#I’m barely scraping by with ikea and instructions

[bonyassfish]

I am about halfway through building this cabinet if I can finish I will 100% brag about it on lesbian tinder to get girls

[s-brant]

Baby Names

(gif: @mishellejones) (SERIES MASTERLIST)

Summary: Y/N gets frustrated while putting the crib for her and JJ’s baby together and finds herself missing her dead brother more than ever.

Word Count: 2.2k

Warnings: Fluff and minor angst.

A/N: Asks and ye shall receive, here’s a little blurb about what happens after Tokens! You don’t really have to read the other parts to enjoy this fic if you don’t want to, but I do recommend it for some backstory. This was slightly inspired by this fic by @cognacdelights, so go give her stuff a read! Let me know if you liked this. Have fun!

Y/N Routledge thought she got over her brother's death long ago.

Though you never truly "get over" losing a loved one, though there will always be a small part of you, however small, that aches for their presence again, she thought she moved past the tragedy to the best of her ability...until last week.

To say that the pregnancy was a surprise would be the understatement of the century. She and JJ were both on the same page about children when their relationship began, and that page was that neither of them wanted them yet. Sure, the idea of it in the future stirred their hearts with fond emotion, but considering that they had yet to graduate high school and barely scraped by on their own, they weren't jumping headfirst into that aspect of adulthood.

They were meticulous about safe sex. They couldn't afford another mouth to feed, she wasn't sure she could handle the emotional trauma of having an abortion, and, underneath it all, he had some reservations about being a father. It wasn't that he didn't envision a future with kids in their relationship, he did, but the topic of fatherhood always took him down a dark path within his mind.

So, she went on birth control once they started dating and they went along with no scares for the next six years as they graduated and started figuring out what the next step for their lives was going to be.

Y/N could get lost thinking about it, honestly, but she tries not to get too swept up in the minor mistake that led to this.

"You, my friend, need to stop moving around in there," she whispers down at her protruding belly with a hand cradling the heavy weight of it, "I'm trying to get your crib set up without JJ yelling at me for not asking for help, and if you don't stop kicking me, I'm not gonna get anything done."

She's sprawled out on the floor in the living room of the Chateau with her legs stretched comfortably in each direction while she hunches over to read the directions of the Ikea furniture. The sugarcoated description makes her want to hunt down the company CEO for sport, because for how "simple and easy!" the construction of it claims to be, she is at her wits end.

The last thing she needed after having her grief over John B's death reignited by their decision to name their kid after him last week was to stress herself out over something as stupid as this, but she won't quit. With how much JJ has been coddling her the further into the pregnancy she gets, she wanted to prove that she could do something for herself.

Whenever she brings in the groceries from the car and goes to lift the bag of dog kibble out of the trunk, he rushes up behind her back and scoops it out of the trunk before she dares to touch it. It always ends with her hollering after him that it's under twenty pounds, the upwards limit of the weight she's allowed to carry according to her doctor, but he refuses to hear any of it.

Inside of her, she feels a sharp sensation of something hitting her right in the ribs in response to her comment, and she groans in frustration. It's as if he did it because he knows she wants it to stop, the feisty little fucker.

"You're definitely your daddy's son, aren't you? It's already enough having one of him, the last thing I need is a JJ clone."

Their three-year-old Rottweiler rescue huffs a sigh from where he lays, frog-legging it, on the floor next to the unboxed crib pieces she can't put together to save her life. His drooping jowls produce a puddle of slobber on the her favorite carpet that is past the point of saving from his constant wear and tear. After a year of having him, she decided to stop trying to prevent him from ruining it. There’s no point.

She smiles at him as she leans forward to read through the directions for the billionth time, saying, "I actually think he'll be a lot like his uncle, but that's just me. If he isn't, I'll feel a little stupid over the name situation."

John Booker Routledge-Maybank.

Hell of a name if you ask her yourself, but for every internal struggle it reopened inside of her, she couldn't help but love it as soon as JJ casually proposed the idea on his way out of the door for work one morning.

Going on without John B has been a learning experience in every aspect. Any time she wanted to turn to him for advice or tell him something about the recent events in her life, she had to walk out back to their dying magnolia tree and sit under the shade to talk to the wind. Then, once the tree finally died and they were forced to cut it down, she took to sitting on its stump and doing it there.

It got easier as time went on, but she can't keep herself from wondering what it'd be like if he didn't die ever since she saw the results on the pregnancy test six months ago. Whenever she does something like going to her OBGYN appointments or, case in point, setting up the crib, she pictures him there.

She can see him here now, petting Bowie's shiny coat until he falls asleep with his head propped onto John B's outstretched legs. He'd be twenty-three years old by now with his life barely starting to blossom to its full potential, yet here they are. Correction, here she is, and he's off somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, already decomposed to the extent that not even his bones can be salvaged anymore.

Her chest sinks in another sigh, and she flips through page after page of the instructions with increasing aggression.

"This crib is so fucking—"

"What are you doing?"

The sound of her yelping in surprise at JJ's voice coming from the door is enough to make him laugh to himself, though his amusement is buried partway by what he's walking in on. He specifically asked her to wait for him to put the crib together, knowing damn well it wouldn't be the easy task she thought it was, but he should've known she'd do it anyway.

She looks over her shoulder with a mixture of guilt and frustration painting her features as she throws her hands up in the air and gestures vaguely to the unassembled crib. Her eyes are shining with the rapid onset of hormone-induced tears.

"I can't put this crib together 'cause the instructions aren't right, all the pieces are labeled wrong, your son won't stop kicking me, and I miss my brother so much right now," she spews the words with no pauses to breathe until the very end, when she stops short to suck down a breath as soon as she gets the last part out.

It leaves JJ standing at the entrance to the house with this stunned expression.

There's no amusement to be found anymore. Once she turned and flashed those wide, teary eyes that never fail to spark an ache in his heart at him, his tired smile vanished and his feet started moving before he could say anything to her.

The floorboards creak beneath his half-laced boots on his way across the room to her. It prompts Bowie to pop his head up from around the side of the coffee table to catch a peek of whoever it is that's approaching his emotionally distraught owner. Upon seeing JJ's familiar face, the dog relaxes back into his lounging position atop the carpet and tracks JJ’s movements until he's seated next to her.

"This is about John B?" he asks.

Her cheeks are flushed in embarrassment at her sudden outburst, and she can't bear to meet his gaze right now. Despite him being her closest friend and husband, she feels as small and vulnerable as she did six years ago when she first learned of her brother's death from Shoupe. Time might as well be shaped in the form of a never-ending circle for them, directing them back to their seventeen-year-old state of mind every time things turn sour.

Y/N finally lifts her hanging head to look over at him after another few seconds and thinks she might crumble at the look on his face. He hates watching her cry.

"I guess," she says through a sniffle, "It's about the crib too, but I've been thinking about it a lot more since we picked the name. Our baby’s gonna grow up never knowing who his uncle was..."

With that, JJ takes it as his cue to pull her closer.

He scoots up behind her and lets his chin rest on the curve bridging her neck and shoulder together as he twines his arms around her body. It's a closeness that's as natural as breathing for him, so natural that he can hardly remember the years before it became normal for them to take part in little moments of intimacy like this. The warmth of their bodies cohabitates in the blurred line distinguishing where she ends and he begins, and he feels her relax, sagging in his embrace in appreciation of his miraculous ability to make her feel better no matter how worked up she is.

One of his hands rests on the swell of her bump in an absentminded effort to calm him too. Even though he isn't consciously thinking of it, he knows that her distress must upset the baby too. The contact steadies her, keeps her grounded to the moment rather than allowing her to slip away into the current of her negative thoughts, and she clings to every word he has to say.

He says, "You and I both know that isn’t true. He's gonna grow up seeing all the pictures you have of John B and ask about him all the time. And we'll tell him all the stories"—there's a pause of contemplation as he recalls a few particularly non-PG memories of his best friend—"Well, maybe not all of them, but you know what I mean."

This draws a soft bout of laughter from deep within her chest that he feels with how her body shakes ever so slightly with it. It seems so wrong to laugh with tears in her eyes but she can't help it. Her emotions have been scattered in every direction since the pregnancy began, and it has only gotten worse the further along she gets.

"If you ever tell him about the kief incident, I'm never giving you a bl—"

His free hand smushes over her mouth before she can say the rest.

"Don't even think about finishing that sentence.”

It's said so frantically, it makes her erupt in laughter hard enough to tickle her abdomen muscles with the aching sensation of it. The vibration of it under his palm makes him drop his hand a second later with the need to hear the beautiful sound. After seeing her cry, it's a welcome shift in mood, even if it's at his expense.

Her head is thrown back on his shoulder, mouth parted into a smile with the gleeful giggling filling the room. His stomach churns with butterflies at the sight of her. Even after all these years, he has the same reaction to her laughter every time. It makes him smile to himself and watch her in quiet reverence. It makes him ache with the same inklings of longing he felt for the first time when he was much younger.

Her laughter begins to die down by the time she can draw enough breath in to murmur a soft, "Sorry, angel," to him and reach down to hold the hand he rests on her belly as consolation for her joke.

They remain this way for another few minutes, tangled up in each other's arms on the floor of the living room with Bowie snoring a few feet away, before he manages to convince her to let him be the one to set up the crib instead. It takes a good five minutes of playful back and forth before she concedes under the condition that he'll let her paint the nursery by herself when the time comes, and that's all it takes for her to abandon the task in favor of finding something to snack on in the fridge.

In her defense, the crib is actually quite difficult to put together.

JJ doesn't consider himself an expert handyman by any means, at least not with anything outside of his area of expertise as an electrician, but he likes to think he knows enough to put together a "no assembly required" Ikea crib without wanting to bang his face against the wall.

In the end, it gets finished by the two of them in the middle of the night over a box of cold leftover pizza from the previous day. It takes them two hours of struggling before they get it fully assembled and placed where they want it in the room that'll soon belong to their son.

He pretends not to notice her sneaking back in to tie John B's old bandana around the wooden railing before they go to bed.

Tag List: @gabiatthedisco, @fangirlvoice, @black-syren, @apparrio, @particularcth, @planetdemon, @idk-ijustworkhere, @krisphann, @astrydis, @k-k0129, @zarahsloves, and @stilesflannels.

[poeticsandaliens]

Hold My Beer

Pairing: Debbie Ocean/Lou Miller

Rating: Mature

Summary: The Life and Times of the Heist Wives family, chronicled by things attempted after speaking the timeless declaration, “hold my beer” or Five Times Lou Miller said “hold my beer” before doing something spectacular and stupid, and a couple times someone else did.

I owe this ficlet to a conversation I was having earlier with @smashingmagicklovely​ about

1. how I wanted a full compilation of everything Lou has ever done after saying "hold my beer"

2. How Lou is badass but Soft on the Inside and Debbie is a non-romantic smartass but Soft For Lou.

and 3. how "my womb says yes but my heart says no" essentially sums up my entire attitude toward writing Heist Wives domestic fluff.

This is the fruits of my labor. Thanks Em for drop kicking my muse at ten o'clock at night.

Tagging @casliyn, @louxdebbie, and @oceansnineball because I feel like Dani and Darcy became ‘a thing’ somewhere between the three of them and an onslaught of adorable Instagram AUs.

Lou sprawls across two separate bar stools in Nine Ball’s pub, watching Debbie beat herself at a game of pool. “I got good in prison,” she had explained the first time she creamed Nine Ball.

“You had a pool table in prison?” Nine Ball asks incredulously, blowing a cloud of smoke over the table.

Debbie shakes her head. “Nope. I had a pen and some paper, and once I finished the Greatest Heist of All Time I calculated the angle of every shot in a standard game of pool and invented new scenarios until I ran out of ink.”

Not for the first time tonight, Lou wonders how she got so lucky as to love a woman as clever as Debbie Ocean. She’s not stupid—Deb is lucky as Hell to have Lou covering her ass, but that’s the magic of it. They click like a hairpin and a padlock, picking their way through barriers and unhinging each other as they go.

Lou turns to Amita, who’s perched demurely beside her with a fucking spectacular cosmo. Lou knows—she made Nine Ball show her the recipe. “Hold my beer,” she instructs Amita, sliding it down the counter to her. She steps on her bar stool, swaying as it spins.

“Holy shit,” she hears Debbie murmur, looking up from her one-sided game. “Lou—”

Lou steps onto the bar and weaves through a line of empty drinks until she’s perched on the corner, in front of Debbie. She fishes through her pocket until she finds the ring. She drops to one knee, knocking over a half-empty margarita in the process. She can feel the tequila soaking into the knee of her jeans.

“Debbie Ocean, darling, m’love, my partner in crime, my favorite felon on the planet, I love you from the bottom of twisted criminal heart. Will you marry me?”

2. 

They host the wedding reception at Tammy’s, because unlike the warehouse, Tammy’s place has grass and trees and aesthetic value; no to mention it lacked the warehouse’s air of chaos. It also smells of hydrangeas, rather than takeout Chinese food and expensive perfume—which mattered, apparently. At least, Rose and Daphne seemed to think so, and by that point Debbie and Lou took the backseat in planning their own wedding ceremony. They were perfectly content to marry in a courthouse, surrounded by their friends, but apparently that lacked romantic oomph.

(For her part, Lou found the idea of eloping in secret very romantic, but she can’t deny the feel of grass under her bare feet and the tickle of a breeze through her cream-colored suit.)

Lou and Debbie wander from the small party as the sky darkens. Fireflies drift through their vision like tiny lanterns, and gypsy moths swim in their path, clumsily seeking the porch lights. They stroll hand in hand down Tammy’s endless driveway, buzzed on quality alcohol and the undeniable high of their own marriage. Lou lets her eyes wander down Debbie’s figure, striking in an royal blue dress that whispers sprite-like across her skin.

No white, she told Rose, to the designer’s loud protests.

White is the color of a wedding dress.

No, white is the color of ‘purity’ and has too many connotations attached. It’s not even about virginity—I’m a con artist, for fuck’s sake. You’re an amazing designer, and you have my full confidence, but it feels wrong for me to marry Lou in angel-white.

Lou stops before a shiny object on the ground; squinting in the vanishing daylight; she makes out the outline of a child’s Razor scooter. An idea crosses her mind, too quickly for her to refuse it.

“I know that look,” Debbie warns her, eyeing the scooter.

“Hold my beer, darling” Lou says, handing Debbie her drink—not a beer, in fact, but a flute of champagne—and flips the scooter onto its wheels.

“Lou this feel like a bad idea.”

“Nonsense.” She kicks off, barefoot in her wedding suit, and sails down the driveway. She’s done wheelies on her motorbike before; this has to be easier. She jumps once, twice, then lifts up the front tire—and topples over onto Tammy’s lawn in three awkward, lunging steps.

Debbie cackles. “Not quite a motorbike, is it Lou?”

3. 

They honeymoon on Daphne Kluger’s private beach, because of course Daphne Kluger owns a private beach, a tiny tropical place sprung from the Caribbean, half a mile long. Perhaps it’s excessive, extravagant, but they’re not complaining when Daphne offers to let them stay in a fucking gorgeous beach house and have the ocean to themselves for two weeks.

“We should crack open one of those coconuts.” Debbie gazes at a hunched palm, shielding her eyes from the sun. Her skin has warmed and bronzed; her mischievous grin is infectious. Lou can’t say no to those soft brown eyes.

“Want me to knock one down?”

Debbie smirks. “If you can,” pretending she doesn’t know Lou will take it as a dare.

Lou looks up at the palm tree, laden with four coconuts. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to shimmy up, but the tangerine sunset and her fourth drink of the evening has her seeing the world through a pair of rose-tinted, how-hard-can-it-be glasses. She makes up her mind.

“Hold my beer.”

Lou squeezes the tree trunk between her thighs and begins to climb. The bark scrapes her skin; sure she’s only wearing a bikini and a breezy blouse, but the glint in Debbie’s eye promised a lusty reward for her efforts. She hangs from the top of the tree and kicks a coconut. The palm leaves catch her button-up and scratch along her exposed torso. Her efforts pay off—a massive coconut drops to the sand below with a decisive whack. Debbie whoops. Lou shimmies down the trunk and downs the rest of her drink.

When they relay the story at home, Daphne asks how the hell Lou managed to climb a palm tree in a bikini.

“Drunkenly,” she replies, “having forgotten what thigh chafing feels like.”

4.

A car revs outside the window. Lou looks up from the textbook length Swedish instruction set. “Fuck,” she mutters.

“This isn’t happening today,” says Nine Ball, gazing over the sea of bars and screws that could theoretically build a crib.

Lou groans and sips her beer. “Tammy you’ve built one of these. Help us out?”

Tammy shrugs. “They’ve changed the design since Alicia was born. Sorry.” But she’s made more progress than the rest of them, having managed to fit the bottom boards of the crib together into a solid surface.

“You’re a fence; I thought you knew how this shit worked.”

Tammy crossed her arms and got up from the floor, dusting off her jeans. “Yeah, I don’t build the things I fence.”

“Uh-huh,” says Nine Ball. “I always thought you’re one of those… DIY moms.”

“Only on occasion.”

The front door of the warehouse slams shut. “Where the hell is everyone?” Debbie’s voice echoes from the floor below them.

The group of them, somehow sweating and sore from failing to assemble the worlds’ shittiest IKEA crib, emerge from the room. Lou leans over the railing and smiles at her wife, who at six months pregnant (and beyond over it) has managed to carry four-and-a-half people’s worth of Chinese takeout in her arms while balancing an extra-large 7-11 lemonade between her chin and her baby bump and sucks nonchalantly on the bright red straw.

Sight for sore eyes, Lou thinks fondly, because she’s a fucking sap who loves this woman more every day.

She turns to Nine Ball. “Hold my beer,” and swings her leg over the railing. Nine Ball rolls her eyes as Lou slides down the spiral staircase at breakneck speed. She attempts to flourish as she rounds the final bend, but it quickly becomes an emergency crash landing, as she topples spectacularly onto the warehouse floor. With all the confidence of a clumsy woman who’s convinced the world she’s graceful, she dusts herself off and proceeds to trip over the couch, which has apparently moved three feet since last she saw it. She eats it again and finally stands to meet the half-amused eyes of Debbie Ocean.

In lieu of a greeting, she presses a kiss to Debbie’s lips, then to her neck, then to her belly for Creature (as they’ve insisted upon calling it, to everyone else’s chagrin) and then her lips again for good measure.

“I swear to God, Lou, if you die before this kid is born... ”

“Never,” Lou replies. Her hands curiously search Debbie’s midsection for a kick from Creature. “Just a couple of bruises. Although we might want to move the couch back to wherever it was.”

“No one moved it Lou. Your muscle memory isn’t worth shit.”

5.

Before Darcy is born, they take a vacation. Dani stays with Tammy—the “adult friend,” as Debbie so delicately put it when Constance asked why she couldn’t watch their child for a week. They rent a place along the Baja peninsula, a hidden coastal oasis to themselves, complete with a jacuzzi and an underground spring that bubbled into a natural pool. Overlooking the pool, to Debbie’s delight, a cliff perfect for high dives.

“How are you doing?” Debbie emerges from the house sporting a craft beer and an impressive sunburn.

Lou lifts her sunglasses. “Distracted,” she mutters.

“And how is Nessie doing?” Debbie asks, plopping onto the chaise. Her gaze softens, and pulls Lou into a warm kiss, slipping her hand under Lou’s green button-up to where their second daughter grew.

“Playing me like a fucking marimba,” Lou says softly, resting her hand over Debbie’s, over the taut skin of her belly. It’s funny, she can’t help thinking, the undisguised tenderness with which Debbie touches her. When Debbie was pregnant with Dani, she was all tough shell, and the entire nine months had been a stressful road littered with complications and doctor’s appointments and a couple close calls.

No way in Hell am I doing that again, Debbie swore, and quite understandably. Nope, no way, miracle my ass.

Well then I guess it’s my turn, Lou promised and kissed her against their creaking headboard.

Her turn—an unspeakably weird turn, she realized when first the alien creature moved inside her. Curious, the way it’s spoken on black and white British TV—curious. Weirder, perhaps, Lou woke one more to find Debbie softened like honey, curled around the new-to-them curve of her abdomen and smiling the sweetest thing she’d seen in months. Captivated the way she couldn’t be with Dani, and Lou in turn was bewildered by her.

“No shit,” Debbie whispers now, feeling Nessie (a nickname coined by Rose, of course) press against her hand. “You’re on vacation,” she mutters to the errant alien foot. “Relax.”

Lou tosses back her head and laughs. “Your voice only riles her up,” she says, shooing Debbie away with her hand.

“Her or you?” Debbie retorts, voice full of promise. So far, this vacation has rivaled their honeymoon in terms of good food and better sex.

“Both of us.” She pulls Debbie close and kisses her with fervor, pressing her thumb between Debbie’s thighs to elicit a rewarding groan. “God, you know how hot you are,” Debbie growls, her words slurring into something needy and near-impossible to resist. Debbie pinches the sensitive skin of her breast, and she’s wet already, God help her.

Debbie’s lips are running a full-on expedition of her body, tanned legs straddling her and her hand inside Debbie’s swimsuit, when few sharp sucker punches from the baby force her to break away. Debbie grumbles softly and runs her hand through Lou’s sun-bleached hair.

“More later,” Lou murmurs, low and husky, “when Loch Ness quiets down.” She’s gone on this woman, gone on Debbie Ocean forever. They’re conquering the goddamn world every second they spend in the same room. She doesn’t want Debbie more than three feet away, especially not now.

“Fine,” Debbie acquiesces. It’s playful, frustrated all the same. Debbie stands up at the promise of later. Then, her gaze fixes on the waterfall, and her eyes light up. “Hold my beer.” She shoves her drink into Lou’s hand and races to the pool.

“Fuck you, that’s my line!” Lou calls after her.

“Not anymore!” Debbie clambers up the slick rock, hauling herself onto the rock’s edge. She gets a running start, hurling herself into a front flip that from Lou’s vantage point is executed perfectly. Until it isn’t. Debbie hits the water in what can only be described as the most painful belly flop Lou has ever witnessed. She stands stone-still in the pool for a full minute before making her way to the edge.

“Are you alright, baby?” Lou shouts, half-teasing and half dead serious. Because when Debbie emerges from the water, she is the color of cheap boxed wine from her neck to her knees, pinching her stinging midsection with both hands.

“Fuck off,” Debbie mutters, but she’s chuckling through her pout, an indicator that she’s not severely injured herself.

Lou hands her back the bottle, cocking her eyebrow dangerously. “That’s what happens to people who laugh at me for getting stuck in the jacuzzi.”

6.

It is the twelfth anniversary of the Toussaint heist. Tammy, good friend that she is, offers to host the barbecue. She’s just purchased a backyard trampoline that has automatically made her the “most cool aunt” in the eyes of Dani and Darcy, and really, who can protest?

Debbie the grillmaster is flipping burgers, chatting with Daphne Kluger about her latest endeavor in directing, which is generating a fair amount of Oscar buzz. Amita and Constance are teaching Darcy how to steal jewelry off a person’s body without being caught, and what kind of hypocrite would Lou be o protest that it isn’t a useful life skill? Dani, predictably, has climbed onto the trampoline.

Lou’s heart swells as she watches her daughter bound across the elastic surface. “Hey,” she says to Rose, “hold my beer.”

She strides over to the trampoline and climbs on, shoes and all. She takes a couple steps onto the trampoline. “Hi Ma!” Dani cries enthusiastically.

“Hi Darling, are—” Her feet drop from under her. Apparently, the three-inch stiletto heels on her boots were less than ideal for a sheet of kevlar and rubber, because they’ve split two holes in the trampoline, and the woven strips of it are springing up everywhere, and Lou is flat on her ass beneath it.

Dani peers down at her, howling with laughter. “Ma you broke it!”

Lou scooches out from beneath the gaping hole, ass first, with the shreds of her grace and dignity.

7.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Darcy asks her older sister as Dani straps on her helmet and elbow pads.

“Great idea,” says Dani. She fixes her gaze on the massive pipe she’s rolled into the warehouse parking lot. On the other side of the pipe lies a ramp, and on the other side of that, a curb and chain-link fence she’ll just have to steer away from.

Dani mounts the skateboard and tests its wheels. Sturdy, smooth, waxed.

“You only finished it yesterday,” Darcy says skeptically.

“Yeah but it’s, like, the third prototype. This is the perfect board; trust me.” She’d snatched the old parts from junkyards and the back closets of skate shops and finagled them together into a board all her own.

“You have the camera rolling?” she asks, wiggling her board underfoot. Darcy nods.

“Great.” She quickly tames her hair into a top-knot and adjust the knee-pads on her torn jeans.

“Last chance to back down. If Ma sees you hit that ramp, she’ll read you the riot act,” Darcy warns her.

“Pssssh, have you seen the old photos of her on the motorbike? She used to take it to California and do some crazy shit out in the desert.”

“She still does. Doesn’t mean she’s okay with you hitting that ramp on your skateboard. Don’t be a jackass.”

Dani shrugs. “Takes one to know one, sis,” she says with a grin that her sister quickly returns. “Hold my beer.”

Her drink and camera safely in Darcy’s hands, Dani kicks off down the empty lot. She jumps into the pipe, listening to her wheels rumble on the plastic, then gives herself a boost before hitting the ramp. All of a sudden, she’s flying. It’s fucking fantastic. She flips the board once for good measure and lands beautifully, but before she can gloat the chain link fence is upon her.

Right. This is why you don’t put a ramp near a fence. She collides head on, and damn, she thinks, it’s a good thing this fence is pliable. It spits her back out like a catapult, and she lands on her ass on the concrete.

Darcy runs up to her. “Are you alright?” she repeats, taking Dani’s hand and helping her to her feet.

Dani nods shakily. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, that went great for the first trial. Did you catch me eating it on camera?”