Cook and I walked hand-in-hand through the streets lit dimly with streetlights.
The air was cold and the roads were completely deserted, which - of course - wasn't unusual for two-fifteen in the morning.
"Here we are." Cook announced, our fast pace coming to a halt. "Here's our pit stop."
Cook pointed directly across the road at a petrol station that was open twenty-four-seven.
"And what exactly are we pit stopping for?" I wondered.
"Alcohol." Cook told me, leading me across the street.
"And who the fuck is paying for that? I have no money."
"Well, the shop will pay for it... because we're stealing it." Cook flashed me his mischievous smile as we stood outside the door to the shop we were about to rob from.
I chuckled to myself. "How did I know we'd end up doing something illegal?"
"Because it's me and you, princess. We break the fucking rules." Cook laughed. "Now what's our game plan?"
"You're going to grab the alcohol, and I'm going to distract the cashier."
Cook and I looked at the cashier in unison, a greasy boy who looked approximately eighteen or nineteen, with countless pimples on his face and an awkward stance.
"And how do you plan to distract that weird-looking fuck?" Cook threw out insults like they were ingrained into his vocabulary.
I gestured to my face and body in response. "Easy." I replied. "Now come on."
I pushed open the door to the shop and Cook followed closely behind me, quickly separating and heading to the alcohol in the middle aisle.
I headed straight to the till to flirt with a boy that I found disgusting, but it was all for a good cause.
"Hey." I smiled at him, placing my hands on the counter, only several inches away from him.
"Uh... hi." The boy answered, his cheeks already beginning to flush. I assumed girls rarely talked to him.
"What's your name?" I asked him, initiating the conversation and pretending that I was interested in having one.
"Uh... Sam."
"Sam!" I exclaimed. "Wow, the first guy I ever fucked was called Sam. It's a shame it wasn't you." I gave a fake giggle, which quickly turned into a stifled laugh at his beetroot-red cheeks and frozenness.
As I turned round to check that Cook was completing his end of the task, I noticed a pound coin on the ground.
"Can I get these?" I smiled, before smirking to myself as I intentionally bent down a foot in front of him, pushing my ass in the air as I retrieved the coin from the floor along with a bag of Haribos from the shelf. I spun back around and placed the bag of sweets and the coin together on the counter.
"Uh, sure." Sam stammered, even more flustered than before as he scanned the bag. "That's - oh, a pound." He laughed as he realised I'd already put it down, clearly feeling awkward.
As Sam put the pound that I'd found on the floor into their till, I heard Cook exit behind me and I knew he'd managed to get the alcohol. Thankfully, Sam didn't notice. I wasn't sure Sam had noticed that there'd been anyone else in the shop at all.
"Thanks, Sam. See you around." I winked, grabbing the bag of sweets from the counter and watching him remain frozen as he watched me walk out.
I laughed as I came outside and reunited with Cook who had walked a few yards to wait on the corner.
"That was easy." I bragged. "What did you get?"
Cook pulled out a seventy-centilitre bottle of vodka from the inside of his jacket with a smirk on his face, feeling accomplished. "Give me a sweet."
I ripped open the bag and ate one before handing it to Cook. "Here. Give me the bottle."
Cook twisted the lid off the vodka bottle, took two large gulps and then handed it to me. "Here."
I took a swig and then grabbed a sweet from the packet that Cook held, trying to get rid of the taste. "So, where are we going?"
"You'll see." Cook smirked.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, the only sound being the breeze, the rustle of a Haribo bag and the vodka being chugged. And then Cook asked, "so, was the first guy you fucked really called Sam?"
I laughed and shook my head. "No, that'd be Jack just after I turned thirteen. Sam wasn't until a year after that."
***
Cook and I walked for ten minutes through the deserted streets.
Three quarters of the vodka bottle had been drained by us and there was only five sweets remaining. The pair of us were beginning to stumble and randomly laugh due to the large alcohol intake in a short time period.
And then suddenly Cook stopped. "Here."
I furrowed my brows, completely confused. Cook had stopped us in front of a house.
The house looked empty, and everything about it was unkempt. There was smashed glass amongst the overgrown grass, small plastic baggies from drugs on the pathway and a sharp kitchen knife under the bush.
"Is this... is this your house?" I stuttered over my words, partly due to the alcohol and partly because I didn't know how I'd compliment Cook's home.
But he laughed. "No."
"So... who's is the shithole house?" I asked, kicking the wheelie bin as I chugged the vodka again.
Cook smiled before saying, "this is Johnny White's house." And then he laughed as he saw my shocked face and followed it up with, "good, right?"
"What? Are you sure?" I checked, and Cook nodded. "How are you sure?"
"He's lived here for fucking years and he's an infamous gangster. People get wind of where people like that live." Cook shrugged.
"So... what are we doing here?"
Cook proceeded to pick up a plank of wood that had come loose from the broken fence. "We're going to teach him a lesson."
I eyed the plank of wood that Cook held with a concerned expression, hoping that he wasn't expecting me to wait for Johnny to arrive to attack him with his own fence. "What kind of lesson?"
"A lesson like... having no windows in your house, that kind of lesson." Cook shrugged.
"You're going to smash all of his windows in?"
Cook shrugged again. "Just the downstairs ones. Are you with me?"
I felt unconvinced and slightly concerned. We were drunk and we were in a gangster's garden and we were about to smash in the windows of his house. It was a recipe for disaster.
But then my memory flashed, and I recalled the moment he smashed Cook over the head with a bottle, and when he gripped me by the hair and pulled me backwards, and when he shoved Freddie to the floor.
And suddenly, I didn't need any convincing at all.
I grabbed a plank of wood that had lay by the one Cook had picked up and I smiled. "I'm with you."
"Marvellous." Cook smiled back at me. "Now let's go check this dodgy prick doesn't have any CCTV, yeah?"
The pair of us walked quietly into Johnny's back garden which was just as much of a mess as the front.
Almost immediately I spotted the security camera above us.
"Cook." I alerted him and pointed to it.
"Oh, yeah." Cook casually looked at it. And then he jumped up on the windowsill and began smashing it repeatedly with the plank of wood he had, before using the wood to detach it from the wall. It hit the ground, and Cook jumped down from the windowsill and stamped on it. "Sorted."
We both laughed, and then gave each other a small nod before we started smashing in Johnny White's windows.
Each window that I smashed with the plank of wood, I felt more and more exhilarated. It was like we were serving justice to a shitty person. It was like a complete release of anger, and laughing with Cook always made me feel unexplainable exhilaration for life.
We met back at the front of the house where we both uncontrollably laughed as we stared at the final window that hadn't been shattered.
"Do you want to do the honours of smashing the final window?" Cook asked.
"I think I'll -"
But my sentence was cut short by the window of the house beside us swinging open and a gruff woman's voice shrieking, "oi! Who the fuck is there?"
Cook smashed the final window in a split second before grabbing my hand tight in his, pulling me through the bush to the neighbouring house on the other side and dragging me through the gardens to get away.
We laughed as we sprinted, and we sprinted for at least five minutes, both feeling intoxicated and elated.
We reached a dark glen and Cook pulled me through the gateway and inside, both of us panting in a desperate attempt to regain our breath.
"We need to stop. I have a stitch." Cook clutched his side and bent over.
I crouched down, cupped his face in my hands and kissed him clumsily in my drunk state. "That was fun. I like us together." I gushed.
"We are fun." Cook admitted, still keeled over with the pain of his stitch.
"Come on. Come and sit down over here." I ushered him over to the most hidden area of the glen, behind several trees, just as a precaution that we could be being searched for after our mindless vandalism.
"Are you feeling alright?" I giggled.
"Yeah." Cook sighed, regaining his usual breath. "Got any more sweets?"
I laughed. "Yeah. A few." I threw him the bag.
We sat in silence for several moments, listening to the small lake that was nearby and looking at the several thousand stars above us that seemed to be shining brighter than usual tonight.
"Hey, Josephine." Cook got my attention and I looked at him and laughed as I saw him holding a ring-shaped sweet in front of me. "Josephine, will you be my fuckbuddy for the foreseeable future?"
I grabbed the ring and faked a gasp, acting as though this was the biggest moment of my life. "James, this is just so romantic!" I laughed as I spoke sarcastically. And then I slid the sweet onto my ring-finger and smirked at him. "How could I resist?"
I launched on top of him, pushing him onto his back on the damp grass and straddling him before beginning to plant passionate kisses down his jawline and onto his neck.
"Oh, fuck." He moaned under his breath, exactly the way I liked him to.
"Do you like that?" I whispered.
"You know I like that, you fucking tease." He shook his head.
We both laughed together and I sat upright, still straddling him as he lay on the ground.
"I really enjoy spending time with you, you know?" Cook started, his words ever-so-slightly slurred due to the alcohol. "I'm glad I met you this week."
"I'm glad I met you, too." I told him, and I meant it.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I've never had a 'fuckbuddy' that hasn't caught feelings and some point and then made me out to be a cold-hearted bitch when I haven't felt the same, and I just know that that won't be the situation with us. You're like me. We can fuck and have fun and still be just friends, and I like that."
Cook smiled and then giggled a small giggle that made him look completely innocent in that moment. Until he said, "if you like it so much then fuck me."
I rolled my eyes before lowering myself down so our faces were inches away. "Since you asked so fucking nicely."
A/N: thank you for 1k reads on this story so far.
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