Letters She Wrote | Outer Banks

𝐱𝐢𝐱. 𝐜𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐬

[ xix. coffeehouse conflicts ]

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DESPITE THE FACT THAT Willa was brutally exhausted and her frazzled, hazy mind pleaded to be turned off for just a few short and measly hours, the tired teenage girl did not manage to get any sleep upon returning back home to the Deveraux household in the early hours of the summer morning.

Once more Willa opted to take another shower in an attempt to rid the new dirt and blood that clung to her body, but while the fresh heat managed to relax her tensed muscles and cleanse her knotted brunette locks, the warm shower did little to otherwise soothe the raw cracks in her broken skin, her bloody scrapes throbbing incessantly with the rushing hotness of scalding water.

By six-thirty that morning, Willa found herself back downstairs in her dark and empty kitchen, sitting alone on one of the plush high-rise seats that lined the island table. Beside her was the idle and empty seat that her mother had been sitting at only hours prior as she nursed one too many wine glasses, and in front of her now was a ripe banana that had yet to be peeled and a bowl of sugary, flaky cereal that had long since grown soggy and unappetizing in her hesitation to eat.

It was not that Willa did not want to eat breakfast—because believe her, she truly did. She was hungry and spending the past two days living on nothing more than salty pretzels and warm beer was doing little to aid her weakened and battered system. But, nonetheless, despite the strong lull she felt weighing heavy in her tired heart and the dangerous pull that dragged at her paling eyelids, her wary system was still alert to the idea of danger around her, and Willa Deveraux now found it impossible to look away from the backdoor on the opposite end of the kitchen. From where Willa currently sat at the table, she found that she could see the back exit to her beachfront mansion better than anywhere else in the entire home. And she had no intentions of moving anytime soon. Willa was not quite ready to brace the reality that two violent strangers had all the power in the world to burst through that pristine door if they pleased and take all that they wanted, whether it be something as little as a minuscule object or something as grand as a human life.

While Willa craved the sanctuary that was her room, the fear of the lethal unknown that rested beyond her own backdoor was what kept her from her bed, but she accepted that harsh and exhausting punishment. No one had put her in this position of fear but herself. If she only had held onto those damn keys.

As she pondered the whereabouts of her house key, in the back of Willa's mind she could not help but also wonder where the two gunmen were currently at. They had fled the scene of the downtown area at the arrival of Peterkin, but Willa knew that those two men were entirely unafraid of the local sheriff. They would strike her down with a bullet as quickly as they would have struck down John B. and herself.

John B. Dammit.

At the invading thought of the boy with the warm hickory stare and the contrasting cold and bruised expression, Willa could not help but shiver in her seat and clench her sage green eyes shut, stilling her quivering jaw. With the world now black against her closed eyelids, all that Willa could see in her mind's eye were the past three chaotic days unfolding haphazardly before her, the images of beaten faces and sun-kissed moments blurring together in a horrific fashion. Willa struggled to silently work through all the whirlwind events that she had had been through with John B. Routledge in such a short time—so short that she still found it hard to believe that she had even lived through any of it at all. How was it that she had gone weeks and weeks during the school year without ever doing nothing more than merely looking in his direction, and now—now!—out of the blue Willa had stared down the barrel of a loaded gun with him and had walked away bloodied and alive, hand-in-hand with him?