ONLY ANGEL | JJ MAYBANK

FIVE... the frog walks the plank

CHAPTER FIVE

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Collins had left the Château in a bit of a haste after the whole strange men breaking and entering and making them fear for their lives fiasco happened.

At first, she'd just been too shaken by the whole thing to gather a coherent thought and ask the Pogues why she had almost just risked her life with them. Her mind was a jumbled mess and all that she could think of doing was just getting the heck out of there. She wanted to go home where she felt safest between its thin walls and frail roof.

She'd gone back into the house and walked into the mess the two men had made shuffling through John B's property, and felt an uneasy churn in her stomach. When she went into the office room, she searched for her bag in the mess and spotted her canvas tote with her books spilled out onto the floor and knelt down on the floor as she tried to gather them and her notes that had been torn in the raid.

Her breathing felt erratic, like she was going through the motions of inhaling and exhaling but couldn't take in any air. And she could see her hands shake each time she reached out to grab a book and stuff it back into her bag. It was uncontrollable and even when she tried to hold them in each other, they still continued to tremble. She was in the midst of reaching for the last one when another hand suddenly picked it up before her, and Collins quickly looked up to see JJ holding it out for her to take.

"Thanks." She murmured and stood up abruptly, pulling her bag closer to her chest with a tight grip. She averted his gaze and looked down at the ground, anywhere but his eyes.

"Are you okay?" He asked her as he studied her face carefully while she nodded stiffly.

Visibly, she was fine; she wasn't physically hurt or anything so that was something to be happy about. She just appeared tense and it wasn't without reason. It had been twice now that Collins and JJ had been caught in the same two traumatic encounters. One could only wonder if that was somehow a sign that that was how their relationship would be destined to be; full of chaos.

Collins didn't automatically see a correlation between JJ and the stressful situations, even though the first one on the beach was pretty much all of his fault and the men that had showed up with menacing intentions were after him and his friends. She didn't link the two because first of all, her mind was in disarray and for some reason the only thing she could seem to think about was how she was going to get the shoe print off her library book. And second, Collins was too busy trying to steady her balance because the look in JJ's eyes when he was looking at her the way he was made her feel dizzy. It was like a spotlight shining in her eyes and she was seeing spots without any grasp of her orientation.

He looked at her like he actually cared, and the attention was overwhelming enough to make Collins woozy, which was truth be told, pretty pathetic if you asked her. She was so used to going unnoticed that when she actually was acknowledged, it was an unfamiliar experience. Collins wished she wasn't as melodramatic as she unassumingly appeared to be.

Her eyelashes fluttered as she blinked the blurriness away, and she slowly turned on her heel before making a beeline out of the house. "I'm fine." She managed to utter, and swallowed back the lump in her throat as she did so.

She had her head down and her gaze focused in front of her as she bounded down the porch steps and began making her way back to her house, but footsteps following behind her indicated that she wasn't walking alone.

"I know what happened back there was crazy, so the least I can do is make sure you get home okay. Does that sound fair to you?" Collins glanced over at JJ in confusion, but didn't protest to his offer. She figured that there was no point in her objecting to it anyways, and once she was safe and sound, he'd just leave.