Letters She Wrote | Outer Banks

𝐱𝐯𝐢𝐢𝐢. 𝐛𝐲𝐞, 𝐛𝐲𝐞, 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐞

[ xviii. bye, bye, birdie ]

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WILLA DEVERAUX HAD LOST all sense of the specific hours and minutes by the time John B. Routledge finally pulled the Twinkie back onto the familiar lawn of the darkened Chateau. Stepping out of the warm Volkswagen van and onto the cold, dried grass, it was pitch black outside and the faraway night sky twinkled with distant and dying stars, but aside from the quiet nature of the lulled marshland around her, Willa had no true way of knowing if it was only barely scraping past midnight or if the new dawn was steadily approaching on the nearby horizon.

Now that the thrill of the spooky cemetery chase had faded from Willa's heightened system, and the calming marijuana that had once cooled her boiling blood had now gradually dissipated back into the wind like the hazy smoke from JJ Maybank's previously rolled joint, Willa's thoughts were brought back to the heaviness of the long afternoon. Once more, she was reminded of another drastically different chase, one of violence and rage that had ended in blood and bruises amongst scorching asphalt on the familiar streets of her hostile hometown. Once more, she was reminded that her home key was gone. Whether her key had vanished in her panic to escape or was stolen by the cruelty of savaged souls, Willa could not truthfully be certain—but the weight of her massively guilty heart, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into her own aching chest like a large boulder dropping into the deepest of oceans, pulled dangerously at her rattled nerves, as if the only logical option for her key's disappearance was the latter. Because Willa could never be that lucky as to have simply dropped the key.

"You okay?" John B.'s voice rippled through the stillness of Willa's outer demeanor. Still standing in the center of the yard, a frozen silhouette in the dark marshy shadows, Willa slowly looked up to see John B. lingering on the porch steps for her, waiting patiently even after all of the other pogues had disappeared into the wooden shack.

And once more, staring into those warm hickory eyes, glowing even in the blackness of the night, Willa Deveraux was reminded of that goddamn kiss in the very place that John B. Routledge now stood.

But that kiss—that disastrous, haunting, and heated kiss—was an issue for another day. An issue that Willa wanted to put so far on the back burner of her chaotic mind that it was cold, unwanted, and rightfully forgotten by the time she ever returned to it. "Yeah," Willa confirmed to John B., nodding her head gently in his direction. "Right behind you."

Willa was silent as she followed John B. into the dimly lit Routledge household. Because of the island-wide power outage, the only lights that the five teenagers could provide were those of their lanterns and flashlights from their little adventure through the pogue cemetery. Most of the small lights were now set up in the kitchen where the food and booze were, of course. Soft hues of yellow were scattered to all edges of the messy room, displaying numerously different shapes in the shadows of the spastic movements from the wandering teenagers, but the dying light was enough to hold back the relentless dark that threatened to swallow them all whole.