The J.A.C.I.E. Project (All Time Low Fanfiction | Jack Barakat)

Chapter 10

My friends and I liked to go out and do things together. I had my close group of girls including Sara and Hazel, then the slightly larger group that all joined me on my twenty-first birthday, but the friend group was even larger than that. It was a weird mix of people I knew from high school, people I knew from college, and other people these people knew from somewhere else. People would leave for various reasons (including moving to a different state for college), and new people would join whenever we organised another outing.

They all fully accepted Jack. Surprisingly. Or not. He was quite likeable afterall. And he did respect the boundaries quite well. He didn't just barge into the friend group and act like he was better than everybody, which wasn't uncommon to run into here in LA. These friends were mine and he would occasionally be invited as well. No need to merge friend groups just yet.

Everybody in my friend group knew we were a thing, though. His? Not so much. I was just an intern there. Or well, we were starting to break past that a little...

Not in the romantic way. No, in the friendship way. I had a big laser tag game coming up with my big friend group to catch up again. The big group always required a bit of planning since we all had different schedules afterall. This time, I had invited Jack as well, who was more than excited to come. And, then, later when Jack and I were talking about it in the studio, I invited Alex as well. It would have been weird not to, and this was an opportunity to really solidify the better relationship we had going on now.

"Hey, you guys made it!" I beamed as I stood up from leaning against the table the group had claimed to put all our stuff at.

"Of course we did," Jack smiled right back at me. He had been planning on coming for a week now, but ever since I invited Alex as well, it felt a little more like a come-along-if-you-wanna-no commitment-to-come-though invitation.

"Thanks again for inviting us," Alex added as he stopped at the table as well. "I hope we're not intruding."

"Never," Nash, a guy I knew back from high school said as he walked around the table and held his hand out for them, "any friend of ours is allowed to join."

I rolled my eyes at the way Nash put emphasis on 'friend.' While everybody here knew Jack and I were dating, I had told them to treat us as just friends today since Alex didn't know. It was a bit disappointing that we'd have to keep things more than PG, but then again it was also great that I could really spend just as much time with my other friends without leaving Jack behind.

"Okay!" Nash raised his voice so everybody around the table could hear. "Now that we're all here, it's time to make teams. I'm obviously captain of team Nash, and Jacie's going to be the other team captain because I'm going to fucking destroy her this time."

He pointed at me with a semi-serious look in his eyes. We tried to play laser tag twice a year, and last time we were on the same team. Together, we sped-ran the game together, getting anybody who crossed our path out in no time. But then I shot him in the back at some point just before the other team had been completely wiped out. Even though we played in teams, we also played until the last man standing. That meant you could also hit people on your team. It kept it more interesting.

Alex ended up being on my team, while Jack was on Nash's. We couldn't have those two together, they'd team up and since they didn't really know anybody well enough, they wouldn't just randomly betray each other. That was the whole fun of the game. There was nothing better than trying to get somebody to trust you and not trusting anybody else, trying to be one step ahead of each other. Even if that meant banding together with somebody from the other team.

Which is exactly where I ended up at some point.

The game felt like it had been going on for ages, but in reality it must have just been 10 minutes in. So far, I obviously had managed to evade being shot and even managed to win a few showdowns. I just happened to always have the advantage, whether that be the element of surprise or my position. Well, that was until I came head to head with Jack.