ONLY ANGEL | JJ MAYBANK

NINETEEN... in my time of need

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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Collins approached the Château confused by all of the brightly colored string lights draped across the yard. She should've questioned it when Charlie mentioned them to her earlier, but seeing it now was still just as peculiar. Just a few minutes prior, she'd been wracked with nerves thinking about what she might be walking into and what she was going to say when she saw JJ—if this was even where he was. A part of her was sure that if she laid eyes on any fresh wounds at the hands of his father, she would burst into tears. And those tears would be the sticky, blubbery, and snotty kind of crying that didn't flatter anyone, which neither of them needed to experience.

But when Collins had laid eyes on all the luau mixed with disco themed decorations strewn all over the place, every single ounce of worry was replaced with bewilderment at where the source of all this stuff came from. She had a sinking feeling that she wasn't going to like the answer, either, but she pretty much already knew it anyways.

The shock was only further amplified at the sight of a giant hot tub sitting in the middle of John B's front yard with the top half of JJ's body draped across the side, basking in relaxation. It was a sight worth dropping a jaw over.

"JJ?" Collins slowly approached from behind him and came around to stand at the edge of the hot tub where he could see her. Sure enough, it was him in the water with a pair of sunglasses over his eyes and a large bottle of champagne in his hand. He pushed them down to the bridge of his nose and raised his brows to look at her with a smirk on his face. "Where did all of this stuff come from?"

"I bought it." He replied, his voice less tense than it was the last time they'd spoken. There was a slur in his words indicating that his upbeat mood was probably a result of the alcohol he was consuming. The glass of the bottle was too dark to tell how much he'd drunken, but already Collins could tell that it was enough. "What do you think?"

At a loss for words, Collins hesitated before she spoke again, looking around at all the new stuff around them. There was a generator whirring next to the house not far from them, and it was clearly working overtime with all the lights and the hot tub that it was powering along with the house itself. All of this had to be crazy expensive, and Collins didn't even have to guess where the money had come from. Now, her sole focus was on why JJ hadn't used the money to pay his restitution like she'd thought he was.

"Come on, have a drink with me, Colls. I got the good stuff, stuff you can't pass up because it's so good." He started messily pouring her a helping of the bubbly into a stemmed glass that sat in a floating cup holder the shape of a flamingo, splashing liquid out of the bottle and into the water of his hot tub. "And put on a swimsuit and get in, what are you waiting for? This thing's hot but like, in a good way, you just gotta try it."

Collins remained standing where she was outside of the hot tub, looking at JJ uneasily. "JJ, what happened?" She asked him, needing answers to explain this behavior that he was displaying. In all seriousness, it scared her to see him this way; maybe even more than when he'd been robbing a drug dealer. This JJ was coming down from a volatile high, except it didn't seem to be a gradual fall, it was a plummet. There was no net to catch him, all Collins could do was hold her arms out and hope for the best.

"What do you mean?" JJ chuckled drunkenly. "I got us a fuckin' jacuzzi, Collins. Can't you see it? The jet's on this thing are insane."

"But why did you get it?" Collins questioned. "The last I heard from you, you were taking that money home. I thought- I thought you were giving it to your dad to pay for restitution."