Disarm / Rafe Cameron

00. You Get What You Give

You Get What You Give
chapter o.
warnings: cocaine use, peer pressure,
underage drinking, sexuality

     LAYNE HETFIELD WAS A GOOD GIRL. Rafe Cameron liked that, even if he failed to admit it. He would be lying if there wasn't a tinge of interest that peaked in their middle school years, and descended into a slightly unhealthy infatuation by the time they were seventeen. Nobody could really blame him—however turned off everyone would be by the idea of Rafe Cameron being even relatively close to a pogue of that caliber. She worked as an attendant at the marina, cleaned boats and sent tourons on charters for god sake.

Rafe knew his parents wouldn't care. His father was a man with a short fuse that lifted him off the ground with one hand and stabbed him with the other. He didn't know his mother, and he didn't even know if his sisters were even fully related to him—let alone a step mother who breathed down his neck and kept two eyes open at night ever since he was a child. There's something wrong with Rafe, he had heard her say one night, in Ward's study, when he was eleven. He didn't know what that meant. There wasn't anything wrong with him—he was the most popular boy in school, wore name brands everywhere and wouldn't be caught dead near the south side. There was nothing wrong with him. He was completely fine.

He liked the way Layne Hetfield would walk on eggshells around him. He scared her away after she dropped ice cream on his shoe in the sixth grade. Ever since then, Layne would hardly even look at him. It wasn't like she had to—they lived on completely different sides of the island, with different lives. She had two jobs, he had two houses and a yacht that she cleaned. (Well, she only cleaned it one time, during a recovery clean up after a hurricane in 2014. He was cleaning it too—but that was besides the point.) Rafe Cameron didn't understand why he chose Layne Hetfield out of all the girls on the island, but he just did. She was weak and couldn't take care of herself, and Rafe wanted to take care of her, and needed someone to take care of him. Layne wasn't like the other girls on the island. She took care of him when he needed her—and even when he didn't.

The sun was hot, and draining. It was the worst time of day to be under the sky—4:37 PM, when the sun was setting yet it still gave Layne the most blistering sunburns she would get that day. She had forgotten her sunscreen on the kitchen counter before she left that morning, and she was currently on her hands and knees scrubbing the fish blood off of Mr. Pocino's boat. He had given her one hundred dollars to clean off the fish stench and residue from the floors while him and his crew lugged the tuna back to get cleaned and gutted. Meanwhile, the tourons that paid for the charter vomited off the side of the dock from being seventy-five miles off shore and forgot to take Dramamine the night prior. Layne had pretty much seen it all up to this point, and as long as she was getting paid, she was fine with it. It wasn't like she hadn't scrubbed fish blood off of boat floors before.

The smell of fish didn't bother her anymore, but she still pulled the neckline of her tank top over her nose. Her earbuds were shoved deep in her ears blasting Bob Marley, too loud for her to even hear herself sing. We've got a mind on our own, so go to Hell if what you thinkin' is not right.....

There was a chorus of footsteps that rang out on the dock before something nailed her on the back, and when she turned around, it was plastic fish bait with a deformed hook on the end. Frantically pulling the ear buds from her ears she turned around and saw JJ Maybank and John B Routledge standing there with shit-eating smirks on their faces.

"You assholes, this has a fucking hook on it!" she picked it up and threw it back at them, but they dodged out of the way.

"We saw it on the dock, we figured we should return it to you," JJ chuckled, giving her double thumbs up. Layne was used to them and their antics since they were seven, and she was ten. They were like the little gnats that fly near your face and don't disappear unless you put your hands up. Ever since they turned fourteen a few months ago they had been around her constantly, and Kiara insists that they have crushes on her, but she decides to look past it. She thinks its just because she was the only one of their friends who could drive—she didn't mind their company, for the most part, but they always busted on her music choices when she would drive them to the beach in her 1995 Jeep Wrangler—that had a hole in the floor on the passenger seat and could hardly fit her surf board, let alone three—and a nearly permanently removed roof. JJ had a deadbeat father and a missing mother, and John B's father kept his nose in his work for ninety-five percent of the time. She felt sorry for the pair of them, no matter how annoying they were.