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My nervous strength is slipping away, my time, my courage, and I fail to catch with myself day after day, and am somewhere out of reach, full of flowers past their bloom, whose fading scents fill me with dead weight—it isn't so new for me, this feeling
RAINER MARIA RILKE / 1892-1910
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
Living in Outer Banks was Layne Hetfield's one-way, non-refundable ticket to paradise. The ocean was far from shut down throughout the other nine months of the year when tourists overly even out the locals to tourons ratio within a matter of weeks. The calm before the storm arrives in May, when the locals can bask in the final moments before the streets are bustling with families from all over the country coming to enjoy Layne's normality. It also means that her job as a marina attendant amplifies from just seasonal charters to consistent and non-stop relaying of family boats, rentals, and keeping the kooks and tourons clear of dirty pogues like herself. (However, most kooks have their own docks that they don't need assistance with—she likes to think her job is one of a kind. Most tourons are too oblivious to notice the neverending class war on the island.) Layne doesn't mind the short solace away from home, until she returns in the evening and she's banished from the Figure Eight like a fly on their back.
So, naturally, Layne doesn't understand where the entanglement with Rafe Cameron even began.
She could say it began when they were children, and technically she wouldn't be wrong, when Layne found a frog hidden in the custard place in town, and accidentally dropped her chocolate cone on his white shoes. They were twelve, freshly twelve—right when Rafe started to slick back his hair and his (step) mom Rose would force him to wear Ralph Lauren button ups and freshly pressed slacks. Layne got the short end of the stick from him throughout middle school, until they were fourteen, and she heard that boys who were mean to you had a crush on you. (She will forever condemn whoever came up with that phrase.)
