Chapter Text
The check-out day from their Seattle hotel crept up on them unexpectedly.
They'd spent as much time as they could out exploring the city, wandering hand in hand through art galleries and museums, parks and shopping districts.
They'd spent a few afternoons high as fucking kites (on legal edibles), laying in the grass in one of the local parks, staring up at the cloud.
They'd listened to Soundgarden and Nirvana through JJ's old school earbuds that still had the string attached, hands interwoven together, Kiara resting her head on JJ's shoulder.
They'd also eaten a lot of insanely good food, it was surprisingly easy to get top-chef quality food for reasonable prices in the city if you knew where to look.
He'd had to stop Kiara from very nearly bartering her fictitious first-born child to a Pike Place market vendor in exchange for the recipe of a lobster bisque.
JJ was but her diligent uber driver, squinting over his sunglasses to read the directions off her phone every time, because she couldn’t be bothered to tell him where the turning lane was, causing JJ to have to make some very illegal lane changes in the middle of the street.
There was also in JJ's phone, a growing collection of pictures he'd taken over the last few days.
It was a toss-up of vague candids of Kiara, focused on reading the description of one of the musuem exhbits, face turned towards the sun on a park bench, curls blowing over her eyes.
There were also some goofily posed selfies in front of major landmarks like the Space Needle and the gum wall (with their tongues trying to touch their noses and the whole nine yards).
And because Kiara was the person that she was, she always offered to take pictures of other couples and pairings in their vicinity, encouraging them to pose in different ways for her to get the perfect shot for them.
This in turn without fail, always led to said couple offering to take Kie and JJ's picture together, causing them to scramble together awkwardly.
JJ never knew where the cross-section between the right and respectful place to put his hands was, so they always ended up looking more like a couple on their first date stuck in a middle school prom pose, both turned in the same direction with plastered-on smiles.
"You wanna just go to Canada instead for a few days?" JJ asked her, yelling through the hallway that connected their rooms, toothbrush halfway hanging out of his mouth, shirtless, save for a pair of jeans. The doors to their rooms propped were open with their carry-ons, one of JJ's playlists crooning through the space.
They'd slept past the alarm Kie had set on her phone for what had felt like only a few minutes, tucked under the heavy down comforter of JJ's bed, his head curled into the side of her neck.
When Kiara finally did wake up, the realization hit that it was nine in the morning, not six and they needed to scramble to make it to the elevators to achieve the 11 am check out.
"What?" She'd asked, an incredulous scrunch between her brows as she managed to rearrange her suitcase yet again for the 12th time that day to fit everything she'd bought during the trip, somewhere between halfway dressed in Levi's cutoffs and a floral lace bralette.
"Canada, you 'n me, after we leave here, I'm pretty sure there's a ferry we could take, I read about it on the way here, you can drive your car onto it and everything, I've never been, could be fun." He supplied, running his toothbrush under the sink's tap, rinsing and spitting.
"There's nothing that says we have to go home yet Kie". He reasoned, pulling a comb through the worst of his hair which always seemed to be in a state of having a permanent cowlick.
Maybe it was a shot in the dark, an extremely last-ditch effort to stay together only for a few more days, for JJ to be able to convince her to stay with him, for just a little longer, to change her mind.
"Nothing, right." She just about laughed out, "Other than our jobs, and your apartment, and my fiance who's calling everything off and my parents who are probably writing me out of my inheritance as we speak."
She shoved more things into the available pockets of her suitcase, more forcefully than before. "I finally called them back last night, by the way. My parents."
"You called them?" At that, JJ stomped out of his bathroom and down the hallway that joined their rooms, only to be met with Kie halfway pinning her hair up in her half-dressed state, bobby pins sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
"-Sorry! I'll just go and-" He immediately clapped a hand over his line of sight by instinct, turning to exit her room on a heel, until she walked over, knocking him upside the head with her open palm.
"Jayj - you idiot, it's not that big of a deal, you've seen me with far less clothes on than this before, really, stay here, let me just put my shirt on." She shrugged like it was a casual thing for them.
And yes, JJ had seen her like that, back when they were drunk on cheap mixed drinks and clueless about what life after college would be like, stripped down and soft-spoken under him, hands fisted in his hair, tugging, begging him, please.
but he wasn’t thinking about that.
Because he didn’t want to think about that.
She didn’t come on the trip to be ogled and pined after by him, day after day, night after night. JJ realized he had to get his fucking ego in check before he damn near embarrassed himself any worse than he already had.
"You called them." He repeated, it sounding more like a statement now than a question, eyes still fixed on a random spot on the hotel room carpet until she gave a wordless sound in response, now fully clothed.
"I called them." She confirmed, pacing back to the bathroom and shoving another pin through one-half of her space buns for good measure, spraying it in place with hairspray.
"And-?" JJ prompted, feeling like it'd be much easier to play a game of Mad Libs with Kiara than anything he could remotely attempt to guess what the phone call entailed.
"Told them I wasn’t kidnapped and they asked if I was safe - I said that I was with someone that I trusted, and for them not to worry."
JJ blinked, a hand carding through his hair, "And they were okay with that?"
"Oh hell no," Kiara snorted, "I'm for sure out of the will by now, Mom's sisters are probably well on their way to inheriting the Carrera fortune by now."
"Did you happen to tell them when you're coming back?"
"Uh, didn’t think to mention it."
"Kier-"
"Don’t, don't you do that to me JJ - it's fine, everything is fine, I'm fine." Her tone was brusque and clipped and JJ flinched back like he'd burnt himself, blinking very suddenly.
"God, JJ I didn’t mean it like that, I'm sorry, I'm just stressed, I still haven't finished my packing and we're going to miss this flight if we don’t-" She chewed at her lower lip, anxious dissolving into a state of rambling, glancing over the mess that was her still unpacked bags.
"Fuck it then,"
'What are you-"
"Fuck it all - we don’t make the flight, we go buy a ferry ticket to Canada, find a place and a car when we get there, and go from there." JJ supplied, shrugging as he went to sit on the edge of the bed.
"First of all, I doubt they'll be very happy if you call their entire province Canada," Kiara deadpanned while placing her things inside smaller zippered pouches.
"Kie, I literally failed ninth-grade geography - you were there."
She rolled her eyes at him, moving to sit on the edge of the bedside table, playfully kicking at his ankles.
And in Pogue fashion, they truly said fuck it.
They both rolled their eyes at the amateurs who stayed inside the ferry to keep from getting seasick while they both chose the top open deck, Kiara sprawling out on a bench, her legs stretched out over JJ's lap.
"Sure beats the HMS Pogue, god rest her soul," JJ said, miming the action of taking his hat off to hold over his chest, paying tribute to the shitty little fishing boat that saw them through most drunken nights of their teen years.
"To saying fuck it," Kiara toasted, reaching her pinky finger to link in his, crossing hands exactly like they did a few short years earlier.
"You know, we should get tattoos," JJ theorized through a mouthful of pizza crust as he lay in their Airbnb's empty bathtub, pulling tight the laces of the one pair of shoes he brought with him.
The on-their-last-legs converse were just about pulling off from the soles but JJ couldn’t bring himself to throw them away.
Call him sappy or sentimental, but they held too many memories to just be sentenced to the dump for the foreseeable future.
They were his lucky shoes. The ones he'd spent one too many times running from the OBX deputies in, and the ones he always wore to Boneyard bonfires no matter how many times John B offered to loan him another pair.
"I'm not getting another tattoo, 'specially with you JJ." She said with a pointed glare. She was sitting cross-legged on the bathroom counter, defending the position to him earlier that it was the best way to do her eyeliner.
He simply watched with quiet fascination as she ran the pencil under her eyes, shoving it behind her ear as she grabbed for yet another makeup brush, this time to dust something glittery along her cheekbones.
"Another?" His interest was sparked instantly, eyebrows raised.
"Oh right, yeah, guess I never told you about the one I got back in Peru, it's actually just right above my ass chee-"
JJ promptly choked on his saliva, sitting violently upright with a cough as he attempted to stop the noise.
"Dear God, you're gullible," Kiara crowed, stifling a giggle behind her hand, nearly falling off the edge of the countertop from laughing so hard.
"Yeah yeah, you're real funny, laugh it up Carrera," JJ rolled his eyes, pitching his balled-up napkin in her general direction.
It'd been a bit of a sprint to this club before they stopped letting people in, Kiara had seen it scrolling through Instagram in the parking lot of their Airbnb, and was pretty insistent they had to go.
Parking their rental car somewhere they wouldn't get ticketed and trying to read the signs was a task in itself. Each time JJ would swear that it was a legitimate parking spot, Kiara would read the fine print that it wasn’t.
She'd grumbled and nearly turned them around on the road back to their temporary place, issuing thinly veiled threats that 'if it's so easy, why don’t you just get out and try to park the boat',
So they'd waited in line, behind people similar ages as them, in tight-fitting clothes, the EDM bass obvious when they were about four heads behind the bouncer, JJ keeping a strong arm curled around the top of her shoulders, absent-mindedly running his hand over the charms of her gold necklaces.
"If the drinks are shitty we can just bounce in an hour-" Kiara just about screamed over the music, which JJ responded to with a very enthusiastic thumbs up, because this was most definitely not his scene, but he'd stick it through, for her.
He set a few crumpled bills onto the bar rail and collected their shot glasses from the bartender. He handed one to Kiara, once he found her just short of the club's main dancefloor. He held hers just the slightest bit out of her reach at first, taking full advantage of his height over her until she was nearly kicking at his shins to get to her drink.
"Okay, shit - ouch - okay, here-"
"What is it?" She narrowed her eyes, sniffing at the rim of the shot as if it would somehow aid her in identifying the alcohol used, "And JJ, I don't do tequila-"
"Relax, really, I know that,- cheers." He clacked the edge of his shot glass against hers, throwing it back, the warmth of the liquor easing its way down his throat, the comfortable and familiar burn settling in right under his ribcage.
Kiara cursed, her face scrunching as she handed him back the empty shot glass.
Call it muscle memory, but his hand curled around her hip easily, fingers hooking into the belt loops of her jeans to pull her closer to him, breath warm against her ear. "Y'know, I know more about you than you think Kiara. You might've forgotten about everything that happened that summer but I didn’t."
"JJ," Her tone wavered with a warning like he was choosing to still swim out to the deep end of the ocean when the lifeguards had put up the red flags, meaning danger, go back.
"What? I'm not saying anything that bad-" He drawled, his Carolinian vowels always coming out a bit more strong when he drank, taking her hand in his to spin her under it.
She looked up at him through heavy lashes as he draped his arm around her shoulders, swaying her hips to the beat of the music, his mouth still warm against the underside of her neck, singing along through raspy vocals to some 90s cult classic the DJ was remixing.
Kiara's accent had slipped through the cracks of being in LA for so long, adapting to the high-pitched tone, but JJ's voice always felt like home to her.
Not that she'd ever tell him, but some nights back at her apartment, she'd call JJ — praying to everything he wouldn’t answer as she knew he never picked up his phone unless it was a life or death situation — just to hear his voicemail message. She'd listened for just long enough that she knew exactly the point to hang up before the beep sounded.
"You wanna go dance?" His hand was around the side of her neck as he asked, his voice just above a shout.
"What?"
"I said -" JJ paused to give a dirty look to some dark-haired man in a white button-up long-sleeve shirt who had placed his hands over Kiara's hips to get past. "Who the fuck does that guy think -"
Her hand laid softly over the side of his jaw, thumb stroking over his cheek, anchoring him back to her, "JJ, hey, it's fine, really, let it go, come dance with me, yeah?"
JJ let her lead him hand over hand to a slightly empty spot near the DJ's booth, the music pounding into his chest, feeling more like himself than he had in years, warm and just over slightly buzzed.
He wasn’t exactly sure how he found himself toe to toe with the guy from earlier.
Scratch that, he definitely knew.
He was getting Kiara another drink before last call when he saw her boxed in by him, her eyes instantly finding his and saying 'help' with her look alone.
He didn’t need the time or effort to think it through, he was in front of the guy in an instant, yelling over the backing track of some bubblegum pop remix so loudly, a crowd started to form.
"Leave her the fuck alone-" JJ barked, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he watched the hint of something territorial flash across the other man's face.
"And who are you? Her little boyfriend? Well, I don’t see any ring on her finger, so I guess she's fair game for me to take her home."
"You wanna say that again?"
The guy was a bit taller than JJ, but not by much. He gave him a look of bewilderment as if he didn’t truly believe it, he opened his mouth to say something else damn near derogatory and JJ drove his elbow back, fist instantly connecting with the guy's nose.
"Motherfucker! -"
The burly man proceeded to throw the rest of his beer, mug and all, in JJ's direction, the glass crunching under the soles of his Converse as he stumbled back, nearly stepping over another patron to distance himself further from the chaos.
There’s a heavy level of commotion on the dancefloor that has the club's bouncers coming out from what felt like the fucking woodwork, instantly wrapping their arms around JJ and the other man's neck, pulling them over to separate exit corners.
JJ strew together a string of curse words that even his deadbeat father wouldn’t be able to come up with, breathing through his teeth while trying, desperately, to shake out the sting that was spreading through his knuckles and up his fingers.
"JJ!" Kiara's voice was climbing in octave, her eyebrows as furrowed as he'd ever seen them, pushing past sweaty glittering bodies to reach him.
"Let me through! Please!"
It's desperate, and it guts JJ from the inside out the moment he gets a glimpse of her. "JJ, look at me -"
"What-JJ, what the hell? JJ!" She didn’t have time to finish her prospective questions into how the hell it all happened before they were both forcibly shoved out of the bar by some security guards that could've easily been retired WWE wrestlers from the 90s.
"It wasn’t his fault- assholes!" Kiara's attempts were in vain as the back door to the bar was slammed shut.
"Oh god, Jay, are you okay?" He cradled his less-than-good hand against his chest, nodding through scrunched eyes.
"Never better, peachy fuckin' keen," He sucked in a breath through his nose, willing his legs to move towards where their car was parked. He pulled open the passenger-side door, lifting himself into the seat, resting his head back with a groan.
"Oh for gods sake, here-" She fumbled through the backseat, tearing open her backpack for one of her extra tshirts, wrapping it around his hand and physically moving JJ's other hand to hold it in place.
"I knew we shouldn’t have gone out - do you think it's broken?" She frowned from the driver's seat, fumbling through her purse for the rental keys, the car humming to life once she turned the ignition.
"I, uh, don’t know, really hurts like a bitch though - you're sure you're okay to drive?" JJ asked, turning his body to look over at Kie.
"— God, yes I'm fine and — Jesus J, stop moving! You're gonna make it worse!" Kiara gritted out, her eyes wild and stormy with concern, as she looked between JJ in the passenger seat and the highway in front of them.
"You're overreacting, it's fine we don’t need to-"
"JJ, you're going to bleed all over this damn rental car if we don’t, and I really don't have the disposable cash right now to pay for it to be deep cleaned." The car swerved over to the left lane as she just narrowly missed their exit, and JJ gripped the roof's passenger side handle as fast as he could, while also pressing Kiara's shirt to his knuckles.
"Shit, I'm sorry, I don’t think the blood is gonna come out of this, fuck" He'd mumbled, staring at the red patch blooming its way through the material of Kiara's shirt, his words coming out unrestrained and unfiltered as ever.
She'd driven them to the first emergency room her phone could direct them to, nearly taking off the front end of the car in the process after JJ had helpfully pointed out that they were about to miss the turn into the hospital's parking lot.
"JJ, I don’t care about the shirt, honestly couldn't give two shits about it - I care about you." She sighed heavily.
"You're going in- I can do bloody noses and that one time you had strep throat when we were fifteen, but this is above my paygrade as your best friend." She threatened, throwing the car's emergency brake on so fast in the lot, JJ was afraid he'd develop whiplash on top of whatever was wrong with his hand.
He chose to purposely ignore the way the words of 'best friend' on her lips stung harder than any kind of fresh bruise, nearly making him want to wince even further.
"What was his name anyways?" JJ asked out of the blue, legs propped up on hospital pillows as he took full advantage of being able to stretch out on the gurney, waiting for the numbing agent to kick in enough for them to realign and splint his fingers, the vague haze of a medically induced high still in his forebrain.
A boxer's fracture, the resident doctor on call had told him. After a series of x-rays they determined he hadn’t tucked his thumb in tight enough when his knuckles connected with the asshole at the bar's face, so everything got misaligned horribly in the process, hence the searing pain, the blood and the damage.
"Who- what?" Kiara swore under her breath and she whipped her head up so fast from her phone JJ thought she was for sure going to hit her head clear off the back of the wall.
"Loverboy?" At Kiara's dumbstruck expression, he snorted a laugh, waggling his eyebrows at her "You know? Mr. Kiara Carrera? Your fiance? Dude you left at the altar?"
"Oh, him, right, of course." She sighed, a hand carding through her hair, "Mathias, but he hated his full name so he was always just Matt to me."
She laughed quietly under her breath, flushing with embarrassment, then she stopped, brows scrunched together at him in inquiry. "We sent you an invitation, didn't we?"
"Yeah, you did...You looked pretty," He mumbled affectionately, gazing up at the ceiling and its water-stained constellations. "But you always look pretty Kie-"
"You’re on like four different kinds of painkillers right now, you're not gonna remember any of what you said tomorrow, and it's going to be such a blast when I get to be the one to explain it all to you tomorrow Maybank." She dragged the pads of her fingers under her eyes, collecting stray streaks of runny mascara trails, before getting up and out of her chair.
"C'mon now Mike Tyson, scooch over before I change my mind." Her tone was under her breath joking as she stood by his bed and waited until he shifted over before climbing into the side of his hospital bed herself.
It wasn’t exactly the most ideal situation or positioning. He was paranoid she could hear how much his heartbeat was finding its way into his throat, as she brushed her soft fingertips over his face, along the bridge of his nose, over the light scruff of his jawline, over the damage done by Luke over the years.
His scars had faded through the years, still an unkind reminder of what he'd endured when he looked in the mirror, but when they were younger, Kie had always told him he was pretty, handsome, even on the days when he didn't feel like it was the truth.
He'd shown up at her house one night during their sophomore year of high school, after a particularly nasty row with his dad. He'd parked his bike right in the gravel of Kie's driveway, halfway to passing out right over the handlebars, spitting blood onto Mike and Anna's perfectly manicured lawn.
She'd looked like she was going to be sick as soon as she saw him, stricken with panic and fear, but had still taken him through the garage door, up to her bedroom, as stressed out as he'd ever seen her.
She cleaned him up as best she could with a wet washcloth, the worry ever evident in her gaze, as she wiped it over his split lip, then again over the open gash in his eyebrow, covering it with a girly pink patterned band-aid, kissing his forehead, and apologizing endlessly under her breath that it was the only kind she had.
It ended up becoming a twisted dark inside joke between them, JJ'd still shown up to school the next morning, to write one of their history finals to the surprise of their teacher, looking like he'd just been through the wringer.
He'd fallen asleep on Kiara's floor, sneaking out her window the next morning before her parents got up. With the band-aid still there, Topper and his country club attending crew teased him relentlessly in class for it, until Kiara threatened to tell their dads about the party they'd had that past weekend and anonymously report them to the sheriff for underage drinking.
As if on instinct alone, his head lulled heavy onto her shoulder. His eyelids closed over the feeling of her fingers raking through his salt blonde, still matted by a combination of sweat and beer from the club, her nails drifting over the shorter hairs at the back of his head.
"Lemme know if-"
"You can try and sleep a bit Jayj if you want, it's okay, you’re safe with me, I'll talk to whoever comes in okay?" She spoke softly. A comfortable silence settled in between them, the only true sound being the whir of the room's overhead fan and the faint sound of traffic.
"Kie?"
"Yeah, J?"
"Love you." It's half asleep mumbled, but it's still there, clear as day.
"Yeah, yeah, I love you too JJ, get some rest."