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Kiara had picked a pier that he knew for a fact was a spot she’d go to with her dad. And JJ doesn't know a lot, but he knows that’s not a coincidence.
Spring had struck through with unseasonable warmth, even for the Banks. They’ve lasted this long, on their boat. Their island. Long after the icicles trickled off the cabin, after the frost melted into glittering sunshine, sprouted dandelions and weeds of clover at a place on tenth.
There were still nicks and scratches, maybe there always would be. But JJ’s figuring it out, how to sand them down, how to build something strong enough to shield them from a storm-furied spring. There’s no black eyes or hollowed bellies to haunt him, no undertow of swallowed feelings. But the relentless riptide never seems to fully let up. Namely, the one that pulls them to the past.
They’d left him and Kiara there – wisely, he’d thought – under the guise that they’d start prepping the fish they caught, but JJ’d seen Cleo’s sly observations all day. It was the same way she’d assessed them on Poguelandia, and it was the truth of it there, the fact that Cleo doesn’t pretend for anyone, that made him think it wasn’t all in his head.
He didn’t quite know what to do with it then. Still doesn’t. But he’s holding on with his calloused and cursed hands anyway.
“Remind me again why we’re willingly catching our own food and eating it?” Kiara says wryly as they watch Pope and Cleo take off on the bike.
“You can take the man out of Poguelandia, but you can’t take Poguelandia out of the man.”
“Even when said man has a shit ton of gold to his name?”
“Even then.”
She nods, her silence as gray as the overcast sky. She’s had days like this – they both have. For no reason and all the reasons. Reasons like fallen fathers and missing mothers. Reasons that brought you to evicted homes and childhood fishing spots.
She’s always been like this. Reminiscent, nostalgic to her detriment. Maybe it’s what makes her harsh, what makes her so forgiving.
Her all too familiar button-down flutters in the breeze, cutoffs and a floral bikini top he’s seen lying around the Chateau more times than he can count. It’s far from there, he thinks. Wherever they are now.
Sweeping windblown curls from her bun behind her ear, she steals a look at him. “Do you miss it?”
It’s how she’s looking at him now that brings him back to a descending plane at dawn, that same stolen glance – wanting to stay and guilty for it. After all, he’d spent a lot of time wanting too, a month of midnights telling each other so.
His reflection’s still there all the same, and he holds her gaze before she can flit away again. “All the time.”
A beat passes, her eyes wide and shiny. “Even though we ended up getting the gold?”
“I meant it when I said we had everything we needed.”
She smirks, a temporary lift as she leans in. “I could’ve kissed you then.”
It still twists him good on the insides, burns him up in a way only she ever could, knowing she felt that – feels that – even with millions of kisses between them since then. He leans in just the same, a tuck of her hair against that merciless wind. “Why didn’t you?”
She folds her arms, eyebrow cocking. “Why didn’t you?”
He doesn’t answer, because she knows why. The same reasons she couldn’t really kiss him then either. Anyway, he’s kissing her now, and JJ doesn’t want to live in the past any more than they’re forced to.
He begs a little with his tongue, nips at her lip softly as she chuckles and murmurs something about later. Tugs him to the railing before she drops her elbows down.
“Do you ever wish we just stayed at the Chateau where we belonged?”
“No,” he scoffs, but there’s no bite. “How else am I gonna afford that statue of myself?”
She shakes her head with a laugh. Shoves at his arm but lingers there. “I’m serious, Jay.”
Portis’ house crashes in, crooked and unwanted. When JJ’d held a knife to his throat, cursing his silence but more so the portrait of the Royal Merchant on the wall. “I did think that…a lot during the hunt. But it’s over now.”
“Is it?”
A callback of sorts, to echoed eyes all hazel and fire, father and son. How John B’s leg bounces and his hands jitter, searching for something and nothing as he spends endless days of quiet in the Surf Shop. The way he holds on to Big John’s belongings, pores over his journals as if he wants to keep writing his story.
But for once, JJ is writing his own story. “It’s whatever we want it to be.”
She sighs, eyes plunging to the water below. “I know what the gold means.” She does. He’s long stopped resenting, when resenting was easier than reconciling how he felt about her. And it’s guilt again, he can see it heavy on her shoulders, like she shouldn’t be saying it. “But I just… don’t you ever miss who we used to be?”
He bumps his shoulder gently to hers. “Back before I got to see you naked? Nah.”
She resurfaces with a smile. “Keep it up and you might never again.”
“Fine, then maybe I'll keep this prime specimen covered up too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Please. You were more than happy to strip when you were jumping in the shower with me this morning.”
“Oh yeah? Who jumped in with who the day before?”
She shrugs coolly. “Maybe we need to go jump in the shower right now.”
“Kiara,” he chuckles breathlessly, “you really can’t say things like that to a man in public.”
She shakes her head, fights a losing battle with the upturn of her mouth. He hooks an arm around her waist to draw her into his side.
“Now see? If we’d stayed at the Chateau, we wouldn’t be here. Showering together and what not.”
She cocks her head, eyes searching from beneath her lashes. “Wouldn’t we though?”
He busts out a laugh. “Well. You always were the smart one.”
“You’re smart, Jay.”
He passes over her comeback, forehead dropping to hers. “Hey, we’re still them.”
Eyes narrowed, she smiles at him sweetly. “Just naked?”
“Just naked.”
*
Springtime a year ago was just as unseasonal, unpredictable. JJ’d wondered if they’d turn 18 on that boat, 19, 20, even. If they’d still be holed up in that hull below while he gave his charter tours above. The island had told them, after all, that fathers in the wind, in South American soil, didn’t qualify you for adulthood.
It’s a sign, she’d said, that their age was keeping them from renting a place. A sign. He’d thought it had more to do with ghosts and french toast, but he kept that to himself. Kept the place Ricky found that would take cash in lieu of a lease tucked away too.
They still weren’t fully unpacked, even months later. The shower faucet leaked, and Ricky’s girlfriend definitely lied about the square footage, but he didn’t care.
Because Kiara was turning 18 under the candlelight tripping through the shadows of their kitchen, her hands clasped together over the old work table he’d salvaged from his evicted yard, smile aglow as she patiently listened to him warble through a crossfaded rendition of Happy Birthday.
“...dear Kiara…happy….”
The oil stains were still there, scratches from the motor parts they’d finally cleared after all that time. They cut her cake on that table, streaks of white icing and soft crumbs scattered over the deep marks.
He couldn’t explain when he knew, why it was the right time to tell her about the house on tenth. Maybe it was how she stopped making, or rather burning, french toast, deciding to accept it at their doorstep instead. Her brow fading into something a little softer, calmer, each week. Or maybe it was just how she’d looked at him that night, buzzed and blushed, rattling off about hanging Marley albums when they have the room.
It was his sign, he’d thought. When she slung her leg over his hips as they laid on the boat’s dock, pushed her fingertips beneath his shirt, a palm to his chest, kissed him full and deep like she meant to stay there, like those Marley albums were already hung. When he told her about the place Ricky found that would let adults that weren’t technically adults rent, she’d said again – it’s a sign – muffled into his neck. He didn’t ask what she’d meant.
Eventually, they fixed the leak. Replaced the pilot on the gas stove once, after they almost burned the place down twice. Ate meals on that old work table more times than he could count. Her Marley albums hung on the wall, but he couldn’t help but notice that nothing else was.
It was a secret he had from Kiara, just a tiny one. Namely because he didn’t really know how to explain it, not in a way that made any sense.
There was just something about climbing in the window of Kiara’s old room, being let into her world. He missed it. Remembered the first time he ever saw her room. It was always shimmery, even in the dark. Smelled nice, felt warm. A frame with every school picture from kindergarten, snapshots of her and her dad on fishing trips, Anna with her arms wrapped around Kiara, all frizzy hair and knobby kneed in a holiday dress. Her artwork through the years, even the scribbles from grade school framed proudly.
It wasn’t all happy, he knew that, but still. He’d never seen anything like it before.
He’d thought about that a lot on the boat. Even with Kiara sprawled next to him in bed, bathed in the first slip of sunlight. Wondered if this place could ever feel that way. But when they moved into their house, when Kiara started collecting plants, when they finally had a couch and a dinner table, an actual shower, big enough for two, he’d thought about it less and less.
He didn’t know if Kiara ever told her parents they moved. Figured, she hadn’t, because as far as he knew, she still wasn’t answering her mom, and their french toast was still showing up at the boat. Still, Anna had left a couple of boxes for her a time or two. And they weren’t all clothes.
He’d forgotten about all that until now, until the day he noticed there was still one left unpacked. It was on that day that it happened. Kiara stopped dead in her tracks making her way to the coffee pot, slow and sputtering, her words tried to catch up with what she was reading on her phone.
Quick as it came, it lingered. Seeping into the shadows as he held on to candlelight. She never said exactly what they wanted, what made this time different, and he didn’t ask. Just watched one last lonely box, too afraid to know what was inside. All he knew was, the walls felt more barren than ever. He thought maybe he was right not to ask her about signs.
*
Another spring was approaching. If they could survive the winter first. JJ remembered the last time he and Kiara looked in a mirror like this. That one from the grade-school carnival was distorted and warped, shiny but shaped differently.
He thought maybe this one was not so different. Converse and combat boots, dizzy from the shimmering spirals on her dress, the strong smell of leather. Them but not. Different, but utterly the same.
Kiara blinked. Smiled at him through the reflection. “I dunno, it’s not really me, but I kinda like it?”
“Me either,” he said, striking a pose to profile view, the black leather cool as he slid a hand down the side. “But me too.”
She smoothed down the purple and yellow swirled skirt, tugged at the string along her collarbone. “Is this what ‘cocktail attire’ means?” She crinkled her nose. “I dunno, my mom was usually the one who–”
Without warning, the funhouse mirror warped yet again, despite being light years away, her smile washed away in the dark. He held her eyes through the reflection for a few beats before he turned to look at her. “We don’t have to go to this, y’know. I’m not exactly jumpin’ up and down about it either.”
“We’re going,” she whispered, and he knew it anyway. The same way he knew they were going to jump on shipping containers, off of motorcycles and overpasses.
It was an entirely different threat though, worse even. One disguised as a celebration for their accomplishments. He was still trying to figure out what Kildare really wanted from the Pogues.
He nodded, crossed an arm over her chest, hooked a hand on her shoulder. Rested his chin atop her hair as they locked eyes in the reflection.
She drew her fingers lightly over his forearm, held on tightly. As if knowing who’d be there to pull them apart. “I haven’t answered her yet.” A pause. Then, “She mentioned you.”
This was it then, he’d thought. What made this message different, why this particular one stayed with Kiara. He should be past denying it, especially when she’s staring at him in the mirror telling him so. But it was an ache he hadn’t quite gotten used to, feeling love and loyalty that wasn’t just his own, feeling guilt for it all at the same time.
“Hm,” was all he mumbled into her curls. Tried not to seem surprised or disappointed or whatever – for her sake, but mostly because he didn’t really know how to feel.
He didn’t know if he could ever forgive them for what they did, but he also knew that it wasn’t his forgiveness that mattered. Black eyes and boats on the horizon, a mother on the mainland, didn’t really qualify him to give out advice on family dynamics. But he did know if he didn’t handle it with care, it was things like this that could break people. He saw it, when John B couldn’t understand how Sarah felt about Ward, when Sarah tried to understand how John B felt about his own father, but he wouldn’t let her. When JJ went home with a wad of drug dealer’s cash, thinking things could be different. This time, they would be. Only to raise a wrench, his fragile hope shattering beneath him. He hated that Kiara was joining this club now.
“Said she’d love to see us,” she whispered, looking far too young to have crossed into adulthood just last year. “‘You and JJ.’”
Thing was, he believed Anna, namely because it was Kiara, but especially because he saw her broken-eyed on that boardwalk.
Meeting Anna in that chance encounter, meeting each other halfway at The Wreck. The lonely box. The timeless text. It was all there, hanging on them like clothes that weren’t quite them, but clinging nonetheless.
“A sign,” he’d said dumbly before his brain could catch up. “What did you mean when you said it was a sign about the house?”
“Just that…things tend to happen like they’re supposed to.” She ran a hand soft along his cheek. “But maybe we don’t always see the signs, or we ignore them.”
He was afraid to ask it, though he wasn’t sure why. “Are you ignoring one now?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, angling her face to look up at him, wide eyes searching like she’d find the answer there.
He should probably know the right thing to say by now, something profound and perfect. He’d told her once that he didn’t know how to do this, and he thought something must be inherently wrong with him that he still didn’t know. It had been over a year of this now, and he still struggled to do something, anything, other than what he knew how to do.
Surf. Smoke. Smile. Silence when none of that worked, when she couldn’t bring herself to smile back.
Soft hands, slipped through the half open zipper in the back of her dress, in her hair, turning her towards his chest.
The way she gripped on to his back, buried her face further against his pulse point, he thought maybe it was enough. That she heard him whether he knew what to say or not. They weren’t old enough to even know what cocktail attire meant. And yet, it felt like they’d lived a hundred lifetimes, caught in a dangerous loop. He didn’t know how long they stood there intertwined, holding on through whatever freefall they were in now, but it was their silence, he thought, that brought a knock to the door.
“You kids are not supposed to be sharing a dressing room.”
*
When JJ peeled out of the Carreras’ driveway last year, he’d called them the worst thing he could imagine. It wasn’t lost on him that he’d called Kiara the same thing, that he’d known all the while they’d never be able to keep apart.
He wonders if it’s that way for Kiara. If deep down she’s known the very same thing about her parents. If deep down, he’s had his own Carrera cutting wounds he didn’t even know were there.
They were supposed to be better than him. They were supposed to be those people that framed her artwork, that would never abandon her, run away from her like he did, like his mom and dad did to him. Who knew how to accept her love, how to love her back and tell her so.
But their love turned into finger mark bruises on her arm, nightmares about locked cabins and force fed medication. Maybe he was stuck in that mirror again, a dizzying distortion watching them all become something else entirely.
Y’all really are some Kooks. He didn’t want them to be. Thinks, she doesn’t want them to be either, still grasping for french toast and whatever else is buried within that text.
He nods towards the shaved ice stand down the pier, recognizing Jorge’s cousin running the place. Maybe it’s not just the fishing she’s holding on to here, but that version of her dad that would pick a spot in the Cut. “How ‘bout a lil’ somethin’ we couldn’t get on Poguelandia?”
“Aren’t Cleo and Pope expecting us?”
“Nah,” he dismisses with a wave of his hand. “I think they know better than to wait up for us by now.”
He watches splashes of purple and blue bruise blank white, a whole mound waiting to be conquered with color. And he knows it isn’t his place to say how this all goes together. After all, more than half the people on this island think he isn’t good enough for Kiara. He tries every day not to be one of them.
She licks the side of the cup when he hands it to her, trying to keep the mess at bay. A mini avalanche erupts when she breaks through the ice with a spoon, and it all tumbles out.
“I told her I’d think about it,” she whispers to the crashing tide below.
“And have you?” Even as he says it, he knows that she wants to do it. Had probably already decided when she picked this spot, when she reflected on gold-less versions of themselves, if the sacrifices were worth it.
It was the hope it gave her, he realized that day in the dressing room. His name written beyond a takeout box. Maybe one of them still has a window to something shimmery and warm. He knows what it is to place hope upon the hopeless, but maybe it’s not all lost for one of them yet.
“If you decide to do it,” he says to her silence, “it’s just dinner.”
“It’s never just dinner with them, Jay, you know that.”
“I do,” he concedes. But he refuses to let go of writing that story. “They don’t get to decide anything here though, you do.”
She sighs, a contemplative beat before shaking her head. “I can’t ask you to–”
“You’re not asking.”
She sighs, eyes fluttering as she reaches for his arm. “If I did…it would be with conditions.”
“I’ll start drafting your rider.”
She scoffs. “A rider?”
“Well, if you wouldn’t have fallen asleep during that Charlie Daniels documentary last week, then–”
“I know what a rider is, Jage–”
“I know you do,” he cuts in with a light laugh, his hand dropping to her waist. He shrugs. “And if they don’t wanna meet your demands…then fuck ‘em.”
She nods, an uncertain half-smile. So he smiles wider. Chooses not to ignore the signs. There’s always going to be another one, after all. Something nudging her in their direction.
It was a sign when she’d ran straight for him through a sea of Kooks, and again on a dock, held him tight as the whole world spun around them – and when the whole world stood still until he picked a lock and found her again. So they can’t be all bad.
She doesn’t say anything, but when her smile lifts, he brushes a thumb at the corner of her mouth. “See, Kie – what’d I say? Still us. Livin’ on the edge, walkin’ straight into the lion’s den.”
“Well–” She chuckles humorlessly, “it’s not quite the same thing as cliff diving on a deserted island, but-”
“Then let’s make it be.”
He nods towards the end of the pier, a dare. To leap, to lean into the freefall. Because it’s them, because she wants it. And fuck it, they’ve earned this, all of it. To be serious, to be grown up. To have bank accounts, and boats, and houses. To be carefree and stupid and all of 18 years old.
“What?” she says breathily through a laugh.
“You dared me once, remember? And maybe we don’t have a Poguelandia cliff, but like I said, you can’t take Poguelandia out of the Pogues.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“That’s half the fun.”
“We might be escorted off this beach.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can, Kie.” He pauses, still trying to come up with that perfect thing to say. Thinks, maybe he already said it. “You can.”
That quiets her, surveying the ocean ahead. But when grateful eyes flit back to his, he can see it all just as clearly as he did from the top of a cliff. It’s true, it is far away. But they’re closer than ever too.
“Are we going, then?” When it comes out, he’s not really sure if he’s talking about the dinner or the jump. It doesn’t matter anyway.
“We?”
He snags her shaved ice, abandoning them on the railing. They’ve become something else entirely at the end anyway, murky and melted together. He grabs her hand, a firm grip leading her down the pier.
“We.”
The wind carries loose curls over her eyes, her wide smile peeking through. “Yeah. I think we are.”
“Then off we go.” He lays his free hand on her back to hoist her on the railing, but she stops suddenly, pulling out her phone.
“Quick picture,” she says, nestling her face against his, “a little pre and post jump comparison.”
It stalls him for a moment, but he recovers quickly, slinging an arm around her shoulders. She laughs as she looks back at it, his tongue hanging out, her eyes trained on him not the camera. “Ah, that’s a framer.”
“For the wall,” he chances.
She grins, brushes her lips across his cheekbone before she meets his eyes. “The wall, for sure.”
When he takes his place next to her standing on the railing, they reach for each other at the same time. With their fingers intertwining, he counts, “One, two–” A kiss to her hand. For luck, for her. Even for himself.
She’s aglow under the overcast sky, a flickering flame searching through shadows. A nod, one last squeeze before they leap. “Three.”