"Hey, can I get two Pepsi's please?" Kiara directs her question towards the boy stood behind the concession stand.
She's trying to get her gaze to remain on the vendor in front of her, but in her periphery she can see someone walking towards her. Although their face is a blur, it's hard to mistake that tall build for anyone else, she knows it too well, it's him. She's hoping that he will walk past her, but she can feel his eyes fixed on her, and the way he is charging in her direction has her unnerved.
Rays of sunlight beam down on her as Rafe approaches. In his eyes, she had taken centre stage and the sun was the spotlight that exalted her. To him, she was the only person that needed to be seen, the background characters do not matter when the spotlight shines so brightly on her. The sunlight only intensified the warm hues of her skin, it glistened like honey, honey he could get stuck to —cling to— if she'd let him.
The smell of her overwhelms his senses so he closes his eyes and draws in a sharp breath, breathing in the floral trail which spirals the air that surrounds her. Taking in her scent was visceral experience, he pictures himself walking past the hanging flowers of the Gardens of Babylon, he imagines it smells just like Kiara because her essence could only be described by the rarest of flowers, a scent that was only specific to her. No one else.
"Hey Kie," he is greeting Kiara yet he glares at the vendor as a threatening gesture, staring him down just because he is looking at her; the teen is just trying to do his job. Rafe cannot seem to fathom that not everyone who looks at Kiara wants her the way he does. The teen thinks nothing of the glare, he just stereotypes Rafe as another one of those Kooks that think everyone must bow down to them; he reads him like an open book because he was completely correct in his assumption. There was only one person that could make Rafe's authoritarian personality waver and that person was stood right in front of him, he would submit to Kiara if she asked him to, besides, it's nothing he hasn't done before.
He directs his eyes to refocus on Kiara's when the boy looks away, "How are you?"
Kiara is confused and it is evident on her face, she expected Rafe to say something mean about her friends or do something of his usual nature, so she is thrown off guard when he asks something as casual as 'how are you?'. Surely he doesn't really care, surely this small talk was just to distract her from one of his ploys.
'I was fine until you got here' is what she wants to say. Snarky comments between them were a common thing of the past. A past in which the flame between them burned so ferociously. The back and forth snide remarks would crescendo into arguments. The quarrels rarely amounted to anything detrimental because Rafe would be the first to give in. It would all fizzle out when he pulled her into a hug that she couldn't escape, she would sluggishly pretend to wriggle out of his arms just so Rafe could hold her tighter, the feel of his arms enveloping her was butterfly-inducing every time.
However, sometimes she liked when the arguments didn't subside. In fact, sometimes she would do things to provoke him because the feuds fuelled the nights behind closed doors.
But that was all buried in the past, and she doesn't want to dig up the past. The embers may still glow but ultimately their flame burned out, so she answers his question with a simple "I'm fine" instead of a snarky comment because it wasn't a 'them thing' anymore. 'Them' has ceased to exist; now it's just Rafe, and it's just Kiara.
"Good", he smiles sincerely but it quickly drops and his expression turns ominous when he says "Tell your boy that we know what he did."
There it is. His intent unveiled, his intention to threaten her friends.
She furrows her eyebrows and tilts her head to the side, but her eyes remain glued to his, "I'm sorry, what boy are you talking about?" She stares daggers into his eyes, but it's hard to stare into them when she knows how irrevocably destructive they can be. The daggers are supposed to pierce through him but maybe both sides of the sword were sharp because staring this intensely at him was having the same effect on her. His eyes matched the deep blue of the ocean but they don't reflect the beauty of it, they only present the danger. She watched his irises get smaller and his pupils grow bigger, it was like watching a sinkhole forming in the ocean, and if she stared too long she'd get swallowed up by it.
