing through her earbuds and into her ears, and she got distracted from her book for a moments when she zoned out and began thinking about the gold. What was she gonna do with 80 million dollars? That was a lot of money. A lot. Like, she wouldn't have to work for a very very long time, maybe even the rest of her life.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a tapping at her window. She paused for a moment but passed it off as something in the song she was listening to. When she heard it again, she finally took her earbuds out and got up, making her way to the glass with furrowed eyebrows and thinking, Why are people always tapping at my window? She figured it was Sarah again or Kie coming to update her about the gold or something.

She opened the curtains, and her eyes widened when she saw JJ Maybank crouching on her roof and staring out at the road.

"Oh, my God," she exclaimed before pushing the window open quickly. She stared up at him in shock and confusion, and he whipped his head around when he heard it. "JJ?"

He gave her a little wave. "Hey."

"What are you doing here?" she asked, a little worried. No one had heard from him all day, ever since he left them at Barry's trailer, and he just appeared out of nowhere. 

"I—I don't know," he replied, shaking his head like he had just done something stupid as he began to turn around again on his toes. "Sorry for bothering you. I'm gonna go."

As he began to leave, she reached out and grabbed his wrist, pulling him back so fast that he almost fell off of the roof. "Would you, um...Would you like to come in?"

"Sure," he responded after he recovered from the initial shock he got from the question.

She stepped back a bit to give him some space to climb down and get to the ground and gesturing toward her open bedroom with a welcoming expression. "Come on in, then."

"Wow," he muttered after he got down with the help of the windowsill. He scanned the room in wonder as she followed right behind him. "I've never seen the inside of your house before."

"Well, then, welcome to my humble abode," she smiled. 

He spotted a soccer ball sitting in one of the corners of the room, and Bree swore she could see a layer of dust coating it since it had been there for a very long time, untouched. "I didn't know you played soccer."

"Well, if you count the soccer phase I went through for, like, a week when I was seven, then yeah," she told him, walking over to it and picking up the ball, dusting it off. 

"Well, I played for about a year," he informed her, approaching her and wrapping his hands around the ball to take it from her. "Think you can get it from me."

He dropped onto the ground and stopped it from rolling around with his foot. He looked up at her with a smirk, which she gladly returned. "Oh, definitely."

She lunged for the ball with her foot, but he quickly snapped it back. His reflexes were a lot quicker than hers, but she was still determined to win. They went on like this for about 30 seconds, laughing as they went about and she continued to fail. 

Finally, she stepped on the ball the wrong way and slipped on it. She yelped as she began to tumble to the ground until hands wrapped around her waist, catching her before she could hit the ground. The angle they were out made him lose balance as well, though, but luckily, they came crashing down onto the bed.

Bree landed on her back with JJ above her, propped up on his elbows, air the only thing separating the two. She peered up at him through her eyelashes, and he gazed back down at her with an unreadable expression. Their faces were inches apart.

The Maybank boy breathed out, and she felt his warm breath fan across her lips. She could barely breathe, and she felt his hand brush her hair off her neck. She glanced down at his lips, but when she looked up, her eyebrows furrowed when she noticed something.

A fresher black eye.

"Oh, my God," she muttered, reaching up and grabbing his face. His eyes widened, thinking she was doing something else. She ran her fingers along the bruise, and he realized what she was talking about. "What the hell happened?"

He reached up and grabbed her hand, wrapping his fingers around it to gently pull it away as he began to get up, and she suddenly began to regret ruining the moment. She frowned at the loss of his warmth. "Oh, uh, you know me, always getting into fights."

"Who'd you fight?" she quizzed as he helped her stand up with him. They were further apart now that he wasn't on top of her, but it still wasn't as close as she would like. She now had a weird and confusing ache for the boy in front of her.

He shrugged. "No one important."

"You sure?" she asked, a little worried. Of course, he was always getting into fights with almost everyone — there was rarely a time that he did not have a black eye — but something was a bit off about this particular one.

"Yeah, don't worry," he assured her, waving her off and taking another step back from her. "Um, I'm gonna go."

She fought the urge to groan because she didn't mean to upset him, and she really did not want him to go for a reason that she couldn't put her finger on. "Hey, I'm sorry. You don't have to leave."

"No, it's fine. I wanted to get some surfing in anyway before the sun goes down," he informed her, and he approached the already open window, refusing to meet her eye.

"Oh, okay," she mumbled, and it was obvious that she was a little let down. She was still frozen in place, upset that she brought it up because it clearly made him uncomfortable, even if she wasn't sure what was going to happen if she hadn't. "I'll see you later, then."

He nodded as he hopped back up on the roof and waved at her again. "See ya."

And then he was gone.