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RULE #1: This is a One-Time Thing
"You're the one who wanted to playby the rulebook."
Time for a crash course on the Outer Banks, North Carolina.
The line of islands was a mysterious place for outsiders (or those on the mainland) because everyone in the Outer Banks knew each other. Trust that, at some point in time, your neighbor was friends with your cousin or the elderly woman who checked you out at the local shop babysat your mom when she was little. If you think they can't spot an outsider from a mile away, that would be the touron in you. Easy enough for beginners? Then, there's the split in the Outer Banks. A divide. No one was sure where the names came from or who invented them, but after having been passed down from generation to generation, everyone in the Outer Banks knew their place: either you were a Kook or you were a Pogue.
The Kooks lived lavish out in Figure Eight. The fancy, rich people homes―the homes that any sane person would point at and dream about owning one day. The Pogues were the working class people who cleaned up those fancy, rich people homes. The sane, if you will (save for a few bad eggs, but aren't there always some?)
Nonetheless, the two divides in the OBX were civil...for the most part. Aside from the disrespect and degrading comments every-so-often, and the snobby-uptight princess jokes...they were fine and dandy―and while the crash course may be written in past tense, were was past-past tense. Who were the Kook and the Pogue that ruined the casual dislike for the other? None other than the two most graced of their kind, Rafe Cameron and Leonie Maybank.
A Kook and a Pogue to their birthrights, down to the mansion of Tanneyhill that Rafe lived in and the two (and a half-ish) bedroom house that Leo was quite literally birthed in―but they had their similarities. Deep down, whether either of them wanted to see it or not―but that wasn't how their story started. The ending of them? Well...that you already know...but the beginning and the middle was the most important for Rafe and Leo. Not the end―because, for Rafe, it still hadn't ended.
But enough of a crash course. How did their story truly begin?
A romantic setting actually. Imagine a sunset, the waves crashing in the background, laughter of teenagers...a very tipsy, very angry, very short hot-headed Maybank using every possible way of the word "fuck" in a sentence to a very privileged, very unafraid, very tall rich-boy Cameron.
