𓍼 Rafe ⋆.˚

There had always been this unnamed space between them—too close for just friends, too uncertain for anything more. Even now, sitting together on the edge of the Cameron backyard dock during a party they’d both slipped away from, the in-between hung quietly between them. Music thumped from the house, people laughed around the firepit, but out here it felt like they existed in their own pocket of calm.

Rafe pretended he didn’t care, tapping the dock with his sneaker like he wasn’t waiting for her to say something. But he’d followed her out here the second she disappeared inside, and she always noticed that. Their pasts were messy, full of wrong people and wrong moments, but with each other things felt lighter. He knew every shift in her expression; she knew the gentler way he spoke when the world wasn’t watching.

From the house, their friends could probably see them—Rafe laughing at something tiny she said, her leaning just a little too close without meaning to. It wasn’t dramatic, just steady and real, the kind of connection that grew quietly until it was impossible to ignore.

Lately, she found herself edging closer to him without knowing why. And even with the noise of the party behind them, it felt like they were the only two people on the dock—still hovering, still figuring it out, still wanting something neither of them had learned how to name. More than anything in between.

So here they were: stuck at a bonfire, surrounded by their friends.. and their enemies.

The kind of Outer Banks crowd that knew too much about everyone and said even more, each joke tossed across the fire like kindling. Someone was always stirring drama, someone was always exaggerating a story, and someone was always watching Rafe Cameron a little too closely.

She sat beside him on a driftwood log, pretending not to notice how the group’s teasing kept drifting toward them: how they “always show up together,” or how Rafe “gets weirdly quiet when she’s not around.” It was just the usual noise, the same social chaos they’d grown up in, but tonight it felt louder.