Funny I'm at Home
Summary: Being in love with Rafe Cameron wasn't an original experience. Him being in love with you? That definitely is. How many ways are there for someone so in love with you to fuck up? Ask him.
Pairing: College!Rafe Cameron x Reader
Trope: Best Friends Brother to Friends to Something to Enemies to ???
Word Count: 4.7k
AN: Finals are over, so enjoy my labors of me avoiding my work
Masterlist My Masterlist
It’s been three days since you’ve spoken to Rafe Cameron.
Three days of ignoring his calls. Three days of ignoring the obsessive knocking at your door. Three days of trying to convince your friends you have a stomach bug and that’s why you haven’t been responding to texts.
Three entire days since Rafe Cameron publicly humiliated you without the slightest care in the world.
Part of you knew it was coming. That no matter what inevitable force there was that kept throwing the two of you together, you were always going to end up in exactly the same spot you are right now: curled up in your bed while the morning light threatens to peek through your tightly closed curtains with your phone buzzing with the tenth incoming call from Sarah going unanswered on the mattress next to you, and a feeling squeezing in your chest so tightly that you know for certain that death would be a much kinder fate than the ache you are experiencing.
Fate had a funny way of throwing you into someone’s orbit, pulling the wool over your eyes to make you ignore the blinking red signs that this was going to end in disaster until you found yourself knee deep in it, fate pushing the mask off and asking if you are really so blind you couldn’t see what was coming?
It seems you have always been destined to have your heart broken by Rafe Cameron.
The screen lights up again without even allowing itself the chance to go dim, the picture of you and Sarah dressed up for your middle school formal plastered on the screen for the millionth time since you had gone ghost. Your other friends may try to believe that you have contracted some kind of random sickness, but the two of you have been inseparable since you moved to Kildare after your 10th birthday.
She was there when you got your first period. When you had to share the most awkward spin the bottle kiss with John B during your first official high school party. She walked around in a bra all day when your top broke taking your graduation photos and punched JJ in the arm so hard he almost cried when he laughed.
Your very best friend.
The same girl who had warned you time and time again to avoid harboring any feelings for Rafe because she knew how it would end. You were the only person she thought capable of breaking his heart, but she refused to live in a world where he had the power to break yours.
You, who didn’t know how to love anything half-assed. The person who had attempted to interrupt every bar fight JJ had somehow scraped his way into because you couldn’t stand to see someone you love mistreated. The girl who caught a flight at 2 am because Cleo had sounded a little off in a text while visiting her mom and you couldn’t bear the thought of her hurting alone.
Rafe couldn’t see out of his own ass enough to fall in love with anyone, but he did love finding any way he could to one-up his father’s “perfect” daughter. And you?
You always tried to find the good in creatures that bite.
So, she warned you. And him. Especially him. Neither of you were to engage in anything other than cordial acceptance of each other because when the two of you imploded, there’s not a person alive who wouldn’t feel the impact.
She refused to let you be collateral in the storm that was her brother.
You got swept away anyway. You’re not sure how it happened, the exact moment where you went from viewing him as just a facet in his sister’s life to seeing him as someone else entirely missing from your brain no matter how hard you tried to remember the distinct moment that you lost your mind.
Not as Sarah’s aggravating older brother. Not Ward’s loose cannon son. Not the arrogant football player who seemed to be on the arm of someone new every time you caught him on the sidewalk.
Someone who always answered FaceTimes from his younger sister no matter how busy he is to help her figure out the correct spot to place Lego pieces when the instructions got lost. The first person on the field and the last to leave, making sure that he wasn’t asking anything of his teammates that he wasn’t willing to do himself. The guy who is so unnaturally good at chemistry (something that he made crappy jokes about anytime you brought it up) that when you got the lowest grade of your life and were in the middle of a mental breakdown, stayed up for almost 36 hours straight to help you with your make-up lab and never once mentioned it again.
Just Rafe.
Without all the frills and fireworks that somehow managed to follow him everywhere he went.
Somewhere along the way, between the bar fights you pushed yourself into and the two of you somehow ending up in the same math class, you forgot the thing he was known for above all else.
And now you’ve got the broken heart to prove it.
Turns out that there’s no real way to hide the fact that you’ve been crushed by your best friend’s brother, but if there was, you’re absolutely sure you’ve done it wrong when you’re opening your bedroom door and find your foot connecting with JJ right in the balls.
“Son of a bitch,” he groans as your hands shoot out to try to catch his shoulders as he tips over, your bag dropping against the door frame with a loud thud.
John B is laughing loudly as you help the blonde up off the floor, ignoring the glare you send his way as you stand back up.
“What the hell were you doing?”
“These guys were too chicken shit to try to pop your lock-”
You narrow your eyes at him, your gazes catching for the first time in days, and he is jumping behind John B, who is trying to cough away his laugh when he notices the look on your face.
“I could’ve been naked.”
“Or you could’ve been dead,” JJ fires back from his spot behind John B, his chin coming to rest on his shoulder as if the boy in front of him is the only armor he needs from ending up with another cheap shot sending him to the floor. “Figured I would take my chances.”
You bend down, pulling your bag up onto your shoulder as you roll your eyes at the blonde cowering behind his best friend.
“If I was dead, I’m pretty sure Kie would have smelled me already, genius.” You point out to JJ, who just puts his hands up in the air raising his eyebrows as if he needed to tell you that he was doing the best he could in his own thought process.
He’s playing defense because he always does. It’s the exact same approach you are taking right now, tightening your hand on the strap of your bag as you look at the three pairs of eyes looking back at you.
The two of you have always had that in common, which is the reason you two are the only duo in the group who can’t drink at parties together.
“Can I go to class now,” You ask, motioning to the bag in your hand. “Or are you guys going to follow me and try to crack open a window?”
“You’re going to class?” John B asks, the words tumbling out of them before he can catch them it seems. He mentally slaps himself, you can practically see the word ‘idiot’ crawl up the back of his neck and settle into the blush at the tips of his ears. “Duh, I meant-”
“You could always just answer your phone and we could avoid all of this.”
Sarah finally chimes in, arms crossed as she fixes you with a calculating look. It doesn’t take a genius to know that she knows you were lying about being sick, but that doesn’t mean you have to give it away.
Your shoulder brushes against the doorframe before you lean against it, copying her crossed arms with your own sitting tightly across your chest. There’s a tug in one of your eyebrows, fixing her with a look that shows as much amusement as you can muster.
“I’ll be sure to answer you in between gags next time, Cameron.”
Her last name tumbles out of your mouth and you can taste the bitterness on your tongue in its wake. It’s an old habit, the name flopping from owner to owner over your years of run-ins with the entire family. A nickname meant to be funny because of how scrunched up Sarah’s face would get when someone called her that, turning into a way to mentally remind yourself of the distance you needed to keep from the other half of the name.
He hated when you called him by his last name. It was a conversation you two had more frequently over the last few months, but it would work its way out of your mouth just so you could watch how his eyes would flick over your face to see what he possibly could have done wrong for you to have reverted from calling him by his first name.
It was a way for you to maintain distance from him. Then a way to tease him.
You can’t use the name for him anymore.
You’re not sure your voice would even function within a thousand feet of him ever again, but you still know that the name now belongs to the girl standing in front of you and you can’t help the way your stomach lurches at the thought.
Maybe you should throw up right here and now, take that knowing look out of your best friend’s eyes and maintain the story that you were sick.
JJ’s face scrunches up at the thought of you answering the phone while hunched over the toilet, shaking his head and muttering for you to feel free to never answer his calls in a situation like that. He would be just fine with a text for a sign of life.
“You and Rafe must have caught the same bug,” Sarah says, the tone in her voice trying to sound like the idea is pure coincidence but you aren’t stupid enough to miss the look on her face. “He seems to be MIA too.”
You refuse to let the twinge in your chest at his name show on your face, keeping your face blank as you raise an eyebrow and accept her silent challenge to see if you are going to double down on your story or give her the answer she is really looking for.
The real reason why you have tuned out the rest of the world and locked yourself in your room.
“You having JJ bust in on him naked too,” You ask, your eyes meeting hers, “Or am I just special?”
She purses her lips together at your deflection, irritation showing on her face that you have seen only a handful of times in your life and never once directed at you. Her eyes linger on yours for a moment in the hopes that maybe you will change your mind. That you will just tell her what happened and let her help you through this.
The ache in your heart wants nothing more than to curl up on your bed and cry into her shoulder about how stupid you feel. To sit with her while she tells you that you deserve better and that none of this is your fault.
Except it is.
Because she warned you about exactly this. She had drilled it into your head that the only certainty was complete and utter heartbreak, and you went and did it anyway.
And he’s her brother.
Her sometimes crazy, irrational, and idiotic brother, but still.
Always her brother.
The one person who she had been so worried about breaking your heart. The very person you had almost been sure would rather die than ever hurt you.
You had been stupid enough not to listen to her.
How were you supposed to tell her that?
“Can I go to class now?”
As you watch her face fall, you realize you may not have to.
Your professor is overly empathetic to your “sickness”, offering to send you an email with the notes from the classes you missed while you stand in front of her desk at the end of class, a sheepish look on your face. She makes a comment about her daughter picking up the same bug which you respond to with a polite nod and well wishes because you can’t tell her the two situations simply aren’t the same.
You doubt the sick feeling in your stomach is ever going to fully go away.
But you smile and nod your way through the conversation anyway, letting yourself laugh when she says Gatorade is the cure for any sickness- or hangover- she has ever encountered. Your feet don’t feel like they hit the ground as heavily as they did on the way here, the normalcy of your presence out in the world giving you some sort of life back.
It’s the same path you take from class every day, your feet leading you on auto-pilot like you hadn’t missed anything at all. The past few months have had this exact path filled with grumpy comments and loud high-fives that were always aimed at the brooding figure that had claimed a spot next to you despite not having a class in this hall at all.
The spot is empty now and you’re not sure why, but that feels like the worst part.
You hadn’t really realized just how much of your life had been consumed by Rafe Cameron before this exact moment. He had somehow made himself a piece of everything. A singular person not being around should not have you walking down the hall with a lump in your throat. You shouldn’t actually miss snarky comments about the smell of nursing homes as you pass by Professor Wynn’s class- a lady who had been tenured for incredibly too long and always seemed to park on the sidewalk despite everyone collectively refusing to park near her.
But you do.
For the first time in the semester, your hand is the one reaching for the handle on the exit door and you could scream with the hesitance that crept up your arm. You have to push back his voice in the back of your head, scolding you for opening it up when there is someone fully capable of doing it right next to you.
Except he’s not.
So, you push.
The door moves out from under your hand just as soon as your fingers brush against it, pulling away just as quickly as you had approached. You fling your arm back, absent-mindedly stepping out of the way for the person coming in to be able to get around you.
The person holding the door mutters out an apology, hardly even glancing up from the watch wrapped tightly around their wrist as they go to step into the space before stopping in their tracks right in front of you.
All you can do is stare at the thick silver band that has taken over your field of vision, your eyes refusing to move any further. You’d know that watch in your sleep, countless hours spent studying across from it tapping harshly against the wooden table in an attempt to grab your attention.
It has your attention now without even trying.
“Hey.”
For just a moment, your body ignites in the same way it always does when it hears his voice. You shove your fluttering heart off a cliff, the sinking feeling returning to your chest just as quickly as it left as you look up to find the very person you have been avoiding.
“You’re, um-” Rafe clears his throat awkwardly the second your eyes meet his panicked blue ones. “You got done early.”
He fumbles over his words for the first time since the two of you have been introduced and you have to restrain the small piece of you that wants to find it endearing. The idea that you could make Rafe Cameron flustered was something that would have had you on cloud nine last week.
“I was-” He clears his throat again, reaching up to rub the back of his hand as he tries to make his voice work. “Kelce-”
Of course you would pick to start attending the one class one of his childhood best friends is in. You hadn’t thought you had seen the boy sitting in his usual spot in the back, but you must have missed him.
You knew you should’ve waited for your afternoon class to make your return to society.
Rafe always had a habit of finding you, even when you were lost in a crowd. Back then, you hadn’t been actively avoiding him. You never minded seeing his friends around, offering them a smile and a wave anytime you made eye contact and you knew the boy in front of you would be there in just a few moments.
Back then, it was endearing. You didn’t care how he found you, just that he did. Having him around somehow managed to make the day less terrible, taking your focus off of how badly you had stuttered through a presentation or completely got a math problem wrong in front of everyone.
Now he is the terrible thing, standing in front of you with those stupid guilty blue eyes and nervously trying to find the right words to convince you to stay. It’s not a matter of if he can because you know that he has a way of keeping your feet cemented in a spot that nobody else has ever accomplished.
It’s a matter of if you will fall for it.
The same sweet talking. The same bright smile. The same nervous neck rubbing that would normally have you biting the inside of your lip and hoping that he can’t physically see your palms sweating from how nervous you are being so close to him.
Except it’s no longer reserved for just you.
The memory you have been pushing off for so long washes over you in an instant, hesitation suddenly disappearing as you allow yourself to be overcome with an emotion that you aren’t sure has ever been reserved for the boy standing in front of you.
Irritation.
“Not interested.”
You drop your eyes away from his, moving quickly around him. You are careful not to touch him as you slip out the door. Being close to him is dangerous. Making contact will only set you back.
A clean break is what you need, and as you step out into the gloomy morning air, you know that the universe isn’t going to be so kind as to give it to you.
“Wait,” he calls after you, his feet falling into step behind you as the door swings closed with a loud thud. People are watching now, you can practically feel their eyes as they look for the source of the boom before landing on you almost sprinting away from Rafe Cameron. “Will you just stop for a second?”
You don’t respond, fingers tightening on the strap of your bag to stop you from turning around. Hearing him out isn’t going to help anything because you know exactly what this is. He knows it too. He knew exactly what had sent you running for the hills.
You were willing to do outrageous things for the people you care about, but willingly pretending to be stupid to make someone feel better wasn’t one of them.
“Can we just-”
His fingers brush against your wrist and you snatch it to your chest, spinning around to glare at him with a fire in your eyes that has him taking a step back.
It aches. Physically aches in the spot his fingers brushed, the small contact lighting every cell in your body up like he always seemed to do. You cradle it to you like it is broken, trying to push aside the flames dancing across the absence of him for the last time.
“I said,” you breathe out, teeth clenched as you make eye contact again. “I’m not interested. Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.”
You’re trying to keep your voice low, not allowing yourself to be oblivious to the eyes on the two of you, everyone trying to figure out why anyone would be trying to ignore the Rafe Cameron. Like he is some sort of celebrity and you should be lucky he’s giving you the time of day.
“I’m sor-”
“I’m not interested.”
You don’t let him get the words out. You know exactly where he is going with this, hands clenching at his sides as he sways on his feet. He has the face of a guilty man, teeth nervously pulling at the inside of his cheek even as you refuse to let him rush out his apology.
You’re past the point of apologies and you know that he knows that. He wants to fix this. That much is evident. He’s never not been able to fix something with his words or a flash of a smile.
This isn’t a situation he has ever been in before, but it is also one you trusted he would never put you in. So, at least the two of you have figured out how to suffer together one last time.
“Not in you. Not in your bullshit. None of it,” You continue, stepping closer and letting your hand point right at his chest. Your voice wavers for just a second. Just a split second, but it has his shoulders dropping like he is bracing for impact. “Take a hint and stay the fuck away from me, Cameron.”
It lands like a slap, his head flying back as if you had physically struck him. No matter how stupid he has been, no matter how badly he has fucked his life up before, you have never spoken to him the way you are speaking to him now. You’re not sure if you’ve ever spoken to anyone in the tone you are using for him right now.
Your name falls from his lips in a breath, a last ditch effort to try to get you to reach out for him. To let him try to talk his way out of this. To give him any sort of hint that there is still something here worth saving.
You forgave JJ for crashing your car in the 11th grade, waving his apology off the second you saw his broken arm and laughing that you hadn’t liked the way it had driven anyways. When Kie had accidentally lost your dog while you were out for the weekend, you swore that you hadn’t even thought for a second about breaking up your friendship.
You gave grace to the people around you. There was nothing that they had ever done that was so horrible you couldn’t immediately forgive them for.
Somehow, this was different and it shouldn’t be. The two of you weren’t anything for you to be feeling like this.
Except you were. You were something before all of this, even if you two hadn’t completely figured it out before it all blew up in your faces.
Well, just your face. He somehow managed to escape the blast.
This was different from some stupid car.
This was Rafe, standing in front of you with all of the apologies in the world being offered on his tongue and you couldn’t bring yourself to accept them.
Your friends have never been terrible to you. They might have made mistakes, but they always made up for them. Kie had torn up the whole island searching for Sprinkles before she finally returned her to you at 3am, your childhood best friend covered in swamp water and your childhood dog just happily wagging her tail at you.
You’d kill for them. You’re not sure there is anything under the sun you wouldn’t do for them, so when mistakes happened, it was easy to forgive them for it. The worst things they had ever done never outweighed your love for them because they weren’t done to hurt you.
This?
He was the one person who you had been warned time and time again would hurt you, but you had never believed anyone. Not after you got to know him. You trusted him completely, no matter how many warnings you had been given because he had never done anything to show you that he was capable of hurting you.
He was the only person you allowed to be in a space to hurt you like this. You never thought that he could ever do something that you wouldn’t be able to forgive him for.
If he was just your friend, you wouldn’t have the same problem. If this was JJ, you wouldn’t hesitate in being there for him. If Pope came to you with this situation, you would probably yell at him for a few seconds, but you would help him fix it.
But you two had blurred the lines of friendship a long time ago, and you knew that he knew that. He had audibly confirmed that the two of you were way past friendship.
That’s why he is standing in front of you, looking like a kicked puppy and trying any way he can to get you to talk to him. To try to understand how he of all people could be the person who hurt you most.
Maybe the two of you had never really been friends.
Friends don’t begrudgingly agree to plans once they find out the other one is going when their ‘brother’ since kindergarten has been RSVP’d for months. They don’t make sure that your favorite drink is in a cooler at a party that they aren’t even throwing. They don’t retake a calculus class just because the other needed to get a better grade to keep their football scholarship and they didn’t want to look like an idiot alone.
Friends don’t hold pinkies at movie night. They don’t get jealous if someone asks for your number. They don’t kiss you and then turn around and flaunt another girl all over the news.
Maybe you had been friends once. Maybe when you were kids and he stole the last Power Rangers band-aid even though you were the only one with a scraped knee. But the two of you had left friends in the rearview a long time ago.
And now? There’s no way the two of you could ever be friends again.
The moment the thought crosses your face, cascading over your emotions and pushing back the tears that have formed in your eyes, you see it click in his. The thought that you are serious, that you aren’t going to let him try to fix this. That the two of you are so over, you never even got a chance to start.
Panic.
“I told you I love you.” He throws the words out in a lower voice than he was speaking before, allowing them to land tightly in your chest before you have a chance to brace yourself. “I wasn’t lying. Please, just-”
You bite down on the inside of your lip harshly, fighting back the frustration twisting in your gut at the tears burning in your eyes. Rafe Cameron is not going to make you cry in the middle of the most public sidewalk on campus, feeding right into the middle of everything. You won’t be that girl.
“Was that before or after you proposed to someone else?”
Your voice forces the words out, tilting your head as if you are annoyed and waiting for an answer, but you know he knows you aren’t going to wait around for one. Your eyes flicker over his face for the last time, watching as he opens his mouth to plead his case but the words die in his throat.
“Goodbye, Rafe.”
