i want you the way that i want to be eaten alive

He resolutely kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, focusing intently on a spot somewhere behind Kelce, refusing to give her the satisfaction of his attention.

Topper glanced at Rafe, sensing his discomfort, before answering for the group. “Nah, we’re all good here, thanks.” His tone was polite but firm. Sofia nodded, her smile unwavering. “All right, just let me know if you need anything.”

As she turned to leave, her eyes subtly drifted over Rafe, as if hoping for a reaction. Rafe’s frustration simmered just below the surface, and he couldn’t suppress a scoff. Fishing out his phone, he quickly texted you, his fingers tapping out the message with a mix of impatience and frustration.

From the moment they had arrived at the country club for lunch, Sofia had been constantly hovering around them, her attention mostly focused on Rafe. No matter how many hints he dropped about being content and committed to his relationship with you, she just didn’t seem to get it.

Rafe: When are you coming?

Y/n: In like 10 minutes!!!

Rafe let out a sigh of relief as he read your reply, his tension easing slightly. Shutting off his phone, he cast a hopeful glance towards the front entrance, silently wishing you would appear any second.

After about ten minutes, the front doors swung open, revealing you and Sarah. Engaged in lively conversation, the two of you walked through the entrance, laughter bubbling between you. Rafe’s face lit up at the sight, and he immediately stood up, making his way toward you with an eager smile.

As Rafe strode across the room, Sofia rounded a corner, her eyes lighting up as she saw him heading in her direction. “Hey, Rafe—” she began, her voice hopeful. But Rafe didn’t even glance her way, brushing past her without a second thought, his focus entirely on you. The smile on Sofia’s face faltered, her heart sinking as she turned to watch him.

“Hey, babe,” Rafe greeted you warmly, his hands finding their way to the back of your neck as he pulled you into a deep kiss. Sarah, standing beside you, rolled her eyes and let out a mock gag. “Jesus,” she muttered, shaking her head before wandering off to give you two some space.

You smiled into the kiss, feeling Rafe’s affection and urgency. Pulling away slightly, you chuckled. “What was that for?” you asked, your eyes twinkling with amusement as he peppered kisses along your cheek.

“Nothin’, just missed you,” Rafe mumbled against your skin, his voice low and filled with sincerity. You couldn’t help but giggle at his tenderness, feeling warmth spread through you.

With his arm wrapped securely around your back, Rafe guided you towards the table where his friends were seated. As you approached, Kelce and Topper exchanged knowing looks, smirking at Rafe’s obvious delight. Sofia, now back behind the bar, watched from a distance.

“Thank God you’re here,” Topper quipped as you approached, a grin spreading across his face. “I thought Rafe’s jaw would break from all the clenching he’s been doing.” You raised an eyebrow at him, then turned to Rafe, who was pointedly looking away. “Why? What happened while I wasn’t here?” you asked, chuckling.

“Sofia’s what happened,” Topper continued, and your confusion deepened. “Seems that pogue’s got a thing for your man here.” Rafe let out a scoff. “You think? She could barely keep her eyes off me.”

You glanced back at Sofia, who quickly looked away when your eyes met. “She kept looking at you, did she?” you asked, your arm protectively wrapping around Rafe’s neck. He smirked, enjoying your reaction.

“Aren’t you popular with pogues these days, hmm?” you teased, giving Rafe a playful nudge. He chuckled, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Mhmm, you jealous, baby?” Rafe asked, his tone light and teasing.

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.

“And if it’s not her, it’s the dog.” You grumble, throwing your head back in exasperation, but giving Clark more room to suck a hickey into your neck. He bites just right till he’s soothing the pain with his tongue, licking a long stripe back up your neck. 

“Uh-huh.” 

It’s not that Clark doesn’t want to keep talking, but he knows he only has so much time with you. It’s been quickies or risky sexy for the past week. At least Kara is apartment hunting now, but considering he had unrestricted access to you before; now it’s nearly impossible. He’s not sure how much longer he can go on like this. 

Especially now, a hand slotted against your mouth as he ruts into you after pulling as many orgasms he could from you before the throbbing of his cock was impossible to ignore. She’s not home yet. His ears haven’t picked up on the sound of the lock turning, but if his hearing goes so far, he can only imagine hers. “I know, pretty.” He reassures, watching the way your pupils dilate. Your breath comes out of your nose, fast and hard, trying to contain yourself. The room is soft groans, whimpers, his words glide over your skin like a secret. You’ve become so used to moaning Clark’s name like a prayer. “I want to hear you. You know I do.” He grunts, his words accompanied by his thrusts. 

Clark’s hand unfortunately can’t cover the lewd sounds filling the room as your pussy grips him. There’s a small puddle of slick underneath you from the other orgasms he had pulled out of you. There was so much pent up want and need between the two of you. It wasn’t much of a challenge for him. You’re soft and pliant beneath his hands now. “Come on, sweetheart. Give me another one.” He’s pleading, wanting to chase after your release with his own. There was no better way than feeling the way you throbbed around him after an orgasm. Just the right amount of pressure, your body alight from his actions. Your pleasure became his own. 

As soon as you succumb to the pleasure, he’s following soon after you, whispering praises along with his sloppy kisses. “That’s it, that’s my girl.” The squelch from his own spend and yours fills the room as he pushes his come further into you with his thrusts. “Gotta give it all to you. Don’t know when I’ll get a chance to do it again.” And Clark after an orgasm is even more touchy, wanting. His hands teasing your sensitive skin. He’s lost in it. All he can see is you. All he can feel is you.

The hand against your mouth is forgotten, his mouth is slotted over your own instead. You practically swallow his words. His cock is still hard inside of you as he begins teasing the bundle of nerves between you. You’re so sensitive, you hiss. “Clark. I–” 

You walked up to the coffee pot, mug in hand. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t even noon yet. An article deadline was creeping up on you, and there were still edits to be made on a few others. You went to grab the pot when Jimmy suddenly appeared, taking it first.

“So… He talk to you yet?” Jimmy asked with a smile, pouring his mug full. He noticed your frown, chuckling once before he filled yours as well.

“Thanks. Who?” You asked, taking a sip.

Jimmy raised a brow. “Uh…”

“James.”

“Don’t full name me.”

“Don’t hide things.”

He sighed, regretting for a moment that he’d ever befriended you. “Clark.”

You snorted a laugh. “Talk to me about what? He can barely look at me without shuffling away.”

“Well, he just—”

The man himself appeared, staring at Jimmy with a tensed jaw. Clark had heard your conversation from across the room, though he couldn’t exactly let it slip that he had superhearing. He had to play it cool. As cool as was feasible for him, at least.

“What are you up to?” Clark asked, grabbing himself a disposable cup to fill. He didn’t often drink coffee this late in the workday.

“Jimmy says you’re supposed to talk to me,” you state, looking up at him and his gorgeous jawline. You let your eyes linger as he glared at Jimmy. “Won’t tell me what about, though.”

“Oh. Uh… well, I…”

“I’m gonna…” Jimmy trailed off, throwing a thumb over his shoulder before he quickly retreated. He didn’t want to be there if a train wreck occurred.

“You…?” You prompted, looking up at him.

“I was just, uh, wondering. If you’d, you know, maybe want to go out some time? Like let me take you out? On… on a date.”

“Oh?”

He blinked at you, cheeks a little pink. You just smiled. May as well cut the poor guy a break.

“Yeah. Sure, I’d love to.”

He let out a breath, his own smile coming out. “Oh. Gosh. Thank goodness. Uh, well, how about tonight? Are you busy?”

“No, I’m free,” you responded, biting back a wider smile. He was adorable. “Where do you want to take me?”

He swallowed. That was a complex question, considering he’d like to take you anywhere. Against a wall, in his bed, kitchen, living room, file room, your car. None of those would be appropriate answers, though, he thought.

“How about Italian food?”

“Love it.”

“Okay! Great,” he replied with a cheesy grin. “Great. I know an amazing place a few blocks down from here, actually, that I’d love to take you to. Uh… d-does seven work for you? Enough time to head home and stuff first?”

“Sounds perfect.”

Clark was floating on air the rest of the day. He had enough time to do a few rounds as Superman after work before he had to actually freshen up and get ready for the date. He’d picked you up at your place, which really means that he flew over and then took you on a walk to the restaurant. It wasn’t far, and it gave him more time to get to talk to you.

The date went phenomenally, and you were equally as charmed as he was. He was sweet at work, but in this context? He was incredible. Chivalrous, shockingly flirty, and you could swear his eyes were literally twinkling. By the time dessert came you were three glasses of wine deep and feeling a little… warm.

“I’m glad we did this,” you say softly, reaching forward to brush his knuckles with your fingers.

He glanced down, heart fluttering as he watched you touch his hand.

“Y-yeah. I am too. I’ve… honestly, I’ve had a crush on you for a while. I’m really happy you said yes.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

You smiled, chewing your lip. He turned his hand over, taking yours. He let his thumb brush over the back of your hand. You sighed dreamily. God, he was big. And gorgeous. Your thighs pressed together under the table, trying to suppress that tingling feeling you always got when he got close. Though, this time it was cranked up to ten.

He tried asking you a question about your family, though he could hardly pay any attention to the answer as a familiar smell hit his nose. He took in a breath, glancing down at your hand again, his jaw ticking once. He tried to ignore it, he really did. But knowing with certainty that you were here, holding his hand, and getting wet just talking to him? It was driving him insane.

“You okay?” You asked softly.

“Hm?”

“You look a little spacey.”

“Oh.” He gulped, looking at you again. “Yeah. Yes, I’m okay. Sorry, just… a little distracted, I guess.”

You tilted your head in question. “Distracted? By what?”

“You,” he admitted quietly with a soft smile. “You’re just… very distracting.”

You grinned, chin resting in your palm. “Oh yeah? How so?”

He sighed once. “Well… y-you’re pretty. Beautiful. Sweet. Funny. Just really… really great. Distracting, like I said.”

Distracting indeed. You could hardly focus on anything but him. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“We should do this again sometime,” you comment quietly as he walked you to your front door.

He nodded. “Yes. Yeah, I would really love that.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.”

He just smiled at you for a moment. You looked back up at him, squeezing his hand once again, trying to commit the feeling of his skin to memory. Maybe if you did it well enough, you could pretend it was his hand between your legs later that night. You figured he wasn’t the kiss-on-a-first-date kind of guy.

You figured wrong.

Clark plucked up all the courage he could, willing himself not to get hard as he leaned in. A tall order, considering he was halfway there from your scent alone. Having super-senses was certainly helpful when it came to gauging your interest.

You looked up with wide eyes, closing them only when his lips were finally against yours. His lips were soft but firm, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to yours, his hand bracing against your cheek.

This was a feeling you were sure to log in your mind for later.

He knew he’d be thinking of it for the next week every time he had an ounce of alone time.

He pulled away after a moment, sighing softly against your lips.

“This was nice.”

“The kiss or the date?”

He smiled. “Both.”

——————————

Clark just shook his head. “You’re not as quiet as you think you are.”

“And you’re oblivious.” Jimmy glanced up as Cat came by, making a beeline for the coffee pot. “Hey, Cat. You’ve got a knack for gossip and office romance. Back me up, here.”

“About what?” She raised a brow, suddenly interested.

“Clark and his little admirer,” Jimmy stated, wiggling his brows as he nodded to the girl currently talking with Perry across the room. “She totally has a crush on him.”

Cat smiled deviously. “Crush is putting it in very tame terms. Clark, given the chance, she’d be crawling all over you.”

Clark stammered, cheeks going pink as he dismissed the idea. There was no way. She was pretty and put together and… there was no way.

He got through the day with his thoughts swirling. They grew even more insistent every time she talked to him or looked at him or was in his general vicinity. Her perfume lingered in his nose, drawing him in like a siren song. He was pathetic and he knew it.

To make matters worse, she’d called him over for help in a cramped file room.

“Sorry, I tried myself but it’s way too high up,” she said softly, looking at him. She was trying to grab an old file from an article about an ice cream shop that had been around for ages, and was now on the brink of closing. “I really need it for my piece. I’m hoping if we draw some attention, they’ll get the sales boost they need to stay afloat. Unfortunately, I am not a 6’5 giant like you.”

“6’4, actually,” he murmured quietly. “It’s nice though. That you want to help them. You’re always so kind.”

“Gee, way to butter a girl up,” she replied with a chuckle. His cheeks flushed again. She pointed up at a box on the top shelf, reaching up on her tiptoes. “This one right here.”

“Got it.” He nodded diligently.

He reached up, expecting her to move out of the way, but she just stood there. Squished between his body and the shelf. He mumbled out an apology as he grabbed the box, pulling it off the shelf. He tried like hell not to let her notice how flustered he was at the contact, her back against his chest. It felt perfect. Too perfect. He ignored the way his cock jumped to life, trying to will it to go back down before it created an embarrassing bulge in the front of his slacks.

“Here it is. W-want it on your desk?”

“Huh?” Her eyes went wide. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she looked a little flustered. “Oh. Oh, the box. Yeah, yes. On my desk is fine. Thank you, Clark.”

He just smiled a little, taking in a deep breath. Gosh, she smelled good. He breathed in again as she moved to get around him, but this time he caught a whiff of something else under her perfume. Like her skin, but more… more. Something that guaranteed he’d have to be taking a trip to the restroom very soon if he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. Thank goodness for the box he could hold in front of his hips.

Was she… aroused?

He let his eyes scan over her, taking it all in as he walked with her to his desk. Her heart beat a little faster, she definitely looked a little bit nervous, her eyes went a little darker, and that smell… Oh boy.

Clark set the box down at her desk, promptly excusing himself from the situation and her pretty eyes looking up at him.

It was a good ten minutes later before he was sinking into his chair again, staring at his computer.

“Long bathroom break, Clark,” Jimmy commented with a short laugh.

Clark nodded curtly. “Yeah. Yeah… I, uh… I’m gonna ask her out.”

Jimmy just stared, taken aback by the sudden change in his tune.

“Any reason why you changed your mind so fast?”

“Just… sensed a change.”

——————————

When you walk into the kitchen, you can't help but bark a laugh so harsh it startles him in his place, hunched over the island with a towel draped over his head and a steamy pot beneath. Rafe curses in between teeth, an echo muffled by the scratchy fabric and the stainless steel, but doesn't move away or tries to look up. He's sniffing, holding his head with two big and shaky hands, a leg that you notice isn't bouncing up and down anxiously. It gives him away, especially with the slump of his posture — he's exhausted.

"What happened, big guy?" you ask, carefully lifting the towel with a finger only far enough to see his face. An earthy scent wafts from the opening, eucalyptus crisp on the tip of your nose "Allergies got you bad?"

"Topper," oh, the irked cadence in his voice. You wouldn't want your name tied to it under any circumstance "Fuckin'– came back from Colombia with a fuckin' virus or somethin'."

"Not precisely his fault his immune system's a bitch," you intervene, and almost regret it. The towel conceals most of his face, but you see the glare he sends your way Kubrick style, raspberry red blush and tired blinking to soften the landing "Oops."

He waits a beat, eyes narrowed, then continues, "He brought this– this travel mug full of coffee and instead of, I don't know, inviting us over for a cup back at his place, he fuckin' let us drink straight from it."

"You–" you stop, nose wrinkling and head tilting to the side "You still refuse eating from my fork."

"Yes, that's gross."

"How is that any different from sharing a mug?" you ask, half scandalised and half entertained. He shrugs, closing his eyes and puffing out his cheeks in a quiet sigh.

"It's colombian coffee," he deadpans, almost exasperated with your questioning.

"Right, and what about making out?"

He shrugs again, "'s hot," his voice pitches up at the end like he's about to sneeze, but his shoulders never tense "Shit, I knew I shouldn't have tried it."

A shiver visibly rattles through him. It makes you pout. It's a good thing Rafe isn't looking, otherwise he'd be irked by the sympathy.

"That sucks," you say, carefully dropping the towel back into place. He sniffs again, then digs his fingers into the fabric covering his head — a migraine, probably "You said 'us' before. Kelce?"

"Texted him this morning," he answers, pressing his head further into his palm. If you weren't so afraid of making it worse, you'd splay a hand over his buzzcut and stroke gently "Throwing up since last night."

"Yikes."

He huffs, right before he shudders again. A fever, you guess. It's so warm outside you would've thought he was dealing with the aftermath of pollen season, but you've lived a winter with him, and not even the snow found a way to get him this covered. Crewneck, sweats, socks bulging over the cuffs — nothing like the thin tee you're wearing today, skin exposed to the spring sun. Slowly, he lifts his head, towel draping over his cheekbones like a veil. You smile instantly, he frowns only a bit.

"Didn't know you were a nun, Rafe. You had that well hidden."

He blinks, not a semblance of a smile. Face made out of sharp angles and straight lines, red in all the wrong places, none of them you wouldn't dream of kissing.

"Shut up."

Even when he tries to be mean he makes you laugh. You think you saw his mouth tilting up, but you may have imagined that.

"How did you get in?" he asks, pressing his fingers where his brow bone meets the bridge of his nose. Carefully, you extend a hand and swipe the dampness off his face with your knuckles. He lets you pamper him, meek like a puppy "Did I give you any keys?"

His confusion makes you hum, amused, "Door was unlocked–"

"Huh."

"–like it usually is," you finish, then grin with enough smugness to feed you both into the next year "Planning on giving me keys already?"

"What if I did?" but the comment comes with a wobble on his stance, tilting to his left a little too much before he catches himself up. It has you straightening up in alarm.

"I think you should lay down, Rafe."

"I'm fine," he rasps out, the pads of his fingers tracing a straight line down to his temples, where he circles slowly. His fever is too evident, it kills you just to look at him "Got a meeting in two hours, just need to get my hands around some Tylenol."

It squeezes something mean in your chest, the dismissal. You don't think Rafe notices how often he gives you brief heartaches, innocent and unintentional, the way he's been raised at an arm's length leaping out of the blue to stun you speechless. He's not used to it, being taken care of, instead molded from young age into keeping head-to-head with the money he won't stop chasing after. When he brushes his own well-being off for the benefit of the business, you resentfully trace it all the way back to how his father treated him.

It hurts to think he was probably never tucked back into bed whenever sickness creeped over him.

Gnawing on your bottom lip gently, you round the kitchen island until you're standing next to him, waist against the edge of the counter. His eyes remain shut, fingertips turning white where he presses further and further into his skull. From here, the smell of herbs is stronger, and you cautiously push the pot away to avoid accidentally knocking it over.

"I'll get you some," you assure him, hand finding his lower back. You flatten a firm trail up to the back of his neck, nudge your touch in between the fabrics keeping him warm, and squeeze the skin delicately. His stance relaxes if only a little bit "But you need to cancel the meeting."

His tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth, "Don't worry 'bout that."

"Are you kidding? You can't even open your eyes."

"Then get me the Tylenol," he snaps. A second later, so fast you can't decide whether to be upset or not, he weakly adds "Please."

You pause, but only to prepare for the mood swing. You haven't found a way into turning him around without getting a taste of all that bitterness he tries keeping in check. Until you do, you decidedly speak up.

"Cancel the meeting."

"I'm not cancelling a damn thing," he grits in between teeth, head turning to the side in a scowl that does nothing to scare you off. You tilt an eyebrow, his jaw clenches in response.

"Yes, you are," then, with a softer voice and a pinch to the lobule of his right ear, you add "Listen, I know you hate this, I know. These people are not gonna think less of you because you caught a cold."

"It's not a cold, it's Topper's fau–"

"Whatever, Rafe," at the edge of your tone, he presses his mouth into a thin line "When was the last time you cancelled a meeting? Scratch that, have you ever cancelled before?"

He scoffs, "'Course not."

"See? You're a professional. I know that, they know that," you assure him, thumb kneading the tension of his upper back. He still hesitates, eyes darting across your face and leaning only a bit away "You're sick, it's human, big deal. Stay home, let me take care of you."

That seems to scandalise him further than the idea of skipping a meeting. To be fair, you should've guessed. His eyebrows knit together, face screwed up in offence. If you didn't know any better, anyone could've convinced you you just insulted him.

In his own fucked up ways, you sort of did. Still, it's hard not to roll your eyes.

"You're not taking care of me."

"Really?" you fight back, trying to keep him from scrambling away from you. The stool tumbles with a scratch when he stands up, and your hands fly to secure him by the arms "Seriously, stay still. You're gonna get dizzy."

"I'm fine."

"No, you're not."

He huffs, eyes as wide as they can get under the heavy puffiness of his eyelids. He's about to argue, hands ready to gesture wildly along the irritated timbre of his voice, but it all dies in his throat when an incoming sneeze makes his breath hitch.

Rafe is... oddly cute when he releases it. That could be the greatest of your discoveries yet.

"Bless you."

Sneeze.

"Bless you."

Sneeze. With it, the towel slips to the ground.

"Bless you."

"Fuck!"

Sneeze.

You snort, "Are we done? Bless you."

He groans, rubbing a harsh up-and-down on his face, hands covering from the hairline to the chin. That's how you notice it the most, his fingers trembling like leaves when he isn't pressing them against any surface. Again, you pout, and again, Rafe doesn't see it.

"Let's go upstairs," you tell him, voice barely hushed.

Rafe doesn't argue this time.

He lets you guide him, docile at the touch like he didn't just spend three minutes barking under your nose, sluggish paced and resigned. His arms are crossed over his chest, tightly, either to keep himself warm or to avoid the annoying flutter of his fingers, and when you reach up tentatively where he keeps his right hand tucked under his left armpit, he clutches your pointer with all the fondness of his fallen-ill heart. He taps twice, you wedge your free fingers vaguely in to tickle without intent in return.

Upstairs, his room has that neatness you haven't yet seen dwindle into a mess, not even a little bit, not even with the crumpled sheets and twisted duvet. He didn't have a second of shut-eye, it's clear, and the bags under his eyes are more obvious to you now than they were seconds ago. Rafe sighs, and when he's near enough he drops side first on his favorite part of the bed, face half hidden on the soft silkiness of his pillow.

It's almost nature by now, you just can't help but pout. He catches you in the act.

"Don't look at me like that," he whines, a wrinkle between his eyebrows that keeps deepening into something equal parts fierce and adorable "Honestly, it's pissing me off."

You giggle, a tender sound that rips some warmth out on your cheeks. He groans, mutters under his breath, throws a nasty glare in between blond eyelashes, but it all leaves a sweet taste in the smile stretching your mouth wide. To distract him of his misery —or maybe putting him under some more, based on his logic—, you stretch the covers over him and tuck them under his chin. He's all red, cheeks flushed angry and feverish in response to your coddling, but he does nothing to push you away.

All bark, no bite.

You lift a finger sharp in the air, final, "Cancel your meeting, Rafe."

"I know," he hisses back, mouth twitching down in a grimace "Just– pass me the phone, I'll give 'em a call."

It's on his nightstand, closer to him than it is to you, but the implication of him being too comfortable to move an inch makes you giddy with satisfaction.

He groans, "Sorry– please."

The corners of your mouth stretch softly, too fond of him for your own good. He tracks down the faintness of the gesture with strange fixation, something warm blooming deep in his chest. Nothing he's not used to, nothing he doesn't like. It hurts, but it's the kind of pain he can't get enough of, how you keep finding ways to melt the frost in all of the sharp edges he's still learning how to let go of.

His fingers peek out near his face, and you drop his phone where he can grab it. He's still glowering. There's no way you know how fast his heart is beating for you.

"Did you eat?"

"Had a coffee."

"Did you eat?" you repeat, almost making fun of him.

He stops a beat, "No."

"I'll make you something warm, then," you decide, pinching the highest point of his cheek with the joints of your fingers "And I'll get you that Tylenol. And I'm taking your temperature, too."

"Is that necessary?" his voice sounds a little rougher than before, you try not to pout again when he winces.

"Which part?"

Rafe stills, then uncomfortably sinks in his place. He's not explaining himself, but you think you know. The caring, he means.

"Actually, I don't care," you shrug, he studies you like he's never been this disoriented "You're sick, I'm not. We're living under my rules today, and I'm doing whatever I want."

He scoffs, but you really do think he tried to laugh, "Right," he drags out, batting his eyelashes slower each time "'Cause you never get away with anything."

"With you? Never."

But you sound so honest, he peeks an eye open to make sure you don't mean it, "Bullshit."

Your smile is a blinding occurrence. Rafe thinks you must know that when you leave his side to draw the curtains.

"It's gonna take me a while, I still need to go shopping," you say, bringing the curtains impossibly closer. There's a thin gap where sunlight always sneaks in, he's complained about it a few times, never expecting you to listen. The mindfulness leaves him dizzy "Try to sleep, yeah? I'll wake you up when the food's ready."

Another shiver. He brings his knees up and curls into himself, arms crossed over his chest. It's almost absurd fighting against the weight pulling his eyes shut, but he still tries. As long as you're in the room, he'll be looking at you.

"Wallet's in the kitchen, I think," he mumbles, breath a little ragged when his back quivers at the nonexistent cold.

"Good to know."

His eyes land on you more severe than he intended to.

"The hell does that mean?"

You spin on your heels, already on your way out of his room, and rest your weight on your hip, "I have a job, you know."

"And?" he urges. You shrug, and it almost drives him up the wall "Don't you dare."

"Excuse you?" you ask, but there's too much lightheartedness in your tone, you're not taking him seriously "I'll use my well-earned money however I please."

"Grab my wallet," he commands, but you're turning around and opening the door "I swear to God–"

The rustle behind you alerts you he's getting up, and you spin so fast to face him it almost leaves you lightheaded.

"Rafe," he stops, frown a straight line made out of something purely unable, but he's never heard your voice so sharp "You're getting on my nerves. Lay down, and sleep. I'm going out, I'm using my money, and I'm taking care of you. Is that clear?"

He bites his cheek, you lift an eyebrow.

"Clear."

You beam, "Alright!" again, and against his palpable irritation, you tuck him back in. He presents more of a fight this time, like he truly feels helpless at the idea of his money not being used "C'mon, let me spoil you. You're always taking care of me, I wanna repay you."

"But I don't need that," he exasperates.

"Well, you're in no condition to chase after me, so."

He breathes out hard. When you lean down to kiss his forehead, way too warm for your own liking, you see a dejection in his eyes you can't quite describe yet.

"Sweet dreams, pretty boy."

He only blinks back. Rafe watches your leisure path out of his room, stomach sinking with something that feels too much like guilt, but he's out before he hears you leave.

He's not sure how long it's been when he comes to. There's a soft rustle downstairs. Tannyhill has been making it impossible for him not to pick up on the smallest of sounds ever since he came back from Guadeloupe. His eyes flutter open, but even then it's easy for him to picture it: the route you make back and forth across his kitchen, the placement of plates and forks and wooden spoons, the slight puckering of your lips when you hum a song. It fills him with warmth, to picture a life in which he's no longer waking up to a lonely house.

Is it too soon to ask you to move in?

A squeak not far from his bedroom door, the noise that springs up on that very specific step he's too lazy to fix. You must be done in the kitchen. He rubs the sleep off his face, then slowly sits up, waiting for you to walk in.

Your face peeps in, the dulcet strings of your voice way too soft to match your devilish grin, "You're awake."

He tries to answer but it comes out a groan.

"I made you soup," you begin, walking in with a tray in your hands. You carefully place it by the seat at the end of his bed "It was a nightmare searching for the thermometer, by the way. Couldn't find it anywhere. Did you know it was in the office?"

"What?" he asks, puffy eyed, his voice rough from sleep. He's almost expecting you to coo, but you only fix the pillows behind him "Fuck, I feel like I've been run over."

"Yeah, I can see."

His laugh is a single tired exhale, "Shut up."

You're quick as you work through his room. You open the curtains for enough light to spill in, then pick up the tray, sit down beside him, and finish by tugging back the neck of his shirt to burrow the thermometer in his armpit. It's cold, but it doesn't make him shiver. With an open palm, you offer him a single pill, a glass of water in your other hand, and smile so bright he's surprised you're not giving him a headache yet.

"Cheers," you joke, when he swallows down the paracetamol "How are you feeling?"

He hums, "Better," but he sounds tentative "Still feel like shit, though."

"Happens to the best of us," you shrug.

On your lap, a tray with a bowl of soup, a single spoon, and two slices of gold-crusted bread. He sniffs, miserably, but the smell of broth can't reach past his nostrils. He's almost bummed out by that, it looks good enough to make his mouth water and get his stomach to open up with interest. When he extends a hand to leave the glass on his bedside table and impatiently dig in, he tenses, then sneezes so hard water spills out on his hand. You chuckle, of course, when he scowls and mutters in response to his own mess.

"I'll clean that later. Here."

You offer him a tissue, he takes it enthusiastically. Rafe's just about to reach for the spoon when you do the weirdest thing — you hold it out for him. He eyes you warily, then the spoonful of soup only inches away from his face.

"What're you doin'?" he asks, skeptical, rubbing an itch away on the tip of his nose with the sleeve of his crewneck.

You grin, "Say 'ahh'."

He watches you, lips parted in a grimace full of bewilderment. His eyebrows twitch in something that, for the first time, doesn't look like a frown.

"You're insane," he simply concludes. Your laugh is a breezy thing, nudging the spoon closer to his lips. He traps your wrist under his hand "What– stop?"

"C'mon, babygirl," you say, too sultry to be be anything but fake "Open wide for daddy."

"I'm kicking you out."

"No, you're not."

"I'm breaking up with you."

You pout, "After I made you soup?"

"You're infuriating."

The smile that comes after is softer. You're done playing, maybe.

"Alright, I'll stop."

He waits, doing a quick scan from your face to the spoon in your hand. You're looking at him like you have all the time in the world, pastel pink smirk that would surely taste sweet had he not been sure he's incredibly contagious. Steam rises slowly and swipes warmth under his nose, and he tries to pretend he isn't too affected by your pampering as he opens his mouth and lets you guide the spoon in. It's delicious, just as he expected, and he hums in recognition.

"Good?" you ask, awfully quiet. He can't bring himself to speak.

He can't remember the last time someone cooked for him. Or tried to feed him, for that matter.

Another sneeze. You extend another tissue his way, then break a piece of bread and hand him some. The rest, you chew with a cheeky dimple — here you come again. Rafe almost sighs in anticipation.

"I'll take it from here," he says, trying to get your hand into slipping off the spoon. He stalls only because he's about to sneeze again, and you take advantage of that.

He sneezes into the tissue, curses against it. You make an awful sound, like you're mimicking an engine, and Rafe groans with a roll of his eyes before you could begin to sing.

"Here comes the airplane!"

He scoffs, dodging the spoon with a scowl, "I'm not a fucking kid," he fumes, trying to push your wrist with his. His nose still has that awful itch that makes his voice stagger, squeak like a pubescent boy. You make another engine-like sound, and swoop the spoon in the air "You're gonna spill."

"Never, I'm a pretty good pilot."

He huffs, but a smirk is already plucking a dimple out on the surface of his cheek, "You're impossible."

"And you need to cheer up," you say, finally dropping the spoon into the bowl.

Before he could register it, your lips find his in a loving kiss. He could turn his head, let your mouth meet his cheek to avoid transferring all of that sickness to you, but even bedridden he's selfish.

Rafe likes it when you kiss him, sue him.

"I'll probably infect you," he mutters, his bottom lip bumping your grin. You frown, sneaking the thermometer out of his shirt.

"I never get sick."

"We'll see about that."

You blink, then giggle girlishly, "No, I swear."

He spends an entire week trying to return the favour, waiting with too much hope for your nose to twitch with a cold. It never happens.

notes from clemz — did i get carried away? yes, let's maybe ignore that.

the whole grumpy x sunshine trope never gets old, does it? it always makes me SOFT. anyway, i hope you guys like this one! it was fun imagining what taking care of rafe would look like, now i'm sad i'll never get to make fun of him while he's sick:( as usual, pleeeaase like, reblog, and comment! i genuinely love knowing what you think😁😁

Clark has just opened his Tupperware of a homemade lunch, made by yours truly, when his phone began to buzz on the table. He was in the canteen, Jimmy Olsen at another table, thumbs tapping away at his own phone.

He didn’t even need to look at the Caller ID. You guys ran on a phone call schedule.

“Hi, honey.” Clark stabbed the rather sad lettuce with his fork, “How are you?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I need your advice on something really quick.”

Clark piled enough food into his mouth and hummed “OK. Shoot.”

“So, you remember how I started Pilates a couple of weeks ago? The one that Cat referred me to? Well, anyway, they had this new class called Nudelates. Not a lot of people signed up for it, and I felt bad for the instructor, so I signed up and paid the eighty dollars—”

“Eighty?” Clark choked on a leaf, “Honey.”

“No, no. That’s not the worst part.” You continued, “So, anyway, I sign up to the class and then I’ve just turned up and bumped into the instructor in the parking lot before it starts. Clark, the class is meant to be done fully naked. As in, absolutely no clothes. Nude Pilates. Nudelates.”

“Okay. And, this wasn’t in the pamphlet for it?” Clark furrowed his brows as he tried to find a solution.

You shook your head as if he could see you, “No. It was just word of mouth. But, the instructor said it’s non-refundable. And, you know how tight I am with my money…I can’t waste it.”

“Uh, right. Do you want comfort, or a solution?”

“Well, I don’t want to take the class nude. But, I spent eighty dollars on this thing.” You sounded a little stressed, like you were seriously considering walking into the building and exposing yourself for this class.

Clark frowned, “Then don’t do it, honey. I’ll give you the eighty dollars if it’s that serious. Are there other women doing it?”

“Nope.” The letter ‘P’ popped as you spoke, “Just me and the instructor.”

Unbeknownst to Clark, you were throwing a line in the hopes he would take the bait. Sat in your car, in front of your apartment building with an iced coffee that the ice had melted in the cup holder somewhere between the coffee shop and the parking lot, you bit at your nails with a grin on your face.

Some days off the clock were more boring than others. You made up enough screen time for both you and Clark, and that came with the consequences on Clark’s end of the stick.

Trends were entertaining to watch. Even more entertaining to perform on your husband with a severe lack of social media presence.

You could hear him mull it over. A part you loved so deeply, and felt so guilty for momentarily taking advantage of, was that any fork in the road problems you brought to Clark; he’d always weigh out both possibilities with the upmost optimism.

Even if he didn’t agree with either outcome. He just wanted you to thrive in your decisions.

“It could be fun?” Clark didn’t sound so sure this time, “Liberating, even.”

Jimmy Olsen looked up from his phone to listen in to the conversation. Clark shrugged when Jimmy mouthed to ask what was happening.

“See, this is exactly what he said.”

The record in Clark’s head scratched.

“He?” Clark straightened his posture, “Who—Who do you mean by he?”

“…My instructor? It’s a guy.”

The chair beneath Clark screeched as he stood, “No.” Jimmy watched his friend storm to the door and throw it open, the wall behind it cracking with the force. “Absolutely not. Where is this place? I’m coming right now.”

“What?”

“The location. I need to speak with your instructor.” Clark was already up three flights of stairs, heading to the roof to fly. It’d be quicker that way.

This part was not included in the joke that, according to your husband, had gone too far.

You panicked, “Clark, no. It’s fine, I’ll just not go. I’m going home now—”

“No, this man is taking advantage of women. And you, honey. I’m glad you’re going home, but I would still like to speak to him. What he is doing is illegal.” Clark began to remove his glasses when he reached the rooftop of the Daily Planet building.

“Are you outside?”

“I’m about to fly. Yes.”

“Whoa. OK. Time out.” You laughed nervously, “Take a breather. I’m joking. I’m joking, it was a joke, Clark. It was just a stupid trend I saw on TikTok.”

Clark paused on the roof edge, “Are you lying to me?”

“No. I’m serious, there’s no naked Pilates. Or, a creepy instructor. Just, just a joke, Clark. I promise.”

Clark pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes wrinkled from scrunching them shut. Nostrils flared, he counted to five before putting his glasses back on and turning on his heel to return to the bullpen.

“Sweetheart?” Clark popped his head round the doorway into your shared bedroom, his features melting to goop when he caught sight of you laying atop of the sheets on the bed. Glasses—for concealment of identity purposes—pushed back up the bridge of his nose, Clark stepped into the bedroom with one motive: kiss you goodbye.

It was a sacred ritual to Clark Kent. He had called it a privilege, kissing you that is, and something he’d take advantage of until his very last breath. Of course, that meant your availability to kiss needed to be at an all time high every morning, shared lunch time break and nighttime.

(Clark had even bought you a subscription to a lip balm company for the sole purpose of saving your lips from being kissed off.)

So, when Clark entered the room with no hidden intentions, you propped yourself higher up on your pillows and tilted your chin upward to give him the access he needed to get his daily kiss fix.

He grinned at you. All smug and devilishly handsome. One hand coming to rest against your jugular as be brought his lips to yours. “Mm.” He mumbled with satisfaction against you, “I’m just about to head to work.” Another kiss, “I’ll miss you.”

“And you too.” You pulled away and let your husband chase you for another kiss. Your hands came to his chest to pat it, “Have a good day at work—What are you doing?”

Clark had pressed a kiss to the very top of your head—not something out of the ordinary considering the noticeable height difference—however, his lips descended downward, to your forehead, your temple, the tip of your nose, lips again and then down to your chin.

He raised his head from where he had begun to work his way down your neck with a morally pure expression.

“Kissing you.” He blinked.

“Yeah. I got that.” You let out a breathy laugh and tugged at the curls on his head. “You’ve already kissed me.”

“Yeah, honey.” Clark threw you a petulant look, as you should have been on the same wave-length as him from the start. He smiled again, “I’m kissing all of you.”

With that, your husband transcended an abundance of kisses upon your body. Not an inch of you went amiss as he swapped smaller pecks for prolonged ones at his favourite parts of you, humming as he made his way down to your feet.

Through the giggling, you had anticipated him to halt his kisses at your feet. No man’s land due to it being too ticklish. To which, you were proven entirely wrong when Clark stood at full height at the end of the bed, his blue eyes pinning you to the spot as he caressed your calf and brought leg upward to press a kiss to your ankle, and finally to your feet.

The moment his lips pressed the sole of your foot, you snatched it away, gawking at his behaviour.

“Ew. Clark.” You rubbed your foot against the sheets to remove the itch.

Clark chuckled. “What? I can’t kiss your feet now?”

“I mean…you can at some point. Just give me time to mentally prepare.” You shrugged and sunk back into the plushness of your mattress with a healthy post-worship glow. “Now scram.”

When Clark saw your name light up his phone, his initial reaction had always been the same. His heart would swell, a smile splitting across his face as he would refuse to let it ring more than three times before sliding his thumb across the bottom of the screen; pressing his phone to his ear to hear the sweet symphonies of your voice; prepared to hear the events of your—as you would call it—mundane day in comparison to his. 

(It was never mundane to Clark. Kept him grounded.) 

However, nothing had prepared Clark for when he answered the phone to you, to be met with a tone he feared hearing from you. 

“I’m mad at you.” You said bluntly, without a greeting. 

Clark paled, “I’m thousands of miles away, honey. What did I do this time?” 

You sighed dramatically, head dropping onto the plush pillow of your bed as you looked up at the ceiling, “I had this…horrible dream. All this tension between you and Lex Luthor has clearly began to seep into my subconscious.” 

“Tell me more.” 

“He decided to use me as bait. Against you. I was tied up in a dark room with duct tape over my mouth. He would taunt you with videos, or photos of me. And—” you paused with your eyes narrowed, “—You just never came. You left me there. To rot away.” 

Clark frowned, “Oh, honey. You know I would burn the whole of Metropolis—” 

“Till death do us part, Clark.” You interjected sardonically, “Was this your way of parting with me?” 

“What? No!” Clark pinched the bridge of his nose and paced the floor of the Fortress of Solitude. Despite being Clark’s entire centre of gravity, you weren’t opposed to occasionally giving your husband a dull headache from your flair of theatrical display. He dragged a palm down his face, “Never, honey. It was just a dream. I promise I would save you. Even if it meant my life.” 

You hummed, “Tell your dream-self that then.” 

After that, you gave up the topic with ease, and to be quite frank, you were only toying with your husband—understanding that the dream was out of some deeply embedded fear within you, rather than Clark’s ability to protect you. However, the further you conversed about your day, and the gossip that had whirled around your workplace; the quieter Clark had become. 

His usual self was upbeat, keen to engage in heart-to-hearts with you seeing as you had been apart for far too long. (It had only been two days.) 

This time, Clark was quiet. Engulfed in his own thoughts whilst you talked his ear off about the fight that broke out over the coffee machine in the staff room. A new wave of guilt began to gnaw away at his thoughts, creating a three-headed monster that was growing to be a problem by the minute. 

All because you had brought up your dream, where he was incapable of saving you. 

But, that was his whole purpose? Saving people. Tilting the world upright each day at a time. Citizens looked to Superman as a beacon of hope, to bring them to justice and protect them from harm. So, why all of a sudden did it fall short with you? 

You had once told Clark over breakfast, that dreams meant something, if you had the time to look it up. This came after he sleepily mentioned that he dreamt that you had replaced all of his teeth with Kryptonite. Obviously, you were only prodding fun that it could’ve meant something deeper than it really was…but, Clark latched onto that piece of information.

And now, he was beginning to run wild with it. 

There was obviously some underlying cause as to why your mind would have ever conjured up such an absurd outcome to a hypothetical kidnapping by Lex Luthor. Clark didn’t want to dwell on the imagery of it all, because it made his stomach churn at the thought.

However, he could think of a million reasons as to why that particular scenario happened.

Clark had been more occupied than usual. Far away from the one-bedroom apartment in the heart of Metropolis, far away from the warmth of the kitchen with the toaster that nearly always burnt his toast in the morning, far away from the soft sheets and ambient lighting of the bedroom; and most importantly…far away from you.

Albeit, only being two days on this particular occasion. It still didn’t account for the four days from the week prior, and the month stretch when he had flown himself to Jarhanpur. 

It was evident what was needed. 

Clark needed to be with you. To regain the trust to make you believe that he would save you. (If you didn’t save yourself in all your strong-headed excellence.) 

“Clark?” Your voice tugged at his strayed thoughts on the other end of the phone. “Are you even listening to me?” 

“Yes, honey.” He swallowed the lump in his throat as he spoke. 

You paused, incredibly in-tune with your husband. Two peas in a pod. 

“You’re upset, aren’t you?” It wasn’t so much a question, as it was a statement; an accurate one at that. When your husband didn’t reply, you spoke again, “Clark, I’m not really mad at you. It was just a dream. It meant nothing.” 

“But, you said—” 

“—I said dreams meant something deeper. Yes. But…more along the lines of if you dreamt we had a baby!” You waved your hand about, “It means, you probably would like a baby. Or, if you dreamt about Ma’s cooking. You miss the farm. That sort of stuff. This was just me being subconsciously scared of Lex Luthor.” 

Clark’s jaw set at that. “I’m coming home.” 

“No you’re not.” 

“Yes. I am.” Clark gave a nod to Gary who was loitering around the area he had been pacing in, “I will be there soon, alright?” 

You rubbed at your eye with the heel of your hand, frustrated with yourself, “Why are you doing that? I promise, I was joking.” 

He had always been strong per se, but Clark had begun working out at the gym within the apartment complex and, well, his bodily assets had grown with sturdy muscle, making it a hard task to wriggle into the suit with haste. 

You, sat on a stool, with one leg crossed over the other had been there for moral support. Other than that, you weren’t required but the Kent family had a hard time peeling themselves away from you.

(Sort of made sense with Clark’s inability to detach himself when his own mother ushered you into the sewing room to keep her company.) 

Clark turns to look at you from where he is standing, and warns, “Honey.” 

“Seriously, Clark,” you start in a tone of astonishment whilst your eyes are cast downward, “It’s massive.”

Your husband throws his mother an apologetic look from where he is standing, because—as much as he loved this aspect of you—he was married to a woman with zero filter, or means to bite her tongue. You say it how you see it, and what you had been seeing was the protruding backend of your husband; with or without the cape. 

Sure, he had his frustrations whilst tugging at the suit in previous circumstances and you had just assumed muscular thighs were to blame. When you’re around your significant other more or less all the time, the changes can sometimes go amiss. Now? Now you could see why Ma had to retrieve the additional scraps of Clark’s Kryptonian blanket from his baby days. 

You blink at the sight of it. His Daily Planet getup of a baggy suit was the probable cause for his suddenly well-rounded backside slipping under the radar. 

(Even seeing him naked, you don’t recall it ever being that big.) 

“What are you squatting?” you ask openly, brows in a pinch. 

Clark takes a breath for patience. He loves you, to the core, but your mouth knew no bounds when you became fixated on one singular thing. 

He chooses to bypass your question by diverting his attention to Ma and asking her about the alterations and if there were any further fittings he was required to do before the pair of you return to Metropolis after a short weekend stay at the Kent Farm. 

Ma adjusts the red cape on her son’s shoulders, “Some more fabric on the backside, baby. That won’t take more than a night for your Ma.” she lilts with innocence.

You, on the other hand—from where Clark can see you in the reflection of the floor length mirror—press your lips together to conceal the bubble of amusement from Ma’s honesty. 

When Clark throws you a petulant look, mortified by your behaviour, you gesture that you’ve zipped your lips from any further prodding whilst Ma’s ears were in the room. 

“I’ll go get the boots.” Ma says in her sweet midwestern twang. She pats Clark’s chest in passing before she passes you where she lovingly pats your cheek as she trudges out of the room. 

It goes quiet. In a foreboding, mischievous type of way. Clark clears his throat, shifting from one foot to the other whilst inspecting the talented craftsmanship of his Ma; where as you slowly turn your head, unable to land your attention anywhere but your husband’s curvaceous behind. 

Clark spots you from the mirror, trying his upmost hardest to contain the small quirk at the corner of his lips.

He couldn’t always push down the desire to appreciate when you showered him in praise in your own roundabout way. Even if it had his cheeks turn bright pink with embarrassment. 

Deep down, Clark thoroughly enjoyed the added attention. (He wouldn’t admit it at this present moment thought.) 

A glint of silver catches his eye on the floor where his Ma had accidentally dropped a pin from her pin cushion. He bends at the waist to pluck it from the wooden floorboard before an unlikely stabbing in someone’s foot happens. 

As soon as he’s bent, you stretch from the stool and slot two fingers between his vulnerable cheeks; making Clark shoot upright with a yelp. 

He grabs your wrist, “What the hey, honey. Cut it out.” He sounds a little irritated this time, so you back down with no visible shame on your features when you fully sit back onto the up-cycled stool. 

“Can’t a woman dote on her husband?” 

“You’re not doting. You’re harassing.” Clark grumbles with the pin rolled between his fingers. 

Your voice is laced with playfulness, “Your lobster is so juicy, baby.” 

Clark folds instantaneously. Your humour tangled with a poor show of flirtatious skills made for quite the hammer that could crack Clark’s—sometimes—moody exterior. His chuckle is low, head shaking at your words as he tries to conjure up a new conversation to steer your chatterbox-self into. 

He lets you roll with one more punch by encouraging it with, “You really think it looks big in the suit?” 

Which is fine. It’s so fine, actually, that her jaw aches from how casually fine she’s being about it.

They aren’t dating. They aren’t anything with a name, because Rafe Cameron treats labels like subpoenas and feelings like something you can outdrink if you start early enough. 

He shows up at her dorm after midnight and kisses her like he’s been starving in secret. He steals the hoodie off her chair and then leaves it in his room so she has to come get it. He texts you up? like that’s not the laziest, most bullshit mating call ever invented by a man with generational wealth and unresolved father issues.

So, really, if Matt from her psych lecture is standing close enough that his shoulder brushes hers every time someone squeezes past them, and if he keeps smiling at her like he’s pleasantly surprised to find her funny, and if she maybe smiles back a little longer than strictly necessary, that seems like a very reasonable use of her evening.

Matt is nice. Actually nice. He remembers her presentation topic from last week. He asks questions like he’s listening to the answers. He has a dimple on one side and no visible fraternity affiliation, which, after a semester of Rafe Cameron, feels actually refreshing.

“I didn’t think this was your scene,” Matt says, leaning in a little so she can hear him over the music.

She lifts her cup and glances around at the living room, where one of Rafe’s frat brothers is currently trying to tape another one to a support beam. “It’s not,” she says. “I’m here under mysterious circumstances.”

“Should I be concerned?”

“Probably.”

He grins, and she lets herself like it. Lets the small, clean pleasure of being looked at by someone who doesn’t already know exactly what sound she makes when his hand is around her throat slide over her skin without guilt. 

Rafe’s still across the room. Rafe’s still laughing at something white-top says with his head tipped back, hat backwards, completely unbothered by the emotional consequences of his own cowardice. 

So she tilts her head and asks Matt about the midterm because flirting is most effective when disguised as academic concern.

He’s halfway through saying something about their professor being allergic to clear grading criteria when the music cuts. The whole house lurches around the silence. Someone boos. Someone else yells, “What the fuck?” 

Then, from somewhere near the DJ table, Rafe’s voice booms through the living room, rough and drunk and unmistakably pleased with its own authority. “If you’re not a brother or fucking a brother, get the fuck outta my house!”

For one perfect second, nobody moves, then the room erupts.

Groans, laughter, outrage, girls grabbing purses, boys making offended noises. Somebody throws a ping pong ball at Rafe’s head and misses by a mile. The music stays off, which makes the clearing-out feel even more ridiculous, like a fucking fire drill.

Matt blinks, then looks at her with an expression caught between amused and mildly alarmed. “Damn,” he says. “Guess I gotta go.”

Something hot and stupid turns low in her stomach, which is humiliating because she’s not supposed to reward this behaviour internally. 

“Yeah,” she says, still staring past him toward where Rafe’s now arguing with someone by the speakers. “Um. Guess so.”

Matt smiles, a little rueful. “See you in class?”

“Yeah. See you.”

He gives her one last look, maybe checking whether she wants him to linger, maybe simply decent enough not to push his luck in a house currently under frat martial law. Then he goes with the rest of them, swallowed by the stream of people heading for the front door.

She turns to find her friends, because she’s also, technically, not a brother, and because letting Rafe Cameron herd her like campus livestock feels like a dangerous precedent even if her body has already started doing several deeply undignified things about the sound of his voice.

She gets exactly two steps before an arm hooks around her waist from behind. Rafe hits her back warm and solid, all beer and cologne and that familiar expensive laundry smell clinging under the party sweat. His hand spreads over her stomach, broad and possessive, pulling her into him like he’s never in his life encountered the concept of public space. 

His mouth is already at her neck, damp and careless, pressing one kiss under her ear, then another lower, sloppy enough that she knows he’s been drinking but not sloppy enough that he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

“Where’re you goin’?” he murmurs.

Her eyes flutter for half a second before she catches herself and hates them both for it. “Home, Rafe. You kicked everyone out.”

“Not everyone.”

“You made a house-wide announcement.”

“Mhm.” His nose drags along the side of her neck, and she feels his smile there before she hears it. “Rules were pretty clear.”

She bites the inside of her cheek, refusing the smile trying to get loose. “I’m not a brother.”

“No,” he says, like she’s said something adorable and academically beneath him. His hand tightens at her waist. “You’re fuckin’ one.”

Heat goes up her throat so fast it nearly becomes anger out of self-defence. “Am I?”

He hums, low and pleased, mouth moving under her jaw now. “You’re fuckin’ me.”

“That’s convenient.”

“Yeah.” His other hand finds her hip, turning her a little, not enough to face him fully, just enough that his body can settle around hers with more intention. “Real convenient.”

She should elbow him. Probably. At minimum, she should remind him that boys who spend half the night flirting with girls in white tops don’t get to conduct population control based on who has recently seen them naked. 

Instead, she lets her head tip back the smallest amount against his shoulder, because her body is a traitor and because his fingers have slipped under the hem of her top, warm against bare skin.

“You’re insane,” she says.

Rafe kisses just below her ear, soft this time, almost careful by accident. “You can stay.”

“Oh,” she says, breath catching around the little smile she still won’t give him. “Can I?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How generous.”

His laugh is quiet against her throat. “Don’t be bratty.”

“You love when I’m bratty.”

His hand flexes on her stomach. For a second, under the thinning noise of people leaving and the sticky ruined floor and the house settling around them, he goes still in the exact way that means she’s landed too close to something true.

Then his mouth brushes her ear, voice lower now, rougher. “I do,” he says. 

It shouldn’t feel like winning. It absolutely does. She turns in his arms finally, slow enough to make him wait for it, and finds him looking down at her from under that stupid backwards hat, eyes a little glassy from beer and jealousy and whatever other self-inflicted problem lives inside him tonight. His mouth is curved like he’s amused, except the hand at her waist is too tight for casual.

“You kicked out the whole party because I was talking to a guy from class,” she says.

Rafe’s jaw shifts. “Party was over.”

“It was not.”

“It is now.”

She stares at him. He stares back, shameless and handsome and impossible, and the worst part is that he looks almost pleased to be caught.

“You’re not my boyfriend,” she says, because somebody should say it.

Something moves through his face, quick and ugly and gone before it can become useful. Then he leans in, brushing his mouth over the corner of hers. “Never said I was.”

“No,” she says, and her fingers curl lightly in the front of his shirt despite herself. “You really, really haven’t.”

His eyes drop to her hand, then back to her mouth. The house keeps emptying behind them. Somewhere near the stairs, a pledge yells that someone stole his vape. Rafe doesn’t look away from her.

“Stay anyway,” he says.

It comes out too low to be a command. Too rough to be nothing. And because she’s stupid, and twenty, and wearing lip gloss she knows he likes, and because Matt from psych never really stood a chance once Rafe’s mouth found her neck, she lets the smile happen at last.

“Fine,” she says. “But I’m sleeping in your bed. And borrowing your comfy sweats.”

His grin is immediate, bright and awful. “Yeah, baby,” he says, already walking her backward through the mess of his own party. “That was kind of the point.”

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He’d told the story before. There was a version he liked to wheel out when he was coked up, the sandbox-or-whatever version that made people laugh. It had Topper crying over a kite at six, or maybe it was Rafe crying over a kite. And that was the short joke of it, and neither of them could keep it straight and it didn’t matter, because the point was they were the kind of friends whose beginnings had dissolved into pure fact. ‘We’ve just always known each other.’ People liked hearing that. It sounded like belonging. It sounded like the thing Rafe had been failing to convince his own father he was capable of since approximately birth. It sounded like there was a reason for their friendship despite their family’s tax brackets.

The problem was that he couldn’t get to the kite anymore without going through you.

That simple fact made him want to put his fist through a wall. He’d try to land on a clean memory; Topper at twelve, sunburned and furious, reduced to tears, because Rafe had out-fished him at the dock. It was something Rafe thought he’d hold over Topper for the rest of his life and then, characteristically, never used. The memory of it would start fine and then it would bend, routing itself towards you. Topper at twelve became Topper at eighteen describing his future with you in it, because Topper’s hand on your knee in over-furnished basements, became the simple pride in Topper’s voice when he talked about you like you cured cancer. Every road into Topper now had you standing somewhere on it, and Rafe couldn’t reach past you to the kid he’d genuinely considered a friend back when he cared about something like having a best friend. You’d colonized the whole territory without trying.

He resented you for it the way he resented the good food at the Thorntons’ table, the unfairness of being made to want a thing and then made to feel like garbage for the wanting.

Topper was good. Yeah, he was good-family, good-school, good-on paper. But Rafe found that Topper was good in the way that should have made him insufferable. Topper had decided, somewhere back before either of them remembered, that Rafe was worth keeping, and then he had simply never revisited the decision. He didn't keep a tally. He'd watched Rafe show up fucked up to a hundred things, watched him pick fights with golf clubs and bigger men, watched him be cold and mean and impossible, and Topper had kept clapping him on the shoulder like his father did, kept being there that it had taken Rafe to realize this was rare.

And Rafe was going to take you from him anyway. Had already started. Was, in the part of his head he didn’t visit in daylight, fully planning to. That was the whole obscene buildup of it, that the one person who’d never once made Rafe earn his place was the person Rafe was robbing. He wasn’t even doing it out of hatred, which would have at least been clean. He was doing it because of a hundred small things he'd had no business collecting and had collected anyway. How you laughed half-a-second late at jokes, always, because you were checking the room first to see if it was safe to, and how that half-a-second was the only honest thing when the laugh actually came. The way you ate the crust off of people’s plates, Topper’s, Ruthie’s, like the food tasted better when it wasn't yours and nobody was watching you want it.

None of it was Topper’s fault. Topper’s only crime was being there for two years and never noticing the half second, never wondering what you were checking for, just hearing the laugh and taking it at face value the way he took everything, gratefully, completely, without the suspicion that there was a whole second self standing behind it.

There was a thought Rafe had, late, that if it had been the other way around, if Rafe had gotten to you first, Topper would not have done this. He wouldn’t have wanted to. It was far from the idea that Topper was weak or because Topper didn’t have it in him to want a thing; it was because Topper was built somewhat right. Topper had been loved correctly and consistently and on time, and so Topper had turned out to be someone who could be trusted around the things other people loved. Rafe had been loved the way Ward did everything, which was to say conditionally, expensively, and from a distance, and so Rafe had turned out to be the kind of person who, handed something good that belonged to a friend, could not keep his hands off it.

He’d been on the boat for nineteen minutes and he was being so good it was fucking annoying. This was day eleven. He had a streak going. Day eleven of not texting you, not driving past the library on Tuesdays, not allowing his brain to build a small detailed house for the two of you and then moving you both into it. Eleven days, for Rafe’s standards, was basically monastic. He’d told himself after he’d dropped you off at your house—after you made that sickly-sweet confession then passed the fuck out, sparing you the indignity of remebering you’d said it. That two weeks was the number. If he could do two weeks, the wanting would sand down to a manageable size, the same way a callus made a thing stop hurting by making the skin too thick to feel it.

He didn’t actually believe this. He had never once in his life successfully made himself want something less. But he wanted a number, and two weeks was a number, and he was eleven days into it and the boat smelled like sunscreen and diesel.

He took a hit off the bong because it was there, and clearly Topper’s parents hadn’t been on the boat because it wouldn’t have been there if they had. He found the stash of weed in the same place Topper always kept it, inside the couch. He’d been making good use out of Topper’s things given Topper was late.

Topper was always late. It was one of the few genuinely annoying things about him, and Rafe had a theory that Topper thought the thing wouldn’t start without him at some point in his life, and decided he never had to make himself hurry. Ward did it too. Rafe, who had spent his whole life arriving places early and then sitting in his truck so nobody would see him be early, found it unbearable in a way he never said out loud.

He was being good. He was being so good. And your foot landed on the gangway and the boat took your weight, and Rafe felt the small dip and correct of it through the hull. He knew it was you before he turned to see who it was. He’d gotten like that. It was nothing to have been proud of. 

You came down the cockpit and didn’t see him at first, which meant he got a second of you before you did of him. Rafe took the second, because Rafe took every second of you he was handed and a number he wasn't.

You looked like hell. Not actual hell, you’d have to work much harder than you’d ever worked in your life to look actually bad, and Rafe resented this about you in a low background way, the unfairness of it. But you did look like you’d been crying somewhere with the door closed, and had then done the small expert repairs and come out, and Rafe knew that particular finish on a person because it was the finish he saw in his own mirror. The eyes slightly too clean. The mouth set in a straight line. Yo’'d put something pink on the mouth on the way over. He noticed that. 

Then you saw him and your face moved slightly, like you were recalibrating and deciding which version of yourself this required.

“Someone looks happy,” Rafe said.

It came out lightly, a little meanly, and exactly how he’d intended for it to. He was good at this. It was, if he was honest, the only thing he was good at; saying a thing that closed a door so quietly the other person wasn’t sure a door had been there. He'd been doing it to you for two years. He'd done it to you because the alternative was doing the other thing, and the other thing could not be undone, and so he had picked, every single time, the small mean sentence over the catastrophe.

You didn’t rise to it. You didn’t do much of anything, in fact. 

“He’s not here yet?” you asked, and your voice sounded so even Rafe wanted to tear the edges off of it. 

“Nah. Late,” Rafe said, letting it sit. “Shocking. I know.”

“Right.” A small laugh, the half-second one, except there was no room to check and so it came out hollow, on cue. The type of shit you’d give another guy for describing an unfunny encounter. 

And that should've been it. The two of you should’ve stayed exactly where you were, not looking at each other, until the rest of the people showed up to act as witnesses. He could do that. 

But you stood at the bottom of the cockpit steps with your bag still on your shoulder and looked around the room. 

“Did they ever fix the—” You tipped your chin at the cleat. “Topper said his dad was going to have someone look at it.”

Rafe raised a brow. You were talking to him like he’d heard you talked to everyone else, a good fucking voice that asked absolutely nothing and gave absolutely nothing. And you were using it on him, as if asking shit like this to him was normal. Something in his chest did a small ugly turn, and he heard himself before he’d decided to talk.

“You don't have to do that,” Rafe said.

You blinked. "Do what?"

“That.” He tipped the bong toward you, at the bag, the mouth, the cleat. “That voice. The—” He almost got to the end of it, but the end was a cliff, so he took a hit instead and let the smoke buy him the half second you were so good at stealing. “I don’t give a shit about the cleat. Neither do you.”

He sounded more annoyed than he’d meant, and it was real but not about you; mainly about the fact that you’d decided you were going to pretend nothing happened, even though that was exactly what he needed from you. Still, getting it felt like being handed a glass of water and told it was the fucking ocean.

You stayed silent. The water did its small work against the hull. Somewhere across the marina a halyard was tapping against a mast, that thin patient sound that Rafe normally didn't hear and now could hear individually, every strike of it, because the boat had gone that quiet. He looked at the bong. He looked at the cooler nobody had opened. He was aware of you not moving.

You moved then, setting your bag down onto the cushion of the bench seat and you crossed the cockpit. Three steps. Four. Past the table, past Rafe, close enough that he got a wash of you, the floral scent, clean and expensive and so aggressively innocent it had always made him want to break something just to have something to apologize for.

Behind the couch he was sitting on was a door. The head, the boat’s bathroom, a closet of a room, teak and a mirror and not quite the square footage to turn around in. You put your hand flat on it and opened it. 

And Rafe didn't understand. He watched you open the door to the head and his brain, his stupid traitor brain that had a whole drawer with your name on it, did not produce the thought it should have produced. It produced something sadder. It thought that he’d made you isolate yourself from him until everyone arrived. And now you were going to go stand in front of Topper's mirror and come back out with the distance reinstalled, and it would be his fault, and he'd earned it.

He even opened his mouth to say something. Sorry, maybe. He wasn't sure. He hadn't gotten there.

You were standing in the doorway of the head with one hand still on the frame, and you weren't going in, and you weren't fixing anything, and you turned your head and you looked back at him across the small bright cabin.

“Rafe,” you said.

He was up off the couch before he'd finished understanding. The bong went onto the table too hard, making the water move in it. Two years of holding still, of the mean sentences, of the moat he'd dug with his own two hands, and it turned out the whole mechanism had been resting on you never once asking him not to hold still, and you hadn't asked him anything, you'd just said his name and left a door open, and the mechanism was already on the floor behind him.

He crossed the cabin in three steps and he did not let himself count them.

You stood in the doorway, the head behind you flooded with the harsh, blue-white of the marine bulb, and you looked at him like you’d always known he’d follow. 

He stopped close, and the head was small enough that close was the only thing available, and Rafe found that he had no words ready. That was new. He always had words ready. He'd built a whole personality out of having the word ready. But the apparatus that supplied the words was on the cabin floor with everything else, and so he just stood there in the blue-white light, breathing, looking at you looking at him, and said nothing at all.

Your hands came up. Rafe’s eyes were fixed on them as they reached up, shy and sudden, to the sides of his face, just to hold. You were just holding, palms careful against his jaw like he was someone who deserved to be held carefully at all. 

His whole body leaned down to it before his brain had been consulted. His head just went where your hands asked it to go, the way water went downhill, the way Topper was late; some law older than choosing.

“Can I—” you started, then the sentence went out of track.

You just stopped, and the third word wouldn’t come. Because the third one was a want, and you were someone who Rafe knew had spent years not saying those out loud, and Rafe watched the question strand there an inch from his mouth, watched you not be able to finish it, and understood that finishing it was a thing you could not do and were never going to be able to do.

So he did it for you. That was the deal, apparently, the complete contract of whatever this was. You couldn’t say the thing and he’d say it; you couldn’t finish and he’d finish. He'd be doing it for the rest of his life and he already knew that, standing there.

“Yeah,” Rafe said against the space where your sentence had been, throwing eleven days outside the window completely. “You can.”

You reached past him instead, one hand leaving his face, and you pushed the door shut behind him. It made a small sound of a click, and it landed in Rafe like a gunshot, because you'd done it. He hadn't reached back and done it for you. You'd closed the door yourself, with your own hand, taken the last out off the table and folded it up and put it away, and Rafe stood in the new confines of the room understanding that he had just watched you say yes in the only language you had.

And then you kissed him. It was careful at first—both of you were, for about a second and a half, careful—and then your fingers slid back into his hair and you breathed yourself through a small, relieved sound.

It was barely a sound at all, but it was a sound you had not chosen to make, Rafe could tell the difference, he’d spent two years watching you choose every sound and every breath and every tilt of your head, and this one had just slipped out of you. He’d spent the last few times he was in your proximity getting a closer read on you. And this was just involuntary proof, that this was happening to you as much as he was making it happen, that you were in here with him rather than being there for him.

He’d run the tape on this so many times it embarrassed him, and in every version you were careful. Soft, a thing he had to coax and gentle and be slow with. 

So when your hand came up and fisted the front of his shirt and pulled—like you’d been the one standing on the wrong side of a door for two years—Rafe's entire model of you went out the porthole, and the loss of it was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Okay,” he said to nobody, to the new discovery of you. “Okay.”

Rafe's control didn't snap so much as it discovered it had never really been there. You kissed him, and he’d been expecting to be the one to do it to you, Rafe the corrupting agent, Rafe with the dirty hands. He didn’t know this one. It felt like being handed a part of you that he couldn’t have witnessed from across rooms, and it turned out to be this—appetite, slow, a little mean—and he wanted it so badly it scared him sober.

His fingers went to your hair, fingers closing at the root and pulling your head back just enough to change the angle, and his other arm came around your back to haul you in past there was room to be hauled. The size of the room was nothing and he wanted you closer than nothing. 

Your chest pressed flat to his and he could feel you breathing through the cotton of your top, could feel the ridge of your bra and the heat of your skin underneath it. His arm tightened across your back.

Somewhere in it, he heard himself say “fuck—you—” against your mouth and didn't get the rest of it out. The rest of it was two years long anyway and wouldn't have fit in the room.

“Rafe,” you said, voice breath-shaped against his jaw, the vibration of it traveling down his neck and settling somewhere at the base of his spine. 

“Mhm.”

“I—” You let his teeth catch onto your bottom lip and gently tug on it. You rose to your toes. “I haven’t been able to—stop—”

“Hm?” He was already gone. His hands found the hem of your denim skirt. His fingers traced the seam where the fabric ended, running along the edge of it, before his palms slid underneath and made contact with bare skin. His palms caught against skin still slick from the humidity, and the give of you under his hands briefly wiped every coherent thought from his head. “Stop what?”

“Being able to think—about you.” Your words came out in two short breaths as Rafe’s fingers palmed the curve of your ass with more greed than finesse, pulling your hips forward into his.

“Shit—yeah?” His voice had gone somewhere low and ruined. A stupid part of him wanted to ask why, hear you say it again, spell it out, tell him exactly what you thought about. “Me too.” 

The same broken noise slipped out of you again, urgently, like the next one and all of the ones after that were owed to him. 

He walked you backward until the bulkhead caught you. You hit the teak with a dull sound and your spine arched off it, pressing your hips into his. Rafe’s vision briefly went white because the pressure of you against him—specifically where he was already hard and had been since you closed the door—was a feeling his body processed before his brain got anywhere near it.

He kept one hand flat behind your shoulder blade so the boat's roll wouldn't knock your skull into the wood. Some backroom part of him was still telling him to make sure you didn’t get hurt.

His hand found the hem of your skirt again and pushed it up slowly, gathering the denim in his fist, and the scrape of the fabric against your skin was loud in the small room. 

You shifted your hips off the teak to help him—lifted without being asked—and Rafe had to stop.

He put his forehead against your shoulder and breathed, because your unconscious cooperation did more to him than everything before it combined. He'd imagined it, and in every version you were hesitant, uncertain, something he had to ease into, and the reality was that you'd just lifted your hips for him like you wanted this as much as he did.

“D’you—” His voice was gone. He couldn’t recognize it. “Tell me to.”

“Rafe.”

“Say it.” He turned his mouth against your neck, found your pulse point, and it felt it hammering against his lips. He tasted the salt on your skin. His hand was on your thigh, fingers spread wide, thumb pressing to the soft inside of it where the skin was the thinnest, and he could feel the muscle twitching under his touch. “Say it?”

You let out a breath into his ear, body loosening up under his hold. “Please.”

“Jesus fuck,” Rafe muttered, and it came out wrecked, halfway to a laugh, because you kept finding things he had no defense for without even trying.

He pushed the lace aside with two fingers, careful at first because the carefulness was a reflex even now, and then he felt you—your warmth and the give and the fact of it—and the careful went the way of everything else. Warmer than he’d imagined, softer, wetter. His fingers slid against you experimentally, testing his touch out, afraid you’d vanish if he made the wrong move.

Your eyes squeezed shut and your thigh clenched against his hip. 

Everything was replaced by the single present-tense reality of his hand between your legs, and the reality was so much more than the fantasy that he understood, suddenly and completely, that he wasn’t going to recover from knowing this.

He pressed his forehead to the side of your head and shut his eyes. Looking at you was too much information all at once; he needed to subtract a sense or he was going to embarrass himself.

He bit down the inside of his cheek, hard, on principle, because the sound that wanted to come out at just this—just his fingers against you, nothing more, the most preliminary fact of you—was a sound that would have told you everything.

It would have laid the whole two years out on the floor, and Rafe was ready to give you a great deal tonight but he was not, yet, ready to give you that.

You made a short, desperate sound. Your hand came off his shirt and gripped his wrist to keep him, to make sure his hands stayed, the fingers wrapping around the bones of his wrist and holding on.

“Not going anywhere,” he said against your temple, which was true in the small immediate sense and a lie in every other, and he chose, this once, to mean only the small one.

Your free hand moved between you, down, and found the waist of his jeans. You fumbled at the button. It was clumsy—your fingers weren’t sure, and Rafe wondered if you’d ever done the reaching before, or if you’d only ever done the reaching before—and that clumsiness nearly took his legs out; the fact that you were trying, that you’d decided his wanting was a thing worth tending to. You, who tended to everything, were turning all the careful attention now onto him. 

He caught your wrist with his free hand before you got to the button.

“Hey. No.” It came out rougher than expected. He pressed his mouth to your jaw so he wouldn't have to look at you while he said it. He could feel your pulse in your wrist, fast under his thumb, and he held it there. “Not—Just you right now. Okay?”

You went still, uncertain, and he felt the small recalibration in you. He couldn’t have that either.

“S’not—” Rafe huffed, frustrated at his own mouth, at the fact that the truth was right there and he had no clean way to hand it over. The truth being that if you touched him, he was done, and he needed it to last longer than that, he needed more of you before he let it be over. He had no way to say any of it that wouldn't crack him open.

So, he said, against your skin, “Let me have this one. You can deal with me later.”

He felt the curve of your smile against his cheek. “Promise?” you asked, like it genuinely could have been that simple.

He chose to believe it could be.

“Yeah, okay.” His fingers moved inside you again and your breath broke and the smile went with it. “Yeah. Promise.”

You made a noise, broken, your hips chasing his hand like the wanting had gone out ahead of you. He almost said it then. The thing. It got all the way up his throat and he swallowed it down because saying it here, like this, with his fingers inside you on Topper's boat, would've made it the cheapest it could ever be, and the one thing Rafe was sure of was that it wasn't cheap. He curled his fingers instead to find the place that made your whole body forget its manners.

His hips pressed forward against your thigh just once off their own accord, moving in a slow grind.

His body was finding pressure where it could, chasing the friction he’d denied simply because of the fact that he was so hard it had passed uncomfortable a while ago and entered something closer to pain.

The pressure sent a wave of relief through him so acute his breath came out shaky against your temple, and his hand stuttered inside you for half a second before he caught the rhythm again.

He locked his hips and stayed still and put everything he had back into you instead, into the curl of his fingers and the pace you needed, and the dull throb of himself went unanswered and that was fine.

That was fine. He could sit with it. He'd been sitting with wanting you for two years; what was another few minutes?

“Look at me.” It came out slow, almost a plea, far from having an order in it. He’d had his eyes shut a second ago and now he couldn’t survive not being able to see. “C’mon. Lemme see.” 

Your eyes dragged open, gone glassy, unfocused, and he held them. He’d wanted to see this for so long and he wasn’t going to spend it blind. 

Your hand twisted in his shirt. You were shaking. He could feel it building in you, your peak, close, and he kept his rhythm exactly where you needed it because for once in his life he wanted to give perfectly, get one act completely right.

“Rafe.” Your voice cracked on it, warning, almost.

“I know,” he said. “I got you.” 

You broke. He felt it happen—felt you go tight, squeezing his fingers, and then gone, your forehead dropping hard to his shoulder, a sound against his neck that you didn't choose and couldn't have stopped—and he held still inside it and let you have all of it, every second, until you went heavy and loose against him and the only thing holding you up was him.

Rafe kept his hand where it was one second longer than he should have, just to feel the last of it, then drew it back slow and fixed the lace with more care than he’d taken with anything in his life. He settled it back like he was hiding the evidence, which he was. He pressed his forehead to yours. Your hands had found his shirt again. Your eyes were shut.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, shaken, as you tried to recover yourself. He saw your jaw tighten like you wanted to say more and were physically biting the words down.

He already knew what was coming. He'd watched it happen enough with you now, the way the wanting closed over and the apology surfaced. He just didn't know it would land the way it did.

The words landed wrong in him, because ‘sorry’ was a thing people were for Rafe, a thing that arrived in his direction with his name attached. 

If you were going to keep reaching for him and you were going to be sorry every time, and he was going to let you, and the wanting was always going to come to him pre-wrapped in your regret.

He couldn't have that. Of all of it—the wrongness, the boat, Topper—that was the one thing Rafe found he could not stand in the room.

He brought his hand up and brushed his knuckles along your cheek, slow, and shook his head, just slightly, just enough. 

“Don’t,” he said, and his voice came out rough. “You see me complaining?”

You looked at him, and Rafe got the full, sober weight of your eyes for the first time since the door had clicked. In them was something he had no idea what he could with, the furrow of your brows and the frown on your lips, like you didn’t want to go.

That made something between his ribs sore, because he could deal with you regretting it; he’d dealt with people regretting him. What he had no capability for was you standing so, so fucking close to him looking like leaving him was the hardest part.

“Hey.” He had reached the edge of what his mouth could do. So he kept the knuckles against your cheek, because moving them was beyond him, and the two of you stood there in the bright nothing for a second that Rafe would later try and fail to make last longer in his memory than it had any right to last.

Then your eyes moved past him—to the door, to the world on the other side of it—and he watched the second you started leaving. 

He watched your face close over. Then your hands left his shirt—he felt the complete loss of them, a cold where they’d been tugging—and went to work; you smoothed the denim of your skirt where he’d greedily bunched it, the shirt next that had, at some point, lifted up, then your hair, fingers finding the loose pieces and threading them back into the shape they were supposed to hold. 

Forty seconds, maybe less, and there was almost nothing left of you that Rafe had put there. That meant you’d walk out into the sun and stand next to Topper, and Topper would look at you and see his girl, intact, unmarked, and returned to him in good condition. 

But you’d been sad to go. Rafe held onto that with both hands. He’d take it up the stairs with him; he’d take it home; he’d take it out later and look at it. He knew, even now, that keeping that would be the worst thing to keep, because the fact that you hadn’t wanted to leave didn’t mean you were going to stay. You were still going. Sad to leave and leaving weren’t opposites; you could do both. In fact, you were about to.

“You should head up,” he said. “Before anyone else comes.”

You nodded.

Rafe reached out one more time, the last time he could, and ran his thumb along the corner of your mouth where the pink had smudged, where he’d smudged it. He wiped it clean, almost carefully, and he tucked the one piece of hair you’d missed.

“I don’t know what—I’m sorr—”

Rafe cut your words off by placing a finger under your chin.

He knew while doing it that he was putting Topper’s girlfriend back together. He was reassembling you with his own hands so the seams wouldn't show, gentle as anything, and he hated himself the exact right amount and did it anyway, because the alternative was you walking up there with the truth still on you and Rafe was not—whatever else he was—going to be the reason it showed.

“Go,” he said, stepping back to give you the door. He found something like a smile somewhere and got it up onto his face and held it there with what he had left. “You look perfect.”

It was at the lawn party that happened every year because the Murrays had a lawn and a reason was not, on Figure Eight, something that was required to have a party. Rafe had come anyway, because not coming was its own kind of information, and another week into a thing like this he started doing calculation on what your absence said as carefully as what your presence did.

He’d been there an hour and he watched you the whole hour. He was good at it by now; he’d had years of practice so it didn’t look like anything, the trick of keeping his face pointed at the person talking to him while the rest of you stayed aimed at the far side of the lawn. Nobody saw him do it, and he watched you move around the grass in a green dress with a drink you hadn’t taken a single sip of.

You were bright and frictionless and doing that stupid fucking laugh exactly on time. Your hand found people’s forearms when you said a kind thing, and the whole set-up of it was so smooth and so total that he had a hard time believing you were the same person who’d asked him to come into a tiny bathroom on your boyfriend’s boat. 

By seven, the parents had thinned out and left Brad and Charlie Murray in charge of the lawn. It was by eight when Rafe noticed Topper leave. It was with some guy Rafe half-knew, a friend of a friend, who looked like he was going to be a problem, and Topper had peeled him off from the keg to deal with him. Topper was doing the small, good thing and taking a guy home before he woke up the next morning with an earful of everything he’d done.

He got his phone out before his mind even processed it. 

where are u, he texted you, making use of that almost-empty chat thread with you that was mainly filled with small logistic details he never cared about that you did. It was deniable, a sentence that would make him look like he was only keeping an eye out for his best friend’s girlfriend. 

He told himself that, too. He just wanted to know where you were; he’d also spent his time unable to decide if the boat had been a real thing or a girl having the worst night of her summer in a small room he just happened to be in. He didn't know which, and not knowing was its own kind of hell. 

about to catch a ride w ruthie

Rafe immediately read it and his mind snagged on the fact that you’d answered him at all. You could've gotten in Ruthie's car and let the question rot. Rafe felt something ugly and electric go up his spine that he had the decency, at least, to be disgusted by.

come by the pool in the back

The typing bubble didn’t come back up. He picked the label off the beer in wet strips and watched the path up to the pool. And you did come up the path, and Rafe got his answer, that the boat may not have been a fluke. 

He should've felt like he'd won something. He'd been telling himself for three weeks that knowing would feel like winning. 

You came around the hedge and saw him sitting on the pool ledge with his feet in the water and his beer on the stone beside him. 

“Hey,” you said. You looked at the pool, the empty chairs, the dark windows of the Murray house where the party noise was muffled into bass and the occasional shriek. You looked everywhere that wasn't him.

“You been avoiding me?” Rafe asked, trying to make it sound as even as possible. 

“No,” you said quickly. Your hand went to the chain around your neck and turned the pendant once.

He huffed out a breath. “Yeah?”

“I’m here, am I not?”

Rafe had no fucking clue how he’d managed to get you in this position, head between your thighs as you laid on the top of his white duvet.

The room was dark except for the dock lights off the marsh throwing slow, liquid patterns across the ceiling. Tannyhill was empty, and Rafe usually hated that, but right now, the silence was his and it had you in it, and that made it the best fucking room he’d ever been in. 

Your thighs were shaking with a small tremor, barely there, and his hands were holding them apart. His thumbs pressed into the soft inside of your skin as your whole body tried to close around him. He could feel the tension in the muscle under his palms, the restless shifting of your hips, and the way your hand had gone to his hair and stayed there.

He’d barely started. His mouth was working up from the inside of your thigh, tasting the salt on your skin, and you were already breathing like you’d been running. He could hear the short, caught inhales that you kept trying to smooth out. 

He said your name against your skin, and you jolted. “Stop thinking,” he murmured.

“I’m not—”

“I can feel it.” He looked up at you from between your legs. Your face in the dim was already flushed with eyes too wide and your bottom lip caught between your teeth. “Relax.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try less,” he drawled, thumb doing a gentle stroke against your skin. “That’s the whole point.”

His mouth moved higher, and your thighs clenched against the sides of his face before you caught yourself and relaxed it. He let his tongue drag down the slit, savoring the taste as your hips came off the bed. The sound you made was small and shocked; you immediately bit it back, swallowed it behind your teeth.

He wanted to stay like this. He wanted to take his time, learn you like this, take in every sound and shift of your body. But your body was rigid underneath him in a way that wasn't anticipation. You were lying on his bed with your legs apart and his face between them and some part of you couldn't stop being aware of it. He could feel your self-consciousness like a physical thing, the way you kept adjusting, kept shifting your hips.

“Rafe,” you said quietly.

He lifted his head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s—wrong.” You pressed your lips together. Your hand in his hair loosened, then tightened, then loosened again. “Can you come up here?”

“But I’m good here.”

“I know. I just—I wanna—” You stopped, letting out an almost-frustrated breath he found deeply amusing. Your eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and furrow between your brows had deepened in a way that wasn't just arousal. You were embarrassed. You were lying in his bed asking for something and you were embarrassed about the asking. “I want you like—closer.”

Rafe tugged his lip between his teeth, and he was sure his own pupils were blown as wide as they could be. “Closer how?”

Your eyes found his in the dark, and the shy wanting in your face hit Rafe in a really, really, difficult fucking way because he had no idea how to deal with it. You held his gaze and your hand gently tugged at his hair, pulling him upward and toward you.

“We don’t have to—” He went, because there was no version of this where he could deny you. He was already crawling up your body because his own was making the decision, his brain, his mouth dragging up your stomach, your ribs, the valley between your breasts. “I don’t mind.” 

Your hands went down from his hair and cupped the sides of his face with your palms, practically forcing him to look at you. “Do you—you don’t want to?” 

The question was so far from reality that his brain physically stalled. He was hovering over you, hands on your shoulders, and you were looking up at him with genuine uncertainty. 

“Are you—” He almost laughed. “You’re really asking me that?”

You grumbled something under your breath, causing him to chuckle then.

He moved his thumb to your lip, pulling it down, as he said, “I wanna. Just wanna make sure you’ll be fine.”

Your lips closed around his thumb, as if relieved at his answer, and Rafe’s brain went to place it wasn’t coming back from.

Your eyes stayed on his, still carrying the shy uncertainty from a second ago, and Rafe was supposed to reconcile that with the warm press of your tongue against his thumb. 

“Okay,” he said flatly. “Yeah. Thanks for that.” 

The corner of your eyes creased. You would’ve laughed if you weren’t currently occupied. 

He pressed his thumb down against your bottom lip, dragged it slow across the fullness of it, and watched your eyes go heavy. His cock was pressed against your thigh and he was fairly sure you could feel exactly what this was doing to him, which was fine, whatever, he'd abandoned dignity somewhere around the second week of wanting you.

“So fucking annoying,” he said, almost conversational. 

He pulled his thumb free, letting it drag. The wet shine it left on your lip caught the silver light. You looked up at him with your mouth still parted and an expression that was dangerously close to being pleased with yourself. 

He leaned down to press his forehead against yours, bracing his arms against your sides as his hips came flush against yours, cock grinding over the wetness of you. He let out a broken gasp at the feeling, eyes closing for a moment. 

Your breath hitched underneath him and your hips tilted up—chasing—and the friction made both of you go still for a second. Your hands were on his shoulders, fingers pressing into the muscle, and your eyes were shut and your mouth was open and you looked like someone at the edge of a cliff deciding whether to jump.

He rocked against you again, watching intently the way your brow creased and your lips pressed together. He could feel you—the heat, the slick of it, how easy it would be to just push forward—and the restraint of not doing it yet, of keeping this unbearable almost-contact, was winding something tight behind his ribs.

“Why’re you letting me do this to you?” he asked, unable to stop the words from stumbling out. He rolled his hips again.

“Huh—”

He shifted his hips, unfair. He knew it was far from fair, but whatever deflection you’d been making lost its integrity. “Why?” he asked, voice quieter.

Your hands slid from his shoulders to the sides of his neck. You held him there, thumbs against his jaw, and he watched you try to find the answer while his body was making it very difficult to think. Your hips moved against his again; small, restless, like your body was having its own conversation separate from the one your mouth was attempting.

“Why are you doing this?” you said, turning it back around on him.

“I’ve got my reasons,” he said without missing a beat. 

Something flickered across your eyes, curiosity, maybe, then washed out. “And I’ve got mine.”

That was enough for Rafe. That was more than enough, that there was something in you that wanted to do this.

His hands went down to find his cock and align himself against you. He pushed forward in one, slow continuous motion, and any words you had for him dissolved into a sound that started as a gasp and ended nowhere. Your lips parted and your eyes widened just slightly at the newfound intrusion in your body as your nails sunk into the sides of his neck hard enough to leave crescents. 

His own breath left him somewhere guttural and graceless, his face dropping to the crook of your neck. He held still, breathing through his nose against your skin, jaw clenched as every muscle tightened.

Your body was adjusting around him in increments he could feel; the tension in your thighs loosening, your hips shifting beneath his to find the angle, your breathing going from held to shaky. Your fingers moved from his neck to his hair, threading through it, holding on.

“Okay?” he managed to say through his teeth.

“Yeah,” you said, voice coming out through a breath. “Just—stay there a second.”

He stayed, and he would’ve done so for the rest of the night if you’d asked him to. Your legs were wrapped around his hips and your fingers were in his hair and he was inside you in his bed and the whole situation was so far from anything he deserved that he was fairly sure the universe was going to correct the error any second now.

Your hips moved first with a small roll, testing, and whatever you found made your head tilt back and eyes close. You let out a small, surprised sound like you’d answered a question. 

“Good?” he said against your neck.

“Move,” you said instead of answering.

He pulled back and pushed in again, and your body rose to meet him on the first stroke like it had been waiting. The angle you found together made you gasp and him swear and it something in motion neither of you could stop. 

He pulled back to look at you because he needed to see your face. You looked wrecked already—mouth open, eyes half-shut, heat spreading down your neck—and something about the expression was more than just pleasure. It was surprise, like you hadn't known it could feel like this.

Rafe thought about Topper—a brief flash, Topper in this position, Topper on top of you—and felt something ugly and possessive claw up his throat. He wondered if Topper had ever seen this face.

He pushed himself up to the hilt to shove the thought aside. Your body kept meeting his with a push that matched his own, your hips rolling up into every thrust, and the careful dissolved in the face of it. 

At some point, through the haze of too-much-pleasure, more than Rafe deserved, your mouth found his shoulder, breathing hard against his skin. On a thrust that went deeper, your teeth came down reflexively, the bite sharp and sudden, sending a jolt down through him. A bright sting that braided into the pleasure and amplified it, and his hips snapped forward hard in response, punching a sound out of you that vibrated against his shoulder.

You pulled back. “Sorry. I’m sorry—”

He let out a small chuckle, shaking his head. “Don’t really care. You do what you want.”

His hand found your thigh, hiked your leg higher around his waist. The angle shifted and your head tipped back and the sound you made was loud enough to fill the room. Your throat was exposed, the pendant resting in the hollow of your collarbone—the initial that belonged to every version of you that existed outside this bed—and it caught the light as your chest heaved.

Rafe's hand moved before his brain had signed off on it. It shifted from your thigh up your body, over your ribs, your collarbone, and settled against the side of your throat, resting. His palm was against your neck, fingers curving around the column of it, his thumb was against your pulse where it was hammering fast enough to count.

You let out a shuddered breath as your back arched off the mattress, and your hips ground up into him. “Rafe,” you said, sounding almost needier. 

Rafe sucked in an inhale. “Yeah?”

Your mouth opened and nothing came out for a second—your body processing—and then a sound that was so unguarded your hand flew up to cover your mouth.

He caught it and pinned it to the mattress beside your head, fingers lacing with yours. His other hand stayed on your throat, elbows resting against the mattress, as his fingers rubbed the skin under your jaw. “Don’t do that.”

Your fingers squeezed his where they were pinned. Your eyes were bright and locked on his. He could feel you everywhere.

Your legs tight around his waist, your hand gripping his, your pulse racing against his palm, the way you clenched around him every time his thumb shifted against your throat. He was keeping all of it. He was putting it in the drawer that had started as a nook and had overtaken every other room in his head. The specific rhythm that made your eyes roll back. The way your body curved into him when he hit the right angle. The small, bitten-off sounds you made.

His lips found yours, tugging them with his teeth rather than kissing at all. Your shaky breaths ghosted over his face.

He could feel you getting close, your breath fragmenting into short gasps and you clenching around his own pulsing. Your hands squeezed his against the mattress hard enough that the bones ached. 

“I think I’m—” you started saying against his lips.

“I know,” he said, letting himself find a rhythm—the perfect one, if there even was one, to make you fall apart under him—as his finger reached up to trace your jaw. “I know.”

Within three minutes of Rafe’s body rolling off of yours, he noticed your body stiffen like a fucking stone. He stayed where he was, on his back, and he let the quiet sit because it was, for now, holding. 

Your shoulder was against his arm and your knee was somewhere near his. The length of you was just there, warm and breathing, close in a way that the boat or the truck or your bathroom hadn’t allowed. Rafe had never had that with you. He found he didn't entirely know what to do with his arm.

He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed and reaching for the jeans on the floor. He got his cigarettes out of the pocket and put his jeans back on. He crossed to the window and pushed it up with the heel of his hand and Rafe sat himself on the sill, half in the room and half out of it. He took the first drag and felt his hands finally have a job. He needed something to do with his hands; lying in bed next to you without reaching out for you again wasn’t, it turned out, a thing his body had been built to do.

He let himself look back at you. You’d propped yourself up on one elbow, the duvet pulled across you, and you were watching him, the way he did you, except he’d had the cowardice to do it across rooms and you were doing it from eight feet away with no apparent shame about it at all. 

When you realized he noticed you, your eyes went down.

Rafe huffed, smoke going with it. “Now you’re shy?”

“Shut up.”

“You can stare. I’m right here.”

You shifted under the duvet at his gaze, and your eyes came off him and went to the middle distance. Something in your shoulders drew in, like you were folding half-inch under a thing you had no cover for.

He shifted on the sill, opening the space between his knees so the foot still inside came down flat on the floorboards. He made the room and let it sit there, took another drag, and looked at the dark outside.

You pushed the duvet off and got up to cross the room in his t-shirt, the grey one, the hem of it at the top of your thighs. You sat down between his legs with your back to his chest, and Rafe forgot, for a second, what he’d been doing with his cigarette.

“You cold?” he said, because you’d drawn in against him.

“A little.”

He brought his arm around you and flattened it over your stomach to pull you back the last inch into him, and it sat there like a bar across your front. Your spine fell against his sternum and his chin landed somewhere at the top of your head without fully thinking about it. He smoked over your shoulder, angling it away so it wouldn’t go in your face. 

“Can I say something?” you asked after a moment.

“That’s never good.”

“It’s not bad.” you said.

“That’s worse.” He felt you huff, the small laugh going through your back into his chest. He tapped the ash out the window. “Go.”

“I didn’t know I’d—” You stopped, looking out the window. “I don’t usually—” The sentence continued to fall halfway, each version dying before it cleared your teeth. You sighed, longly, then gave up on saying it cleanly at all. “It’s usually never like that for me. That’s all.”

It took Rafe a moment to register you weren’t talking about the sex as much as you were talking about yourself. You’d been in one bed your whole life, and so the basic structure of the thing was a blank you were handing him, with no management on it, trusting him—him, of all people—to draw it in honestly.

“Yeah,” he said carefully. 

You nodded against his collarbone, and he felt the small loosening in your body, as though you’d been quietly worried about admitting it and just found out that it was fine. 

“Makes sense, though.” He took a drag, the cigarette going into its last embers. “One person your whole life. You don’t even know what you—” The words came out magnanimous, older, knows-better, and he tried to reel it back because he most definitely didn’t know better. “You gotta get out more. Figure out what you like. Who does it for you.” He shrugged, almost stiffly. “You’ve got catching up to do.”

It sat there for half a second, and then the picture loaded behind it—you, like this, and someone else being the one to go looking and find the same pieces he just found—and Rafe discovered the offer he’d made out of generosity was the single most intolerable sentence he’d said all summer.

You tipped your head back against his shoulder to look up at him. There was something small and amused in your face, because you'd caught the seam in his voice a beat before he'd even finished hating himself for it.

“How many more?”

He huffed, low and hot against the side of your head, and shook it once. “Yeah, alright.” His arm drew tighter across your stomach. “Pretty sure I should be enough.”

The cigarette was dead. He’d smoked it past the point of it being anything, down to the place where it was just paper and heat between his fingers, and he reached out and crushed it on the brick of the sill outside. His hand came back in with nothing to do, and he solved it the way he’d started solving most of it recently, which was to find some part of you and settle on it; the flat of his palm went to your hip and stayed, his thumb moving once over the bone of it and then going still. 

“I should probably drive you home soon, yeah?” he said into the side of your head. “It’s late.”

He felt your spine taking itself back, the slack going out of you, and the cold rushed back into the warm place at his chest. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” you said quickly. “I’ll get dressed really quick.”

Before he could even process it all, you were already up, crossing for your clothes. He watched you put them on.

Stay was right there, but it wouldn’t come up. 

“Hey.” You stopped at his voice, one sandal on, the other one in your hand. “The catching up—” His thumb found the brick where the cigarette had been rubbed. “I’m right here. If you—want to—up to you.”

It was the most he could get out. 

“You’re bad at this,” you said, almost matter-of-factly. 

He huffed, eyes leaving the window to go back to you for a second. “Yeah, I know.” He laughed then, slightly. “Never really been in this situation before.”

“Yeah,” You bent and set the sandal down on the boards. “Me neither.”

Thick syrupy light that came down at six and made people you couldn’t even stand look like they were worth everyone’s time covered your entire vision. You were on a long teak bench against the pergola with Topper’s arm across the back of it, and you had a sweating glass of something pink you’d been holding for thirty minutes. The Devreux twins were in the pool; someone had fallen asleep upright on the Adirondack chair, a tray of those little crab things was going around, and the citronella candles were already lit. 

Topper’s hand was on your knee, it had been there a while. It landed the same way as it always had, without his eyes following it. Two years ago, one year ago, a month ago, it had been nothing, only a thing that came with being his. 

The problem was that it wasn’t anything anymore. You could feel exactly where his palm was, and your whole body had started to keep a completely different count this summer that had nothing to do with anniversaries. The count was three, and it was something your skin knew all too well, even when your face didn’t. So his hand sat on your knee in the gold light and you had to make yourself not move it, the way you made yourself not do a lot of things now, and you understood with a small flat horror that you'd become a person who had to be aware of your boyfriend’s touch.

“—no, that’s the thing about her,” Topper said, free hand sloshing as he gestured, and you pulled yourself back in as you realized it was you he was speaking about. “Last year for her birthday, I planned the whole thing, booked the place on the water and got everyone out—like forty people—and she just—” he tipped his head toward you, fond, the spotlight swinging, and you felt it land before you'd arranged your face for it. “She had the best time. Didn’t ask for anything. My mom says it all the time, she’s gonna be so nice to be married to.”

The bench made a unanimous warm and approving sound. Somebody said ‘we love her.’ You smiled, head tilting on autopilot, and you let yourself remember—for exactly one second—that you had wanted, very badly, to spend that birthday at home. That you’d told him so, gently, twice, and he’d heard you didn’t want a fuss because that was an easier version of you to plan around. 

Forty people on the water; you’d had the best time because you were good at your job. Topper was saying the truth, that was the unbearable part. Topper stood it was a true story about a girl who didn't want anything, and the girl who hadn’t wanted it had simply never made it across to him, had filed the wanting down small and smooth so he'd never have to notice her carrying it.

He loved to talk about that birthday. He’d talk about it for years. He’d talk about it at the wedding. 

Across the lawn, Rafe was leaning against the pergola post with a beer, angled half away from it all. You couldn’t see his face, and you didn’t need to. He was the only person who somehow knew you’d wanted to stay home—a fact that slipped out when your lips had been loose while you were in a haze, simply trying to fill silences—and you had to put your glass to your mouth and not drink just to have something to do that wasn't turning your head.

“You’re quiet,” Topper said, leaning in, the scent of sun and beer filling your nose. “Should I get the car? We can dip early.”

“No need,” you said, smiling. “I’m good.” 

You got up after a few minutes and said something about grabbing finger sandwiches and Topper asked you to grab a beer, already halfway into a discussion about a jetski. You said you would, which meant now you would be grabbing a beer. 

You went the long way, around the deep end, past the abandoned crab tray and the sleeper with his drink balanced on the side of his chair. You walked through all of it with your empty pink drink and the specific loneliness of being the only sober-feeling person at a party that was working perfectly for everyone else.

You stood in the far end of the pergola where the lattice cut the gold light into pieces, and you set the glass down on the ledge. You put both your hands on the wood and looked at the marsh going gold past the property line and let yourself, for one supervised minute, feel it. 

It came up fast once you let yourself feel it; it was the low, slick, swelling kind, the kind that had your name on it. Because Topper was good. Topper was sitting forty feet away being genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, telling a roomful of people he loved how easy you were to love, how little you needed, how lucky he was. Every word coming out of his mouth was true to him, and he had driven you across the island when you were bored, had asked if you’d eaten, had loved the wrong version of you so correctly that you couldn’t even hate him for not finding the real one. 

He would continue being good, and you had spent the summer doing the single worst thing a person could do to another, to him, to the boy who’d done nothing but be exactly what everyone said he was. 

Your eyes went hot and you blinked hard as you felt the first one go before you could stop it. You wiped the tear fast with the heel of your hand because crying here would be a catastrophe, and you hated yourself with a completeness that almost steadied you, because at least the hating was honest, at least it was the one true feeling you'd had all day that you weren’t forcing for anybody.

You felt the change in the air, the quiet of someone arriving who knew not to announce it, and you didn't turn around because you couldn't, not with your face like this. Rafe had already seen you like this more times than you would have liked.

“Hey,” he said, voice low behind you, to the set of your shoulders. “You—”

“Not now, Rafe,” you said, voice coming out cracked. You kept your back to him and pressed the heel of your hand under your eye, fast, like you could get there before he saw, and you couldn't, and you knew you couldn't. “I can’t—I’m sorry, I can’t give you—” Your words were interrupted by a hiccup. “Not right now. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not trying to…” You heard Rafe suck in a sharp breath and let the words trail off. “That’s not why I—” He tried again, and he couldn’t get there again, sounding genuinely unsure about how to finish the sentence. “Jesus. No.”

You turned then, because he sounded too caught off-guard, and you got your first look at his face which was filled with genuine confusion, brows furrowed.

“Why would you think—I saw you walking off looking like—” He looked almost offended as he stared at you. Then, he gestured vaguely at your face, his motions moving awkwardly. “Like that. So I came over. That’s it.” He shook his head, frustrated at himself now. “I don’t—I’m not trying to fuck you or whatever. I just came over, alright?”

You let yourself sit with his words for a moment, feeling something like warmth cover your chest and then immediately feeling like a monster for feeling it. 

“Okay,” you said finally, voice small.

He nodded once, sharply. “He’s being an idiot.”

You let out a sound that was meant to be a laugh but just came out as a hiccup again. “No, he’s not.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, and you could feel how difficult it was for him to talk right now.

“No, he’s not,” you said again, shaking your head. “He’s good, Rafe. He didn’t do anything and I’m—” You took in a deep breath, forcing yourself to look away from him. “I’m just being a horrible person to him.”

“So fucking what,” Rafe said, the words coming out as the complete opposite of a question. “You’ve probably done a hundred good things for strangers in the last six months.” He scratched at his chin for a moment. “It’s annoying to even watch. Maybe you get one bad thing to do.”

You looked up at him with what should’ve been gratitude, but what came was the reflex. “You’re just saying that ‘cause you wanna keep sleeping with me.”

Your words came out smaller than an accusation, like you were just handing him the easy version on purpose. The one where this could stay a thing you understood, because a guy who said nice things to get something was a guy you knew how to be around, and a guy who said them for no reason was not.

Rafe’s face shifted—you’d stung him, you realized, a beat too late—and he chose to not take the out you’d given him.

“Yeah,” he said flatly, voice dry. “That’s it. That’s exactly why. Came all the way here just to lock that one down.” He looked at you with a look you couldn’t recognize. “Don’t be dumb.”

You wanted to let it end there, because it was all going out of left-field, into an area you couldn’t manage. But Rafe continued, like he was the one who hated silences, “I stole a turtle.”

“Today?” you asked, the word coming out of your mouth before you could process his words.

He shifted his neck back as he looked at you. “No, not today. Obviously.” He looked over you for a moment, reassessing. “Eighth grade. It was a class turtle.”

You let out a laugh that was mainly the aftershocks of your wet eyes and stuffy nose. “What’s wrong with you?” you said, and it came out clogged and unsteady and not unkind at all, almost grateful, the question you’d meant as an accusation arriving as something closer to relief.

“Lotta things,” Rafe said, then took a sip of his beer. “Connor’s mom was gonna keep it for the summer. I didn’t like him. Kept the turtle three months in my closet.”

“What’d he do to you?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged. “Something.”

You laughed then, and your hand went up your mouth. The corner of Rafe’s mouth went up. 

“Took care of it, though,” he said after. “Probably better than they would’ve.” 

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mhm. They were going on vacation that summer, anyway.” He picked at the label on his bottle. “Let it go after. It’s fine out there somewhere.”

You wiped under your eye, the crying mostly gone now, just the wreckage of it left. “I’d look for it.”

He looked at you for a long second, like he was deciding whether you were serious and landing on, in this second, maybe. Then he shook his head, slow, the brows still up.

Rafe’s brows went up a little. “Yeah, that’s all you.”

The overhead lights of Kelce’s basement were off and somebody had plugged in the lamp with the scarf over it that Kelce’s mother did not know her son owned, and the room had gone a low amber colour that made everything look a little more like something was wrong. Upstairs, the party was loud. Down here, it was a circle—the deep couch and the floor and the coffee table that had cigarette burns Kelce blamed, every single time, on a cousin—of eight or nine of you, the number loose for people kept arriving then going. 

You were between Topper and Rafe, and you hadn’t chosen this. You’d come down the stairs and there’d been one gap on the couch, and it had Topper on one side of it and Rafe on the other. There was no version of the next two seconds where you would stand in the middle of the basement doing visible math to get out of the situation, so you sat on it. 

Topper’s arm went along the back of the couch behind you, which meant he’d stopped tracking where you were, which was its own kind of love and also the reason any of this had been possible all summer. He was already pitched forward into a conversation about a boat motor; Topper could run a conversation with no fuel at all, indefinitely, like a hybrid. So you sat in the loose bracket of his arm and did all the things you were good at, the nod and the small affirming sound and the face set to show you were listening, and you did not look to your other side. 

Your other side was Rafe leaning over the glass with a card and a folded bill, and you were spending real effort trying to watch him not do it. The effort was the tell.

You’d gotten frighteningly good at it over the summer; the alibis with no holes, the texts timed so the read receipts said the right story, the whole situation of getting away with it. The easy thing, the keeping your eyes where you put them, turned out to be the one you couldn’t do. 

It was difficult, and what came with it every time was the low unstable interest in watching him. There was this wanting to look directly at the thing you’d spent your whole life being walked quickly past. Rafe didn’t manage himself. Rafe had a whole room in him with the lid off, and your whole life had been lids—on drinks you didn’t finish, on sentences you didn’t end, on the want you folded up small and put away before anyone could see the shape of it—and watching him just not do that, just reach for the thing and take it in a basement full of people, did something to you that you couldn’t find a clean name for. 

The bill went around. Madi did hers with a wince. It traveled—a guy you half-knew, back across the table—and came near you, and you said, “I’m good.”

“Course you are,” Rafe said, a half-laugh in it. “You ever loosen up?”

“I loosen up,” you said, the words coming out before you could get a hand on them.

His head came around a few degrees. “Yeah?” He sat back off the table and looked at you. “Okay, then,” he said, soft, just for you. There was a dare folded in it only you could hear, because the only honest answer was sitting six inches to your left and getting off on this. “Name one thing you do.”

You felt the heat go up your neck and sealed your mouth. You watched a grin build itself across his face slow and unhurried, enormously enjoying the trap he’d set in plain sight. 

“Hey.” Topper’s hand came to your knees, squeezing. “She’s gonna stop humoring you if you keep doing that,” he said, laughing with no heat in it.

He wasn’t even facing Rafe—or you—half his attention already drifted back into the room, because to Topper this was nothing, just two people he liked talking beside him.

For a second, something flickered down behind Rafe’s face, ugly and fast, gone before it finished calcifying. You knew the look he’d swallowed a hundred times this summer watching Topper kiss your temple in front of people. 

Rafe leaned back against the couch, head against the cushion. He lifted his hand and dragged two fingers slow across his lip and held them there, and you understood now what the gesture was, forcing it down with two fingers because there was nowhere on God's earth he was allowed to let it out, least of all here, least of all at the person whose lap you were sitting across.

You sat with Topper's thumb moving idle on your knee and watched Rafe swallow a thing he had no business owning, and the awful part—the part you'd think about later—was how it answered something. How Rafe somehow made it feel better than being had.

Then Topper’s phone lit on his leg. He looked at it, said “My dad,” with the apology already on his face, and squeezed your shoulder and stood up, going to the stairs with his phone against his ear.

You saw Rafe’s head turn at the edge of your vision, his body staying exactly where it was, so that when he spoke it came angled at the side of your face. “You see Kelce with that girl earlier?”

You turned to meet him there. “Yes,” you said, too fast. “I’ve never seen her before.”

“Visiting for the summer.” He shrugged, short. “Think he’s pretty into her.”

You weren't a gossip. You didn't do this—it was meant to be beneath the girl everyone had agreed you were—but it came up in you anyway, quick and a little mean and good. “Into her or the summer thing?”

Rafe huffed—almost a laugh, low—and you realized both your heads were turned all the way, that you were angled to him now, and that the two of you had built a tiny private room inside a basement full of people and not one person could have pointed at the thing you'd done to build it. 

“What’s gonna happen?”

“Dunno.” A corner of his mouth went up. “I’ll tell you later.”

You opened your mouth a little, then closed it again. You looked at the coffee table, at the cigarette burns, at anything that was not Rafe, and you found that your hand had gone up to the side of your neck on its own and you made it come back down.

Rafe watched you do all of it as a smile settled into the side of his mouth. 

“Don’t make that face,” you said.

“But it’s the only one I’ve got,” he drawled. The smile got worse, almost bigger and lazier, and he held your eyes for a second longer. Mercifully, he let you go and leaned forward off the couch and back to the glass of the table.

You watched him line it up, the quick work of his hands with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, and the party was a wall of sound somewhere above you. Down here the tally you ran on every room you'd ever been in—who was where, who could see—had quietly stopped running, and you were watching Rafe with your whole stupid face.

He sat back up a few seconds after doing the line and his eyes met yours once again. 

“You’re staring,” he said.

“You’re in my eyeline,” you said.

“Move your eyeline,” he said without missing a beat.

“It’s my eyeline. You move.”

“Guess you’re stuck then.” He didn't look away. Neither did you.

He tilted his head a degree, slow, openly, the way a person looks at a thing when they've stopped pretending they're not looking. There were eight people in the room and one of them was upstairs on the phone with his father, and you let Rafe look, and you looked back, and for a second the not-hiding was so much more dangerous than anything you'd actually done.

“Since when,” Kelce started, apparently not by the stairs anymore, “are you two friends?”

Both of you turned to the sound. Kelce was just standing there, between the two of you, his face mostly amused.

“She’s Top’s girl, she has to—”

“He’s Topper’s friend—” you said at the same time as Rafe, the two of you landing the same beat and the same word and the same lie from two different directions, and you heard it happen, heard your voice and his voice arrive together like that, and so did he, because he stopped, and so did you.

Kelce laughed. “Jesus, I didn’t realize it was a sore subject.”

You should’ve gotten up then, but you remained seated exactly where you were when Topper came back down the stairs.

Topper looked at the couch, at the space between the two of you on the cushion—not a wide space, a space that had been closing all night by degrees each too small to be charged with anything on its own—and he stood on the last stair and looked at it, and something moved across his face that you had no name for, that you had never needed a name for, because in all these years you had never once seen Topper look at you like he was wondering something.

It felt like a snag—probably half-a-second where his face caught on the two of you with something close to confusion—and then it was gone, smoothed over, and he was Topper again, coming down off the stairs, sliding the phone into his pocket, saying something to someone about something.

It was the first time you’d fallen asleep. You would drift off sometimes after, heavy-lidded but you’d still surface if he moved wrong. This time you were actually asleep, all the way under, your breathing dropped into a slow even rhythm. It had happened maybe twenty minutes ago and Rafe had been lying very still since, on his back, one arm dead under you, not moving it. If he moved, he’d risk the chance of waking you, and if you did, it’d mean the end of this. He’d decided, at some point, he wanted to know long you’d stay if he just didn’t fuck with it.

He’d never quite had this part. He’d had the rest of it plenty; the wanting it, the having it, the after where they gathered their clothes because they had somewhere better to be. Nobody slept. Girls didn’t sleep at Rafe’s, that was a thing you did somewhere comfortable, and Rafe had never been once mistaken for comfortable. He had, in fact, spent a great deal of effort making sure he wasn’t, and so the sleeping went to other people’s beds. And now you were here, the one girl on the island who had the most reasons to keep one eye open around him, out cold on his chest. 

He had no idea what he’d done to earn it. He suspected he hadn’t earned it at all, that you’d simply gotten tired and this was an accident of exhaustion rather than a verdict of him. But he was choosing, for the length of your nap, to take it as a verdict. 

Your hand was open on his sternum, fingers half-curled. You’d kicked the duvet down to your knees at one point. You ran hot, he learned. You started every night wrapped up and ended it shoving the covers off—that you slept like being contained was a thing you couldn’t stand—which struck him as the single funniest fact.

He should’ve woken you. It was getting late, you had a home to return to with people in it. You had a phone lying on his nightstand that would start lighting up with the name he’d forced out of his mind while you were lying on him. 

Still, he laid there and let the minutes run on, and somewhere in the running, the minutes stopped feeling like luck and more like debt. A good thing arrived and sat with him long enough to stop being a surprise, and the second it stopped being that, it became something he owed, a thing with a price-tag faced down that he doesn’t get to keep this. 

So when you woke—your hands twitching against his chest—he was almost relieved. Awake, you were a problem he knew how to have. You made a small displeased sound and pressed your face harder into him, like you could climb back under.

“You’re out,” he said, voice coming out rough. He hadn’t used it in an hour.

“‘M not,” you said, voice muffled into his sternum. 

You pulled the duvet back up over the both of you instead, and hooked your leg over his, and settled your cheek back down with a weight that had staying in it, and Rafe lay very still under the fact of you deciding that, and felt the want come up hard enough to scare him.

“Can I say something?” you said into his chest.

He huffed slightly. “You don’t gotta ask.”

You breathed through your mouth into his chest. “Think I should end things with Topper.”

The first thing in Rafe was wrong. Fast, animal, up before he could get a hand on it—a kick of pure want, yes, do it, be free—and it was gone almost as fast as it arrived. The second thing came down on top of it like a ceiling; ending things with Topper meant this thing stopped being deniable. The cover would be gone, the frame would be gone, the whole careful system that let any of this exist would come apart in your hands.

So he went still. He felt the stillness travel down into you and turn into fear, felt you reach the conclusion you'd clearly already half-built and come braced for, and your hand went flat on his chest and you started speaking fast, into him, before he'd surfaced enough to get a single word out.

“Not for—” You stopped yourself, taking in a sharp inhale. “It’s not about you. I’m not—I wouldn’t be doing it because of that. It’s just me. For me.”

You’d handed him the out and all he had to do was take it. 

“Then don’t,” he said.

He felt you shake your head against him. “Don’t what?” you asked, almost tired, like you knew where he was going.

“End it.” He heard how it sounded yet he couldn’t stop the rest of the words from coming. “You’ve been with him two years. You’re not gonna—what? Throw that out over—” He stopped. Started again, flatter, building the case he needed to be true. “It’s not even—don’t let this be a thing, okay? It’s not me. You feel like this ‘cause you’re not supposed to be doing it. It’d feel like this with anyone who made the move. Just happened to be me.” 

You went quiet on him for a second. Then you lifted your head off his chest—something you almost never did, for you said the hard things angled away from him—and you brought your face up so he had to look at it. 

“Don’t say things like that about me.” Your words came out even. He’d braced for mad, that would’ve let him be an asshole and you the wronged party; everyone would’ve been in the right place. “I mean it. Don’t.”

And he, who had a hundred things he could’ve said, who’d built a personality out of always having something to say back, found that the only thing in him was the need to take it all back immediately.

“Alright,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

“Alright,” he said, lower this time, as if that would let you see he was listening. For some reason, he wanted you to know he listened. “I won’t. I won’t say it.”

You eyed him for a moment, then said, quietly,  “Don’t act like you’re better than me.” He was practically forced into staring at you. “Don’t sit here telling me to stay with Topper like you’re doing some favor, when the only reason any of this happened is ‘cause I’m dating him.” You took a breath, then. “You’d never have looked at me twice if I wasn’t with him.”

He let the words move through his body for a moment before he moved, turning to you, getting an arm braced over you as his weight came up onto his side, over you, close. 

“That’s what you think?” he said, and it was the furthest thing from a question. 

“Rafe—”

“No, s’fine,” he said quickly. His hand found your jaw and tilted it. “Is that what you tell yourself?”

He brought his mouth to the corner of your lips and stopped there, close enough to feel you breathing wrong, and let you sit in it, because he had nothing to say and a great deal to prove and he wanted you to feel the difference before he made it.

His palm flattened over your stomach and drifted lower, and yours followed behind, a little more hesitant but still determined. His body jerked slightly as your fingers curved around his cock, and he pushed himself unbelievably closer to you. His fingers found the waistband of your underwear, tugging them off your hips just the slightest, enough for him to press down against your heat.

He bit back a groan at the remnants of your everything you’d done before your nap sliding against him.

He got your underwear off the rest of the way without ceremony with one hand, you lifting your hips and bending your knees to help, eyes never leaving your face. 

His fingers came back to your jaw and it went slack, head tipping back, and he followed it with his mouth to your throat because he couldn’t not.

“Don’t,” you murmured.

He stilled for a moment.

“Mark.” 

Something in him went dark about it, fast and ugly, because it meant you had to go back up that bluff road in a few hours looking like nobody had touched you. He wanted to mark you so badly his teeth ached with it. He wanted to put something on your throat you’d have to explain, wanted Topper to see it and wonder.

Rafe wanted to leave a single piece of proof somewhere on you that this happened, that he had happened. He wanted to ruin the clean line of you on purpose. It was the most honest want he had and it was the one you'd just forbidden.

He lifted his mouth off the soft place and dragged it to the hinge of your jaw instead, somewhere safe and he hated it—and he hated it, hated the leash of it, hated that being good to you and being denied you were the exact same motion—and he let the fury of it pour into everything his hands were doing instead, because that, at least, left no marks if he was being careful.

He got his hand under your thigh and pulled it around his hip and felt you—the heat of you right there, nothing between it now—and had to press his forehead to the side of your face and breathe for a second. You turned your face slightly into his and your mouth found his cheek, the corner of his jaw, a want of a kiss rather than a kiss at all.

“Rafe, do it—”

He pushed in slow, slower than he wanted to. It was slower than his whole body screaming at him to. You made a sound against his temple, a small broken thing, and your fingers dug into his back hard enough to leave something.

He kept going until his hips pressed against yours, flush. He pulled back and drove forward and felt you take it, your whole body shifting up the mattress with the force of it, and he got an arm under your lower back, lifting you slightly, and held you where he wanted you and did it again. Your head fell back and his eyes focused on your throat move.

“Look at me,” he said fast, rough.

You did. You always did, when he asked, and every time it nearly took him apart.

He set a pace that was far from gentle and you rose to meet it, hips tilting, finding the angle, adjusting without asking him to, and he felt the precise moment you found what you needed because your whole body changed and you made a sound low in your throat that he felt in his sternum.

He pushed your leg higher and went deeper, pulling you up so you were almost off the bed, and your hand flew up to the headboard, bracing.

“Yeah,” he said, and didn't mean to say anything at all.

Your eyes were half-closed, your mouth open, and you looked like something he had absolutely no right to and was going to have anyway, had already decided, had already been unable to stop from the moment you'd said his name and left a door open.

His mouth found yours, messy, barely a kiss, more breath than anything. Your hips moved against his and he groaned into your mouth and felt you shiver at the sound of it, your whole body registering it, which meant he did it again deliberately and watched what it did to your face.

He moved his hand between you, finger finding the bundle of nerves, pressing down slightly before he found a smooth motion. He extended his other arm around your back, holding you up.

Your reaction was immediate and unguarded and your head went back against the air with a force that was almost funny, almost—he wanted to say something, he felt it come up—but he swallowed it and pressed his mouth to your jaw instead and kept his hand moving because he wanted you there, wanted to feel it, had earned it by two years of not having it.

“Please—” The word came out of you fractured halfway.

“I know. C’mon.”

You went tight around him and he felt it building, felt the shape of it in the way you gripped him and the hitch in your breathing and the small desperate sound you were trying and failing to keep from happening, and he put his mouth to your ear and said nothing, just let you hear what you were doing to his breathing, let that be the thing to let you know you weren't alone in it.

You broke apart quietly. A deep shudder moved through your whole body, your face open and unguarded, your fingers gripping his back hard enough that he'd find it tomorrow and not mind.

You could mark him.

He followed you over the edge with his face pressed into your hair, your name in his mouth, a low rough sound into your hair and his whole body giving up the careful hold it had kept on itself.

He stayed where he was for a moment, both of you breathing. Your hand was flat on his back, not gripping anymore, just resting. He held you for a moment longer before setting you down on the mattress.

At the dock in the last week of July, during the hour everyone else had gone up to the house before the mosquitoes forced them in, Rafe had stayed back because Topper had, and Rafe understood about ninety seconds later it was to get him alone. 

Rafe had spent his childhood being gotten alone by Ward, summoned to the study (to this day, Rafe still had no idea what he used it for)—or the boat or the living room, for conversations that always meant his father had decided something for him.

So when Topper stayed behind while the others left, Rafe felt the old thing tick over his chest, the same bracing. So, he stood at the end of the Thorntons’ dock with a warm beer he’d stopped drinking a while ago, waiting to decide what Topper had decided for him.

He was surprised when he realized Topper was nervous, the same guy who had never had to go looking for a sentence. He was doing something useless with the dock line—wrapping it then unwrapping it—and Rafe watched his hands and, for a moment, thought that Topper fucking knows.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah,” Rafe said, the word trailing off awkwardly.

“You think she’s happy?”

Rafe felt his mouth go dry. He kept his face pointed at the water. He had four or maybe fifteen answers and ran through all of them—he didn’t even know his brain could think that fast—and under all of them, traitor-fast, arriving before he could shut the drawer on it, Rafe heard your voice against his truck window, ‘I don’t know if that’s normal or if something’s wrong with me.’

Rafe had the answer to Topper's question. He'd had it cold for almost three months, carrying it around like a stolen thing he kept meaning to give back and didn't.

He shrugged, and he hoped it didn’t look as stiff as it felt. “She’s fine. I don’t really know her.”

“That’s not—” Topper stopped, then looped the line again. “I didn’t ask if she’s fine.”

Rafe felt himself turn to look at Topper, because the correction was so unlike him, the small insistence on the gap between ‘fine’ and ‘happy,’ a gap Rafe had never known Topper could see. For the first time, Rafe felt that Topper was acting differently.

Topper looked wretched. “I think she’s somewhere else. Lately.” He gestured with the line, at the dark water, at nothing. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“I don’t know, man.” The words came out of Rafe slow, as though he was reaching for it. “Girls get like that when you’re—” He made a vague motion with a bottle. “On ‘em too much.”

“I’m not on her.”

“I’m not saying you are.” He shrugged. “I’m saying you’re doing the whole—” He made another lazy motion. “Apartment. Rings. The you’re gonna do this with her, you’re gonna do that. Every time you talk about her.” He kept his eyes on the water. He kept his voice in the register that couldn't be weighed. “If some girl was telling me what to do with my life, I’d get weird about it, too. That’s my hunch.”

It wasn’t a hunch so much as it was him molding the exact words you’d said to him about Topper only a few nights ago. Rafe had taken it and scrubbed every fingerprint off of it, scrubbed you off of it, until it was dull and safe enough to hand to your boyfriend.

He watched Topper receive it exactly as that, as a hunch. 

“You think I should back off?”

“I think—” Yes. Back off. Loosen the hold you’ve got so the other guy can—“I have no clue. Girls come back around.”

And Rafe’s words may have meant even a little bit of something if, within two hours of the conversation, he didn’t have you on top of him, the tailgate down and the night doing its loud thing past the trees, and Rafe had his hand flat on your back between your shoulder blades.

Your cheek was on his chest and you weren't talking, and Rafe was finding out for the hundredth time that he didn't know what to do with this part.

The sex he understood. This—the after, your weight settled all the way down onto him like you'd stopped holding any of it up, your breathing gone slow—this he still had no instructions for. So he stayed still and let you be heavy on him and looked at the dark shape of the trees.

“Can I say something bad?” you said against his chest.

“Obviously.”

“Dean, that guy at the party tonight.” You picked at a thread on the moving blanket where it had pilled.  “I think he’s annoying. He was hitting on Madi and she wasn’t into it.” 

Rafe huffed, the laugh moving up through his chest under your cheek. “What’s annoying about him?” 

“He said my name like nine times in two minutes. He did the same thing to her. It makes me trust him less.”

“That’s so mean.” Rafe felt himself blow out an amused breath. “You’re so mean. Nobody knows.” 

“Don’t tell.”

That was even more amusing. “Who am I gonna tell? Barry?” His hand moved on your back, down, stayed. “He’d probably forget in two seconds.”

“I can’t believe he’s the person that makes you go to The Cut.”

“And he beats me up sometimes.” He felt his palm slightly push your body down against him, as if you could get any closer. “Barry would love you.”

“Your dealer,” you said flatly. “Thanks.”

"Don’t ever meet him, though.”

His hand flattened against your back, drawing you up the half-inch it took to put your face level with his. 

His lips found yours slow, a kiss with no chase behind it. His hand cradled the back of your skull off the cold metal, like there was all the time in the world. He felt you sink into it; that was getting easier, as though you’d stopped being scared of how easy.

When he pulled back, his mouth stayed close. “You going to that dinner with Top’s lacrosse buddies on Friday?”

“I’m supposed to.”

His thumb moved at your jaw. “You’ll want to die.”

“I told him I’d go.”

Rafe shrugged. “Tell him you’re tired. Pretty sure my house is gonna be empty Friday, too.”

You took a shaky breath and dropped your head into the crook of his neck. “That’s such a shitty thing to do.”

“Yeah.” His hand went still at your jaw, and he felt his chin involuntarily dip to rest against the top of your head. “You gonna do it?”

“Maybe,” you said, voice muffled against his body.

He moved his hand up to the back of your head again. “Good.”

That should have been all the night asked from him, the two of you going quiet, him heavy and stupid and content underneath you in a way he’d never tell a living soul he was capable of being. He’d half-decided not to move for an hour; he had the whole thing planned, to stay right there.

The phone went off on the floor of the backseat.

He groaned, low, the whole of it vibrating up his chest and into your cheek. “No.”

“Rafe—”

“No.” He pulled you in tighter, an arm banded across your back, like he could keep both of you out of range by its sheer hold. The phone continued buzzing against the floormat, ugly and insistent. “Not right now.”

You were laughing slightly, you'd tipped your face up off his chest, and he felt the warmth of it more than heard it. “Could be important.”

“Yeah? Could be your boyfriend,” he said, teasing.

You exhaled. “I hate you.”

He laughed then, feeling it move up him easily. “Yeah. Okay.”

“You’re the worst person I know,” you said it into his neck, where you'd tucked your face again, and your breath was warm there and your hand had gone back to the hem of his shirt, the idle pulling thing, no point to it. 

He tilted his chin slightly downwards to press his lips against the top of your head. “That’s okay.”

You were smiling, he could feel the shape of it against his throat. The phone was still going on the floormat and neither of you were looking at it, and Rafe thought, for a moment, that he would have signed anything to keep the night exactly here. Not further, not better, only here.

The phone stopped, and he let out a breath slowly. Then, it immediately started again. This time, he felt the change go through his body—the warmth pulled out of him in one motion, the loose gone, everything in him drawing up into the old brace—because nobody rang twice back to back at this hour. Except for the one person who had never, in twenty years, accepted a thing Rafe didn't pick up as anything other than a thing Rafe was going to pay for.

The smile went out of you against his neck, and you got very still, and your hand stopped its idle work and just rested flat over his chest, over the place his heart had started doing the wrong rhythm. 

“You should get it,” you said. 

“Yeah.” He kept you there through one more buzz, and one more, taking the last of it while it was still his to take. “Yeah. Okay.”

He got the phone off the floor without letting go of you. That took some doing; a long reach down the side of the seat with one arm while the other stayed banded across your back. He came back up with it and you stayed exactly where you were, your cheek over his heart, and he answered with his thumb and put it to his ear and did not move you one inch. 

“Yeah,” he said into the phone. He put his free hand into your hair, slowly dragging his fingers against your scalp, the small idle motion his body reached for the way it reached for the truck door, automatic, before the part of him that named things had any say.  “...No, I lost track of time.” 

Ward’s voice then came clipped down the line, and Rafe shut his eyes against the dome light and let it fill his ears, hardly processing it. His thumb found the shell of your ear and was tracing it, completely out of sync with the thing going up his spine. 

“Yeah. The Fischers. I know. I know.” He didn’t know. It was a blank where a plan should have been, one more thing he’d been told and lost. He listened through Ward’s of course you forgot speech, let it go on without interruption. “I’ll be there. Twenty minutes.”

He kept his hand moving on you the whole time, going down your spine now in one long stroke then back up. He half-forgot you could feel it, that you weren’t simply just a warmth but a person who could feel every inch of this. He pressed you down against his chest, firmer, on the hard part of it, and felt his own heart going at the wrong speed under where your cheek was and couldn't make it stop.

“I said I’ll be there.” The edge came up despite him trying to train himself to keep it out when talking to his father. He hated it the second it was out, because the edge was a tell, the edge told Ward he'd gotten in, and he should never let Ward know he'd gotten in. He flattened it back down. “Twenty minutes—yeah. Okay. Okay.”

He hung up. 

His hand was still buried in your hair, his heart still wrong under your cheek, and he kept his eyes on the roof of the cab and waited for himself to come back from wherever the phone had sent him.

That was a thing that took a beat, the return, and you knew it took a beat, and he could tell you knew because you didn't move and didn't ask, you just stayed heavy on him and let him do it.

Rafe thought, not for the first time, that you'd somehow learned the one thing about him almost nobody had ever bothered to; that the worst moment to reach for him was the moment right after, and the kindest thing was to just be there and weigh something and wait.

“Sorry,” he said to the roof, voice coming out rough. He tipped his face down then, into your hair, breathing you in. “M’Sorry. I gotta go. I’ll drop you home.”

“Right now?” you asked, voice muffled against him. 

“Mm.” His arm tightened around you, body lying to his mouth again. “Not yet.”

He stayed under you for a second he didn’t have. He'd be late. He was always going to be a little late to Ward; might as well earn it.

But he did push himself to sit up, and he got his arm that was around you to bring you up as he came off the seat-back, the blanket sliding. Your legs ended up across his lap and his hand stayed flat against your spine. He held you there a beat, upright now, your face level with his in the dome light, and he could see the leftover softness in you not entirely cleared yet, the you that came out here and nowhere else.

Rafe had no idea when he’d agreed to let you look through his closet, but he had. It was almost four in the morning, and you were standing in the open mouth of his closet in one of his t-shirts and nothing he was going to be able to think about clearly, going through his clothes like this was something you just really wanted to do.

He’d put himself on the bed on purpose; it was a safe distance from whatever that was happening, which was you, sliding hangers down the rail one at a time, considering. Rafe was lying back on his elbows pretending the sight of you in his bedroom like this wasn’t doing anything to him.

He’d let it slip on accident, post-haze, that he had to meet Ward’s friends for dinner tomorrow. He’d wanted it to come off as light, carry no weight, because he, three months in, still didn’t want you to see him as a person who was afraid of a simple, stupid dinner with his dad and his asshole friends flying in from fuck-knows-where.

“What’s the dinner for?” you’d asked him.

“Don’t know. Ward wants me there to—” Rafe rolled a shoulder, his lips involuntarily curving into a grimace. “Impress them or something. No idea. Don’t even know what I’m gonna wear.”

Rafe was mildly surprised when you asked him, voice so stupidly lighthearted, if you could help him. And now you were humming, low, as you pulled a jacket halfway out, looked at it, and put it back. 

Somewhere along the way, he’d understood that you’d started being able to read him, too. Maybe not in the way he had been reading you for years, but you’d started to understand his tells. He had a lot of those.

You were standing in his closet frowning at his clothes because you’d worked out, from a sentence he'd stripped all the weight off of, that he was scared, and you were trying to help. The way a person helps another person they don't want to watch walk into something alone.

And Rafe felt his whole body go wrong about it.

He was finding out the hard way that being looked after did the opposite of soothe him; he watched you take him seriously, and every reasonable part of him understood this was a good thing happening to him.

And the rest of him, the older and more reliable part, the part that had been doing Rafe's load-bearing since he was a kid, stood up and started checking the exits.

He couldn’t lose a thing he never had. And you, trying to help him be a son his father could stand to look at, you were a thing he was, very obviously, in the disastrous process of having. Maybe not completely, but it was the most he had ever had.

And the better it felt—and it felt like a hand on the back of his neck and being the right size—the more it was going to cost him later. And Rafe’s nervous system ignored the later was later, for it had started accounting now.

So he reached for the other thing. “C’mere,” he said.

You glanced over at him—a short look, unbothered, God, when had you started being able to be so fucking mean?—and then went back to the rail. “In a second,” you said. 

“Now’s good,” he said flatly. 

You pulled another shirt out and held it up against the dark of the closet. “I’m finding a shirt.”

“Yeah.” He pushed himself up off his elbows and sat up, feet against the floor. He heard his own voice drop a register. “Come find it here.”

“Doesn’t even make sense,” you murmured.

You slid another hanger down, completely unbothered by him, and that was the part of it all that had been killing him lately, you’d stopped being nervous around him. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, and he knew he’d never be able to undo it. 

“Are you cold?” he tried again.

“Not really.” You pulled out a navy button-down, considered it, turned. “Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“You’re being so weird.” You looked at him, and Rafe had a feeling you were realizing that he was reaching for you because you were being so kind to him and it had gotten too big for Rafe to be in a room with, and sex was the only thing Rafe knew how to do with his hands that wasn't standing still inside something good. “You’re gonna distract me,” you said instead.

“Not trying to.”

“You’re completely trying to,” you said lightly, and then you went back to his clothes.

“This one,” you said after a moment. You'd pulled a shirt. You turned around with it, held it up against him from a few feet off, your head tipped, your eyes doing the careful work. “Navy. You look good in navy.”

“You think?” He wanted to hit himself for how fast he asked. “That the one?”

“Mhm,” you hummed breezily. “And it’ll make your dad shut up.”

Rafe sat there and let you look at him, and felt the fight go out of him the way air goes out of a thing, slow, and without much ceremony. He’d spent twenty years not being allowed things, mostly by himself, mostly on purpose, and he was sitting on his own bed with a girl holding a shirt up against his chest and trying to help him not get hurt tomorrow, and he found he did not, tonight, have it in him to keep the door shut. So he didn’t hold it.

He swallowed, then forced out a laugh. “Probably not, but that’s a good one.”

You crossed the room when you were done with the shirt—laid it over the back of his desk and everything—and came to stand between his knees. Rafe got his hands to your waist because they’d been idling the whole time just waiting for you.

You were warm through his shirt. You smelled like his room now.

“You’re gonna be fine tomorrow,” you said, voice completely sure.

“Mhm.” His palms tightened around your waist then, slightly tugging you forward. “You gonna come back to bed now?”

“You’re so impatient,” you said, but you let him pull you, your knees bracketing his as you settled into his lap like you’d done it a hundred times, which—Rafe did the calculation—you basically had.

His hands found the small of your back and stayed there. “Because you didn’t come to bed.”

“I was busy.” You looped your arms loose around his neck, looking down at him. “Someone’s gotta dress you.”

“I can dress myself.”

“Clearly.” You glanced at the floor, at the four shirts he'd left in a heap before you got here, and back at him, brow up.

He snorted, and you went quiet, your fingers playing idle with the hair at the back of his neck.

“Oh. Saturday,” you said after a minute, “Ruthie finally got Topper to do that lunch at the yacht club.” You shrugged. “Till like five.”

It took him a second to process the words. “The whole day?”

“Yeah, I think so. Whole day.” you said quietly. There was something almost shy folded into it, like you'd handed him something and weren't sure he'd want it.

He’d been doing everything right for two weeks, which he considered to be a personal best record. He’d texted Topper back instead of ignoring the text, considering it was the biggest symbol of his fuck up. He’d shown up to things—actual things, plural, voluntarily—and sat in them for the full duration without manufacturing an excuse to leave early, which was the social equivalent of him running a marathon. He’d looked at you the right amount, which was severely less than the usual amount. 

The party itself was at Ruthie’s, which meant it was actually on the beach behind Ruthie’s because her family had that stretch of private sand Ruthie had been leveraging socially since ninth grade. Rafe knew it was going to be the same seventy people doing the same seventy things they always did, and by eleven o’clock someone would’ve cried and someone would’ve hooked up and Ruthie would’ve said the same story about the golf carts that everyone had heard five times. 

He pulled in and you were already there. 

He saw you sitting in your car under one working light doing, as far as he could tell, absolutely nothing. Rafe pulled in next to you and sat in his truck for a beat too long looking at the middle distance like he was thinking about something other than the fact that you were sitting six feet away from him in a parked car without your boyfriend. He wasn’t. He was thinking about exactly that. And then you both got out at the same time, which was its own small fuck-up, and staring at each other like two people who’d recently made out and were each individually trying to act like they hadn’t. 

“Hey,” you said.

“Hey.” He put his hand in his pocket and looked down at the path to the beach. “You been here long?”

“Like ten minutes.” You looked at your phone, then at the path, then somewhere that wasn’t him. You were wearing a baby blue tank top and a denim skirt he was trying too hard to not look down at; an outfit that the June night was already going to make inadequate in about two hours when the wind picked up off the water. “I was just—about to go in.” It sounded more like a question than a statement. 

“Alright.” Rafe shifted his feet, body leaning backwards slightly to press his body against the truck but not quite touching. “Where’s Top?”

You were silent for a moment, which he took as its own answer. “No. Well, I don’t think so.”

“Alright,” Rafe said again, because what else was there to say? He put his hands in his pockets and looked down the path. The bonfire sent a column of sparks up into the dark and someone down there shrieked and laughed in the way that was indistinguishable from either. “Bar’s better anyway. Bonfire wraps by midnight and everyone will just end up there. You could just skip the bonfire.” 

You looked at him for a moment. “Skip the bonfire?” you asked as if that was the most confusing thought ever.

Rafe tilted his head to the side. “I didn’t ask you to skip your best friend’s wedding, Jesus.”

You almost smiled, just slightly. “I can’t go to the bar. I left my ID at home.”

“So go get it.” His gaze—involuntarily—strode towards your car. “I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t have to—” you started, but the words died on your tongue. You went quiet for a moment, like you’d realized that Rafe had decided and you had no way out of it. You went quiet for long enough that Rafe thought you were going to say something along the lines of it being okay and that he should go in or that you’d go alone. 

“Alright.”

𖦹

“I’ve been meaning to redecorate?” you were saying as you opened the door to your bedroom, and you heard Rafe suppress a laugh as he scanned the inside of your room. 

It took you almost two full seconds to register that he had never been in your room before. That was correct. Obviously. There was no version of events in which Rafe Cameron should have been in your room prior to tonight, and there was also, if you were being honest with yourself, no version of events in which him being in your bedroom right now was a good idea. Still, you were operating on the theory that if you behaved as though everything was normal the universe might be persuaded to make it normal; historically, that was far from a reliable strategy, but what else could you do?

“Nah, I like it. It’s you.” He took in a large breath through his nose like he was willing himself to erase the words that came out of his mouth. “Tornado I missed happen in here?”

He took the liberty of shutting the door behind him as you walked further into your bedroom. 

“I didn’t want to go anyway, and Topper convinced me to come.” You crouched down to check under the nightstand. “Then he didn’t come. So.” 

“Pretty shitty.” He said simply with no editorialization. He leaned down and picked up two tops off the floor as if he’d been to your room a hundred times, which he hadn’t, and you weren’t going to think about it. He set them on the top of the dresser without asking where they went, as though he’d decided your floor was his problem now. “Should’ve worn the red.”

You paused your hand over a paperweight on your nightstand, then unconsciously pulled both palms up to the baby blue tank top as you turned to face him. “Why? Is there something wrong with this one?”

Rafe’s brows went up just slightly, like he was surprised by your self-consciousness. “I like red.”

Your brows narrowed. “But does this not look good?”

Rafe’s tongue pressed against the inside of his mouth as he scanned you from head-to-toe, clearly taking your words as an opportunity to stretch his dilated gaze over you. Then, he raised both his arms to his side before stepping back to lean against the drawers behind him. 

“What?” you pressed, crossing your arms over your chest. “You don’t think it looks good?”

“I think,” he started, voice measured like he was choosing his words with great and mocking care, “that you should probably not ask me that.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause you’re not gonna like the answer either way.” 

You stared at him for a moment, then shook your head. “That doesn’t make sense,” you said quietly.

You heard Rafe shuffle behind you before he plopped himself down on your bed. “What’d you two fight about?”

You pulled your ID out of your nightstand drawer. “Found it.”

“Great,” Rafe said mockingly. “What’d you two fight about?”

You maneuvered your way around the room before your feet hesitantly walked you toward your bed, where you sat down leaving a reasonable distance between you and Rafe. “We shouldn’t talk about that.”

“Yeah?” He placed his palms flat behind him, leaning back slightly. You could see him staring at you from your peripheral vision. “You didn’t have a problem talking about it last time—”

“Rafe.”

He let out a slow breath, shaking his head, and said nothing. He kept catching you off-guard with that. He’d never seemed to be one to hold silences, and it seemed he let them exist between you two lately. 

“‘Cause you were drunk?” he asked after a moment, voice lowering like he was hesitant to voice the question, and you wondered if he was asking it about something else entirely. 

But he couldn’t have been. In all the years you have known Rafe Cameron, you never would’ve pegged him for a guy who wondered if a girl only kissed him because she was drunk. 

“Weren’t you?” you asked, evading the question slightly.

Rafe stiffly raised one shoulder to shrug. “Not any more than I usually am.”

“Are you drunk now?” you asked, leaning your head to rest on one of your shoulders.

“Not anymore than I usually am.”

You smiled slightly bitterly. “Top says you’re always—”

At that, Rafe snapped his head toward you, a brow raising in challenge. “What?” When you didn’t respond, he pressed further. “What does he say about me?”

“That you’re always fucked up.”

He laughed, but there was no humor behind it. “Yeah? You got a problem with that?”

You looked at him for a second that lasted longer than that, which was your first mistake. Rafe could do a lot with a second (as he’d shown you in his truck); he could weaponize it, twist it around, and decide what it meant before you had the chance to decide for yourself. But why did it seem like you kept on landing on the same conclusion as him too often recently? 

“I didn’t say that.”

He smiled, and it looked mean. “You think I’m a fuck up, don’t you?”

Your brows narrowed at that, genuinely confused this time. “Of course I don’t think that.”

“Bullshit.”

“No,” you said quietly, letting out a sigh. “I just don’t know why you keep going back to something that’s not good for you.”

He clicked his tongue. “Haven’t found anything else to keep myself occupied, I guess,” he said, gaze pointedly landing on you. “Any suggestions?” 

You held his gaze for a moment too long, a habit you were becoming aware you’d developed recently and couldn’t seem to break. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

“Mhm.” He briefly looked at the ceiling, mulling over his words, before he pointed his gaze back at you. “You volunteering?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“That’s an answer.”

“It’s not.”

“Kind of is.” The mean smile had softened into something else, something more private. He was still leaning back on his palms, ankles crossed, occupying the bed. “What do you do then? To distract yourself?”

“I—” You considered it for a moment. “I don’t know. I go on walks. I bake. Stuff like that. I make lists.”

He let out a surprised laugh. “Lists?”

“It’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny,” he said, not unkindly. His eyes moved around the room — the color-coded bookshelf, the carefully made bed, the deliberate chaos of the floor which was the only place your system had fully broken down — and back to you. “You make lists and your room ends up with shit all over the floor.”

“I was stressed. I told you.”

He looked at the two tops he'd set on the dresser. At the red one on the chair. “What’s the list for tonight looking like, then?”

“No list.”

“No list for tonight?” he repeated, raising a brow. You shook your head. “Good for me, then.”

You cleared your throat. “Rafe.”

He hummed, eyes still fixed on you. 

“How long have you been—” You stopped, then tried again. “How much time has it been—”

He started shaking his head before you’d even gotten half the words out. “Don’t ask shit like that.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” 

You nodded slowly, then someone knocked on the front door downstairs. Once, twice, then thrice. For you, patient and familiar. It was usually comforting, too. Right now, though? Completely present, and loaded.

Rafe’s head came up and your eyes went to the bedroom door. You turned to face Rafe, then he looked at you. The math you calculated was instant and landed in the room at the same time like a third person. 

“Can you—I’m sor—”

Rafe was already pushing himself off the bed, nodding. “Bathroom.”

“Thanks,” you said quickly, pushing down on your door handle. Before you stepped out, you turned back to meet his eyes as he walked into the bathroom. “Thanks, Rafe.”

One corner of his lip kicked up bitterly as he shrugged. “Mind if I do blow in there?”

You paused your footsteps and turned to look at him in disbelief, before shrugging your shoulders stiffly. “Only if you clean it up after.”

He blew out a breath through his mouth. “I don’t leave anything behind,” he said, raising his voice just slightly as you closed the door behind yourself.

𖦹

How fucked up does Rafe have to be to come between a relationship that’s already having problems? How had he managed to go two weeks pretending like the night in the truck hadn’t happened, just to fuck it all up the second he got the opportunity to be alone with you?

Topper had driven here. He kept coming back to you the way you came back to a bruise; he’d gotten in his car and driven to your house because he felt bad enough to do that, because you were worth doing that for, which Rafe had known for two years from outside looking in and was now knowing from inside your bathroom, which was a new and substantially worse angle on the same information.

He’d chosen the marble counter in your bathroom to draw three lines, and he’d finished them all by the time you’d knocked on your own bathroom door. 

“Yeah.”

He heard a moment of you stilling behind the door, which told him something before he saw your face. Your face told him the rest.

He’d half-expected crying, or that managed, manufactured kind of almost-crying you did where everything stayed contained but your eyes were shining brighter than they usually did. You leaned against the doorframe and looked at him sitting on your bathroom counter next to the three ghosts of lines he’d done and chose to not address them. 

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He looked at your face, eyes trailing over your managed, stiff expression with the seams of it slightly visible in the way they were when they were slightly pushed past their limit. His eyes went down to the way you were holding your elbows, arms crossed loosely over your chest, as though you were trying to physically stop from melting apart.

“You good?” he asked.

That seemed to be the question that did it. After the fright of Topper being at the door, talking to Topper, or the entire evening accumulated into this specific moment in your bathroom. It was just him asking you if you were good that cracked it. Your eyes just went bright and you pressed your lips together and looked at the ceiling, like you were using the force of physics and the law of gravity as a way to manage your emotions.

“I’m fine,” you said to the ceiling, and Rafe almost felt bad for making you deal with him on top of everything that may have just happened downstairs. 

“Yeah,” he said. “You look it.”

You laughed once, wet and short, and brought your face down and blinked hard before looking at him on the bathroom counter. Your palms gripped the edge of the counter as you leaned further into the doorframe, shaking your head like that would will the tears away, probably wondering why the fuck was Rafe Cameron in your bathroom. 

“I don’t think I can do it anymore,” you said quietly, like you were talking more to yourself than him. 

And for a moment too long—a moment he was sure would qualify him as genuinely evil if anyone could see inside his head, which thank God they couldn’t—Rafe heard celebration bells. 

Then he heard them and knew he was hearing them and felt like such a piece of shit even he didn’t have great precedent for, which was saying something given his general track record. Why? Because he was aware enough that you were standing in your bathroom doorway, eyes filled with tears with your chin going slightly unsteady before you caught it. And his first involuntary reaction—before the guilt, before anything resembling a decent human impulse—was something akin to relief. And that was. Not good. 

He slid off the counter.

“Hey,” he said, and it came out lower this time.

“I’m okay,” you said, which he was starting to figure was something about you that showed you would never—absolutely ever—admit defeat. 

“I know.” He crossed the bathroom in two steps. “Come here.”

You blinked up at him. “Rafe—”

“I know you’re good,” he said. “Come here anyway.”

He pulled you in before you could decide whether that was a good idea. That was intentional, and he knew he was being intentional. He wasn’t giving you time to decide and just doing it because that was how he got things he wanted. His arms went around you and his hand went to the back of your head. You went stiff for exactly one second, surprised, and then something—he wasn’t sure what—in you gave and your hands found his shirt, holding on. He felt the exact second you stopped holding it together because you didn’t have to anymore. 

There it fucking was after two years of watching his best friend hold you like it was the easiest thing ever, as though it was just what hands did when you were nearby, and now Rafe was doing it. It turned out that Topper was right about it being easy, because it was the easiest thing he had ever done in recent memory. 

Your breathing was unsteady against his chest. Slowing gradually, incrementally, the way it did when something released that had been held too long. He felt it happen in real time. His hand moved once in your hair — just once, just a single slow motion — and then stayed still because if he kept moving it he was going to do something about it and doing something about it was not the current plan.

“He’s a fucking dick,” Rafe said into your hair. “He’s stupid and he’s a fucking dick.”

He felt you shake your head against his chest, and his hand stilled on your head to stop it. 

“He’s not,” you said into his chest. 

Rafe’s jaw tightened. He knew Topper wasn’t a dick. That was the whole problem because if he truly was a dick, this would’ve been a lot easier to navigate and Rafe would’ve done so eighteen months ago. His hands stayed in your hair. 

Your breathing had gone steadier. The crying moving into the after-stage, everything going slightly flat and quiet the way it did when the worst of it passed. Your hands were still in his shirt, just resting. Rafe thought that was even worse because you’d stopped needing to hold onto him and were now just choosing to do so. 

It would be extremely fucking difficult for him to survive this.

You shifted slightly — adjusting your weight, the small unconscious movement of someone getting comfortable — and the shift brought your face up, tilted it, and he looked down at the same moment you looked up and your face was just there. Right fucking there. Your eyes were still slightly bright, your lips were parted around something you were maybe about to say, some sentence forming that he was never going to hear because the part of his brain that was supposed to manage situations like this had been offline for approximately two hours and hadn't sent any indication it was coming back.

He kissed you. 

His hand tightened once in your hair—it was far from gentle or careful—and then his mouth was on yours and whatever you were about to say went nowhere, dissolved, the sentence-shaped space of it was swallowed by Rafe. He felt you go still for a second before your hands pulled at his shirt, and it was the pulling you were doing now instead of the pushing that made his heart kick up faster. 

He kissed you harder immediately as though he’d been waiting for that permission. 

The first kiss in the truck had been frantic and completely intoxicated. This was different; it was slower in places and meaner in others and a whole lot more intentional. 

His hand stayed tangled in your hair while the other slid from your waist to your lower back, flattening there possessively enough to pull you closer, as close as he could possibly get you to him. You let him. You kept on fucking letting him. There was nothing careful or gentle or anything Rafe would’ve claimed to be capable of an hour ago, and his mouth was on yours and he was kissing you in your bathroom while your boyfriend’s headlights were likely still warm in your driveway. Somewhere, in the back of his head, a voice that sounded a lot like his own was chiding, cool, cool, this is great, you’re a great fucking guy, Rafe.

Your body moved closer, seeking warmth and pressure, and your body rubbed against his length underneath his pants as you adjusted yourself against him unconsciously. The friction pulled a rough sound out of his throat before he could stop it. 

He broke the kiss just enough to laugh under his breath, forehead dropping briefly against yours.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

Your cheeks were flushed as he met your eyes again. “What?”

“You doing this to me on purpose?”

Your face changed immediately. As you went to shake your head, he tightened his hand on your back pulling you closer. “I know you aren’t.” 

Rafe looked at you for a moment, a small smile on his exhausted expression because if there was a battle he wanted to be losing, it was this because you were touching him back naturally now. Your hands were moving over his shoulders, his chest, his shirt wrinkled in your fists where you’d pulled yourself nearer without thinking about it. 

It made something ugly and jealous twist inside him. Topper got this all the fucking time? That thought arrived hot and immediate; he got your instinctive softness and your attention and you reaching for him. Topper got your sweet self curling into him on couches and in pools and passenger seats and beds. And now you were doing it to him. You were able to do it to him. 

Rafe’s hand curled into your hair fully this time, holding the back of your head to force you to look at him. 

“You have any idea,” he said quietly, almost disbelieving, “how fucking good you are to him?”

Your breath hitched in your throat, and he felt your body tighten under him. He almost regretted being so fucking honest, letting his jealousy come out sideways, because it reminded you of the very person you were running away to him from.

“You are,” he repeated, and Rafe felt like he was almost intoxicated now looking at you. 

“I wouldn’t be doing this right now if I were,” you said quietly, eyes flitting down. 

His lips moved down to your jaw as he soaked in your words, breath ghosting over your skin as he felt you shiver underneath him. “Just ‘cause he’s not fucking another girl or setting your house on fire doesn’t mean you gotta stick it out with him, you know?”

He heard your breath come out in shakes as you tried to say the words, “Doesn’t mean—mean I should be… cheat—”

He kissed you before you could finish your words. He meant to do it hard so he could shut the word down before it past your teeth, but his mouth landed on yours softer than he’d intended and he didn’t know what to do with the gentleness of it. His body had decided to be careful with you even as the rest of you was actively running you over. The unfinished syllable dissolved somewhere between your mouth and his, and he felt you go still and then your hands tugged on his hair to pull him closer.

Fuckkkkkk.

He pulled back just enough to breathe against your mouth. He couldn’t let you go—not yet at least—because if he did, then you might start talking again and say the words out loud, making it all a real thing. He could deal with this vagueness. A vague disaster, sure, but vague nonetheless. Cheating was a word with sharp fucking edges he knew neither you nor him were ready to deal with. 

“Don’t—” His voice came out lower than he’d meant it.

“Rafe—”

“Don’t say it.” His mouth moved down to your neck. “Just don’t.”

You were looking at him with eyes so wide he could see the entire bathroom reflected in them: the dim overhead, the edge of the mirror behind him, and the smaller, more pathetic version of his own face you were close enough to still. Your lip gloss was smudged. He’d done that. 

Your chest was rising and falling under the thin baby blue of that tank top and he could see the lace of your bra neckline where the strap had shifted off your shoulder at some point. He’d done that too, probably. 

“I just—” you started.

He kissed you again, and you let him do it as your body slowly—once again—melted into his. Every single time he expected you to push him off, you leaned in. Your hand came up to the side of his neck, your fingers cold and trembling slightly as you held onto him like you were the one that needed anything from him. 

His hand slid down from your hair to the back of your neck, to your shoulder, to the strap of your tank top where it had fallen. His knuckles brushed your collarbone and he felt the hitch in your breathing against his mouth and filed it away. He was going to need to remember it later, because there was no version of this night that didn't end with him alone in his truck cataloging every sound you made.

He pulled back half an inch to look at you. 

“This okay?” His fingers were at the hem of your tank top, knuckles against the strip of the skin under your shirt.

You looked at him for a long second. “Yeah,” you whispered, nodding just slightly.

He held back a noise in his throat because it was getting almost embarrassing. Rafe had never been this completely affected at the thought of taking a girl’s top off. He gathered the fabric in both hands and lifted it slowly enough that gave you time to stop him. You lifted your arms automatically. And then the shirt was over your head and you were standing in front of him in your bra and he almost just lost it.

White lace. He’d seen it in the truck two weeks ago and he was looking at it now. There was a small flower between the cups, and for a moment Rafe let himself believe that you’d gotten dressed for him, rather than for your fucking boyfriend. 

“Shiiiit.” It came out involuntarily.

You made a small sound, something between embarrassed and a laugh, and your arms started to move like you were going to cover yourself and he caught them before you could. 

“Don’t do that,” he said. He brought one of your hands and pressed his mouth to the inside of your wrist because he had no idea what else he could do with you right now without his brain short-circuiting. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry—”

“Stop apologizing.”

“I’m not used to—”

“I know.” He pressed your wrist to his chest and held it there. He could feel your pulse against your palm and his own under your fingers. Both of them were going too fucking fast. “It’s okay. Look at me.”

He kissed you again, slower this time, and felt you sink into it. Your free hand came up to his hair and your fingers curled there and he was so far past the point of pretending this wasn't happening that he didn't even bother thinking about Topper, didn't bother thinking about anything except the strip of your bare waist under his palm and the small soft sound you made when his thumb moved along her ribs and the fact that you were, for this one impossible minute, his.

He was going to ruin it. He could already feel it building behind his teeth, the thing he was going to say, the thing that was going to wreck this.

He could feel every inch of you against him and it was so much more than he’d imagined—and he’d imagined it a lot; he’d imagined it in dark rooms and parking lots and in the shower and sometimes even disgracefully while he was with you and Topper—and none of it had prepared him for the actual specific weight of you against him. The realness of you.

You let out a strangled moan against his mouth, small and surprised, and his brain whited out for a second. 

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Fuck you—”

He was realizing with unsettling terror that you were trusting him with yourself. You were crying and now your arms were wrapped around his neck and you trusted him—Rafe—to be careful with you. That was the worst possible thing you could’ve been doing because he wasn’t even careful with himself, and he knew he couldn’t be with someone he wanted so fucking badly. 

You’d let him in because you’d been crying and had a fight. You were looking for a place to put all of it and he was the place, conveniently the place. He’d made himself the place. 

His hand stopped moving and his mouth stilled against yours. He could feel you register it, the change, the small structural collapse in whatever’d been going on, and your hand uncertainly came up to his jaw.

“Rafe?”

“Yeah.” His voice came out strangled.

“Are you okay?”

He pulled back half a step. His hand was still on your waist because he genuinely could not figure out how to make it not be there. His other hand came up and rubbed his face hard, then came back to his side.

“Rafe?” you repeated, and now your voice sounded even more uncertain.

“Hold on.”

“Did I do some—”

“Nah. No, you didn’t do anything.” He couldn’t look at you because you were standing there, arms coming half-up to cover yourself once again, hair a mess, mouth swollen, and quite literally every evidence of what had just happened pointing directly at him. “Just—hold on. Give me a second.”

“Okay,” you said quietly.

You stood there waiting for him to figure out what was happening. Fuck, as if you believed anything he’d say or do would make sense. And he was about to absolutely torch that trust—he couldn’t stop himself—because Rafe Cameron with a self-destruct button in front of him was Rafe Cameron pressing the self-destruct button. Every fucking time. 

He walked two steps to the counter and he placed his palms flat on the marble, because his fingers were itching to hold onto you again.

“You shouldn’t break up with him, okay?”

His words came out flat. He watched your face remain stagnant for a second—the words still hanging—and then he watched them land. He watched the small flicker of confusion, and the bigger flicker of confusion when paired with everything that happened. And then your arms did finally come up to cover yourself and that was the worst of it, because that was the same time you’d started looking at him differently. 

“What?”

“You heard me.” When you stayed silent, he continued, “You should stay with him.” He made himself look at you now. “I’m telling you. Don’t.”

“I don’t—” You shook your head back and forth. “I don’t understand…”

“You don’t have to understand.”

“You can’t just—” Your voice went up and then it came back down, like you realized you were losing control of yourself for once. “Not right now, Rafe. Not after this.” Your voice was small now. “You can’t tell me to stay with him.”

“I’m not making you do anything. I’m saying you should.”

You were shaking your head in disbelief. “How am I meant to stay with him after we did this?”

“The same way you’ve been staying with him for the last two weeks.”

The words came out before he could process saying them, and he saw exactly what they did to your face. You stepped back now, away from him, like he’d reached out and pushed you. Functionally, he had. 

“Wow.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, you did.”

“Hey, stop—”

“You did, Rafe.” You shrugged then.

Fuck, he hated that pageant voice. He hated that he’d reached into you and pulled out the version of you that you that you used on strangers and made you use it on him. 

You were looking somewhere over his shoulder now, and he realized you weren’t going to look at him. He could see you making that decision. You’d done this before, he realized—gone behind whatever wall this was—just never at him. He’d never been close enough to you for you to do it to him, but he’d watched you do it to other people, smug about being the exception. He’d successfully promoted and relegated himself. 

“Look at me,” Rafe said almost stubbornly.

“No.”

“Hey—”

“No, Rafe.”

You turned away from him and bent down to pick your tank top off the floor, where he’d put it only minutes ago. You tried to put it back with one arm because you wouldn’t uncross the other one from your chest. It got tangled. You made a small sound of frustration and tried again.

Rafe moved without thinking. “Let me help—”

“Don’t.”

He stopped. His hand was already halfway to you. He pulled it back like you’d burned him.

You got the shirt over her head, pulled it down and smoothed it over your stomach with both palms, that small unconscious thing you did when you were nervous, except you didn't look nervous now, you looked like you were just going to run away. 

“Can you say something?” His voice came out gruff. “Please.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s okay, Rafe.”

“Will you just fucking look at me—”

You turned on your heels then to look at him. Your eyes were so far away; Rafe could’ve waved a hand in front of your face and you wouldn’t have blinked. You’d already left the bathroom and were completely done with him. 

“Did you just want to see if you could?” you asked quietly, almost curiously.

“What?”

“Tonight. Or the truck.” Your arms tightened around yourself. “Was any of it… real? Or did you just want to see if you could?”

He tilted his head to the side as he rubbed his palm over his eyes. “Don’t do that.”

“I just wanna know.”

“You know it was real.”

“Then why?”

He pressed his lips together. He had several sentences, and there were none he could say out loud. Because, because, because. He had a list. He'd been making the list for two fucking years, ever since his eyes had stopped knowing how to not find you in a room, and the items on it ranged from I’m not good enough for you to I don’t actually believe you’d want me if you spent any longer with me.

You walked past him and made sure to not touch him as you left. The small sidestep that was too deliberate. Ten minutes ago you’d been pressed against him in ways he’d been imagining for years. 

“I was gonna tell him tomorrow,” you said, voice cracking. 

He closed his eyes.

“I had it planned. And now I fucking can’t because—because I don’t even know why. But I just can’t now.” Your hands came up to your face and pressed there for a second. “You should go.”

“Please—”

“I’m going to go downstairs and make a drink,” you said, almost-evenly. “And when I come back here, you’ll be gone. Okay?”

“Alright.”

“Don’t text me.”

“Alright.”

“And don’t—” You paused, and Rafe waited, taking in the sight of you. “Don’t tell Topper.”

The request hit him sideways. “I—I won’t.”

𖦹

You’d had three drinks, possibly four. The fourth one—if it existed, which you were trying to remember—had been a tequila soda made by Kelce, which functionally counted as two drinks. Why? Because Kelce never believed in measuring and had once given Madi a margarita that had put her in a Jack and Jill bathroom for ninety-five minutes. You’d drunk it anyway because you’d put it down to take a call from your mom, and when you came back, the cup had been right where you had left it on the counter. 

So, four drinks, and the fourth one had been doing something to your peripheral vision. It had developed a soft halo around moving objects, and to your skin, which was registering the air conditioning in the living room as general weather. You had a bad relationship with number four. Three drinks was a reasonable Saturday; five drinks was enough for a complete blackout. Four was a no-man’s-land where you were drunk enough to be honest and sober to remember it tomorrow, which was, historically, the worst combination for you.

The fact that you’d let yourself get to four was a separate problem. You had brunch in the morning. Mrs. Thornton had texted on Wednesday: Sunday at the club at 10 AM, just us girls! You’d said yes, obviously. You set your alarm for eight-thirty and laid the navy linen in your room before you left for the party. The navy linen was the dress Mrs. Thornton had complimented at Easter, and wearing it to brunch was a small enough gesture that she’d clock and appreciate it. 

You had been performing very specifically and consistently for fourteen days and nobody — possibly not even you — had been able to tell that anything had happened.

Topper had been in the pool for nine minutes.

“Babe!” Topper called from the water, and you snapped your head with the small Pavlovian instinct two years had built. “Babe, just come in. The heater’s on—”

“I literally can’t, Top.” You took a step toward the deck so he could hear you better. “My hair.”

“Just don’t dunk—”

“I have brunch in the morning. I won’t have time.”

“Brunch?”

“With your mom.”

“Oh shit. That’s tomorrow?”

“It’s literally tomorrow.”

“Baby, you’re gonna be amazing.” This was Topper at his most Topper, drunk in some Figure Eight pool, sincerely confident in your abilities. “Just have, like, two more drinks and you’ll be fine.”

“That’s the opposite of what’ll help.”

“Whatever, get in here—”

“I love you, no.”

He laughed — that sloppy underwater laugh that meant he'd already mentally moved on — and turned to splash Kelce in the face, which was an unwise decision because Kelce was bigger than him and had a longer reach, and within four seconds Topper was being dunked, and Kelce was the one narrating now, and the pool was loud, and your boyfriend was drowning slightly, and you were standing on the deck in a sundress thinking about chicken salad.

You walked out onto the deck and sat down at the deep end with your legs over the side and your feet in the water and your drink — the fourth one, which was actually a fifth one but you weren't counting it — balanced on the concrete next to your hip. The water was bath-warm. Topper had not been lying about the heater. The chlorine was making your nail polish look slightly off.

You did not look across the deck. You did not look across the deck. You did not look across the deck and that was how you knew Rafe Cameron was standing across the deck, leaning against the gas grill that nobody ever used, holding a Modelo by the neck, watching you. You could feel it in the hairs on the back of your neck which had developed, over two years, a kind of low-frequency tracking system that pinged every time he was in your sightline. The tracking system had been on overdrive for two weeks. The tracking system did not care that you had told it to stop.

You fucking looked.

He pushed off from the grill. He was walking around the long way, around the shallow end, past where Madi was sitting with her feet in, past Ruthie on the couch through the open sliding door, past the row of citronella candles Ruthie's mother insisted on even though they did nothing. He was taking his time. He was a person at a party walking from one place to another place and the place he was walking to was where you were sitting.

You picked up your fifth drink that had somehow found its way to your hands, put it back down, then picked it up and took a long sip.

He sat down next to you, leaving maybe eight inches between his hip and yours. He had his pants rolled up to mid-calf and put his feet in the water, mimicking you. He set his beer on the concrete beside him. 

“You driving?” he said.

“No.”

“Yeah, didn’t think so,” he said through a breath of a laugh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re gonna break that.”

You looked down at your drink. You were, in actuality, holding it a little too aggressively, two-handed, like a child with a sippy-cup. 

You loosened your grip. “Better?” 

“Ask the cup.” 

You laughed once, the sound coming out before you could hold it back. It caught you off-guard because you were sure you hadn’t laughed without it being forced all night. You laughed now, and when Rafe heard it, his mouth tightened at the corner—almost a smile—that told you he heard it. 

“What?” you asked, rolling your eyes slightly.

“Nothing.”

You took a longer sip. The tequila was genuinely bad now.

“You always drink shit you hate?”

“It’s not bad.”

“It’s warm.”

“It’s room temperature.”

“It’s pool temperature,” he countered, raising a brow mockingly.

You looked down and he was right. The cup had been on the concrete and the concrete was hot from the heater. “Whatever.”

He almost smiled. 

Topper was dunking Kelce, or trying to. The water was sloshing onto the deck and soaking into the green sundress at the seam where it touched the concrete. Chlorine line. You'd deal with it Tuesday.

“I told myself,” you started, then paused.

“What?” Rafe asked, jumping almost immediately on your words.

“Nothing.”

“Nah, what’d you tell yourself?”

You drank, because you should’ve kept the sentence to yourself. You shouldn’t finish the sentence.

You finished the sentence. “That, if I just—it would go away.”

“What would?” When you stayed silent, he nodded to himself. “Yeah, me too.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop it.”

You were almost smiling now. This was horrible. This was so horrible. Drunk you was finding this funny, and finding things funny with Rafe Cameron next to a pool while your boyfriend was three-quarters drowned in the deep end was approximately the worst possible reaction you could be having. You took another drink, and there was very little drink left.

“Hey,” he said, voice going lower. “Look at me.”

You turned your head to face him. You'd been not looking at him for fourteen days as a kind of ongoing penance and now you'd undone it twice in five minutes.

“You can’t drink that fast.”

“I didn’t drink it fast.”

“You finished it in one sip.”

“That was three—”

“Sweethea—”

The word came out of him and stopped him. He ended it there. You watched it stop. The word hung there in the half-inch of air between you and you watched Rafe Camero —Rafe Cameron, who had not used a term of endearment with anyone— discover that he had said it. He looked away and sipped on his own pool temperature drink. The expression on his face was the expression of a man watching his own foot land on a rake.

Topper surfaced from the deep end, gasping. “Forty-six seconds!” Kelce shouted. “Bro, you’re a fish!”

Topper held up two thumbs. 

“I should go back.” 

“You’re not driving.”

“I’ll Uber,” you said, shifting slightly away from him. 

“Alright.”

𖦹

In bad conscience, you didn’t call an Uber and slid into the passenger seat of your car, only to sit. You’d slid into the driver’s seat by muscle memory, and by the time you'd registered the discrepancy you had already put your bag down and your phone on your thigh and your keys in the cupholder, which meant you were now in the wrong seat and would have to do a thing about it.

You sat and watched your own hands move. The Uber app was on your phone, and it was the simplest possible answer to a problem that had a simple answer. It took nine minutes to get to your house, $14 with the surge. You’d be in bed by 2:30, six hours of sleep, navy linen by 9:45, and brunch by ten. The schedule was too fucking clean. 

You opened up the messages app and purposely avoided the name at the top of the message threads because if you didn’t, you would have to, in some lucid corner of yourself, acknowledge that you were about to send a text. If you did acknowledge it, you wouldn’t send the text that you wanted to—drunk, tired, two weeks into being good for nobody, fourteen days into a performance that had not, in any concrete way, made you happier—send it without acknowledging you were sending it. 

come outside?

You set the phone face down on the dashboard and put both hands on the steering wheel with no intention of driving. 

The driver’s side door opened thirty seconds later and you looked up. Rafe was standing in the open doorway looking at you with a certain sort of patience that meant he was figuring out what he could do to help you. He was looking at the keys in your cupholder and at your hands on the wheel and at the seatbelt that was not buckled, and he was doing math.

“What are you doing?”

“‘M in the wrong seat.”

“I know that,” he said, sighing slightly. 

He stepped back and closed the driver’s door without looking at you. You watched him through the windshield walk around the front of the car slowly, with his hands in his pockets. You had a small intoxicated hallucination that he was going to keep walking past the car and into the road and go away. But then he reached the passenger side and opened the door and stood there with his arms crossed.

“You wanna come here, or?”

“Yeah.”

“Anytime now.”

You looked at the space between the seats. You put your bag on the passenger side and held your keys in your hand. You climbed, and there was zero chance it could’ve been graceful. The dress was the dress, the console was the console, your sandals were too small to push off from in any useful way, and somewhere mid-climb you registered that Rafe was watching you do it and you registered that you didn't care, which was either the alcohol talking or a small structural change in your soul that you would have to deal with tomorrow. You half-fell into the passenger seat. Your shoulder hit the door. The keys made a small jangling sound when they hit the upholstery. You sighed loudly.

“You good?” he asked from the same spot. 

“Mhmmm.”

He held out his hand and you stared at it for a moment before handing him the keys.

He got in and adjusted the seat back six inches and adjusted the rearview.

“Why’d you text me?” he asked so casually as he put the keys in the ignition.

He was waiting. He was, you realized, going to wait until you answered him, and then he was going to turn the key and start the car and drive you somewhere, and that whole sequence was contingent on you saying something now, in the next few seconds, with your mouth.

You tipped your head back against the seat to look at him with heavy eyes. “Does it matter?”

“Yup.”

You tugged your bottom lip between your teeth as your eyes fixed on his hand on the key. “Same reason you kissed me.”

He let out a short laugh with zero humor behind it. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“‘Cause I wanted to.”

He turned the keys; the car came on; the dashboard lit up; the radio came on at a low volume. He reached over and turned the music down lower, almost off. He pulled out of the driveway, and you watched his hand on your steering wheel and tried to will yourself out of thinking what this all meant. 

The glass was cool against your temple when you put your head against the window. You had no clue where he was going. The not-knowing was, you noticed, a state that did not require any work from you—and the relief of that, the small physical relief of being a passenger in your own car at two in the morning while someone else made the decisions, was a thing you were going to have to deal with tomorrow at brunch when you were sober enough to have feelings about it. For now you just had it and let yourself have it.

He drove for a minute before asking, “Why’d you even start dating him?”

It came out slightly quickly, like he’d been holding the question for a while and only just decided to put it in front of you.

You answered without opening your eyes. “He asked me.”

“What?”

“He asked me out. So I said yes.”

You felt the car turn again. “That can’t be it.”

“It is.”

“You’ve been dating him this long ‘cause he asked?”

“Mm.” Your wrapped your arms around yourself as you pushed yourself further back into the seat to get more comfortable. “I dated Dillion Ashbury for two days in freshman year because he was the first guy who asked. I broke up with him ‘cause my mom didn’t like his. I went on a date with a kid from Charleston in tenth grade ‘cause my dad liked his dad.” 

All you could hear from him was his breathing. So, you continued, “And then Top asked.” You shrugged into the headrest with your eyes still closed “And his mom liked me. And my mom liked his mom. And it was—made sense.”

The car kept moving. You could feel the road change under the tires. The ground was smoother now, a main road—you assumed—with fewer turns. You kept your eyes closed because you wanted, specifically and acutely, to be in this car forever and to never arrive anywhere.

“You ever pick anyone for yourself?”

You opened your eyes at that. He was looking at the road, jaw so tight you could see a nerve jump. You watched him drive for two more seconds. You watched the streetlights move across his face in slow alternating bands of yellow and shadow. You watched his hand on the wheel—knuckles still slightly fucked from whatever fight he'd been in at Ruthie's two weeks ago, or maybe a different fight, you'd lost track—and you thought, very clearly and very distinctly, that he was the most awake thing in your life.

“Yeah. Once.”

You watched him shake his head slightly, almost imperceptibly, and lean back against the headrest, and let out one slow breath through his nose like he was trying to physically expel the answer from the inside of the car.

She pushes the door open with her hip. “I’m friendly.”

“You’re not friendly.”

“Selectively charming?”

“You’re somethin’.”

“Mm.” She steps inside, holding the door with one hand and giving him a bright, expectant look. “Are you coming in or are you gonna stand outside and call the police on me?”

Rafe stares at her for half a second. The club’s service hallway spills dim yellow light over one side of his face, catching on the sharp line of his cheekbone, the tired, amused set of his mouth, the little glint in his eye that always means he knows he should say no and is already getting bored of pretending he might. 

He looks too good for someone attempting to develop a conscience in shorts and a faded blue shirt, all broad shoulders and tan skin and the faint scrape of trouble still clinging to him from wherever he’d been before she’d dragged him here.

“Baby,” he says, stepping over the threshold anyway. “This is not legal.”

She lets the door shut behind him with a soft pneumatic sigh. “Since when do you care?”

“I care about not getting arrested at the country club.”

“That’s very class-conscious of you.”

“That’s not what that means.”

She starts down the hallway like she owns it, which is technically not true but close enough. Her sandals make soft little sounds against the tile, her dress swaying around the tops of her thighs, the thin straps slipping a fraction down one shoulder because she’d gotten dressed for exactly this sort of poor decision and not for structural security. 

The whole building is too quiet around them. Too still. Somewhere deeper inside, the ice machine hums. The air-conditioning breathes cold through the vents. The club smells like lemon cleaner, old wood, cut flowers slowly dying in expensive arrangements, and money behaving itself.

Rafe follows because he always follows when she moves like she knows where the bad idea is kept. “You know,” he says behind her, voice low enough that it carries anyway, “normal people just go home after parties.”

She glances back. “Do you want to go home?”

His eyes drop to the back of her dress for exactly long enough to ruin any authority he might’ve had. Then they come back up. “No.”

“Great.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s usually the point.”

He huffs something that almost turns into a laugh and catches up enough to hook two fingers lightly in the little loop of her purse, tugging her back half a step. “Hey.”

She turns under the pull, already smiling. “What?”

“You actually allowed to be in here?”

The question is ridiculous enough that she blinks at him, then laughs once, soft and delighted. “Rafe.”

“What?”

“Allowed?”

His jaw shifts, and she loves that most about him, maybe. Not the jaw specifically, though, honestly, God had been smug with that one. It’s the fact that he can stand there in the dark hallway of a country club they’ve just walked into after hours and ask her about permission like he hasn’t spent half his life treating rules as things that happen to other people with less money and slower reflexes.

She steps into him, close enough that the front of her dress brushes his shirt. He doesn’t move back. He never moves back from her, not really. His hand drops from her purse to her hip like his body has decided that if they’re committing a crime, they might as well be affectionate about it.

“Baby,” she says, sweet as syrup and twice as sticky, “you do more coke than anyone I’ve ever met, you threaten people with guns, and you’re asking me if I’m allowed to be in a building where my dad has paid for the same corner table since I was seven?”

Rafe’s mouth twitches despite himself. “That’s different.”

“How?”

“It just is.”

“Oh, okay.” She nods gravely. “I forgot morality was vibes-based.”

“I don’t threaten people with guns that often.”

She lifts her brows.

He looks away first, which is basically a confession. “Recently.”

“That’s beautiful growth.”

“Shut up.”

She grins and rises onto her toes to kiss him, just once, quick and warm, her hand catching the side of his neck for balance. He makes the smallest sound into it, more exhale than anything else, and it settles low in her stomach with a familiar little spark. His fingers tighten at her hip. The hallway seems to shrink around them, all cool air and old wood and Rafe’s mouth softening under hers like he’s annoyed by how easily she can redirect him.

When she pulls back, his eyes stay on her lips.

“Bar,” she says.

He blinks. “What?”

“We’re going to the bar.”

“Of course we are.”

She takes his hand and tugs him after her, through the staff hallway and out into the main dining room, where the club opens around them in dark, polished layers. Tables sit empty beneath low lights. Chairs tucked in. Napkins folded. The long windows reflect them as they pass, two rich kids where they shouldn’t be, moving through all that inherited restraint with bare arms and bad intentions.

It makes something in her chest feel fizzy and bright. Something closer to the feeling of standing too near the edge of a balcony and knowing exactly how far back you’d have to lean before someone grabbed your wrist.

Rafe’s thumb drags once over her knuckles. He feels it too. She can tell by the way his posture changes, loose on the surface but alert underneath, head turning slightly at every small sound, eyes cutting across exits and cameras and shadows because trouble in him is never just fun. It always has a second set of teeth.

The bar sits at the far end of the room, all dark wood and green-shaded lamps, bottles lined up in pretty obedient rows against the mirror. In the daytime, there’s always some bartender in a white shirt behind it, smiling politely at men who don’t tip enough and women who pretend two martinis is lunch. Now it’s unattended, gleaming and quiet and absolutely begging to be disrespected. She lets go of Rafe’s hand and walks straight behind it.

He stops on the customer side, staring at her. “No.”

She crouches a little, scanning the bottles. “Yes.”

“You don’t work here.”

“I’m expanding my skill set.”

“You’re stealing.”

“I’m sampling.” She finds what she wants on the top shelf, a bottle of bourbon too nice for most people and too available for her current mood. She plucks it down with both hands, the glass heavy and cold against her palm, then turns back to him with a triumphant little smile. “See?”

Rafe looks at the bottle, then at her. “That’s like six hundred dollars.”

“Then it should be good.”

“Jesus Christ.”

She unscrews the cap and takes a swig before he can keep pretending this is about property damage. The bourbon hits warm and mean, all smoke and caramel and rich old-man confidence, burning over her tongue and down her throat in a way that makes her eyes water for half a second before she swallows it cleanly.

Rafe watches her do it. Properly watches. The disapproval on his face goes thin at the edges, giving way to that heavier, darker focus he gets when she does something that reminds him she was never quite as well-behaved as people thought she was. It drags over her mouth, her throat, the bare skin of her shoulder where the strap of her dress has slipped.

She passes him the bottle. “Come on,” she says. “You’re already an accomplice.”

His laugh is low and unwilling, but he takes it. “You’re a bad influence.”

“I know.”

He drinks too. His throat works once, twice, and the sight of it does something irritatingly immediate to her. He lowers the bottle, thumb sliding over the label, and catches her looking. His mouth lifts. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

“You look slutty.”

That gets him. His face goes blank for half a beat and then he laughs, real and sudden, head ducking like she’s physically knocked it out of him. The sound breaks the club’s silence in the best way, bouncing lightly off glass and wood and the stupid rich stillness of the room. It makes her grin so hard her cheeks hurt.

“You can’t just say shit like that,” he says.

“I can, actually. You’re my boyfriend.”

“That’s not how that works.”

“It’s exactly how that works.”

He sets the bottle down on the bar and leans both hands on the counter, coming closer without crossing it, eyes locked on her with that lazy heat starting to gather behind them. “You think I look slutty?”

“I think you have a lot of slutty features.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.” She steps closer on her side of the bar, reaches across, and hooks one finger in the open collar of his shirt. “Very concerning for your reputation.”

“My reputation’s fine.”

“Your reputation is catastrophic.”

His grin sharpens. “You like it.”

She tugs him in until he has to bend over the bar, until his face is close enough for her to smell the bourbon on his breath and the faint clean soap at his skin underneath it. “I love it.”

Something flickers in his eyes at that. They’ve said bigger, worse, softer things to each other in far less ridiculous places. But because of the way she says it here, in the empty club with her stolen bourbon and his hands on the counter, like his damage isn’t separate from the things she wants, like she sees the whole mess of him and still wants to put her mouth on the sharp parts.

Rafe’s smile changes. Lowers. “Yeah?” he murmurs.

She kisses him instead of answering.

It’s awkward for exactly two seconds because the bar is between them and Rafe is too tall and she’s laughing into his mouth at the angle, but then his hand comes up, sliding around the back of her neck, and he holds her still enough to fix it. 

The kiss slows. Deepens. His mouth is warm from the bourbon, his lips firmer now, a little less amused and a lot more interested. She feels it move through him in stages: the initial tease, the give, the shift into hunger when her tongue brushes his and her fingers tighten in his collar.

The club disappears in pieces. First the dining room. Then the cold air. Then the little voice in the back of her head that sounds, irritatingly, like every adult who had ever told her she was too pretty to be this much trouble.

Rafe pulls back enough to breathe, mouth still close to hers. “Get over here.”

She smiles. “Bossy.”

“Yeah.”

She should walk around. That would be normal, or at least the version of normal available to two people making out after hours beside a stolen bottle of bourbon. Instead she plants both hands on the bar, hikes one knee onto the lower shelf, and climbs up onto the counter.

Rafe’s eyes widen just enough to be satisfying. “Baby.”

“What?”

“Don’t fuckin’ fall.”

“That’s so romantic.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re always serious when I’m doing something fun.”

She swings one leg over, then the other, settling herself on the bar top with her knees parted and the hem of her dress riding high on her thighs. The wood is cold through the thin fabric. Smooth. Hard. Her pulse is sitting too close to her skin now, bright and stupid, beating at the hollow of her throat and the insides of her wrists and low in her stomach where Rafe’s eyes go dark as they take her in.

He steps between her legs like his body has been waiting for permission his mouth never intended to grant. His hands find her thighs immediately, broad and hot against bare skin, pushing the dress up another inch without seeming to realise he’s done it. Or maybe he does realise. Maybe that’s the problem.

She wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him in. His breath leaves him in a rough little sound when his hips meet the edge of the bar and her body curls around his. “Fuck.”

“There we go,” she says softly, pleased.

He gives her a look. “You’re insane.”

“You keep saying that like it’s news.”

“I keep hoping it’ll start bothering me.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

She grins and kisses him again. This time there’s no bar between them, and it turns hungry fast. Rafe’s hands slide higher on her thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft skin of her ass like he’s trying to remind himself where they are and failing on purpose. She kisses him open-mouthed, messy and warm and already smiling because he’s so easy to ruin when he’s pretending he’s the one with restraint. Her fingers scrape lightly over the back of his neck, down into the close buzz of his hair, and his grip tightens.

The sound he makes is low enough that it lands more in her hands than her ears. She pulls back just to look at him. His mouth is wet from hers. His eyes have gone that dark, blown blue that makes him look meaner and softer at the same time. The kind of face that would make smarter girls step back. Unfortunately, she’s never been smart in a way that helped around him.

“Security cameras,” he says suddenly, like he’s remembered morality had a second act.

She kisses the side of his mouth. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Mhm.”

His head tips back a fraction, eyes closing for one long second like he’s seeking patience from a God who has never once been helpful when she is in a short dress. “Baby.”

She kisses down his jaw. “What?”

“There are cameras.”

“I heard you.”

“And you don’t care?”

Her mouth moves lower, to the warm skin under his ear, where his pulse jumps very satisfyingly against her lips. “Not really.”

His fingers flex on her thighs. “That’s crazy.”

She smiles into his neck. “A little.”

“We’re not having sex on the bar.”

She laughs then, not loudly, but enough that he feels it against his skin. “You say that like you’ve never done anything worse than this.”

“This is different.”

She lifts her head and looks at him. “Different how?”

“It’s the country club.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise the sacred bourbon altar changed things.”

Rafe’s mouth twitches, but he fights it. Badly. “We broke in.”

“I unlocked the front door.”

“With a code you’re not supposed to have.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“That’s not–” He cuts himself off when her hand slides down his chest, slow over the soft cotton of his shirt, over the hard shape underneath, to the waistband of his shorts. His sentence disappears in his throat. His whole body goes still in the way that’s never still at all, every muscle suddenly aware of her hand, her legs, the bar, the door behind them, the cameras above them, the fact that his bad idea has hands and lip gloss and no sense of self-preservation.

She looks up at him through her lashes. “You were saying?”

His jaw works. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Doing what?”

“You know what.”

She presses her palm against him through his shorts, gentle enough to be cruel, and watches his face change. It’s quick. Tiny. A hard blink, a rough inhale, the barest drop of his chin. But she sees it, and seeing it sends a hot little thrill straight through her body. Rafe Cameron, who has stared down cops and Pogues and grown men with guns, absolutely losing the thread because his girlfriend is touching him in the closed country club bar.

It’s maybe the worst thing she’s ever enjoyed.

“Baby,” he says, voice lower now, rough at the edges.

She leans in and kisses his jaw. “Yeah?”

“We’re not–” His breath catches when she strokes him again. “Fuck.”

“Not what?”

His eyes sharpen on hers, and for one second she thinks that might be it. That he’ll pull back. That the last moral beam holding up the evening might somehow survive after all.

Then his hand comes up and curls around her throat. His thumb under her jaw, fingers along the side of her neck, warm and possessive and steadying in a way that makes her whole body go quiet and loud at the same time. Her breath stops for half a second under the touch, because her body has decided whatever happens next is worth listening to.

Rafe notices. His eyes drag over her face, slow and dark, the corner of his mouth lifting like he’s found something. “There,” he murmurs.

She swallows against his hand. “Don’t look so proud.”

“I’m very proud.”

“You’re very easy.”

His laugh is soft and dangerous. “Baby, I’m not the one who dragged us into a crime scene because you wanted top-shelf bourbon and attention.”

“Crime scene is dramatic.”

“You’re palming me on a bar.”

“You’re hard on a bar.”

“That’s your fault.”

She smiles, sweet and wicked. “I know.”

For a moment they just stare at each other, breathing the same bourbon-warm air, his hand still at her throat and hers still where it absolutely shouldn’t be if either of them intended to leave here with dignity. The club feels too quiet around them now, like the whole room is holding its breath in offended rich-person silence. The green lamps glow low across the counter. The mirror behind the bottles catches the two of them in pieces: her knees locked around his waist, his body bent over hers, her dress riding up, his hand at her neck, both of them lit like something they’d deny in court.

The sight of them in the mirror should probably shame her. It doesn’t.

Rafe follows her gaze, sees the reflection, and gives a low, almost disbelieving laugh under his breath. “Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

He looks back at her. “You look fucking insane.”

She grins. “Good?”

His hand tightens slightly at her throat, just enough to make warmth spill down her spine. “So good.”

He can act like he’s better than the bad idea for exactly as long as it takes to get his hands on it. After that, all his restraint starts coming apart at the seams, and she gets to watch. Gets to feel it. Gets the little reward of his breathing changing, his focus narrowing, his mouth losing every clever thing it was going to say because she’s right there and he’s never been as controlled as he thinks he is.

She kisses him again, and this time he doesn’t pretend. His hand slides from her throat to the back of her neck, holding her in place as he takes the kiss deeper, rougher, his other hand dragging her closer on the bar until she gasps against his mouth. The edge of the counter presses under her thighs. Her dress twists higher. The bourbon bottle tips slightly when her elbow knocks it, glass scraping over wood before Rafe catches it without looking and shoves it safely aside.

She laughs into his mouth. “Responsible.”

“Shut up.”

“You saved the bourbon.”

“I’m trying not to add destruction of property to the list.”

“That’s hot.”

“You’re so fucked in the head.”

“Yeah,” she breathes, lips brushing his. “And you love me.”

His face shifts. The heat doesn’t leave it, not even close, but something moves under it, something sharp and warm and almost too true for the setting. It catches in the space between them, stupidly tender against all the polished wood and stolen liquor and her hand still at his waistband.

He kisses her softer once. Once. Like he has to. Like even here, even like this, he can’t not put the love somewhere. “Yeah,” he says, low. “I do.”

Her chest goes warm in a way that has nothing to do with the bourbon.

She hates him for that a little. For being able to make it sweet when she’s trying to be shameless. For making her feel known in a room where she’s trying to be a problem. For looking at her like he’d follow her through any unlocked door and then complain about trespassing the whole way inside. So she bites his bottom lip.

Rafe makes a rough sound and pulls back just enough to glare at her. “You’re gonna make me forget where we are.”

“That’s the idea.”

“No.” He shakes his head once, but his eyes are on her mouth again. “No, we’re not doing this here.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

She lets her hand press against him again, slower this time, and his restraint visibly suffers. “You sure?”

“No.”

She smiles.

His eyes flick to the ceiling, to the corners of the room, to wherever he thinks the cameras might be. Then back to her. His expression is almost pained now, which feels like its own kind of victory. “There are cameras.”

“I already said probably.”

“Baby.”

“What?” she says, blinking up at him with the kind of innocence that’s never once survived contact with evidence. “Are you scared they’re going to see?”

His mouth parts. Closes. His jaw tightens. “You’re not saying that to me right now.”

“I’m just asking.”

“You’re not just asking.”

“Maybe I think it’s kind of hot.”

He stares at her, and she can feel the exact second the thought gets into him. He doesn’t want it to. That’s what makes it worse. Better. The little flare in his eyes, the way his hand tightens at her hip, the small shift of his body closer to hers like the bad part of him has leaned in to hear the rest.

Then he laughs once, under his breath, dark and almost helpless. “You’re gonna get me killed.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re gonna get us banned.”

“That would be tragic. Where would we drink overpriced cocktails and disappoint our parents?”

His grin breaks through, sharp and boyish and stupidly beautiful. “You think your dad would be disappointed?”

“My dad still thinks I’m at sleepovers when I’m clearly in your bed.”

“That’s not disappointment. That’s denial.”

“Mm. Family tradition.”

Rafe laughs properly then, and the sound goes straight through her, breaking the last bit of tension into something warmer and easier without making it safer. Nothing about him is safer when he’s laughing against her mouth and hard under her hand and looking at her like she’s the funniest, worst, most perfect thing he’s ever touched.

He kisses her again, and she lets herself melt into it for half a second before he pulls away with visible effort. “No bar,” he says.

She groans. “Rafe.”

“No.”

“You’re boring.”

“I’m keeping us off a security tape.”

“You’re being very civic-minded.”

“I’m serious.” He taps her thigh once, then again, like he’s trying to make his hand do something other than slide higher. “Come on. Get down.”

She doesn’t move. “Make me.”

His eyes lift to hers. The air changes so fast she feels it under her skin, the whole reckless, joking shape of the night sharpening into something with weight. Rafe goes still again, but not in the careful way from before. This is different. This is decision. The tiny drop of his chin, the narrowing of his eyes, the way his mouth loses the smile without losing the heat.

“You wanna say that again?” he asks.

Her pulse kicks hard enough that she feels it in her thighs where his hands are still holding her. She should say something clever. She can feel a hundred possible lines flash through her mind and vanish uselessly under the way he’s looking at her.

She lifts her chin anyway. “Make me.”

Rafe moves. One second she’s sitting on the bar with her legs around him, all smug and warm and certain of the little universe she’s built out of bourbon and poor choices, and the next his hands are under her thighs and she’s being lifted clean off the counter. She gasps, arms flying around his shoulders on instinct, the club tilting around her in a blur of polished wood and green lamps as he turns with her.

“Rafe,” she laughs, breathless now for an entirely different reason. “Oh my God.”

He doesn’t put her down. He carries her out from behind the bar like she weighs nothing, like the whole point of having muscles and bad judgment is this exact moment. Her legs stay hooked around his waist, dress shoved high, one sandal dangling from her foot by two determined straps.

“You wanted me to make you,” he says, voice low against her mouth.

She bites back a smile and fails. “I did.”

“Yeah?” His hands grip the backs of her thighs. “How’s that goin’ for you?”

“Pretty well, honestly.”

He kisses her hard enough that the answer turns into a little broken sound she will absolutely deny making. He keeps walking as he does it, which should not be as hot as it is, especially given that he nearly clips her shoulder on the doorway and she has to pull back laughing.

“Careful.”

“You’re the one who climbed on a bar.”

“You’re the one carrying contraband.”

“You’re contraband?”

“I should be.”

His laugh comes warm against her jaw. “You really should be.”

He carries her past the tables and into the darker hallway by the private dining rooms, where the cameras are fewer, the lights are lower, and the old portraits on the walls look deeply scandalised by the youth of America. 

She kisses his neck as he walks, because his hands are occupied and his self-control is already visibly on borrowed time. His breathing roughens when she finds the spot beneath his jaw, the one that always makes his fingers flex like he’s about to break something he’ll later insist was already loose.

“Baby,” he warns.

She smiles into his skin. “What?”

“You keep doing that, we’re not making it out of this hallway.”

“Who said we had to?”

He stops so abruptly her back bumps softly into the wall, one of his hands sliding up behind her head before it can hit. Even now. Even when he’s worked up and annoyed and two seconds from making several more bad decisions, some part of him catches her first.

The thought makes her throat feel strange. Then his mouth is on hers again, and there’s nothing strange about that. Nothing soft enough to worry over. Only Rafe crowding her into the wall in the dark hallway of the country club, his body hot and solid between her thighs, his kiss rougher now that he’s stopped pretending they’re leaving with any kind of moral high ground. 

She tangles her fingers into the back of his shirt, dragging him closer, and he groans against her mouth when her hips shift. “Still worried about cameras?” she whispers.

His forehead rests against hers for half a second, breath harsh, smile cutting through it like he hates her and wants to keep her forever. “Yeah.”

“Liar.”

“Less worried.”

She laughs, and he kisses the laugh out of her so thoroughly it vanishes somewhere between his mouth and the wall.

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