falling

~chapter 2~

They fell into each other easily. Once she had him, she couldn't have enough. The way his hair shone a little brighter under the sun made her smile, the way he always sucked her bottom lip gently when they kissed  made her knees weak, the way he had rocked her to sleep when Rafe stole her money to buy cocaine made her heavy heart swell.

He was the exact same. He had always been lonely, he knew. He missed his mother and he missed his absent father. He was scared to sleep alone and the nights that JJ spent at his house kept him up at night. So when Sarah finally dumped Marcus, who he had been incredibly jealous of, he felt like he had just won the lottery. Because she fell asleep in his arms and she held his hand when he was nervous. He loved her. He's loved her since they were 12 and she cried into his shoulder for nights on end and his heart cracked a little with every tear. It wasn't that her pain made him love her. In a way, it was like his being alone and her being sad brought them closer together. Like when she cried, he felt like crying too. And when she smiled and pushed the hair out of his face, he smiled right back at her. It was like they had some sort of secret. The Kook Princess who cried in the Pogue leaders arms when no one was around. The empress of Figure 8 who made any Kook boy fall at her knees, needed him.

She wasn't sure when she first started loving him the way he loved her, figured it must've come slow and in a process, not all at once. She had two boyfriends before him, but she never uttered those three words to any of them. With John B, she couldn't help herself.

"I think I'm in love with you," she said into his chest as they lay naked in his bed. She'd not only lost the L word to him, but her virginity too.

His hand ran up and down her arms, leaving goosebumps in their wake. "You are?" his voice rumbled.

She nodded, laying kissing along his collar bone.

"Sarah, I've been in love with you since I was 12 years old." He felt her smile against his skin before bringing her lips to his ear.

"I guess we both love each other then," she whispered.

"We do."

"Good thing we're already naked," her hand caressing his chest. "So I can show you how much I love you."

x

In the time that they spend together, John B and Sarah are inseparable, even more so than when they were just friends. He comes to pick her up in his van after school, gets some dirty looks from the boys at her school and some odd ones from the girls. All the Kooks knew of John B. Either he did work at their houses or they saw him at the boneyard, but none of them had expected Sarah to date him. When they were little, it didn't matter as much that he was not from Figure 8. But by the time they were in highschool, everyone had seemed to develop a bad connotation surrounding the Pogues.

Everything seemed right in the world to Sarah when she loved John B. Because he didn't demand things from her like Marcus or the boy before him. He just wanted her and he was the only boy to have ever wanted that. He was the only one to make her stomach hurt from laughing, the only boy to swing in a hammock with her, cuddled up and whispering in her ear. She didn't care that he lived in a shack on the beach or that he didn't have fancy clothes or own the most expensive boat. Because his sheets felt warmer because he was in there with her and his clothes felt so soft when she wore them in the morning and because the Chateau was the perfect place to eat dinner with him and his dad and escape her own father and her maniac brother.

x

They dated for a year and five months. And then Big John went missing. And she tried to be there for him how he had been when her mom died. But something inside of John B snapped when Big John left. He was hurt and he was angry at the world for taking the last parent he had left. So he drank and he surfed and he stayed up all night how he always did when something went wrong. He sported black bags under his eyes, and he got into fights with random men here and there, so he had scars on his arms. Sarah would try to hold him at night, but it's hard when he didn't want to be held. He wanted to ruin what he had left because he felt like he didn't deserve it and more than anything he just wanted his father back. It blurred his vision. He lost sight of what he did have. He lost sight of Sarah and by the time he realized he did, he stayed awake at night forcing himself to believe he was no good for her. It wasn't  a hard thing to go when he stood in front of his cracked mirror. He had punched it when he found out his dad died. He looked at his messy hair and his baggy eyes and his messed up knuckles and the scratches on his arms and repeated it until it was true: he was Pogue trash and Sarah Cameron did not belong with Pogue trash.

Just like that, Sarah lost her best friend and her boyfriend. She lost John B.