𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐅𝐓𝐎𝐏
[JJ Maybank x fem!oc]
"how badly is this gonna hurt?"
he looked up at her, his hair blowing in
the breeze, hesitating for only a second.
"how badly do you care?"
- or in which jj always won...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The past twenty-two days flew by faster than anyone had the chance to realize. But that's just the way summer usually went. Things felt better between the group since they began feeling comfortable enough to talk things out. Previously, each of them was bottling up their true emotions. Now, they could confide in each other if need be. And, okay, maybe there was sort of a strange dynamic shared every once and a while since there were now a friend group devised of two couples, but it was alright. They were dealing with it in their own special ways.
August had started and Athena genuinely thought it was still July. She had stopped counting down the days until her returning flight and now everything felt more than jumbled. The fear of leaving JJ was too overwhelming though, so she forced herself to turn away from calendars and to stop checking the date on her phone.
The fourth of July genuinely felt like yesterday, but here they were now in the dead of August; the 'Sunday' of months.
"Toss me that?" JJ asked, pulling Athena from her thoughts. His right arm was extended and his fingers pointed toward a rope laying next to Athena's feet. She leaned over and obliged without hesitation or ceasing her conversation with Kiara- even though she wasn't giving it her full attention anyway.
"No, I stopped playing the spring season of freshman year. Right in the middle."
"Oh shit. Why in the middle?" Kiara asked, kicking the soccer ball back to Athena.
They had been like this for about fifteen minutes now. They stood barefoot on the damp grass, gently passing an old and withered ball back and forth. Athena never missed a beat. She chased after every one of Kiara's messy passes and sent it directly back in front of her every time, while JJ stood on the dock below them doing whatever it was he was doing as they all waited for Pope to arrive in his father's boat.
JJ and Athena had arrived to Kiara's separately. Athena showed up on a blue beach bike that her grandmother had purchased her a few weeks ago. (Without any request from Athena). And She got there much earlier than JJ, who walked to Kiara's house after his shift ended at a store a few blocks away. He already knew the way to her house like the back of his hand, but the kids had been spending much more time there recently so now it felt like a second home- second to the Routledge shack.
"I had this really big competition coming up and needed extra time to practice. I don't know, my coach got, like, super pissed that I was skipping practices so much. I couldn't take him anymore, so I just quit."
