[ xxx. aftershocks ]

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WILLA DEVERAUX AWOKE TO the soft dusting of calloused fingertips on her smooth cheek.

Ow, was the first thought that entered her head.  The second was, What the fuck?

Her skull was pounding and aching, like a jackhammer searing into the crevices of her brain, and her dulled eyes were crusted as she slowly peeled them open to a room lost in semi-darkness.  Through a bleary, watery gaze, her attention fell first to a soft blue blanket beneath her head and then to an open hand encased in fresh plaster lying upon it.  The stiffened fingers were outstretched and moving, just barely brushing Willa's flushed skin, but she did not pull away in fear, for the next sight that befell her dizzied vision was none other than a breathing, living John B. Routledge.

A quiet exhale of relieved breath escaped her chapped lips, and she slowly lifted her head off the side of the narrow hospital bed as she sat up straighter in her chair.  Her arms were tingling as she unfolded them, but her hands immediately went to his outstretched one and she clutched his hand tightly. 

Despite the obvious drugs that still held John B.'s brain down, that still tried to pull him back into his own slumber, he was already smiling at her.

"Hi, John B.," Willa whispered in gentle greeting.  Her voice felt hoarse, and she could taste the bitterness of her own breath.  She was almost certain she could still taste the whiskey and bile on the tip of her tongue, and the repercussion of that thought send a wave of new nausea through her all over again.

"Where . . ." John B. tried to turn his head to look around, but his movements were sluggish.  Slowly, he slumped back against the gray pillows and his eyes turned half-lidded.  "Where am I?"

"St. Olives," She answered.  It was the biggest hospital on the island where only the most urgent of matters went.

"How did we get here?"

At that Willa paused, and she looked back down to John B.'s swollen hand enclosed between her two bruised palms.  She wondered if he could even feel her touch through the waning sedation.  "Uh . . ." She hesitated in her response, and it was the endless beeping of machines that filled the void of silence between them.  "I don't really remember," She admitted with a dry chuckle.  "I kind of blacked out . . . after you fell."

Willa barely remembered making it into the hospital at all.  Most of it had gone by in a blur of tears and vomit. 

After she had collapsed on the sand beneath the Hawk's Nest, JJ had carried her back to the Twinkie to ensure that she did not accidentally secure her own ride in the ambulance that Kiara had managed to flag down.  From then she had been forced to attempt sobering up which was not easy for a girl that was beyond the brink of a blackout.  With her heavy head hanging out the open door and her limp body sprawled out in the back of the van, JJ had held the remnants of her knotted braid back and had forced her to chug water even though it had been nearly impossible for her to keep it down.  All the while she had been in hysterics the whole time, still believing John B. to be dead.  Kiara had tried to soothe her then, but it had taken Pope's soft and steady voice to fully call her back from the edge.

Yet even in the aftermath of his reassurances, she was still rightfully rattled. For over an hour— long after John B. and Sarah had been swept away by paramedics—the three pogues had waited in the parking lot of the hospital with Willa, helping her regain enough sense of her surroundings to eventually be able to walk on her own.

Willa did not remember any of that time spent in the hospital parking lot.  She did not know what she had said or what the pogues might have said in an attempt to console her further.  No matter, she was certain she had made a fool of herself regardless.  Now, several hours had passed since that nauseating and traumatizing time.  JJ, Kiara, and Pope had all been sent home in the early hours of the morning since visiting hours at the hospital were not active. Willa was only granted permission to stay in the waiting room because her father—who had been called in for the emergency in the dead of night—was John B.'s doctor.

He was also her ride home.

However, despite orders from her father to rest, she did not stay in the waiting room.  Once John B. had been settled in his room, Willa had found her way to him without facing any obstacles.  No nurses tried to stop her, but she knew it was only because of her father's word.  No one would dare touch the Deveraux boss' daughter.

"Are you okay?"  It was John B.'s voice that eventually pulled her from her thoughts of the chaotic evening.  He was still watching her through tired eyes, but even in the shadowy room she could see the concern in his hickory stare.

Willa almost scoffed, but the sound caught in her throat.  "You're asking if I'm okay?" She mused.  "You're the one with a broken wrist and a concussion."

John B. frowned and looked back down to his cast, as if only just now realizing that it was there.  "Ow."  His eyes then flickered towards Willa's own hands, to her own knuckles that were bruised and bandaged from her decision to shatter her household's bathroom mirror.  "What happened to your hand?"

"Oh . . ." Willa swallowed.  She was not ready for that conversation tonight.  She did not think John B. was ready for it, either.  "I dropped a glass at the party.  Tried to pick it up, and only made a bigger mess.  It's no big deal."

"Looks like a big deal," John B. hummed, still eyeing her injury.  "Are those stitches?  That's—"

"John B., please," She pleaded softly, cutting him off with a gentle shake of her head.  "Don't worry about me."

The Routledge boy pursed his lips and his mouth tilted downward.  Slowly, his gaze seemed to rake over Willa's entire being.  From the top of her unruly head to the bunched and torn tatters of a once purple ballgown that rested at her bare feet.  She could only imagine what she must look like to him in his drug-induced haze. 

Once more, his arm shifted along the edge of the bed and his fingertips pressed into her open hand.  "You know . . ." He addressed groggily.  "I didn't get to tell you earlier . . ."  Already his eyes were beginning to droop again, but there was a familiar smug, boyish touch to his tone.  "But you should know that you look . . . you look really pretty."

Warmth flooded her face.  "Pretty?" Willa repeated.  "Please.  I'm covered head-to-toe in sand and dirt.  You don't mean that."

"Sure I do."

"Well, I don't think you look pretty," She teased.

"Ouch."  John B.'s eyes were closed now, but a smile still pulled weakly on his tanned, bruised features.  "Didn't Sarah look pretty tonight?" He wondered.

The laughter died on her lips.  An unexpected coldness struck her then, sharper than ice itself.  "Sarah?"

His next words came out in a tired but giddy slur, "Sarah Cameron."

"I know who—" Willa quickly caught the bitterness in her own tone.  "Yes, she did look pretty."

The Deveraux daughter could feel the sudden splintering within her own chest, tearing and tearing yet never quite severing.  It was an agony that hurt worse than anything else she had experienced in the past forty-eight hours, and she did not know how to stop it.  She did not know how to release the sharpened burn that swelled rapidly in her dried throat, thirsting to ignite the girl in total flame.  She wanted to cry then, more than she had ever wanted to cry before, but her sadness made no sense.  How could she long for something that she never had?  How could she plead for her pain to be put onto another?  How could she dare desire to pass her untamable inferno onto a boy that she wished for more than anything to keep safe from the flames?  How could she look at a boy and feel both love and hate when his gaze met hers?

Willa felt the fine line that she was certain they once balanced together quiver in the desolate distance between them.  Then she forced it to steady, forced it to hold on, even as the weight dared for it to break.

She was grateful that John B. could not see straight.  That he could not see the tears forming in her eyes nor see the tremble of her bottom lip as she cleared her throat and said in the steadiest voice she could muster, "You two make a cute couple."

She knew that she could not yell at him now.  Not ever.  Not when they were only just friends, and the relationship that he shared with the Cameron princess was clearly something more.  Something that she would never know nor experience with the Routledge son herself.  But that was okay.  Or at least it would be.  It had to be.

John B.'s expression seemed to soften further at Willa's seemingly encouraging words.  "Yeah?" He whispered.  As if catching a sudden second wind, his eyes had opened again and despite the haze that held him away in another world, it seemed that he had finally found her through the dark.

Willa nodded her head stiffly in confirmation and she looked away before sullen sage could reach its hickory home.  "Yeah."

Her chest deflated entirely with a single word, the air seeping from her lungs, as she forced her watery stare to remain towards the empty doorway.  She began to count in her head to one hundred, hoping by the time she reached triple digits that John B. might be asleep, and she could leave and not come back without his touch, and his voice, and his eyes haunting after her.

Suddenly, though, she felt John B.'s familiar graze.  His fingers drifted up to her bare right arm, lingered on her shoulder, and then slowly pushed the curtain of hair back from her face.  "What's this?" He asked.

Willa did not need to ask what John B. was looking at as his fingertips ghosted across her now bruised neck.  Goosebumps rose on her arms as she thought back to Rafe Cameron and to the way he had held her on the dancefloor only hours prior.  She had not realized before that he had left marks—that he had left a threatening message on her skin.  She wished that would be the only damage that Rafe would ever inflict on her life, but it was nowhere close to the misery that lay ahead for her.

"Willa."

Her head snapped up at the newfound voice that filled the room and her memory of Midsummers dissipated as quickly as it surfaced in her rattled mind.  Looking carefully over her shoulder, her attention fell to her father and her body immediately slumped at the sight of him.

Alden beckoned her to follow him with a tilt of his head.  It was a gesture that she was familiar with.  He wanted to talk, and he wanted to do it without an audience.  This was not a checkup for John B.  It was a checkup for her.  "Come on," He called.

In any other circumstance, Willa might have stood her ground.  But she was tired.  She was so very tired.

She also did not want to talk about her injuries any further and she feared that her bruises and scars were all that John B. would want to talk about.  That trauma could wait for another day—or, maybe in John B.'s quiet delirium—be forgotten altogether.  If only she could ever be that lucky.

Willa nodded understandingly to her father and then turned back to John B. one last time, to perhaps bid him a gentle goodnight (even as the sun was beginning to rise through the window), but he was still watching Alden in the doorway.  His gaze had grown colder and guarded in the presence of an adult stranger.  He only looked back to Willa once she began to rise out of her seat beside the hospital bed and his glare had shifted to widened eyes of shock—of fear even.

She had to forcefully pull her hand free from his tight grasp and she winced, feeling his cast scuff against the cuts on her own knuckles.  "Goodbye, John B.," She murmured.  He opened his mouth to speak, maybe to protest, but she would never know what he might have said.  She could not bear to hear anything else.  A goodbye was all that mattered then.

And Willa was out of the room before she might ever regret saying it.

➸➸➸

THE WAITING ROOM WAS empty.  Willa's dirty bare feet padded softly on the sleek white tile as she moved to sit in one of the padded chairs pushed against the far wall in the square-shaped room.  Alden was right behind her and lowered himself down with a low sigh into the seat beside Willa's.  The hospital's PA system hummed quietly over their heads and for several long moments, her father did not speak.  Willa remained unmoving, waiting, but perhaps Alden had taken back his previous calling.  Maybe there were no words that could be said to save the fallout of this night between a parent and their child.

Yet Willa was unsure if there was even anything worth saving.  She was not close with her father.  Sure, she preferred his company over her mother's, but she would have gladly gone without either if that was ever an option.  Her father had taken away as many of her first experiences as her mother did. 

After tonight she knew that her parents were disappointed with her.  That they were likely furious; that maybe they were even considering sending her off to boarding school, but there was no anxiety in that for Willa.  None of this talk of punishment was new to her.  Her parents could no longer hurt her in ways that had already become so familiar.

"Your mother thought it was you," Alden began.

And still, even when Willa thought that she had it all figured out, her parents still surprised her.  Because that was the thing, wasn't it?  Teenagers think that they have it all figured out. 

Then they get hurt.  And sometimes they hurt others in the process, too.

"What?" Willa asked.

Alden exhaled a slow breath, but he kept his eyes forward, down towards the tiled floor.  He could not even look at his own daughter.  "After you left the reception . . . we started hearing sirens.  Not long after that, we saw the ambulance go past—in the direction that you had run off in.  Your mom thought it was for you, and it took everything within me to keep from running for the truck," He explained.  "But then I got a phone call from the hospital saying that a boy had been brought in with head trauma . . . And so, I told my wife that our daughter was fine, even when I wasn't sure.  Even when I knew that it was one of your boys . . . Because for all I knew you were still only one ambulance away, right behind him."

Willa could hardly imagine her mother's reaction to her own disappearance—to the thought of her own daughter actually being hurt, possibly even killed.  It did not seem like her mother was capable of such an expression.  Willa felt numb to the concept.  "Does mom know where I am right now?" She wondered.

Her father scoffed.  "No," He admitted.  "But she will once I'm done speaking with you."  Alden turned to look at Willa then, and there was a sternness in his expression that had not taken over his features in so very long.  Not since the day he had torn her old job away from her.  "What you did tonight was extremely irresponsible, Willa," He scolded.  "Not only was it disrespectful to your mother and me, and to your brothers, but also to yourself.  Putting yourself out there like that . . . The drinking . . . The yelling . . . The kind of behavior that you displayed tonight reflects very poorly on your future."

"Dad, I don't care what those people think of me.  I never have, and you know it," Willa dismissed bluntly.  "Tonight, when I was with my friends—with those kids that you all despise so much—that was the happiest that I have been in a long, long time.  I finally felt like I belonged somewhere.  All my life I have stood out with the crowd that you and mom have tried to force me into, but that just isn't my crowd.  I'm not like you.  I'm not perfect like you or mom, and I don't want to be."  She exhaled a cautious breath of her own that she had not been aware she was holding.  "I'm sorry if I let you down tonight, but I'm not sorry that I did it.  I won't ever be sorry for that."

"I know you won't," Alden agreed.  He sounded disappointed.  Devasted.  "And it's going to break your mother's heart."

"What about my heart?" She demanded in return.

"Honey, you are so young.  Your heart doesn't even know how to break yet."

Willa's eyes narrowed and she shook her head in disbelief.  "You're just like mom," She snapped.

"We just want the best for you."

"No, you don't!" She exclaimed.  She did not care that her voice had grown louder; there was no one in the waiting room to hear her.  "I tell you that I'm happy, and you tell me that it's wrong.  You don't even give my friends a chance."

"Because I know who those kids are going to grow up to be," Alden insisted.  She hated how calmly he spoke to her, so unlike her mother who only knew how to belittle and shout her way into dominance.  It only made her angrier.  Willa could fight fury with fury, but she did not know how to handle an uncracked composure when her own had long since ruptured.  "I know that they don't stand a chance," Her father continued, unwavering.  "You do."

Her jaw dropped in disgust.  "How could you say something like that?"

"Because I saw it happen to my own friends when I was your age, too.  Look, I know that isn't what you want to hear right now, but it's the truth.  That's just the cycle of a town like this."

Willa rose her hands above her head and clenched them into fists.  She could barely focus on her father's words.  She did not care about her father's childhood.  She would not allow him to turn her future into his past.  "Cycles can break," She growled.

"They can." Her father nodded.  He was willing to give her that.  Yet he still took.  "But often they don't.  And that's the reality."

Her hands dropped back down to her sides and grasped tightly at the armrests on her chair.  Her face was burning as she glowered deeply at the floor.  "That's such bullshit," Willa muttered under her breath.

Alden did not move.  He was not phased at her little swear, but Maren would have screamed bloody murder if she had heard it.  For that, Willa was relieved in the silence that settled in the wake of her building wrath, and as much as she despised both of her parents in such upsetting moments, at least her father let her feel.  At least he let her feel the absence of something before he took it away.  Her mother just took whatever she wanted whenever she wanted and left her daughter with newly shattered pieces to fill a fresh void.  All these years later, she was still trying to figure out which was worse—the grief of knowing beforehand or the shock of never seeing the blow coming.

"If I ask you to go wait in the car while I finish up John B.'s paperwork, will you listen this time?" Alden asked quietly, interrupting her thoughts.  Silently, begrudgingly, Willa merely nodded.  Her anger spoke for her now and her father recognized that all too well. 

Alden then stood up from his chair and pulled his dressy blazer from the party off.  "Here," He said as he passed it to his eldest daughter, along with the keys to his truck.  "I'll be out in twenty minutes.  Try to get some rest.  Lord knows once we get home that your mother's not going to let you run off to bed so easy."

Willa listened mindlessly to the rattle of the keys in her hand.  At least these ones were not stained by blood.  "Figures," She huffed.

Alden made a quiet nose in the back of his throat, his way of saying goodbye under less-than-ideal circumstances, and then turned away to discuss closing matters with the night shift nurses that would be responsible for John B. that evening.  Willa had almost forgotten that the Routledge boy was the whole reason she was even there at the hospital in the first place. 

Hell, Willa would not be in many places now without having met John B. in the first place.

A part of her wished to run right back to his room and seek his comfort, but an even larger part of herself was already picking up her own broken pieces and molding them back into place.  Willa watched her father for a moment longer before shrugging on his jacket and heading for the exit.  She was just nearing the end of the hall when the elevator opened, revealing two familiar yet unwanted faces.

Sarah Cameron clung tightly to her father's hand and her face lit up at the sight of Willa.  "How is he?" She questioned.

"He's in-and-out," Willa answered tiredly.  She could have left it at that.  It would have been enough.  But then she added, "He was asking for you."

A gasp of relief slipped from Sarah Cameron's lips and her shoulders sank as if a heavy weight had been pulled from them completely at only five simple words.  "Really?  Come on, dad," She beckoned of her father.  She did not say another word to Willa, but the latter had not expected it, anyways.

It was Ward who gave the final farewell.  He nodded his head in Willa's direction and whispered a small, almost grateful 'thank you' as his lovestruck daughter began eagerly pulling him down the hall in the direction of John B.'s room.

Their footsteps echoed loudly on the tiled floor.  However, this time—unlike her father's own leaving—Willa did not watch them go.  If she did, if she watched Sarah Cameron round that corner, she would feel that same pain all over again.  That betrayal and emptiness and sadness that did not make any sense at all because even if John B. would not remember it, she had let him go tonight.  She had told him that it was okay to move on—to know and accept that nothing would become of them—even when every nerve-ending in her entire body was screaming that it was not okay at all.

But there would be no more screaming tonight.  She was done with the aftershocks of her past poor decisions. 

With a last exhale of finality and of grief, Willa Deveraux quietly stepped into the awaiting hospital elevator, pushed the designated button for the ground floor, and allowed the hum of new electricity to pull her away from the nightmare of this night and into the breaking dawn of the fresh morning ahead.

~~~~~~~~~~

it's sad #willb hours. but is #willb officially over? only time will tell.

dun, dun, dunnnnn

gah, anyways i hoped you enjoyed this chapter. i honestly contemplated whether even writing these behind the scenes or not, but i actually really ended up loving this quiet chapter??? big moments shared with willa between both john b. and her father... i think willa really needed to say her piece while also getting that moment with alden, even as much as she thinks it hurts her. but man, willa really is in the process of growing up. she's going to get her heart broken quite a bit before the end, but that's life, and i love exploring it through her eyes.

so, how are we feeling about this chapter? what did y'all think??? this chapter involved a lot of letting go for willa... but is she really ready to let go? what did you think of her convo with john b?? or her convo with her father?? i'd really love to hear some thoughts and predictions!! those kinds of comments just make my day as a writer!!

also, two updates in one week? who am i???

stay safe and well.

--B.