my blog contains smut, hard k1nks, and stuff that would be classified as ‘dead dove, do not eat’. if you are not a fan of this type of content, simply block me and scroll! all my content is intended for mature audiences, and you are responsible for the media you consume ♡
♡ note: no racism, homophobia, zionism, misogyny, pro-MAGA, pro-ICE, fatphobia, or hate of any kind will be allowed on my page.
໒꒰ྀི´ ˘ ` ꒱ྀིა i take ALL requests—any k1nk, au, etc. as of right now, i’m only doing rafe cameron unless stated otherwise, however feel free to submit any prompt you want with him! not all prompts will be completed based off time, motivation, etc 𐔌❤︎ ͡𐦯
warnings: age gap (rafe is 34, reader is 22), cussing, drinking, denial, yearning (like a spec of it closer to the end), you’re Rafe’s investors daughter
a/n: self-serving cause uhh yeah!! I hope you guys enjoy!! I’m not making this a series but maybe some smut or blurbs based off this in future!! If you don’t like this kind of trope, don’t read or complain to me. I have daddy issues and this is my cope. It’s based of the song “You Are My Destiny” by Paul Anka!!
“𝙃𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙚
𝘾𝙖𝙣 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙢𝙚
𝘾𝙖𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝙄'𝙙 𝙗𝙚 𝙖 𝙛𝙤𝙤𝙡 𝙩𝙤 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪
𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝙖 𝙛𝙤𝙤𝙡 𝙄'𝙫𝙚 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙗𝙚𝙚𝙣
𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙢𝙮 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙮, 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙢𝙮 𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚
𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙢𝙮 𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙚, 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩'𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙧𝙚”
Rafe Cameron didn’t mean to fall in love. Truthfully, he didn’t even want to like you. He was meant to focus on work, his investors, and money. And surely, not his investor’s daughter.
Rafe had spent years of his life learning how to separate what he needed and what he wanted, and what he needed was for his company to grow. His investors and business partners trust him enough to keep his name untarnished. He didn’t need the distraction of a twenty-two-year-old woman who looked at him like he hung up the moon and not the man who dominated the finance industry. He didn’t need the way you remembered intricate details about him, the way you laughed when he did his hair differently, or the way you let him rest his head in your lap when the silence of his environment became unbearable.
He especially didn’t need the terrifying realization that somewhere between business meetings and late-night conversations at random bars, you’d become the one thing he found impossible to leave alone. Rafe couldn't convince himself to let you go. He could walk away from his family easily. Lay off employees or drop partners.
But you, he was stubborn about you.
The first time you two met, Rafe didn’t think anything of it. That definitely bothered him later.
There wasn’t some grand moment where the entire room went quiet and he saw you in slow-mo and rose colored lighting with your hair blowing in the wind, no stumbling over his words. Rafe always believed people exaggerated those things. He thought love was something people edited too much, something that was made to sound more magical and full of bliss than it really was. He thought he never had space for it anyway, so why should he care. He’s spent years making sure he was never in the right place for anything like that. Love was vulnerability.
Rafe Cameron was not vulnerable.
He hated the idea of exposing himself, letting someone reach into him and know the parts of himself he hated. He wanted everyone to know him as a businessman before they knew him as a real person. It was easier. Easier for respect, rather than love. Easier to be feared than to be disappointed.
Love meant getting hurt and being left in the burning house. Rafe couldn’t go through that again.
So went he walked into an investor gala one night, he had no intention of finding anything besides another conversation, a few more handshakes, and plans of deals that would benefit his company. That’s what all these events were for.
Your father’s company has been one of Rafe’s biggest investors for two years now. Rafe already knew who you were before you ever introduced yourself.
He knew your last name, your family, and he knew the world you came from.
He didn’t think you were a bad person. He was aware you grew up around money, you have money, and you spend said money a lot. You’ve had lavish birthday parties since 18 on “The Y/n”, the yacht your father named after you. You wore near $400 dollar sweatpants because “it has angel wings on the waistband”, and you got an Aston Martin DB9 just last year as a graduation gift from your mother. There were a lot of markers that you weren’t lacking in money or material items.
At the gala, you’d been around people your age on the terrace drinking and passing around a cigar. He wasn’t very far off from you, his assistant was telling him who he would talk to and who he should avoid. You looked at him and pointed, which made everyone one else in your group look at him. He couldn’t hear what he said, but he could read your lips. You’d said something along the lines of “why the hell” and “he looks dumb”, chased with laughter from you and the others.
Rafe felt his face heat up out of embarrassment. The nerve of you. Maybe you were exactly what he thought you were. A spoiled prissy rich girl with no regard for anyone but yourself. Gosh, why’d he feel so embarrassed. He’d closed multi-million-dollar deals but he’s managed to feel hurt by a drunk woman 12 years younger than him.
He’d been looking in your general direction for awhile and basically tuning out his assistant. He didn’t hear her say,”You got that?”
She tapped his shoulder,”Mr. Cameron?”
Rafe blinked and tore his eyes away from you like cold water had just been splashed on him,”What?”
His assistant stared at him for a few seconds before letting out a long sigh, flipping back through the portfolio in her hands. “The CEO of Whitmore and Whitmore. You need to speak with him before eight. Then Mr. Bennett and his wife. After that, the Klein merger discussion.”
Rafe nodded and checked his watch,”Right.”
“You weren’t listening at all, were you?”
“I was.”
“No you weren’t.”
Rafe straightened his jacket cuff, clearing his throat as though that somehow covered the fact that hed just spent the better part of five minutes watching a girl he’d never met making a mockery of him from across the terrace,”I just got distracted.”
His assistant followed his previous line of sight before looking back with an expression he couldn’t really place,”Oh.”
“What?”
She smiled to herself,”Nothing.”
Rafe narrowed his eyes,”What?”
“I just…didnt think you’d be distracted by…” She glanced toward you again “…that.”
His jaw tightened,”I’m not.”
“Right.”
“I’m not.”
“If you say so..”
She walked off before he could argue, leaving him standing there with an irritation that had nothing to do with her or this dumb gala. It had everything to do with you. Usually when he got ridiculed (which was more often than he’d admit), the logical part of his brain told him to forget the interaction entirely. Somebody laughed at him.
So what?
People would always laugh, always talk, and always have something to say about what one does or doesn’t do. He had more important things to worry about. He literally had investors waiting, contracts that needed signatures, and a whole company with hundreds of employees depending on him to make the right decisions.
He shouldn’t have cared.
He didn’t care.
Then why the fuck did he keep looking back? Every few conversations, his eyes would wander back toward the terrace or he’d try to find a glimpse of your dress or your hair or your face.
You’d be talking. You’d be laughing. You looked like you belonged nowhere near a room full of people discussing quarterly earnings and market forecasts. Everyone else around you did belong here, no matter how hard they tried to pretend.
It didn’t make sense.
You were your father’s daughter. Hell, you’d grown up around these people. You should’ve been inside schmoozing executives and memorizing names you would probably need twenty years from now. Instead, you were sitting on a wide stone railing overlooking the city, heels hanging on by the pads of your feet while you absentmindedly swung one foot back and forth.
Rafe frowned and muttered to himself,”Well, that can’t be safe.” As if you heard him, you strategically put yourself back on the ground.
A waiter walked past you, carrying a tray of drinks. Before the man would continue, you reached over and stopped him, not to take a glass, but because one of the champagne flutes on the tray had started to slide. You’d caught it before it fell. The waiter smiled gratefully and you smiled back.
“No,” you answered with a laugh,”Thank you. I mean, you’ve been carrying those things all night long. So what? That a bunch of rich people could ruin their livers even more?” The waiter laughed at your joke and went back to work.
Rafe looked away almost immediately. For some reason…that irritated him. Because it didn’t fit.
Spoiled girls weren’t supposed to help waiters. They didn’t say thank you with genuinity. They weren’t supposed to laugh with the staff.
He found himself seriously searching for reasons to dislike you. Undoubtedly, there had to be one.
Then, as if sensing someone watching, your head turned. Your eyes met his own again. To Rafe’s surprise, you smiled instead of pointing. You lifted your glass a little in his direction, mouthing something he couldn’t quite make out.
He stared—squinting his eyes, and mouthing back,”What?”
Your lips moved again,”Sorry.”
Rafe blinked. Sorry?
You laughed a little, them more but you covered your mouth with your hand and walked back into the crowd, leaving him more confused than before. He didn’t know why that bothered him. Maybe it was because he decided you were a bitch before he saw how you acted.
And now, less than ten minutes later, that version of you he’d made up in his head and hated so much, was already dissolving.
That was a problem. A big problem. Because Rafe Cameron spent the entire night trying to prove you were exactly what he expected. But somehow, without even trying, you’d done the one thing nobody had ever managed to make him do.
You made him curious.
Unfortunately or Rafe Cameron, curiosity was dangerous. Curiosity meant he was thinking about you now.
Rafe had spent years of his life making sure he didn’t think about things that didn’t matter. He didn’t wonder about people. He didn’t replay conversations in his head or analyze the meaning behind someone’s smile. That was a waste of time, and Rafe Cameron did not waste his time.
At least, that was what he told himself. The truth was that he had thought about you more than we wanted to admit. Not enough to concern himself, but just enough to be irritating. He kept remembering the way you looked at him during the gala, completely unaware that you were supposed to be intimidated or take him seriously. He remembered the way you laughed when he looked confused. He remembered the way you apologized, like you actually cared that you had embarrassed him.
He hated that he remembered, because remembering meant you had left some kind of impression. Rafe didn’t let people leave impressions. People came and went. Relationships changed. Partnerships ended. Friends disappeared. Family disappointed you.
That was life.
That was normal.
So when your father invited him to the country club a few weeks later to discuss future investments and business plans, Rafe didn’t think anything of it.
Or at least, he convinced himself he didn’t.
It was business.
That was all it was.
A meeting.
A conversation.
A few hours of talking numbers with someone who had helped build his company into what it was today. Nothing more. Definitely not an excuse to see if you were as interesting as you had seemed that night.
Definitely not.
The golf course was exactly what Rafe expected. A place filled with wealthy men pretending that standing outside in designer polos somehow made them more relaxed. It was the same world he had always existed in. The same conversations. The same carefully planned smiles and handshakes.
Everyone wanted something.
Everyone always wanted something.
Rafe had just finished speaking with one of the club employees when he heard laughter. Not the fake kind.Not the polite, controlled kind he heard during meetings. A real laugh.
He knew it was yours before he even looked.
That annoyed him.
Because he shouldn’t have known. He turned his head anyway.
And there you were.
Except you looked nothing like the version of you he had created in his mind.
At the gala, he had seen expensive clothes, champagne, and a group of people who looked like they had never been told no.
Here, you looked completely different.
You were standing on the grass in a simple golf outfit, your hair pulled back, sunglasses resting on top of your head. Your dog was running around you happily tugging against the leash, completely ignoring the fact that the two of you were probably ruining someone’s perfectly maintained lawn.
“Cameron!” Your father’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts.
He looked over and immediately straightened his posture.
Business mode.
“Good morning.”
Your father smiled and shook his hand. “Glad you could make it.”
“Of course.”
They exchanged a few words about the course, the weather, and the upcoming meeting.
Rafe tried to focus. He really did.
But then you looked over and smiled like you were actually happy to see him.
“Finance guy.”
Rafe stared.
Your father looked between the two of you.
“Finance guy?”
You shrugged, scratching behind your dog’s ears.
“I didn’t know his name at first.”
Rafe raised an eyebrow.
“And now?”
“Now I do.”
You smiled.
“Mr. Cameron, or as my dad calls you, Rafe.”
Something about hearing his name from you felt strangely different.
Which was ridiculous.
It was his name.
People said it every day. Employees, Partners, friends.
But from you, it sounded less like a title and more like you were actually talking to him. Not the company. Not the reputation.
“You remember me,” you said.
Rafe looked at you,“I’m not sure if that’s surprising.”
You laughed, “It is. I embarrassed you.”
“You did.”
You covered your mouth, trying not to laugh again, “Wow. You really hold onto things.”
“I remember things.”
“Like people laughing at you?”
“Especially that.”
The smile on your face widened.
And despite himself…
Rafe almost smiled back.
Almost.
Your father eventually walked away to speak with another businessman, leaving the two of you standing there. For a moment, neither of you said anything.
Strangely, it wasn’t uncomfortable. That was the part Rafe noticed. Usually silence with people felt like something he had to fix. Something he had to fill with a question or a business conversation.
You just stood there, watching your dog run around.
“You don’t golf,” Rafe finally said.
You looked over,“What?”
“You’re holding a club, but you haven’t actually played.”
You looked down at the club in your hand then back at him.
Rafe looked away and for some reason, that made you laugh. He realized something he didn’t particularly like. He didn’t mind you. Not even a little.
Rafe stopped asking if you would be there. You just were. Sometimes you would sit next to your father quietly writing notes in the margins of meeting papers that nobody else bothered to read. At times, your father would find you walking around the lobby with a coffee stopping every few feet to talk to someone. It didn’t matter who they were. Receptionists, security guards, assistants, janitors. You spoke to all of them in the way like they were people before they were employees.
Rafe noticed this. He noticed everything. He noticed that you always bit your thumbnail when you were thinking, he noticed that you couldn’t sit through a meeting without drawing little stars in your notebook, he noticed that you didn’t like coffee but you drank it anyway when you forgot to order your usual vanilla latte, he noticed hat your laugh changed depending on who you were with. It was softer around your father and way louder around your friends.
He noticed things that he should not have noticed…every new thing he noticed stuck with him until he couldn’t think about anything else. It got so bad that Rafe started looking for you before he looked for your father. This made him feel sick.
Your father was his investor. Your father was the reason Rafe went to these meetings. Your father was the man who could change the course of Rafe's company with his signature. So why was Rafe looking for you everywhere? Why did every conversation feel long if you were not there? Why did he remember things about you more clearly than the numbers he had been memorizing all week?
It was near impossible to understand. Rafe had built his life on being disciplined. Discipline got him through tough negotiations, tough years. It kept his emotions in check. It kept him alive. So why was discipline not working for him now?
It was one thirty in the morning when Rafe finally admitted to himself that he had not done anything in over an hour. The lights from the light posts and opposite office buildings shone through the windows of his office making the glass look like mirrors that reflected a man he did not know. His laptop was open in front of him with three contracts waiting for his approval. His phone buzzed with emails that he normally would have answered away.
He had not even read a word, staring at the sentence for forty three minutes. Rafe rubbed his eyes slowly. Leaned back in his chair letting out a tired breath. "What is wrong with me?" he asked. There was no answer. He laughed. It’s not funny. It was due to the fact that the alternative was admitting that he had lost control of himself.
Rafe had survived times. Hostile takeovers, public scandals, the end of relationships that were supposed to last forever. He had buried people he loved. He had rebuilt companies from nothing.
The thing that was breaking him was not another businessman or money or failure. It was you. A woman who laughed loudly who thanked waiters like they were old friends, who remembered that Rafe liked to sit by the window during meetings because he liked watching the city.
Rafe put his head in his hands. He didn’t get why his chest felt tight whenever you smiled at him. He did not understand why he looked up whenever he heard your voice from the side of the room. He didn’t understand why after twelve years of making sure nobody could matter this much you had walked into his life and changed everything.
His eyes burned. It wasn’t because of tears . It was because he was tired. Tired of pretending he was not looking for you. Tired of pretending his heartbeat did not change whenever your name came up in conversation. Tired of telling himself that this would pass if he just ignored it enough.
It wasn’t passing. It was getting worse every day, every conversation, every time you smiled at him. Every smile chipped away at the walls he had built around himself. Rafe got up and walked around his office stopping in front of the window that looked out over the city. His reflection stared back at him. A thirty four year man who had built an empire who could negotiate big contracts without getting nervous who never doubted himself.
Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about one person. One.
Rafe's throat felt tight. Quietly he whispered to the office "I do not know what is happening to me." The silence that followed felt unbearable. Because for the time, in years Rafe Cameron did not have a solution.
I LOVE your sugar daddy Rafe x bratty reader fic!! Their dynamic is so funny and cute🥹🩷 do you have any thoughts about Rafe taking her on a shopping trip? I feel like she’d have sm fun going to all her favorite stores while he opens the door for her and holds all her bags and uses his credit card🥰
𝙋𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜: sugar daddy!Rafe Cameron x bratty!reader
𝙒𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: 18+, minors dni, daddy kink, sugar daddy x baby relationship except they’re also actually in a relationship, age gap (Rafe is in early-mid 30s, reader is in early 20s), MAJORRR misogyny and sexism, objectification, babying, super condescending, SEXIST RAFE!, touching, fondling, blowjob in public, power imbalance, I think that’s it.
𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙮: Rafe’s having a business meeting and you decide to interrupt…
𝘼/𝙉: yet another surprise little drabble! I love writing these two, let me know what you think! and any other scenarios you wanna see them in!
“Hold this, pretty please.”
You toss another item of clothing at him without so much as a glance back. Too in your zone. You got like that whenever he took you shopping. Which was practically every other day since spending his money was your favourite pastime.
“This could be done online.” Rafe balances the light pink miniskirt on top of all the other shit you have him holding, along with the five shopping bags of things he’s already bought you. “I have better shit to be doing right now.”
It’s a bold faced lie. Taking you shopping turns him on more than anything else. It’s the way you just go to town with his American Express like you’ve got no other care in the world. Which you don’t. He takes care of everything. And gets off on seeing you buying random shit with his money. Drives in the fact he owns you completely.
“But daddy, we still have shoes left. And lingerie. And then something to eat, maybe?”
You blink up at him cutely, and he’s aware you know exactly what you’re doing. Knows he can’t resist you when you get like this. That’s why you’d dressed up all sweet today too. In this little pink dress with the ribbons, flouncing around the mall like some goddamned Tinkerbell, holding onto his hand before something shiny and exciting inevitably distracts you.
“Fuck shoes,” he growls, “you’ll take hours in there.”
“So what you’re saying is you don’t love me.” You cross your arms over your chest (your completely free arms because God forbid you hold a shopping bag. Not that he’d let you anyways).
“What I’m saying is I’ll book the store out for you tomorrow, and you can come back and not have to deal with people or lines or shit like that.”
You frown, considering it before finally smiling. Going on your tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek, “Okay fine. But you owe me, because I wanted new shoes today.”
“Sure, princess.” You and him both know who really owes who. And he’d get his end of the deal whenever he so pleased. “One more store and then we’re done for the day.”
You roll your eyes and huff, go through your whole bratty shtick of how “he’s sooo unfair” and how you had a “whole list of things I still need to buy!” He waits for you to be done and sure enough, soon you’re all smiles again.
“Okay, let’s go to Victoria’s Secret!” You announce after he’s finished paying for the latest round of clothes you’ve chosen. You drag him out of the store, but it’s only after a few seconds that you stop and pout, “Why aren’t you holding my hand?”
Rafe wonders if you try to wind him up on purpose. He knows you’re not as much of an airhead as you sometimes pretend to be. Now, he simply stares at you, his hands very clearly full and occupied by the shit ton of Prada and Louis Vuitton shopping bags.
But you just smile sweetly and hold your hand out. In the end, Rafe sighs and shakes his head, offering you his pinkie finger that you happily hold on to.
“You’re a piece of work.”
“You love it.”
You go wild inside the Victoria’s Secret store. Rafe hands all the shopping bags to one of the sales associates as he watches you in your element. Picking out everything pink and glittery, leopard print, rhinestones, lace. He comes up behind you and slips his hand up your skirt, squeezing your bare ass. You giggle, but you know better than to push his hand away.
He nods at a red lacy set on a mannequin, then at the sales associate, “She’ll try that one.”
“Yes, sir.”
The VIP dressing room is dimly lit and spacious. Rafe sprawls out on the velvet sofa, eyes dark as you model one set after another for him. He nods at all the frilly pink shit you try on, the silk negligees that show off your pretty legs, and push up bras that make your tits look fucking insane.
“Can you buy me angel wings, dada? Like the models have in the fashion show?”
“If you’re good.”
His jaw clenches when you come out in a lacy black corset and matching g-string. You give him a twirl and he gets a good look at your cute little ass on full display. His palm itches to spank it.
“This one is soooo cute,” you gush, “I think I’ll wear it to Sarah’s costume party this weekend.”
“You’re not going to any parties dressed in that.”
You roll your eyes, “Obviously I’d wear it with like shorts or a skirt or something. And a cute kitty tail and ears.”
Rafe licks his lips, “Kitty huh?”
You smile cutely, “yes daddy.”
He motions for you to get down on your knees, not really having to say anything because he’s got you trained well enough to understand orders based on a look. He crooks his finger, beckons you closer.
“Crawl.”
You both know how much he gets off on it, the power he has over you. You were a little brat and he spoiled you rotten but in the end, he could make you do anything. Snap his fingers and you’d come running. Spread your legs for him if he so pleased. Crawl over to him like a little kitty cat in a public dressing room because he said so. Because he paid for your life. And he owned you.
He pets your head lazily, stroking your hair while you nuzzle against his hand like a good little pet in your sexy lingerie. Looking up at him through those sexy long lashes. He smirks.
“You wear this to a party and I’ll make sure it’s the last one you ever attend.”
You pout, but he presses his thumb into your mouth to silence you, allows you to suck on it to keep your tantrum at bay.
“You can still get the kitty ears. Wear ‘em in bed for when I come home from work. Maybe we can get you a collar and leash too.”
He makes you stand up, give him a few more twirls before slapping your butt and sending you to try on the next set. It’s the red one he’d chosen, barely conceals anything, just tiny strips of lacy red fabric and a bunch of strings.
Rafe grabs the front of your panties, dragging you into his lap till you’re straddling him. His patience is wearing thin, and you’re being a little tease with how you’re flaunting your cute, sexy body at him. As if he didn’t own you and could have his way with you whenever he pleased.
“Knees.”
It’s all he has to say and then you’re on the floor between his legs. You scowl though, because you’re you and of course you would, “Floor’s uncomfortable.”
“I don’t care. Take it out.”
You do. He’s got you trained well enough. And it’s so hot, your hand wrapping around his dick, expensive manicured fingernails gleaming against the dim lights. He grabs your hair, pushing your head down. You take him like a good girl, as deep as you possibly can. None of that kitten licks shit because you know he’d beat your ass if you tried that right now.
“Good girl,” he mutters, stroking your hair back and making sure you’re looking at him. Watches your lips stretch out on his fat dick as you bob your head and suck him how he likes it, “So cute on your knees.”
It’s definitely Rafe’s favourite part of these shopping trips. You could be as bratty as you wanted but at the end of the day, you’d always be on your knees for him. His property, his pet, and he kept you looking so pretty and expensive. His bratty little girl, all dressed up in head to toe designer, complaining and throwing your cute little tantrums but never once daring to say no to him when he wanted you.
A successful investment.
He finishes down your throat, watching you swallow before pulling you into his lap for a rough, possessive kiss. You’re all submissive and shy now, cuddling into him with nothing left to say.
It never lasted long though.
Sure enough, once his car’s been loaded up with all your shopping and he’s put you in the passenger seat that you finally speak again.
pov. reader pranks rafe by calling him her friend, and he shows her what friends don’t do.
content warnings. ⸝⸝ fem reader, cussing, missionary, degrading, praising, face grabbing, no proof read, teasing, dom!rafe, sub!reader, penetration, slight mention of throat grabbing, edging(?)
your phone was already recording before rafe even wandered into frame. “rafe!” you called out.
he got up from the living room couch and came to you soon as he heard his name. you were standing at the kitchen island with some overpriced drink you’d bought because your followers kept asking you to try it, the front camera angled just enough to catch both of you. they also requested you to prank him, and who are you to say no?
rafe leaned against the counter beside you, absentmindedly spinning his truck keys around one finger while watching you talk to the camera. he was focused on his plans with golfing, so he wasn’t paying much attention to what you were saying, only half listening as he reached over and stole the drink out of your hand for a sip.
you laughed, pulling it back. “give it—” you say, watching him drink it. “it’s not even good,” he muttered after swallowing, setting it back in front of you. his disgust settling faintly on his face.
you rolled your eyes dramatically toward the camera. “anyway,” you continued, “my friend picked this one out, so if it’s disgusting, blame him.” you say to the camera, and then silence leaked into the conversation, not from you, but from him.
you noticed it almost immediately. rafe didn’t move, he didn’t even blink at first. it was almost like he was he was freezing to contain himself.
“…fuck you just say?” he asked, his eyes look in at yours. you looked over innocently. “my friend.” you echo, and his eyebrows pulled together into an scowl. “what’d you just call me?” he questioned, and you frowned like you genuinely had no idea what he was talking about. “…my friend?” you repeated.
he stared at you for another second, waiting for you to laugh, but you didn’t. instead, you turned right back toward the camera. “he picked it because he said it’d be good.” you said to the camera, smiling.
“i’m your friend?” he asked again, his voice was flatter now. you looked back again. “yeah.” you say, your face straight and tone nothing but serious.
you were looking at him as if he was crazy and that bit at his patience. “no.” he replied, and you blinked slowly as if you were just trying to piss him off…you were.
“..no?” you echo, and he continues glaring at you. “don’t call me that.” he demand but you let out a confused little laugh. “why?” you ask. “cause i’m not your friend.” he answered and you tilted your head, brows furrowed in confusion.
“yes, you are.” you reply.
he looked at you like you’d just said the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. “…what?” he asked, but not wanting an actual answer. “you’re my friend.” but you gave it anyway.
“no, i’m not.” he defends, shaking his head side to side.
“rafe,” you laughed, “you literally are.” you continue, and his jaw flexed. “no, i literally ain’t.” he corrected, you tilted your head, toying with his patience. “but you are.” you add. he let out a slow breath through his nose, trying very hard to stay patient.
“that’s not what i am.” he says. “then what are you?” you asked, testing even more how far you could take this. he gave you an incredulous look. “…seriously?”
you only shrugged.
“i mean… you’re my friend.” you said, and silence settled once again. this time, the tension was thick. he looked from you to the phone, then back to you. his irritation was starting to be visible now. “are you hearin’ yourself?”
you frowned. “what?” you asked. “friends?” he quoted you and he scoffed under his breath.
“friends don’t fu—” he stopped himself due to the video, pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek before shaking his head. “nevermind.” he mumbled.
you rolled your eyes to smoothly hide your face so you could at least grin from your suppressed laughter. you then looked up at him with the straightest face you could possibly have. “what?” you ask.
“nothing.” he replied, then he looked away for a second, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck before looking back at you. “don’t call me that.” he commanded.
“why are you getting so worked up?” you asked, genuinely selling the confusion. “you are my friend.” you stated, his head tipped back for a second in disbelief. “i’m your boyfriend.” he corrected. “yeah…” you said, dragging the word out.
“…and?” he asked, gesturing his hands as if he wants you to speed up the word and finish the sentence. “…boyfriends are friends.” you state and he let out a dry laugh. “that’s not the point.” he said, getting serious. “i don’t see the problem.” you admit and he stared at you in response. “course you don’t.” he comments, his annoyance finally slipped into his voice.
“you stand there, lookin’ me dead in the face, callin’ me your friend like we’ve just been… hangin’ out.” he describes, his eyes never looking away from your eyes. “we do hang out.” you reply.
he shut his eyes for a brief second. “jesus christ.” he mutters to himself and you smiled sweetly at him in response. “what?” you ask. he points at himself. “i’m your boyfriend.” he corrects and you shake your head side to side. “no, you’re my friend.”
“oh yeah? i’m just your friend, now?” he asked, his tone dripping with dare. you swallow, his eye contact making you nervous. “yes.” you confirm and he stared at you for another long second before snatching up your phone and ending the video.
his thick cock pushes into you in one rough thrust, stretching you so wide you gasp, back arching hard off the mattress as you try to adjust to the sudden fullness. he’s so deep already, buried to the hilt, your walls fluttering around his girth.
“look at me,” he orders, his voice low. you barely manage to focus, eyes glassy, when his hand roughly grabs your jaw, fingers digging into your cheeks as he forces your face up to meet his intense stare. his hips snap forward again, fucking into you harder, making your tits bounce with every thrust.
“is this what a friend does to you, huh?” rafe questions, eyes filled with tease, his cock dragging against that perfect spot inside you over and over. you’re so full, so overwhelmed, the words stick in your throat. only broken whimpers escape as he keeps pounding into you, the wet sounds of your pussy filling the room.
“answer me,” he demands, tightening his grip on your face, hips never slowing. your back arches sharply again, trying to take him deeper, adjust to how thick he feels splitting you open. your nails dig into his shoulders as you finally grunt out, voice wrecked, “no!”
rafe smirks, satisfied, and leans down to bite at your neck while he fucks you even harder, claiming every inch of you like he’s proving exactly how far from ‘friends’ you really are.
rafe doesn’t let up for a second, his hips slamming into you with punishing force, driving his thick cock so deep your eyes roll back. the wet slap of skin on skin echoes louder as he fucks you harder into the mattress, your legs spread wider around his waist.
“fuckin’ look at you,” he taunts, voice rough and mocking as his hand stays locked on your jaw, forcing your hazy eyes back to his. “so cock drunk on your supposed friend’s dick already. can’t even think straight, can you? just taking it like a good little slut.” he teased.
you try to respond but another brutal thrust knocks the air from your lungs. your back arches even harder, pussy clenching tight around his girth as he grinds against that spot that makes your toes curl. words won’t form, only broken moans and gasps spill out while he rails you.
“such a slutty little thing,” rafe sneers, leaning closer so his breath fans hot against your lips, hips snapping relentlessly. “got a boyfriend waiting somewhere and here you are, legs spread wide open for me. letting your ‘friend’ stretch this pretty pussy out. bet he doesn’t fuck you like this, does he?” he teased again.
you’re shaking under him, overwhelmed, body jolting with every deep stroke. your nails rake down his back but you can’t manage a single sentence, just pathetic whimpers as he pounds you senseless.
he chuckles darkly, thumb brushing your bottom lip before he grips your face tighter. “is this what you want, huh? my attention? my cock ruining you?” he punctuates the question with a particularly hard thrust that makes you cry out, walls fluttering wildly around him. “answer me, baby. tell me this is exactly what that slutty pussy needs.” but you can’t.
you’re too full, too fucked out, only able to moan and arch into him as rafe keeps driving into you without mercy, owning every inch while he teases you mercilessly in that low, filthy voice, dripping with his annoyance he had before toward you.
“you love this, don’t you?” he growls, voice low and taunting, grinding deep before pulling back and slamming in again. “tell me, baby. do you love me? huh?” he asks.
you’re so cock drunk, eyes glassy and unfocused, but you nod repeatedly, fast and desperate, your body jolting with every thrust as broken whimpers spill from your lips. your move closer, trying to take him even deeper, pussy clenching around his girth like you never want him to pull out.
rafe’s smirk, satisfied. he leans in closer, lips brushing yours as he fucks you harder, hips relentless. “yeah? then what are you to me? say it. what the fuck are you to me?” he asked.
you’re gasping, barely able to form words, but the pressure of his cock dragging against your walls forces it out between moans. your voice comes out wrecked and breathy, “you’re not my friend—i love you—” you babble.
the words break off into a loud moan as he rewards you with a particularly deep thrust, burying himself to the hilt and staying there, grinding slow and filthy while he stares down at you with hunger.
“damn right i’m not your fuckin’ friend,” he hisses, finally releasing your jaw only to slide his hand down and wrap it around your throat, squeezing just enough to make your head spin as he starts railing you again.
rafe’s thrusts grow erratic, harder and deeper, his thick cock swelling inside your tight, fluttering walls as he chases his own release, while he stares down at your wrecked face. “gonna fill this slutty pussy up,” he growls, hips snapping forward with punishing force. “bad girls like you don’t get to cum, but i do. take it.” he comments.
you’re shaking, so close, desperately trying to grind up against him, but he pins your hips down with his weight and fucks you even rougher.
your moans turn into broken sobs of pleasure as he buries himself to the hilt one last time, groaning low and filthy as he cums hard inside you. thick, hot spurts flood your pussy, pulsing deep while he grinds through it, making sure every drop stays buried in you.
you clench around him, right on the edge, whimpering and arching, begging with your body for just a little more.
but rafe pulls out slowly, his spent cock dragging against your sensitive walls, leaving you empty and aching. his cum leaks out of your stretched hole as he sits back on his heels, breathing heavy, a cruel smirk on his lips.
“bad girls don’t get to cum,” he says, voice rough and mocking as he watches you squirm. “you wanna joke about me being your friend on your little tiktok shit? then you can stay dripping with my load and unsatisfied like the desperate slut you are.” he stated.
he leans down, pressing a mocking kiss to your forehead while you whine and try to reach for him, thighs trembling.
in which i present to you rafe cameron x hypersexual!ditzy!reader headcannons!!
too many warnings to state them but lots of kinky things & not proofread.
hypersexual!reader who is absolutely insufferable about his hands, and not in a subtle way. she’ll stop mid sentence in a crowded room just to grab his wrist and examine his fingers like they’re a museum exhibit, turning them over and tracing the veins, murmuring “god, look at these.” under her breath while rafe tries to carry on a conversation with topper like his girlfriend isn’t openly ogling his knuckles. the obsession reaches a tipping point one lazy afternoon when she’s lying across his lap on the couch, supposedly napping, but instead she’s pressing soft, open mouthed kisses to his palm, his fingertips, the inside of his wrist. rafe lets her for a full minute, tension coiling in his gut, before he curls those same fingers under her chin and tilts her face up. “you got a problem?” he asks, voice already sandpaper rough. she blinks up at him, lip gloss smeared, and says with devastating sincerity, “just thinking about how good they feel inside me.” he has her bent over the arm of the couch within seconds, two fingers knuckle deep while she keens and babbles about how she knew they’d feel this perfect, she’s been thinking about it all day, and his hands are her favorite thing maybe ever. he makes her count each orgasm on those fingers after, holding them up, slick and shining, while she whines and loses track at three.
hypersexual!reader who talks during sex, genuine, unfiltered stream of consciousness rambling that should ruin the mood but somehow never does. he'll be balls deep, bottomed out inside of her, her back arching off the mattress, and she'll gasp out, "oh my god, wait, did i tell you what sarah said about the—oh—the party? she said kelce might not—right there, right there—bring a date and i said—" and rafe laughs against her neck, low and breathless, and says, "baby, baby. love you, but i swear to god i’m gonna need you to stop talking about kelce right now." and she'll blink up at him, dazed and flushed, and whisper, "m’ sorry. you just make my brain go all fuzzy." and then he's kissing her again because she's so unbelievably ridiculous and he puts up with it.
hypersexual!reader who has a habit of asking for the most unhinged things in the sweetest voice, like she's requesting a refill on her iced latte. they'll be lying in bed, post round one, her tracing patterns on his chest while he catches his breath, and she'll prop her chin on his sternum and say, "hey, rafey? can you choke me next time? like, not too hard, but hard enough that i feel it the next day?" and he just blinks at the ceiling for a solid five seconds before looking down at her with an expression somewhere between disbelief and desperate arousal. "you can't just say shit like that," he manages, voice wrecked, and she tilts her head like a confused kitten and says, "why not? you'd be so good at it! you've got such big hands." he has to take a moment. then he rolls her onto her back, wraps a careful palm around her throat, and watches her eyes flutter shut with a breathy little "finally." that makes him dizzy. she babbles through the whole thing about how safe she feels, how much she trusts him, how she knew he'd be perfect at this too, and afterward she's so blissed out she just curls into his side and murmurs, "told you," before passing out cold.
hypersexual!reader she has a habit of crawling into his lap during the most inconvenient moments, and rafe has stopped being surprised by it. movie night? she's sideways in his lap, legs hooked over the armrest, twirling her hair and whispering commentary about the film directly into his ear. family dinner at the camerons'? she's perched on his thigh like it's her assigned seat, passing him bread rolls and trailing her fingers up his forearm under the table until he has to excuse himself to adjust his pants. the worst, or best, depending on who's asking, is when he's on the phone with barry, pacing the driveway and trying to handle business, and she pads out in nothing but his button down, climbs onto his lap right there on the porch bench, and starts kissing his neck. "i'm on the phone," he mouths, but she just smiles against his pulse point and whispers, "i'll be quiet," in a tone that promises she absolutely will not. barry hangs up three minutes into rafe's increasingly distracted responses, and rafe doesn't even call him back.
hypersexual!reader who develops a pavlovian response to the sound of his belt unbuckling, which would be embarrassing if she had any shame left. it starts during a particularly tense fight that isn't really a fight, just him wound tight from a deal gone sideways, pacing his room like a caged animal, and she's perched on her knees on the bed trying to figure out how to help. he yanks his belt free in one sharp motion, more frustration than intent, and she just melts. visibly. pupils blowing wide, thighs pressing together, a tiny involuntary sound catching in her throat. he freezes, belt still in hand, looks at her with that slow, calculating head tilt, and pieces it together instantly. "oh, you like that?" his voice drops into something dark and curious, and she can only nod, glossy lips parted, completely caught. now he uses it against her constantly. will casually start loosening his belt in public just to watch her squirm, hooking his thumb in the leather with a half smirk while she completely loses her train of thought mid conversation. the first time he wraps it around his knuckles and uses the folded leather to tap her inner thigh, gentle, teasing. she makes a sound she's never made before, and he adds it to his mental arsenal.
hypersexual!reader who discovers a mirror kink by accident, or maybe not, because everything she does feels calculated in a way rafe is still learning to decode. they're in his bathroom, her freshly showered and perched on the marble counter in just a towel, him standing between her legs while she complains about having to move her nail appointment. he's half listening, more focused on the way her towel's slipping, when she glances at the mirror behind him and just stops talking. her eyes lock on their reflection, on the way his bare back looks, on her own post shower glow, and she breathes out a tiny "oh" that's all curiosity and zero shame. "wait," she says, pushing at his chest until he turns around, until she's facing the mirror with him pressed up behind her, "i wanna watch." and rafe gets so hard so fast he has to brace his hands on the counter. she watches herself with wide, greedy eyes the whole time, chattering away about how pretty they look together, how good he fills her up, how she wishes she could film it for later, and he comes harder than he has in weeks, face buried in her damp hair, rearranging his entire mental list of turn ons around this single moment. the mirror fogs up by the end, and she draws a little heart in the condensation with her fingertip, prints still smudged on the glass, and hums, "we should do that again tonight." and they do.
hypersexual!reader who gets it in her head that she wants to roleplay the classic "stranger at a bar" scenario, and rafe's initial reaction is a flat, unimpressed stare. "you want me to pretend i don't know you?" he says, leaning against the kitchen counter with a beer in hand, and she's already bouncing on her heels in a dress that barely covers her ass, nodding so fast her earrings jangle. "it'll be fun! you'll be all mysterious and broody—well, broodier—and i’ll be a ditzy little thing you pick up." he takes a long sip, eyes narrowing. "you are a ditzy little thing i picked up." she gasps, hand flying to her chest in mock offense, but her grin is pure trouble. "rafe! be meaner. pretend you don't like me yet." so he does. he slides onto the stool next to her with a cold, appraising look that sends a shiver down her spine, and orders a whiskey without breaking eye contact. she plays her part so well, twirling her hair, biting her glossed lip, asking if he comes here often in that breathy, clueless voice, that he almost forgets they've been together for months. by the time he's got her spawned out on the kitchen island, her legs on his shoulders and his name a wrecked chant on her lips, she's babbling about how he's so good at this, how she felt like she was cheating on him with him, and he just laughs against her throat, a low, surprised sound, and says, "you're batshit, you know that?" she hums, nails raking down his back.
hypersexual!reader who has a thing for waking him up with her mouth, which rafe discovers on a random tuesday when he blinks awake to find her already under the covers, working him over with the kind of lazy, unhurried dedication that says she's been at it for a while. "what the f—" he starts, voice wrecked with sleep, and she pops up from under the blanket like a daisy, hair a mess, lip gloss long gone, and beams at him. "morning baby. you just looked so pretty, i couldn't help myself." he stares at her, chest heaving, one hand fisting the sheets while his brain reboots, and she just ducks back down without waiting for a response. it becomes a thing after that, he never knows when he's gonna wake up to her mouth or her hands or her already sinking down onto him with a contented little sigh, murmuring about how she couldn't sleep and he felt so warm next to her and she just wanted to feel close. he starts going to bed earlier just to give her more time, not that he'd ever admit it. one morning she's so focused she doesn't notice he's awake until he's flipping them over and pinning her wrists, "my turn" against her throat, and she just giggles and spreads her legs wider and says, "finally! i was getting lonely up here."
hypersexual!reader who gets obsessed with the idea of being his "good girl" in the most literal sense, wants rules, wants praise, wants him to tell her exactly what to do and then reward her for doing it. rafe thinks it's ridiculous at first, this hyper feminine little thing asking him to "give her structure," but then she's kneeling on his bedroom floor with her hands folded in her lap, looking up at him with those big eyes, asking "how can i be good for you today?" and something in his brain short circuits. he starts small. she texts him her outfits for approval, asks permission before touching herself, waits for his nod before she orders at restaurants. and every time she follows a rule, she glows, preening under his muttered "good girl" like it's a standing ovation. the sex is unreal, she's so eager to please, so responsive to every command, melting into a puddle of breathless gratitude when he tells her she's taking him so well, she's being so perfect, she's the best girl. after, she's curled up against his side, tracing shapes on his chest, and she whispers, "do i get a gold star?" and he laughs so hard he pulls a muscle, then kisses her forehead and says, "i'll get you a whole sticker chart, baby."
hypersexual!reader who has a habit of saying the most unhinged shit mid bite of a salad, like her brain and mouth have zero filter between them. they're at lunch with sarah and john b, some tense double date thing rafe only agreed to because she asked, and she suddenly sets down her fork, tilts her head, and says to no one in particular, "i think i have an oral fixation. like, not just with food. with everything. rafey's fingers, his d—" and rafe chokes on his water so violently sarah has to thump him on the back. "what the fuck," he coughs, eyes watering, and she just blinks at him with genuine confusion like she forgot other people were at the table. "what? it's a real thing— i read about it." john b is staring at the ceiling like he's praying for death, sarah is bright red, and rafe is gripping the edge of the table with both hands, jaw tight, a vein ticking in his forehead. "we're leaving," he announces, throwing cash on the table, and she pouts the whole way to the car about how she was just trying to share, she thought they were all friends. he doesn't say a word until they're in the truck, and then he just turns to her with this wild, incredulous look and says, "you cannot say shit like that in front of my sister. ever. i fucking mean it." she crosses her arms, lower lip jutting out, and mutters, "fine. but you know i'm right." he drags a hand down his face, starts the engine, and doesn't speak for five full minutes. then, quieter "i know." and she beams.
hypersexual!reader who has a habit of absentmindedly touching herself while they watch movies, not even in a performative way, just idly slipping a hand between her thighs under the blanket while she’s curled against his side, eyes glued to the screen, breath hitching so subtly he almost doesn’t notice. the first time it happens, he glances down and sees the movement, the blanket shifting, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and he goes still. “are you serious right now?” he asks, voice a low rasp, and she turns to him with those big, startled eyes like she forgot he was there. “oh! m’ sorry, just felt good,” she pouts, completely unashamed, but starts to pull her hand away. he stops her, wrist caught in his grip, guiding it back where it was. “don’t stop. let me see.” after that, movie nights become a gamble, she’ll either fall asleep on his chest twenty minutes in or end up straddling him with the credits rolling, both of them too wrecked to remember what they watched.
first time writing little blurbs/headcanons (???) like this and i luv theyre so fun and cute. i have a really good rafe fic idea and i got inspo from a video i’d seen on twitter so im excited😫 but i also wanna write a fic for the 4th but sooo undecided on if i should do rafe, garrett or dean ughhegsgshsg help & send ideas!!!! kisses to u all<3
bully!rafe protecting shy!chubby!reader from other bullies
— warnings ; bullying , physical assault , fighting , slightly less mean rafe
— wc ; 840
— a / n ; not proofread but its somewhat apart of rafes redemption arc i guess.. i know i wrote it but im not completely sure considering i dont plan out any of this
you sat on the swings in the park not far from your house. it was just a typical weekend, you even brought homemade sugar-cookies with you to eat. it being the start of summer meant you finally wore skirts again, the heat being a contributing factor. your outfit consisted of a pink ruffled shirt, a plain white tennis skirt, and pink ballet flats.
you smiled softly as you opened the container of sweets, swinging your legs at the perfectly orchestrated day. you were alone, happy, and enjoying yourself for the first time in a while.
you finished one cookie before you felt a small pebble hit the side of your head. assuming it was just wind, you ignored it, continuing to eat. you ignored every single rock until the fifth one came.
you looked up towards its direction to see a few kids from your school. your smile dropped and you felt that heavy pit of worry drop in your stomach. you picked up the container, closing it as you began to stand up, all while the group of kids began approaching closer.
in a split second you ran off, abandoning the container as they chased you. just as you reached the entrance, you tripped on the wooden plank used to separate it, falling down face first into the bare concrete. your knees were scraped and your hands torn. you just laid there for a moment, on the of verge of bursting into tears.
your classmates stood above you, watching your pathetic state. they hit you, kicked you, threw rocks at you, and even smashed the discarded cookies and poured the crumbs in your hair. you tried using your hands to cover your face just to have it stepped on.
“the hell is going on here?” a voice asked, causing everyone to stop.
unable to see the face, you hoped it was an adult or maybe another person from your school who came to protect you. you were desperate at this point, you didn’t care who it was, you just hoped it was someone with the intention to help you.
you didn’t really know who you expected to come.
but you definitely didn’t expect rafe cameron.
you blinked and you saw rafe staring down at you with that signature smirk.
your eyes widened and you tried crawling away, blood painting the concrete.
you were stopped abruptly as one of the kids grabbed onto your ankle, pulling you back. you tried resisting, holding onto the ground to no avail.
“whatcha’ guys doing? making fun of my fun of my favorite pogue without me?” rafe asked sarcastically, pouting mockingly as you sat there purely terrified.
“they really did a number on you.. didn’t they y/n…” he said condescendingly, feigning care.
you backed farther away from him as he got closer to you, the kids laughing as rafe continued.
“do you want my help?” he asked, his face going completely serious, and his voice slightly softer.
you stared at him in disbelief before whispering an almost inaudible, “yes,”
he reached his hand out, picking you up to your feet while he shooed off the other kids.
“go home.” he said firmly, looking back to see all of them dispersing. all of them except one.
rafe walked closer towards the boy, their height difference becoming horribly evident as rafe sized him up.
“whats with the change of heart rafe? i thought you hated her! do you got a crush or some-“ the boy spewed right as rafe clocked him in the jaw.
he fell to the ground as rafe stood over him with probably the worst mean-mug in the world.
“go home. don’t embarrass yourself further, i’d hate to see you get the absolute shit beaten out of you.” rafe said to him, watching as he ran off.
you stood there like a deer in headlights, watching the exchange. rafe looked at you, cracking his knuckles before walking towards you. you instinctively began backing up, it was pure reflex upon seeing his face.
“whats your deal? i just helped you dummy.” rafe said, tilting his head in confusion as he reached a hand out towards you.
he walked with you to your house in comfortable silence. you still kept a small distance from him.
suddenly he hit the back of your head, making you lose your balance and trip forwards slightly.
“what did i do..?” you asked, brows furrowed and voice cracking.
“let someone else put their hands on you. you gotta learn to defend yourself.” he said firmly. “but you hit me all the time..” you responded to him. “thats different, im allowed to do that.” he said, crossing his arms as if it made complete sense.
you arrived at your house and as normal, rafe greeted your father standing on the porch.
your father saw as you came home with all those scratches, grabbing you by the back of your neck and pushing you into the house. not without thanking rafe for keeping his daughter out of trouble, of course.
“please, baby, please don’t leave me.” rafe said, after you practically talked shit on his entire bloodline. he could barely handle just the image of you not being in his life, let alone seeing you actually utter the words ‘i fucking hate you and your sorry ass family, i’m leaving you’ it didn’t matter who you spoke on, he loved you so much.
he fell to his knees, luring you in by his hands. “baby, please. don’t do this to me.” he begs, his breath shaking as he swallows hard. his hands reaching up to hold onto your face but you slap it away. he respects the boundary, latching onto your hips now. “you can’t do this to me.”
you cross your arms, looking down at how helpless he was. his eyes were glossy, lips parted, out of breath as if he went on some type of run. it was like the man couldn’t breathe without you, you were sucking all the air out of his body by doing this to him.
“what are you going to do better?” you test, lifting an eyebrow as his brows furrowed in concern “talk to you better, watch my mouth, fuck, baby you name it. don’t let me guess.” he begs more, his eyes watching your face and how you react. he was absolutely consumed by you, he knew just exactly how you feel just by your face and he’s using that as his cheat code.
his throat felt dry, like it was closing in on him, and you still didn’t reply, you were quiet and disappointed. he hated seeing you upset at him, that was worse than you leaving him, worse than you not saying you love him back, worse than you saying goodbye in the mornings to go about your day in the outside world.
pairings — rafe cameron x fem!reader, topper thornton x fem!reader
summary — rafe cameron has never wanted something he couldn’t take. it’s not his fault topper’s girlfriend turns out to be one thing he can’t stop thinking about.
warnings — 14.4k words. MINORS DNI! cheating (reader cheats on topper, topper’s rafe’s best friend), toxic dynamics, super messy morals, substance use (cocaine, alcohol), addiction themes, codependency, public confrontation/humiliation-adjacent, physical violence, parental disapproval, reputational consequences and social fallout, skinship, non-sexual shower, lots of intimacy without sex, morally grey characters
author’s note — I’M SO SORRY FOR DELAYING THIS LIKE A MILLION TIMES it was so immensely stressful to write i hit my vape every 20 seconds. i hope this does feed you guys though i was kind of at a loss with where to take it and half of these scenes came to me in my dreams
Getting what you want makes you stupid. Rafe had spent his whole life lean and paranoid and correct about the worst-case; he was a guy who walked into every room already knowing where the exits were and who in it had a reason to dislike him. Three months of having you had scrubbed all of that down to nothing. He’d gone soft in the head. He could feel it happening and he didn’t care, which was the softness talking.
Case-in-point: he was leaning against a column on the south side of the bar, shirt gone damp against the stone, doing the one thing he promised himself he wouldn’t do today, which was think. His thinking had gone greedy. He was running the last twenty-four hours the way someone counts an inventory he’s scared someone’s coming to take (every item, twice, in order). Because twelve hours ago, he’d had more of you than he’d ever had. The whole night. Nine-forty-six until sunup, a quantity of you he had no idea was orderable, hadn’t dared put in for.
Second Heineken. He’d ducked off within twenty minutes of arriving to do two lines off the back of his phone case, less out of need than habit, the way you crack a knuckle. He kept telling himself he hadn’t seen you yet, which was a lie, because he’d seen all of you.
You on his back step at nine forty-six with your bag on your shoulder and the guilty face you got after lying about where you were going. You in his kitchen once the house went dark. You on the stairs. You in his bed, on top of the duvet, then under it, then at three a.m. with your face on his chest doing the slow even breathing that meant you'd gone all the way under, a thing you'd only started doing in the last few weeks, and which he tried not to make mean anything, and failed.
You at six at the sink, a loose piece of hair escaping the elastic he'd handed you because you hadn't brought one and the spare you'd left was on his nightstand. He knew exactly where it was. Shit like that had started living in his house, paying no rent.
You at six fifty-six, in the yellow dress, on the edge of his bed. He'd sat and you'd stood between his knees with your back to him and your hair held up off your neck, and he'd done the buttons. Small buttons, small holes, and his were not by any measure small-button hands, but he'd put the first one through the first hole with a care he didn't bring to one other thing in his life. He'd missed the sixth on purpose — through the fifth hole instead — one wrong piece of fabric sitting the wrong way against your spine, and you hadn't noticed, because you'd been watching his other hand, the one not on the buttons, which had drifted to the back of your hip and stayed. He'd done the seventh right. Doing all of them wrong was the kind of thing you'd have caught, and he hadn't wanted you to catch it. He'd wanted to send you out into the day with one small wrong thing on you that nobody knew about but him. Couldn't have told you why with a gun to his head.
In daylight he could finally see the dress for what it was. It hit just above mid-thigh, the exact color the princess wore in the movie with the beast.
“You hear a word I just said?”
“Nah, man. Sorry,” Rafe said, not sounding it.
Kelce had been narrating the lawn, he loved doing that. He was a gossip in the full unembarrassed sense, who took the same pleasure in who’d shown up and who they’d shown up with as he did in who was playing third for the Yankees. Rafe let him, mostly. Every fifth thing was worth hearing; the other four needed a grunt and a ‘no fucking way,’ and that was the contract. He’d lost the thread somewhere in the buttons.
“I said, Top’s not drinking.”
The name went through Rafe like a draft through a door Rafe thought was shut. Something ugly turned in his chest; guilt, or the thing guilt had curdled into over the summer, which was that he'd quietly and completely started to hate the guy, somewhere around the first night he got his hands on you. He couldn't tell the two apart anymore. He'd stopped trying.
“He is,” Rafe said, though he hadn’t watched it happen. He tipped the Heineken at the club, the people, the whole pastel of the afternoon. “No shot he’s not.”
“Club soda. He got a lime in it so it looks like a vodka tonic,” Kelce said. “I asked the bartender.”
Rafe looked at him. Kelce looked back with the mild bafflement of a man who'd turned over a rock, found a fact under it, and had no idea what the fact was for.
“He’s probably hungover,” Rafe said.
“From what? We didn’t do shit last night.” Kelce’s face looked almost wounded. “You two go out without me?”
“No.”
“Because if you and Top went somewhere—”
“We didn’t go anywhere.” The words came out flatter than he intended because the ‘we’ in Kelce’s mouth was the wrong one, a different one than he’d spent the night inside of, and his body had reacted to the collision half a beat ahead of his brain. He drank to cover it. Stop talking about Topper. “He’s probably watching it. Big-boy summer. Who knows?”
Kelce accepted this completely, and then the Devreux twins came up from the dock in matching pink, which he found genuinely remarkable each time, and his attention went out like a struck match. It left Rafe at the column with the small itch the club-soda-fact had left on his skin; he declined to scratch it. Scratching meant picking the thing up and turning it over, and Rafe had gotten expert this summer at leaving certain things face-down on the table.
He found you instead, out of reflex — across the lawn by the long table, holding the listening face for one of the mothers. Somewhere under the fifth button was the wrong thing he'd built into you this morning, the flaw with his name on it, sitting warm and stupid behind his ribs. You'd worn it all day. Stood in front of your mother and the whole club with his small wrongness against your spine and never known.
When he looked back, Topper was heading in his direction. He was walking across the lawn with his hands in his pockets at an angle that was almost lazy.
“Hey.” He clapped Kelce on the shoulder, the greeting he’d borrowed off his father at sixteen and never returned, and Kelce lit up about the twins. Topper let him run a second—nodding, eyes moving around the cluster of them, Kelce, the column, the stretch of lawn behind Rafe where you stood—and back.
“You see Whitaker’s serve?” Kelce was saying.
“Nah.”
“All shoulder now. Used to be hip.”
“He’s old,” Rafe said, on autopilot, half his head still on the warm stone at his back and the long slow tilt of the day toward evening, toward the part where everyone went home and he might, if he timed it right, steal one more hour of you before it closed.
“Hey,” Topper said, to Rafe this time, angling himself closer to him. “Can I ask you something?”
There it was. The opener he'd been answering his whole life — can I ask you something — the same three words that had come through every study door Ward had ever spoken to him from, the same ones Topper used for boats and birthdays and which restaurant for the October thing and, lately, the one Rafe had spent two months bracing for: which Christmas, which ring.
His body did the small old flinch out of habit, the low please-not-that he'd been swallowing all summer, and got ready to say yeah, man, and felt almost fond about it, relieved. Because as far as his soft, ruined, Heineken afternoon brain still believed, the worst thing Topper Thornton could possibly ask him was when to buy the fucking ring.
“Yeah,” Rafe said.
“How long have you been fucking my girl?”
Rafe’s whole head went white. The words hit him somewhere behind the neck and his teeth came together hard. The volume of Topper’s words felt wrong, for he hadn’t done a single thing a man does when he wants a question kept between two people.
He’d pitched it at the exact ordinary register he used to ask about a drink, and it went into the warm air at that decibel and kept traveling. Rafe felt the lawn behind and around him take it.
This was the gap where he had to produce the denial—what the fuck are you talking about, are you out of your mind—that he’d been manufacturing on autopilot all summer, deniability so practiced it ran without him.
He reached for the slot, and it all came up fucking empty.
Lying was the thing Rafe was good at. It was foundational and the complete floor of him. And he stood there and felt the floor not hold, felt the lie die somewhere south of his mouth, and some cold back-room part of him understood, even now, the dying was its own answer; a guy who says nothing has already told you.
Why was he telling? Why, he had no idea.
“Don’t.” His jaw barely came apart. “Don’t do this here.”
Topper laughed, and it was more of a dry exhale as his brows lifted up. “Here’s not good for you?”
“There’s like eighty people, man.” Rafe tried to keep his voice low, kept the edge of it scrubbed down to something reasonable. It’d worked on Topper before, it was easy to get him to turn away from unreasonable by simply telling him it was. “Whatever you think’s going on, this isn’t the—”
“Don’t.” Topper’s voice came out flat, and Rafe felt his trick slide off him like water off glass, because Topper had walked over here already past the place where Rafe's voice worked on him, and that was new, that had never once been true in years. “Whatever I think. Okay.”
“Outside.” Rafe’s hand had come off the column. “You wanna do this, we do this outside.”
It was the only language Rafe had for it. It was the only shape conflict had ever come in for him; two guys, a parking lot, fists, the thing settled in the body and left there. He was offering Topper the cleanest version of it that existed, one that stayed between them, and some primal part of him was almost grateful for the offer, because a fight he understood. A fight he could lose and still be standing inside of.
“I’m not fighting you,” Topper said, almost puzzled. “That’s—nah. That’s what you want. Take it outside, I hit you, you hit me. We’re square, you go home.” His jaw moved as he shook his head. “You’d love that.”
Yeah, he would have loved that. Topper had looked straight at it and seen exactly what it was, an exit, a clean ending dressed up as a reckoning, and declined to give it to him.
Topper had never in his life been the one to see through Rafe. That was the order of things. Rafe was the one who saw, who cataloged, who knew the underside of people. And here was Topper, sunburnt and shaking slightly and reading him like a thing printed in large type.
Getting what you want makes you stupid, Rafe thought again, and this was another case-in-point.
“This isn’t—” Topper stopped, then started again, and his voice shook just slightly. “She’s not some—you can’t make this a you-and-me thing. Like she’s a—” He couldn't find the word, or found it and couldn't say it, and what came out instead was lower and worse. “She was it for me, man.”
The words went into the quiet and the dads around had stopped pretending that they weren’t listening. Rafe could feel the ring of it wielding behind him.
“How long?” Topper asked again. “The bonfire?” His voice climbed, each word a thing he was checking off a list he'd clearly been building alone in the dark for days. “When I asked you to drive her home when she was about to fuckin’ cry?” He laughed, and it cracked apart in the middle.
You’d been talking to your mother and Carol Hutchinson about Carol’s daughter’s wedding registry—Carol had strong feelings about people who registered for cash—and somewhere mid-sentence the lawn changed its pitch, the talk thinning in a ring off to your left, and your body—the one that had been trained on rooms—knew before you did.
Your mother knew too. She didn't stop nodding at Carol, but her eyes cut, and that was how you always confirmed a thing was real: when your mother's attention moved before her face gave her permission to.
“Excuse me,” you said to no one and put your drink down on the table without checking that the table was there.
Despite everything, you knew before you crossed the grass. There was no merciful second where you could even wonder, for the picture was already finished by the time you reached it. Rafe was against the column with his beer hanging forgotten in his hand, Topper square in front of him with both hands at his sides, and between them and around them the loose arc of fathers who had stopped being men holding drinks and become, in the last ninety seconds, an audience that had not bought tickets and could not believe their stupid luck.
You forced yourself to stop at about eight feet. Closer was a decision and further changed absolutely nothing, so you stood at the distance that asked the least of you.
You thought—with a cruel form of clarity—that you’d been preparing for this. Things, situations, predicaments as tousled as this never stayed in the dark. You’d run the thing so many times in the dark—the having-been-caught, the fact of it laid out—that you’d mistaken the running for readiness. You had not prepared for shit. You’d only rehearsed the dread until it felt load-bearing, and now the real one had come and the rehearsal had turned out to be a different play entirely, and you’d memorized nothing that mattered.
It felt like the winter you were thirteen and they gave you Ophelia for the scene where her father sets her down in a corridor with a book she wasn’t reading and tells her to stand there, just stand there, like you’re praying, so the men can hide and watch what happened to her.
You’d rehearsed the standing more than any line — I shall obey, my lord — and you’d said them into the drama teacher’s clipboard a hundred times without once hearing them, the way you didn’t hear a lot of things you were good at saying.
Here it was again, surfacing now in its little Elizabethan lilt while eighty feet of lawn watched the boy you’d wrong decide who you were. You felt exactly what you did at thirteen, the strange flat calm of knowing your blocking, standing very still at the center of the thing that was supposedly about you and finding, again, there was nothing for you to do but be looked at.
You were good at this. So, so good, finding easily how your body found the mark and held it, how still you could go when something was happening to you and be praised, afterward, for how stupidly well you’d stood there.
Topper turned his head toward you, just enough. Then, he flicked his gaze back to Rafe, as though he only wanted to register your presence.
“Everybody’s always—” He stopped, and despite the distance, you could hear him loud and fucking clear, for he had no intention of keeping this private. His mouth moved, like he had no practice for this. You’d watched Topper’s mouth move for two years and it had never once reached for cruelty—never had an occasion to, it hadn’t been built for it—and now it was groping for one and coming up clumsy, and that was somehow the part that undid you. You’d driven a kind guy all the way to the edge of a country he had no map for.
“She’s so sweet. So sweet.” The word came apart a little more each time he aired it out. “And this entire time she’s been—” He moved his jaw, and he couldn’t get the rest out cleanly. “Sneaking around. Fucking you.”
Your left hand closed at your side. You opened it and smoothed your palm flat against the green of the dress, the small managing motion your body still ran with nobody home to drive it and you watched yourself do it from somewhere far back, the way you'd watch a sprinkler finish an arc over grass that didn't need it.
Two years of training, still firing. You’d have laughed if your face had been yours to spend, but your face was the last thing out here you still owned and you weren't spending a cent of it.
The words were bitter as he mourned who he’d loved for two years. You’d made her up so well he might as well have married her in his head. Now he could talk of the theft of something that never existed, and you envied him for it. He got to miss her, and you had to keep being the one who stood in front of her, so completely that even you had half-believed it.
A muscle in Topper’s jaw ticked as he realized Rafe was remaining silent.
“Say it was worth it, at least,” he said, furrowing his brows together. “Tell me there was—something. Anything.” He laughed shortly. “You blew all of it up for—what? Genuinely, for what?”
“Why are you doing this here?” you heard Rafe say, voice as low as he could make it, the sentence having no true question in it.
Topper shook his head. “Two years I’ve been with her and I couldn’t even tell you who this girl is.” His eyes flicked up to you. “Good-fucking-luck.”
That one went lower than the others. The rest had landed where he’d aimed them, in the flat and overly-exposed places. This one went under—into the small space where you kept things you suspected were true about yourself and would not take out and look at—and Topper had reached in without knowing and pulled it up into the light.
You waited, with a cruel wanting you hated yourself for, for Rafe to say something.
You saw Topper’s right hand closing.
“Top—” Kelce was moving in his direction. He’d been off to the side this whole time, holding his drink like he’d wandered into the wrong room, and he came alive too late, his hand coming up.
Topper’s arm drew back the small distance it needed and went, and the punch caught Rafe right across the mouth. The sound of it was smaller than you’d have thought, a dull wet knock that the lawn heard anyway.
Rafe hadn’t braced; he’d seen it coming, he must have, and he’d done nothing. He hadn’t lifted a hand or turned his head; he had stood there against the column and let Topper hit him like it was a thing he had coming, like it was the one part of this he agreed with.
His head went sideways with it and his body followed, down, one knee finding the grass as his hand came up to his face. When it came away, there was a dark start of blood on his fingers where his lip had split against his teeth—the same lip, you thought, stupidly, helplessly, that had been on your mouth hours ago in a dark room—and you stood at your distance and did not go to him, because going to him was the one thing on this lawn that could still make it worse, and you had just barely enough left in you to know it.
Topper was breathing hard and looking down at Rafe on the grass with an expression that wasn't satisfaction. It wasn't anything. He'd spent the last of it. He turned.
And you understood, a half-second before he moved, that he was turning toward you. There was nowhere to stand in the lawn that wasn’t here, at the end of the small path the fathers had opened without meaning to.
He stopped in front of you. Up close his face had gone strange, the anger still in it but something underneath the anger working harder, a man holding two stories and trying to decide which one he got to keep.
“You’re not gonna talk either.” Topper’s voice had dropped, down to a register that was aimed only at you, the one he'd used for two years across pillows and car consoles. That was the part that nearly took your knees, that he could still find it, that it was still in there, that he'd reached past everything to use the voice he'd loved you in.
“I’m sorry,” you said, the words coming out small and automatic.
You saw the last of his kind story go out of his face—the one where Rafe had reached into his good clean life and taken his good clean girl, the one where you were a thing that Rafe happened to—and what was left underneath it was worse, because what was left was a boy looking at the person he'd picked, finding out she'd picked something else.
“I would’ve—” His voice cracked and he pushed through it. “You know I’d have done anything. Anything.” He shook his head, more at himself than you. “And you threw it for—”
He tipped his head instead of saying Rafe’s name, a small sideways nod at the grass where Rafe was.
And you eyes went—before you could stop them—down to Rafe. He was still on one knee where Topper had put him, his hand half-down from his mouth, the blood bright at the split of his lip.
He was already looking at you. He hadn't been looking at Topper. He'd been looking at you, the whole time, from the ground, and he didn't stop when your eyes found his, he held it, that unreadable thing he did, the look you'd spent three months learning and still couldn't translate when it mattered.
“I hope he was worth it,” Topper said finally, passing you, hardly looking at you when he said it.
There was a loud ringing in your ears as you pushed the words out of your mind, eyes drifting back to Rafe.
There was a small, insistent thing in you that wanted to go check on him, and you had a feeling he realized that while looking at you, for he shook his head slowly, eye twitching like he needed you to see it was a bad idea.
You held his eyes for a second longer than was safe, long enough to take the no he was giving you. The small slow shake, his way of pushing you off the lawn without using his hands.
Don’t. Not here. Not me. He’d rather kneel alone in front of all of them than have you make it worse by being kind to him in the open.
The lawn rushed back in all at once. Kelce was saying something to nobody, both hands still half-raised; a woman near the bar went ‘oh, my,’ without finishing; the small wet collapse of ice resettling in someone’s abandoned glass; the band of fathers reassembling their faces like they hadn’t just watched the most interesting thing of their summer. Somebody’s child was crying somewhere off by the pool and being walked, briskly, away from all of it.
You wanted to laugh at the idea of having done something a mother would want to hide from her child.
The heat was behind your eyes and it stayed there, held, because crying was the one thing left that people could carry home whole, and you’d already given them enough freight for the next three months.
Your mother’s hand found your elbow before you’d even registered she was there. It was the same hand she used at church when you were seven and your tights were twisted and she needed to correct the situation without making a scene about it. Two fingers and a thumb wrapped around the inside of your elbow, pressure applied in a frequency only you could hear, the frequency drilled into you for years.
“Car,” she said, and it wasn’t even a word as much as a shape her mouth made.
She steered you off the lawn through the side gate, the one with the broken latch the club had been meaning to fix for two months and hadn’t. She steered you past the overflow parking where valets staged the cars and past the dumpsters that smelled like crab shells and something sweet and rotting underneath. The gravel was loud under your heels and your mother’s grip stayed firm and you didn’t ask her to loosen it.
The car was at the far end of the lot because she never trusted other people’s doors. She unlocked it without looking at you, and you got in. The leather was warm from sitting in the August heat and stuck slightly to the back of your thighs. She got in on her side and put her bag in the backseat, which she never did; she always put it on the floor on the passenger side.
She settled her hands on her lap and looked through the windshield at the car parked in the front, a white Range Rover with a parking sticker from the yacht club and a small dent on the rear fender.
“Is it true?”
“Mom—”
The slap came fast but not hard the second she realized you weren’t denying it. It was almost clean—as clean as a slap could be—with the flat of her palm against your cheek then gone, like punctuation.
You sat in the stinging surprise of it, because she had never, not once, and you understood immediately that this was the measure of it. This was how big it was, how big she considered it to be; she’d done a thing she’d never done.
She turned to look at you, and her face was completely assembled. “You know how embarrassing this is, don’t you?”
You forced a swallow, forcing yourself to look up at the ceiling of the car because, frankly, what you thought was embarrassing was staying with a guy you don’t think ever wholly loved for two years and doing nothing about it. Until you did.
“Rafe Cameron, of all people,” she said through a breath, shaking her head. “His father can hardly stomach talking about him.”
You looked back down from the ceiling and found the dent again. Somebody had tried to buff it and made it slightly worse.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Now, you go back in there—”
“I’m not going back in there.”
The silence that followed was new, too. You hadn’t interrupted her since you were fifteen and it had gone badly and you’d learned. Her eyes moved over your face, nose scrunching as though she was disgusted.
“We have to say goodnight,” she said, slightly recaliberated. “People remember things like this.”
“Let them remember.”
“That’s not—”
“Mom.” Your voice came out so steady, so even that it surprised both of you. The cheek had stopped stinging and what was left was the knowledge of it, the fact of it, the permanent newness of tonight. “I’m not going back in there. You can. Tell them I’m not feeling well. Tell them whatever you need to tell them.” You forced yourself to look out the window, not having enough of a stomach to look at her face. “I’ll wait here.”
She was quiet for long enough that you could hear the party behind you, the band still going, the crowd still moving through the shapes of the evening like nothing had rearranged. That was the thing about these parties.
They absorbed everything. You could set the whole summer on a lawn in front of them and within twenty minutes it was just more texture.
“He’s not going to be who you think he is,” she said, voice lowering. “Boys like that—they don’t—” She pressed her lips together, choosing the words, sorting through what she had about Rafe and boys like Rafe. “They’re gonna take from you. Then they get tired and move on. And you’re left—” She took in a breath, shaking her head. “You’re left being the girl who let them.”
You distantly understood she wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t right and she was talking about somebody you’d told her a total of zero things about, someone she’d assembled entirely from his father’s reputation and years of Figure Eight gossip she had no idea she’d been collecting.
She was talking about the version of Rafe that belonged to the island’s collective memory and not the one who drove you home when you were crying and pulled over on a side road just to let you empty out.
For the first time in your life you could remember, you had nowhere to be.
There was no brunch. There was no dinner. Your mother had, conveniently, withdrawn mention of any events on Figure Eight by withdrawing herself.
You could distantly remember you had to be at yet another charity benefit hosted by one of the families you could practically consider neighbours. It seemed like spending too much time with Rafe Cameron took a charitable hit to your reputation, and you had taken a charitable hit with it.
You were on the back porch with your second coffee going cold on the railing. It was eleven in the morning, which was late for you. You woke up at seven out of compulsion rather than necessity, made the bed before the day had given you any reason to, had a list running by eight-thirty on most mornings even in summer.
The list simply hadn’t appeared today. You woke up and waited for your brain to catch up, to receive it like you received most things—on autopilot—and you laid there in the blankness of that twenty minutes before getting up to make coffee and coming out here to look at the water.
Your phone had been doing all sorts of things all week. You’d developed a system of looking at the name before you decided it existed. Your dad, yes. Madi, not yet, she’d want to know all details about it and you weren’t ready to look back at it at all, because looking back meant it’d be in the past. Topper, three times, which you’d stared at without opening because there was no version of that conversation that cost something you simply didn’t own. The group chats had gone all kinds of quiet that were louder than the noise.
The phone lit up now on the railing next to the cold coffee. Ruthie. She hadn’t reached out, and you had a feeling she was only doing so because she had something to say. She always did.
“Hey,” you said.
“Okay,” she said, her voice already in the middle of something like it always was, like she’d been running the entire conversation in her head for a while and you’d just joined it. “Before you say anything, I need you to hear me out.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I had no idea there was an actual thing happening—I swear I thought—” A door closed on her end somewhere. “I just told Topper that I’ve noticed Rafe looking at you for two years. I figured it was just him being—” She made a sound that covered Rafe without having to say it, and your mind was already going fuzzy.
“Two years?” you echoed out loud, then clamped your lips shut.
“Yeah. At least,” she said. Ruthie always knew things first. It was something about her you’d spent years confusing for intimacy. “Honestly I’m surprised you didn’t notice. It was pretty obvious.”
“I didn’t,” you said evenly. Two years. You turned the time over in your head. “When’d you tell Topper?”
“At the lunch I went with him on Saturday. I had no idea he’d find out something else—I didn’t know there was something else to find.”
“It would’ve come out anyway,” you muttered, and the truth of it landed in you even as you said it, because that was the thing about Figure Eight, about this summer, about all of it. There was no version of it that stayed contained. You'd known that, somewhere in the back of yourself, since the truck, since the boat, since you’d laid in bed with him until the young hours of the morning. Some things simply had too much mass to stay small. “It would’ve come out.”
You parked on the road outside the front gate, the small dark space between the streetlight at the end of the long drive and the next streetlight half a mile down toward the bend. Your car was the only one on the road. You could see their house through the live oaks—gold on the front porch, one upstairs window lit, the rest of it dark—and you sat in the driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel and tried to do the math on whether Ward Cameron was up there.
You couldn’t tell. You thought about Ward opening that door—a glass of something in his hand, the button-down he wore in the evenings—and looking at you in the hoodie on his porch, your hair the way it was, the sweatpants, the sneakers. You understood, clean, that you could not be the person Ward opened the door to. You did not have the equipment for it on the best day of your life and you did not have it now.
Spending this much time with Rafe had only solidified the fact rather than change it, even a little.
You also understood that if you sat in the car for two more minutes, the tiny piece of you that had gotten out of the house was going to run out. You’d drive home and let your mother put you on whatever plane to somewhere really, really fucking far away.
You opened the door. The driveway was long. You had been up it a hundred times in the dark in the past three months, in his truck, with his hand on your thigh, and you had not registered the driveway as a thing in any of those times. You registered it as a thing now. The gravel under your sneakers was louder than gravel had any business being. The live oaks above you were doing their Spanish-moss thing. The cicadas were electric in the way they were in mid-August. The hoodie was very big on you. There was a small bleach stain at the cuff that you had been staring at on and off for five days, and the cuff was over your hand now, and you let yourself have it.
The walk was longer than you remembered taking from his truck.
You picked the knocker. Two knocks, as soft as you could make them. The brass against the wood made a firm sound anyway and you flinched. You stood with your hand still on the knocker and waited.
The footsteps that approached the door weren’t heavy enough to be Ward’s. You knew this by three months of cataloguing the footsteps from Rafe’s bedroom—who is where and how they are walking—and these were lighter than Ward's. Wheezie didn't answer the door at Tannyhill. Which meant Sarah. Your shoulders came down by the small fraction they had access to coming down.
The deadbolt turned and the door opened. She must’ve been in the kitchen or the living room.
Sarah was on the other side. Pajama shorts. A t-shirt with a faded school logo on it. Her hair was up in something that was not a hairstyle. She had a book in one hand with her finger marking the page. She had not been expecting anyone. She opened the door a few inches wider when she saw you.
“Hey,” she said, her voice quiet like she was talking to a skittish animal.
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
You nodded stiffly. “Yeah, I’m okay.” You tried to force a small smile on your face.
Sarah nodded and chose not to press, let the words stew as the placeholder they were.
“Um—?” You didn’t know how to ask about him.
‘Is Rafe here?’ just sounded wrong. ‘Where is he?’ sounded desperate. You closed your mouth, then opened it again.
As if she could sense the turmoil in your head, “He hasn’t been home in a while.” She let it sit, then added, “He’s probably at Barry’s.”
You had never thought about Barry. Barry was a piece of Rafe's life you had not pictured. Barry was on The Cut. You knew that, abstractly.
You nodded. “Okay—thank you.”
You turned to go, and you were at the top of the porch steps when you stopped. You turned back.
Sarah was still in the doorway.
“Where does Barry live, exactly?”
Whatever she saw in your face—you in the hoodie at Tannyhill at almost ten at night, the small bleach stain at the cuff of your hand, your hair and the way it was—was enough for her to decide that she was going to tell you.
She stepped back into the entryway. She set her book on the side table by the door and picked up her phone. She unlocked it. She found the address. She relayed it to you carefully, giving you a rundown of how far it is and the turns you’d have to take even though you could simply put it onto your phone.
“Thank you.”
Sarah nodded. You turned again. You were going to walk down the porch steps and down the driveway and back to your car and drive to Barry's. You were almost at the first step when she said, behind you, “Hey. Wait.”
Her face was careful, about to say something she wasn’t not sure she should say. You waited.
“I think Rafe’s got it pretty bad for you.”
You weren’t sure what to do with this. Your face moved in a way you couldn’t feel from the inside. The crying that had been on the other side of the wall for five days made a small sound against the wall for the first time. You wouldn’t cry on her porch. You were not going to cry on her porch. But your throat was doing the thing it had been doing on and off for five days, and you had to swallow once before you could say anything.
She continued, “But—I don’t know.” She laughed without any humor in it, as though she was now regretting saying the words altogether. “I don’t think you should let that decide for you.”
You weren’t sure what to do with that either. You could tell she wasn’t issuing out a warning, nor was it a rebuke. She was likely saying it because she had nothing else to offer you right now, when it was abundantly clear part of the reason you looked forlorn was her brother, and what she could offer you was the thing she had learned.
To not let that decide for you, what Sarah thought, was to write your own equation, something that had always felt theoretical. You’d spent your entire life letting things that weren’t about you decide for you anyway. The boy who asked and the mother who approved. The future that was already being planned in someone else’s calendar before you’d thought to check your own. To decide for yourself felt like something that happened to the girls in other zip codes who knew how to want things that hadn’t been cherry-picked for them before they could even get to the first stage of their formative lives.
Ruthie had said two years. Sarah had an inkling of whatever Rafe felt. You stood with both of those and tried to put them somewhere that wasn’t a small pressurized container behind your sternum that was getting closer and closer to its structural limit.
You’d only ever noticed The Cut from the passenger seat of other people’s cars. There was a point on the bridge road where the infrastructure of Figure Eight simply gave up; the median plantings, decorative lampposts, and small reflective markers all stopped being maintained at once, for the island had drawn a line and decided one side of it was worth the county's money. You’d been driven past the line before, but you’d never driven past that line yourself. There was a difference, you realized, eyes on the blue dot of yourself crawling along a road that the map had rendered in the same grey as every other road and that the windshield rendered in a dark you had to lean forward slightly to see into.
The houses got closer to the road. They got closer to each other. The lots started being yards, and the yards had things in them. A swing set, a boat on a trailer with a tarp, a basketball hoop with no net, a dog that you heard instead of saw. The map said you were four minutes away and then it said two and then it said that you had arrived, in the bright assured way the map said things, and you slowed the car and looked at a house that did not look like a house someone arrived at.
It was a one story house with a porch that ran the front of it with a roof that sagged a little at the center. There were people on the porch; you could see the small orange coals of cigarettes moving—two of them, maybe three—and you could hear the low shape of music coming from inside, and under the music a sound that was people. Enough people that the house had a hum to it.
You saw Rafe’s truck in the driveway, the same way you’d grown used to noticing it at parties. And seeing it there did something to your chest. It was just there, and that meant Sarah had been right and he was inside this house, and you were going to have to get out of your car and walk past the orange coals on the porch to find him. If you even wanted to, you still weren’t sure if you did.
You stepped out of the car, and the orange coals on the porch turned toward you as you came up the small cracked path. You forced yourself to keep your eyes on the door; you had spent your whole life being looked at people in a way you had learned to absorb without acknowledging. This time, though, the people doing the looking did not know you and had no reason to be kind, and one of them—a girl, you registered in cutoff shorts with her legs crossed at the ankle—said something to the person beside her, low, and laughed. You felt the temperature of it land on your skin and you kept walking.
The board at the top of the porch gave a little under you. You knocked on the screen door because your hand was already up, and even though the door was already somewhat open.
The shape that came to the door was far from Rafe and was not, you understood immediately, anyone you were going to have to be afraid of. He looked just a year or two older than you and he had a beer in one hand and an expression on his face that was almost amused.
He looked at you through the screen door for a moment before he pushed the door open; it caught on a brick and he nudged it aside with his foot. He looked at you properly, in the dark porch, with the yellow light of the house behind him so that he was mostly a silhouette with a beer.
He looked over your shoulder, and you assumed his gaze had snagged on your car.
“I’m—” Your voice came out exactly as wrong as you assumed it would, low and folded-up and almost strange. You cleared your throat and tried again. “I’m looking for Rafe.”
A slow grin started up one side of his face. “Are you, now?”
You assumed this was Barry. “Mhm.”
His grin had gotten worse, or better, depending. “Sweetheart, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for somebody to come here looking for Rafe.” You pushed down the urge to roll your eyes. “C’mon, then. And don’t be alarmed. I think he’s on somewhat of the most annoying fucking bender of his life.”
He turned and went in without waiting to see if you’d follow, and you stood on the step for a second with the music coming out at you, and then you went in, because the alternative was driving home, and you surprised yourself with how much you preferred this to the latter.
Inside it was yellow and lower-ceilinged than any house you’d spent time in, and you could smell cigarettes, weed, and something cooked or recently cooked. There was a couch with a sheet over it. There was a TV on with the sound off, throwing its light at nobody. There were people—fewer than the hum had suggested from the porch, five or six of them, scattered, a guy and a girl folded into an armchair together, two more at a small table doing something with a deck of cards, somebody you couldn't see in the kitchen running water—and they looked up at you when you came in, and then most of them looked away again, because you were not, in the end, very interesting to them. You were just a girl, and they did not know whose girl.
Barry cut through the front room and you followed half a step behind him, closer than you would normally walk behind a stranger, because he was the only thing in the house you had a relationship with and the relationship was ninety seconds old and you were holding onto it anyway.
“He’s been real unpleasant,” he went on, pleasantly, ducking under a hanging plant that had died some time ago. “You know he told me I talk too much today? Three days on my couch, eating my food, and he’s shitting on the host.” He glanced back at you, and there was the grin, but there was something thinner under it now, something more careful. “Don’t know how you deal with him.”
Did Barry even know the extent of your situation with Rafe? You couldn’t tell. You’d spent three months being the most carefully hidden thing on Figure Eight, and now a stranger was strolling you toward him like it was a thing everyone had known.
“You could’ve done a lot better than that guy. You knock on a door looking like that, you’ve got options.” The grin came up one side of his face, easy, not really meaning anything by it. “Door’s always open for—”
“You do talk a lot,” you said, raising a brow.
Barry waved both his hands to the side, like he was waving off your words. “I guess you two deserve each other after all.”
He didn’t know half of it. He pushed the screen door open and the night came in all at once; the cicadas were loud, a wall of them, and there was a green wet smell of whatever grew behind the house, and a heat that was somehow softer out here than the heat had been on the front porch.
“Out here,” Barry said, and stood aside, holding the door for you.
It had been a porch once and still mostly was—a back porch that someone had half-screened and never finished, the mesh sagging out of the frame on one side, the dark pressing soft against it. There was a string of cheap lights along the top that did the work of one weak bulb. There was an old couch that had been left out here long enough to belong to the nature now.
There were a few people: a girl sitting up on the porch rail with her feet on the cushion of a chair, a guy beside her rolling something with great concentration, another guy lower down on the steps with a beer hanging off his fingers, all of them turning to look at you the loose unbothered way the front room had looked at you, registering you, deciding you weren't theirs to think about, turning back.
And on the couch, sitting up loosely, was Rafe.
You’d spent the last three months unconsciously learning him, the build of his shoulders, the way his hands sat when his phone or a cigarette wasn’t in them, the constant vigilance he carried even asleep, even in his bed, that made it deeply obvious Rafe was always waiting for something.
He was in a grey t-shirt that didn’t look like something that belonged to him; it was too big on the shoulders, like it was handed to him from a pile in the corner. He hadn’t shaved, and you could see three days—maybe four—coming in uneven along his jaw. His hair looked like he’d been sweating into it and pushing it back with his hands and not once looking in a mirror to see what any of that had done.
The bruise was on the right side of his face, along the cheekbone, where Topper’s fist had landed on the lawn. It had had days to come into itself, and it had used them, purpling at the center and going a sick green-yellow at its edges, the color of an injury that nobody had iced and nobody had asked about.
A part of you—a part larger than you’d ever intended—felt a short ache in your chest at the thought of him letting the bruise bloom without ever doing something about it.
There had been a version of these four days where Rafe went home, where someone iced his face, where the shirt got changed by somebody who loved him. Rafe wasn’t handed that version, or maybe he’d chosen to not choose it.
He’d chosen Barry’s back porch and a stranger’s grey t-shirt and the bruise left to do whatever it wanted, because some part of Rafe Cameron had decided, after the lawn, that he was not a thing worth collecting. You were distantly aware of how you’d learned his frequencies or, at least, believed you had.
You hardly felt Barry step out onto the porch beside you, and looked at Rafe on the couch, and then looked at you, and whatever he'd been carrying on his face the whole walk through the house, the grin and the tour and the ease of it, he set it down.
“Country Club,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue easily. “Look what the tide brought in.”
Rafe looked up, and it took him a moment. His gaze came up off the boards between his feet, slow, snagged on Barry, and then moved the last small distance.
You watched his face move, and you attested that to the fact that three months had made you the only real scholar of it (the managed one, the one he wore at the country club and across Ward’s table; the other one, the one that only ever came out in his truck with the engine ticking down, in the dark, at the bad hours). Tonight, he’d run out of whatever he built the first one from. You watched his face settle in pieces, because even truth and reality was slow for him, it seemed. You watched him see you, then land it was you. And for a second, his whole face went open, and a moth-shadow swung across it, and he looked, for that second, like a person who had never once in his life braced for a door.
“What—” His voice came out scraped down to nothing, the same place yours had been living in the past five days. He came forward on the couch, elbows to knees. “What are you—you shouldn’t be—”
The cushion he’d been sitting on stayed dented in the shape of him. Somebody’s bottle was sweating a ring onto the arm of the couch by his hand. You pressed your lips together as his sentence hung loose, unfinished, in the cicada noise. The look on his face found the old place in you anyway, suddenly feeling too exposed and too wanting, and your shoulders came in, the hoodie taking you.
You took half-a-step back, body moving before your mind could register it’d been alarmed, and your sandal found the lip of the screen-door track.
A flinch pulled inward on his face as his mouth opened into the shape of a sentence, perhaps a full one. You’d seen him in light worse than this. And once again, the two things reached you nearly together; that maybe he doesn’t want you here, that you’d made a huge mistake even thinking this was the right idea—Rafe didn’t want you here, no. This wasn’t how the two of you worked, and it was never going to be. And then, hard on its heels, you thought that maybe he did want you here.
He pushed himself up, the time on the couch had clearly unlearned the movement out of him. He got a hand on the arm of it, knocking the sweating bottle which left it spinning slowly, and came up wrong. All of his height delivered upright at once, and none of it was organized.
He crossed the porch to you two steps too fast, which you thought was faster than the rest of him could carry.
His face scrunched up slightly, hands hovering up by his sides like he wasn’t sure what to do with them as he gave you a once-over, shaking his head. “You good?” he asked, voice rough.
You tugged your lip between your teeth and raised a palm to cover the lower half of your face, shaking your head. “Sorry—I don’t know why I’m here. I just—” Your shoulders came up to your ears in a shrug, body suddenly feeling too stiff all at once. “I haven’t seen you since—and.”
He was nodding before you could even finish your sentence like he was going to accept anything you were saying. Then, before you could process it, his arms got around you and your face went into his chest. An exhale left him, long and slow. His chin came down on top of your head and his arms tightened once, adjusting, as one hand spread flat between your shoulder blades and the other went to the back of your head, fingers finding your hair.
He tipped his head sideways so his mouth would be closer to your ear. “What are you doing here?” he asked again, except this time the words had been taken apart and put back together softly.
And it seemed so backwards—him asking you that, him, with his arms locked around you like you were the thing keeping him upright and not the other way around—that something almost like a laugh moved through your chest, small and disbelieving.
“What are you—” Your voice didn’t make it through the whole sentence, voice coming out against his chest as the words came apart halfway. “You’re the one who—what are you doing?”
It went the way ice goes, in stages; the shoulders first, coming down out of where they’d been living, somewhere up near your ears; and then the spine; and then something lower and more structural than either, something that had been braced since the lawn, since the foyer, since the slap and the not-looking that came after it, and that you had not once set down because there had been no one in five days to set it down in front of.
The laugh came up, the small disbelieving one, and it got out of you, wet and surprised, the realest sound you'd made since the country club lawn, and it ran on a beat longer than the moment had handed it.
“I think I ruined my life,” you said in a whisper against him.
You felt him go still around your words. “Nah,” he said, the word low and scraped. His arms tightened, the last of the uncertainty gone out of them, something decided arriving where it had been. “That one’s on me. I did that to you.”
You shook your head against his chest, a small motion, barely anything, but Rafe felt it. His arms registered it and held on through it as though he was aware you’d argue and had already decided he wasn’t going to let you.
“Stop,” he said quickly, as soon as he heard the shape of your mouth open against his chest. “Don’t do that.”
You started anyway, and he let you get half a breath to it before saying, “I’m serious.” His arms tightened. “This one’s mine. I did it.”
You were too tired to push it and he wasn’t going to budge and you knew that; you’d come across Rafe staying in one spot a hundred times, refusing to budge. So you let the lie stand, and you let him have it. You let him hold you in a way he never had before, most likely to ease his own misplaced guilt, the one Rafe likely didn’t know what to do with.
It was Barry who broke it, in the end. “Three days,” he said from somewhere behind you, pitched for the whole porch. “Couldn’t get this kid off that couch, and now he’s doing fucking laps.”
“Shut up, Barry,” Rafe said into your hair quickly.
Barry put both his hands in the air, a man thrilled to lose ground. “Mhm. Forget I noticed.” When you caught his eye over the top of the moment, he only raised a brow at you, like the two of you held the same piece of information now, and he was glad, on the whole, that you’d been let in on it.
Rafe pulled back enough to get his face out of your hair and look at you. His hands slid to your arms and stayed there, as though he was afraid you were going to lose balance. You watched him take you in up close; the hoodie, the hour of you, whatever five days had done to your face that you hadn't checked a mirror to confirm. Something moved through his expression that he didn't have the equipment, tonight, to hide.
“You want me to—” He cleared his throat, eyes dangerously trained on your face. “I can take you home?”
The word came out of him already flinching from itself. It was the thing he was supposed to offer, the decent thing, drive you home, and the whole of him stood behind the offer waiting for you to turn it down. You heard both halves of it. Three months had taught you to hear both halves of everything Rafe said.
His hand tightened on your arm when you didn’t respond.
“Yeah. No.” His jaw worked, and you felt his hand move slightly down your arm, an attempt of soothing. “Let’s go to Tannyhill. I need a shower anyway.”
He'd found the one version of the offer that could hide inside an errand of his own. I need a shower. As if Tannyhill were a thing he had to go do anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with you, and you would simply, incidentally, be there too. It was the affair's old grammar—plausible deniability, the offer smuggled inside something deniable—except he wasn't using it to hide something secret anymore. He was using it because it was the only way he knew how to ask.
“Yeah,” you said. “You do.” The words came out before you could stop them.
Rafe laughed. It was small and there was only a single huff of it. Still, it made it all the way up the climb, and it was the first sound he'd made all night that wasn't scraped down to the wood.
“Okay,” he said. “Mean girl.”
Rafe gave Barry a small pat on the back, a meager acknowledgement, but one nonetheless. Over Rafe’s shoulder, Barry mouthed a small ‘thank you’ to you.
The mean part inside you said that he had nothing to thank you for. All you’d done was cause this to happen.
Rafe was already moving, one hand on the small of your back as if he couldn’t trust the floor, and you let him steer, through the screened porch and back into the yellow of the house, past the card game that had resumed without you, past the girl in the armchair who didn't look up this time, through the front room and its sheet-draped couch and its TV still throwing light at no one. Barry trailed you as far as the front door. He held the screen with one arm and the brick scraped and the night came in.
“Drive safe, Country Club,” Barry said, a grin etching his face again.
Rafe lifted his hand off your back long enough to knock it once on Barry’s shoulder on the way past and then the screen door clapped shut behind you and Barry's house went back to being a lit square in the dark, and it was just the yard, and the warm night, and the dog three houses down that had finally given the whole thing up.
His truck sat in the drive and he angled toward it on instinct, his weight already shifting that way, his hand leaving your back to go digging for keys.
You raised your hand and it hovered above his own searching ones. “I should drive.”
He looked at you and opened his mouth to argue it, the old reflex that had driven you home from so many dark places with one wrist hung over the wheel, and you watched it fail to find any fuel. He looked at his truck. He looked at you, at whatever your face was doing, at whatever he already knew about the state of himself.
He grumbled something under his breath you didn’t catch, then said, “Probably.”
The locks thunked and the dome light came on when you opened the door, lighting up your sunglasses in the cupholder. There was a receipt curled on the passenger seat and a hair tie looped around the gearshift. You swept the receipt off the seat. Rafe folded himself down into the space where it had been.
You got in and pulled your door shut. The dark closed over the two of you, and the noise of Barry's house went behind glass, and for a moment you just sat there—keys in your hand, engine off—in the first private, enclosed, unwatched quiet you'd been given since the lawn.
You heard Rafe blow out a breath as though he’d been holding it in for his entire life. He threw his head back against the seat and turned his neck to face you, eyes hardly open. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” you said, raising your brows slightly. “So do you.”
He huffed and let his eyes drift all the way shut against the seat. “Yeah, I know.”
For a while, neither of you said anything. You'd carried the question across the whole island. You'd had it the whole five days, really, curled up small under everything else, and you hadn't let yourself take it out, because taking it out made the answer real.
Your hands tightened on the wheel.
“Rafe?” Your voice came out wrong, low and narrow. You kept your eyes ahead, on the chain-link in the windshield, because you couldn't ask it and watch his face at once. “On the lawn, when Topper said—all that.”
You felt him shift slightly against his seat beside you.
“Did you believe him?” The words came out smaller than you’d built them, as if you hadn’t been agonizing over the answer over the past five days.
The silence went a beat too long, and you turned your head, because you had to know what his face was doing in it. For a second you read the furrow of his brows as a yes, as though he was trying to say it in the most gentle way possible.
“You think I believed him?” He raised one brow, albeit lazily at you. “That’d be pathetic if I got punched in front of everyone over the kind of girl he said you are.”
“Don’t.” You were already shaking your head.
“I’m serious.” His head had come off the seat. “That’d make me the dumbest guy on that fucking lawn. Worse than him.” He let the words sit for a second, worse than the guy who’d been cheated on. The math was unsurprisingly ugly and entirely Rafe. “And I’m not. I’m a lot of shit but I’m not that.”
You nodded, even though you didn’t have it in yourself to believe him.
As if he could sense that, he said, “Don’t even think about that. Not worth the time.”
“Okay,” you said.
Rafe let his head go back against the seat and closed his eyes again.
“Drive,” he said quietly. “I really do need that shower.”
The bathroom light was too white and overhead, and under it, Rafe looked worse than he had on the porch and the car. The porch had given him the dark to hide in. The car had given him the seat that he could let swallow him. The bathroom gave him nothing, and so you got the whole of him at once, the bruise, the four days of no shaving on his jaw, and the way he was standing like he didn’t have that left in him.
“C’mere,” you said. “Arms.”
He lifted them, most of the way at least. You got the hem of the borrowed grey shirt and worked it up, and he tried to help and that was the thing that caused the problem, for his elbow caught the collar dragged over the bruise and he hissed, a short ugly sound through his teeth. You said to stop, and to just let you. He stopped and he let you.
You could see what four days had done. The bruise had had time to come fully into itself and it had used the time, gone the deep wrong colors at the center, and his jaw was rough and his hair was a thing he'd been sweating into and shoving back.
“Sink,” you said, because your voice was the only thing holding and you needed it to keep doing that.
You steered him the half step back against it so he had something to lean on. He put his hands on the edge of it on either side of his hips and let his head hang, and you crouched to get at the laces of his shoes because he was plainly not going to, and he watched you do it from up there with his eyes barely open.
“You don’t have to—” he started.
“I know that.” And you’d continue doing it, because you hadn’t done much of anything these past few days for the first time in your life. Taking care of Rafe, for some twisted reason, felt right.
You took off the first shoe, then the second. You pulled off his socks and set them on the top, and the whole time you were aware of the strangeness of it. In three months, you’d taken off Rafe’s clothes more than you’d let yourself count, but it’d never once been this. It was never careful. He was just a person who couldn’t, and you were just a person who could; the gap between those two things was the whole reason you were both in this room.
You reached up for the button of his jeans and his hands came off the sink, unsteadying his balance slightly. They got in the way of your hands and accomplished nothing, just two sets of fingers and no progress, and he groaned like he was embarrassed.
“Rafe.”
His hands stopped, and he sighed. “‘M sorry,” he said, voice a whisper, low enough that it almost didn’t reach you.
You did the button. You did the zip. You worked the denim down and he managed the small cooperation it needed—one foot, then the other, a hand landing hard on your shoulder for balance and staying there after the balancing was done. You let his hand stay for a moment.
He had nothing left to be done with him, so you stood up, knees cracking, and for a second, the two of you just stood there. Him with no armor left, literal or otherwise. You still in the hoodie. Both of you too tired to pretend this was anything other than what it was, which was the most undefended either of you had ever been in a lit room together.
His hand came off your shoulder, got a fistful of your hoodie, and pulled, as though he wanted to make sure you stayed in the bathroom. There was nowhere to go and nowhere else you wanted to be, and you ended up close enough that you had to tip your head to keep his face in view.
His fingers messed around with the zipper of the hoodie, trying to pull it down. It got stuck less than a quarter way down, and you brought your hands up to stop him. You guided his hand down in the right direction, because you wanted his hand to stay close to you. You undressed the rest of the way the same, which was quickly. You’d been undressed in front of Rafe more times than was wise to tally, and it had always been charged. This was just two bodies and a bad light and a long night, and you stepped out of the last of your clothes and felt, instead of exposed, something closer to unburdened, like the clothes had been one more thing you were tired of holding up.
You got the water going; it ran cold for maybe half a second before it started warming up. You put your hand under it until it was right. You guided him in the same way you’d done for the sink with a hand on his arm. Rafe went where you put him with the awful pliancy of a person who had run all the way out of his own opinions.
Under the water he looked, somehow, even more like himself and even less. The bruise went darker, wet. His hair flattened. He stood there with his head down and his shoulders up and his hands not knowing what to do.
You stepped in behind him, grabbing the small blue bottle of shampoo and squeezing it out in your hands, lathering it. You reached up to put your hands in his hair.
You felt the whole length of him stiffening under your hands because gentle was the furthest thing Rafe’s body knew to receive without first checking it for a catch. You kept your fingers moving slow against his scalp and waited him out. You worked the water through. You were careful, so careful, around the right side, around the bruise, your touch going feather-light every time it neared the place Topper's fist had been, because you could not wash his hair without the lawn being right there under your fingers, without the whole reason for all of it sitting purple on his face four inches from your hands.
It went all out of him at once. His shoulders came down. His head tipped forward, into it, into your hands, the full weight of it surrendered, and he let you hold his head up the way you'd let him hold the rest of you up on the porch, and a breath went out of him that was too long and too uneven to be only a breath. The water took most of it. You let the water take it.
“I should’ve just ended it,” you said, letting the water wash off the shampoo. The words came out of you low, half-lost under the water, and you weren’t even sure where they’d been summoned from. “Should’ve just ended it properly instead of doing that to him.”
Rafe lifted his head out of your hands, enough to look at you, his hair dripping. “You think he would’ve let you?”
You opened your mouth to answer it and found that you couldn't, because the answer was no, or at least, he wouldn’t have let you do it easily. He’d have been kind about it, even. He would’ve been so reasonable and so wounded and so, so kind that ending it would’ve taken months, cost you hundreds of conversations, and you’d have lost all of them.
“I guess,” you said, shrugging your shoulders slightly.
His hand slowly came up and pushed your wet hair out of your face. His thumb went along your temple once, getting a strand you hadn’t noticed was stuck there, and tucked it back. His hand came to rest at the side of your neck after, his palm flat and warm.
You stiffened, just slightly, as he leaned down to put his mouth to your forehead and held it there a second. You felt the breath go out of him against your hairline, and you understood that he had just done the plainest tender thing there was, because he had finally run all the way out of the other ways.
You closed your eyes under it, and then, because the question had been sitting in you, and he had worn down whatever that kept it tucked in, you asked, “Do you regret it?”
You felt him pull away just slightly, his breath still ghosting over your forehead. “Fuck kind of question is that?” It came out with no edge, almost tired.
“Rafe.”
He dragged a breath in and kept his head bowed against yours, as if the answer was easier to give without looking at you. “No,” he said to your hairline, between the small wet space between the two of you. “Alright? No. Do you?”
You owed it the truth and the truth had parts, and you had to find them one at a time. “I regret what I did to him,” you said, voice quiet. “Topper. My mom. His mom, too, I guess. All of—” Your hand made a small motion in the water, at everything, the whole detonated shape of it that was waiting past the bathroom door. “That’s not what you’re asking.”
Rafe shook his head.
“Then—” Your throat closed up, like you were admitting you were, in fact, guilty. “No. Not the part you mean.”
Rafe lifted his head then and looked at you, at the water running off the both of you. “We really did fuck this up, though.”
You felt yourself let out a chuckle that was devoid of all humor and let your head drop against his chest. “I know.”
You felt his hands, slightly unsteady, reach up to the back of your head, putting a slight pressure as if he wanted you to get even closer to him, hide yourself in him. Involuntarily, you thought about Ruthie’s words, the timeline of them, and felt your body go still against him.
“What?” he asked immediately, hands stilling at the back of your head.
“I just—I heard something,” you started, burying your head against his chest. He hummed, and you felt the vibration of it go through you. “How—well, how long? Have you—”
He went quiet for a moment, then his hands resumed the same slow motion at the back of your head. “Long enough,” he said roughly.
“Rafe—”
“Been long enough that it doesn’t matter when exactly,” he said evenly, aimed at the top of your head.
You lifted your head off his chest to look at him, water running down his face, the bruise, the jaw. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting right now.” His thumb moved at the back of your skull, once. His eyes held yours for a second, then he tipped his chin down, pressing his mouth to your forehead and leaving it there. “Does it really matter?” he asked against your forehead, and then added, “Took me long enough to get you here. Not gonna ruin it just yet.”
You moved your head slightly to meet his eyes, and his eyes were darker and closer than you’d registered, the water still running down his face in slow lines. His jaw was set and he was looking at you as he shook his head. “Don’t make me say it yet.”
Your lips caught between your teeth and you nodded. “Okay.”
His jaw loosened a degree and his eyes dropped briefly to your mouth, then your throat, then back up.
His thumb pressed in at the back of your skull, and then his hand slid down your neck, your spine, the flat of his palm moving slow and certain over each vertebrae like he was counting them, learning you in the water, and you felt every single inch of it, the warmth of his hand against the cooling water. His other hand found your hip and his fingers curled slightly at the bone, thumb sitting in the small, soft hollow beside it that he’d found sometime in June and kept finding ever since. You pressed your forehead against his chest again.
You’d changed into the shirt he’d folded at the end of the bed, a soft worn one that had been washed enough times that the neckline had gone slightly loose, and you’d gotten under the covers on the side that had become yours sometime in July without any conversation. The pillow smelled like him, which you’d stopped being able to pretend you hadn’t noticed somewhere around the fifth time you’d stayed, and you lay on your back watching the dock light move on the ceiling as you listened to the sink water humming in the bathroom.
It ran for a long while, enough that you assumed he’d simply been standing there without actually doing anything. Then, you heard the drag of the cabinet, the third floorboard from the door, and then the bathroom light went out under the door.
He came out, crossing to his side and sitting down at the edge of the mattress. He placed his elbows on his knees as his head dropped forward, hands hanging between his legs doing nothing. The dock light came off the marsh in its slow pattern and moved across the muscles of his back.
“So fuckin’ tired,” he said to the floor.
Your eyes snagged on the line of his shoulders as they came down, and you could practically feel the tension easing in him in your own body. He sat there for a moment, then turned his head to look at you over his shoulder.
Your body pulled itself in slightly under his gaze and the covers came up half-an-inch. Rafe wetted his lips as he watched you do it, then he stood up off the edge of the mattress, and you tracked him across the room in your peripheral vision as he came around to your side. You tipped your chin up to follow him and found he was already close, already right there, looking down at you in the light with his hair still slightly damp at the ends and his jaw carrying its four days.
He reached and pulled the covers back a few inches you’d pulled them up, and he got a knee on the mattress and his hand found your jaw before he tilted it the last degree it needed. He closed the inch between you slowly, as though he was testing it all over again, and his thumb ran along your jaw while the weight of him settled on the mattress beside you and then over you.
“Rafe,” you said against his mouth.
He let out a short breath, fingers climbing up your jaw and behind your ears to gently tug on your hair. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
You brought your hand up to his face without thinking, your palm against his unshaven jaw and felt the rasp of it against your fingertips. The weight of his face leaned into your palm so easily that your eyes went slightly wet and you blinked it back because you weren’t going to it, not right now, not with his mouth this close.
“‘M here,” you murmured, your voice coming out smaller than intended.
“Mhm.” His thumb moved over the hinge of your jaw.
His fingers were still in your hair, not pulling, just holding, and you could feel each individual one of them against your scalp, the specific pressure of his hand cradling the back of your head like he'd decided it was something that needed cradling.
You turned your face up further into it. His other hand found the hem of the shirt and his palm slid underneath it, warm and slightly rough, and he spread his fingers wide against your hips.
You brought your free hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat under your palm, fast, faster than his face was giving him credit for, and you pressed your fingers flat against it and felt him register the pressure, felt his breath shift against your mouth.
You moved your lips to his jaw. The corner of it, where the muscle jumped when he was holding something in, and you felt it jump now under your mouth and felt his fingers tighten in your hair. You followed the jaw down to his neck, mouth finding the warm skin below his ear, and he made a sound low in his throat that he swallowed before it finished, which was the thing, which was always the thing with Rafe, the sounds he almost made.
“Wait —” His hand stilled on your ribs, and his face moved to the side, then he let out a small, humorless chuckle. “Hold on.”
With his palm under your shirt, he pushed you back against the bed and slid off of you, the whole heat of his body leaving yours gradually. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at you sideways, then tilted his head to your phone laying on the bed.
You glanced over to see Topper’s name, the same way it had been coming up on your phone for the past five days.
Rafe shook his head, the corners of his lips curving into something less relaxed, more annoyed. “Should’ve probably asked if you guys are actually over.” He lifted his shoulders in a stiff motion. “That’s my bad for assuming.”
You swallowed, brows furrowing. “We’re over.”
He gestured vaguely to your phone. “Does he fuckin’ know that?”
“I don’t think he’s planning on—” You shook your head, suddenly startled by Rafe’s tone. “Don’t think he’d want anything to do with me after I cheated on him.”
Rafe raised his brows and pressed his lips together. “You’d be surprised,” he murmured.
“Okay,” you said, voice coming out slowly. “I’ll call him back later.”
“Call him now,” Rafe said.
When the phone lit up again a minute later, Rafe reached over and held it out for you without looking at you, his eyes on the screen and jaw set. Your eyes flickered down to the phone, the patience of Rafe’s gesture, and you took it from him. You pressed the phone to your ear.
Rafe lay back against the headboard in one slow motion and his arm opened and you went into it, back finding his chest, and his arm came over you, settling across your front. His chin found the top of your head.
“Hey,” you said into the phone.
There was a pause on the other end, and you heard Topper inhale a sharp breath. “Hey,” he said carefully. “Wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”
“I know.” You forced a swallow. “I’m sorry it took me—”
“It’s okay.” It wasn’t okay, you both knew it, and he’d said it anyway because it was him. You pressed your lips together as he continued, “I’m—I’m not happy about the lawn. But you—” He let out a breath, and it sounded something forcing it to be a laugh. “It really fucking sucked that it was true, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” you said, pinching your eyes shut. “I’m really sorry—I know it doesn’t change anything, but.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “Did it have to be him?”
You opened your eyes and looked at the ceiling and felt Rafe’s heartbeat under your shoulder blade, and you thought about how to answer it honestly without being cruel. You turned your neck slightly to look at the guy in question, and he was already looking down at you, jaw set. He tipped his chin up in question, and you shook your head against him.
“I didn’t do it right,” you settled on saying, turning your face away from him. “I should’ve done it differently.”
“Like by breaking up with me before you fucked my best friend?”
“Yes,” you said, forcing down the sharpness in your chest and answering plainly, because he’d asked so plainly. “Yes. That’s exactly what I should’ve done.” Then, you added, “I’m sorry.”
Topper exhaled. “Stop apologizing,” he muttered. “It doesn’t change it—fuck.”
Your mouth opened to do exactly that on instinct, then you closed it. The line went, just like that without a goodbye or final word. You held the phone up against your ear for a second longer, just to be sure, then you lowered it. You lay there in the after of it and felt what had just happened settle over you, the specific weight of a thing that was done now, finally, actually done, the door closed from the other side and not by you which was its own thing to sit with. You’d wanted to be the one to do it properly and instead he'd been the one to end the call and somehow that was the most Topper thing that had ever happened. Giving you the last word and then not waiting for it. It was the least of what you deserved from him.
The steam from the shower filled the bathroom, fogging up the glass door as the hot water ran through both of you. This should have been just one of your study sessions but rafe stood there with his back against the tiled wall, his surprisingly lean body glistening with little water droplets. His hair was slicked back while you were on your knees on the wet floor infront of him, cheerleader uniform long discarded somewhere in the hallway.
Your hand wrapped around his thick cock, stroking him slowly at first. He was already rock hard, eight inches and girthy—easily three fingers thick—twitching in your grip. You looked up at him with a mischievous grin, water splashing across your face.
"You know, I thought you were gay the first time I saw you," you teased, your voice playful and low over the sound of the running water.
He looked down at you, offended and pouting. Those big nerdy eyes narrowing behind wet lashes. “Im not gay.” he protested, his voice cracking just a little. He gestured pointedly downward to his big dick before. “I mean, hello!?”
Your smirk widened at the sight of his impressive dick bobbing right in front of your face, heavy. He was super cute like this.
Without another word, you leaned in and took him into your mouth, lips stretching around his thickness. Rafe groaned loudly, one hand tangling gently in your wet hair as you bobbed your head, sucking him deeper. The water made everything slick and messy, your tongue swirling around the head before sliding down his shaft.
“Fuck… just like that,” he muttered, his usual shy demeanor melting away as you worked him. You hollowed your cheeks, taking as much of his eight inches as you could, stroking the rest with your hand in rhythm. His hips bucked forward instinctively, but he was careful—still a bit of that polite nerd in him even now.
You kept your eyes locked on his as you sucked harder, faster, the wet sounds echoing in the shower. Rafe’s pout faded into pure pleasure, his head tilting back against the tiles, mouth open in heavy breaths. His cock throbbed against your tongue, getting even harder as you pushed him closer to the edge.
“Oh shit— I’m gonna…” he warned, voice strained.
You didn’t pull back. Instead, you sucked him deep one last time, and Rafe came hard with a shaky moan, pulsing thick ropes down your throat. You swallowed around him, milking every drop until he was spent, trembling under the spray.
He looked down at you afterward, chest heaving, a dazed little smile breaking through that post-nut haze. “Definitely not gay,” he mumbled, still catching his breath.
This one was pretty cute to make, i love submissive rafe hehehehehehe
disclaimer // 18+ content. this story includes mentions of drugs, taking & using drugs. mentions of sex, p in v, and mentions of drug deals.
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rafe has it bad for you. you're absolutely gorgeous, your body is beautiful, your smile lights up the darkest rooms, and you're the sweetest bun he's ever met.
he refuses to admit it though ─ he's a drug dealer and doesn't need to be worried about a girl or better yet, bringing a girl around his deals and around his money. his money is dirty and so is he ─ there's no need to get attached to a girl that's too precious to be around that shit.
especially a girl like you ─ you're too sweet to get addicted to some random shit like he did. you're too sweet to end up like half of the fuckers he sells drugs to. you're too sweet to be around the negative, dark side of drug dealers.
he refuses to give you anything but weed, too pretty and too sweet to let drugs corrupt you. he refuses to be anything to you but your drug dealer, too pretty and too sweet to let him corrupt you.
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"hey doll, got your shit right here." he smiles softly as he leans over and grabs a bag of weed for you ─ you start to notice every time you're buying off of him, the bags get bigger and bigger and you pay less and less.
"thank you, rafey." you smile up at him ─ grabbing the bag from him while your manicured nails drag over his hand. with the furrow of your brows and the sight of you biting your inner cheek, he's already asking what's going on.
"what're you thinkin' about?" you shrug your shoulders lightly while inspecting the bag of weed he handed you. "wanna try something else." he shakes his head and sits down on the couch behind him ─ his thumb swiping over his nose as his legs spread.
no, no, no ─ too sweet to be dealing with anything else other than weed.
"no can do, doll ─ already told you all you can get from me is weed." he looks up at you with a stern look, "cant have you fuckin' up knowing its my fault."
you whine and pout your plump, glossy lips at him ─ walking closer to him and sitting down next to him. "please? pretty please, rafey? i'll only do it once, okay?" he shakes his head, his eyes darting around the room as he scratches his jaw. "nope."
but you look so fucking pretty when you pout, so pretty.
you grab his hands, subconsciously bringing them closer to your chest as you intertwine your fingers with his. his breath hitches as you beg him and his hands being dangerously close to your chest.
but you sound so fucking pretty when you beg, so sweet.
"fuck ─ okay, okay fine. but you're stayin' with me 'til it wears off, got it?" you eagerly nod your head as rafe stands up and walks over to his stash ─ grabbing a pill and walking back over to you. you grab the pill from his hand and observe it, "what is it?"
"molly."
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you felt so fucking good. rafe looked so good, the music he was playing sounded good, every time he brushed against you felt good. everything feels and looks so fucking good.
you look over at rafe sitting next to you with a giggle, his head turns to you with furrowed brows and a soft smile. "you good?" you nod your head slowly ─ still staring at him while giggling.
"feel so good." he chuckles softly, smoking on a blunt he just rolled not too long ago and turning his attention to the tv. "yeah?" he says quietly, looking at you again with raised brows.
you nod your head slowly again, your eyes slowly moving around the room with a soft smile on your lips. "yeah." you whisper. you lean your head back against the couch and let out a soft, content sigh while closing your eyes.
he watches your chest rise softly, your long lashes fluttering against your cheeks ─ your glossy, plump lips part as soft breaths leave your lips.
you're so fucking pretty it hurts.
he watches you open your eyes, looking at him with a dazed look and a soft smile. you stare at him for a moment, studying his lips and his nose ─ his pretty eyes and eyebrows. he looks so good.
you don't say a word as you lean closer to him, slowly moving your body onto his lap ─ never breaking eye contact with him. he watches your legs wrap around his waist, his eyes trailing up your body until he meets your eyes.
you look so fucking pretty on top of him. no, no, no he can't get attached.
your lips slowly attach to his neck, kissing and sucking and licking ─ it feels so good but you're too sweet, too pretty to be around the shit he's around. he knows if he fucks you ─ you're not leaving him. he can't do it.
but he's groaning and leaning his head back, giving you more room to lick up his neck and suck tiny, sweet marks on him ─ his hands gripping your hips tightly, grinding your hips into his slowly as your lips finally meet his, moaning softly against his lips as his hard, clothed cock brushes against your clothed clit.
but his eyes are rolling back when the sounds of your pretty moans fill his ears ─ his hands trailing up your back for a moment before he pulls your baby tee off of you, his eyes wide and a throaty groan leaving his lips at the sight of your bare chest. he stares up at you for a moment before his lips attach to your pretty, pretty nipples ─ sucking and licking them like his life depends on it.
but he's slowly pushing you back to pull your shorts down, his eyes fluttering shut momentarily at the sight of your pink, lace thong ─ harshly grabbing at your hips to bring you back to him after pulling it off.
holy fuck, you're so fucking pretty ─ can't fuck you, no, no, no.
but he lets you pull his gray sweatpants down, his underwear sliding down his thighs too. he lets your hands slowly reach his shirt, pulling at it as he rushes to take it off. he lets you lean forward and kiss his lips again, he lets you lick his teeth and suck on his pink tongue.
but he lets you reach down and line his hard cock up at your entrance, groaning softly when you move his cock to rub against your puffy clit ─ groaning loudly when you sink down on him with a loud moan. it feels so fucking good.
he lets you bounce on his cock, throwing your head back. you feel so good, he feels so good, everything feels so good - so high you can feel his cock sliding in and out on you on a different level. his lips find your neck, leaving his marks - marking his territory.
no, no, no. cant stop it feels so good ─ you're mine. mine, mine, mine.
he lets you whine and moan, his hands gripping your hips as he meets your thrusts. he lets you stop bouncing on him as you lean your head against his shoulder ─ crying out as he fucks his cock up into your soaking pussy.
"feels so good, rafey. so good." he groans, his head leaning forward and resting against your pretty tits as he moves faster ─ his eyes rolling back when your moans get prettier, louder, closer together.
he lets your pussy clench around his thick cock, suffocating him. he lets your nails dig into his back and shoulders, he lets you cry out his name.
say it again. rafe, rafe, rafe. it's yours to scream, it's yours. yours, yours, yours. fuck.
he lets his hands grip onto the fat of your hips and ass as he moves faster ─ you're so high, so fucking high and it feels so fucking good. the sounds of your skin slapping against his, his groans, the feeling of his cock is the only thing you can feel, all you can hear ─ so euphoric.
he lets you cry and scream his name as you cum around his cock. he lets himself cum inside of you, marking you. his territory. his girl. his.
no shade at alllll but the obx rp accounts always make me laugh bc they’re always so ooc 😭😭😭😭 like why is jj saying “the clock is ticking mamas.” ??????
