CHAPTER THIRTY
[30]
song: cry by cigarettes after sex
The sun had set completely by the time Cassie pulled the Jeep into her driveway. She'd helped Rafe out of the passenger seat, as he held an old sweat-towel he'd found in his glovebox to his bleeding head.
The house was completely dark, and there were no flickering lights left on the living room TV. She could hear her grandma's CPAP machine from her bedroom. She didn't have to say anything, it was a given that they needed to be quiet when Cassie slowly closed the creaking door shut.
She'd sat him down in the upstairs bathroom, on the edge of the tub. Below the sink in a wire basket were leftover supplies from Cassie's arm. She didn't realize how soon she'd have to get them back out.
She held them on her lap, sat on the toilet seat with her shoes propped up against the edge of the bath. "I don't like that this is becoming a reoccurring thing." She spoke, and while she said it as a joke, it came off more depressing than intended.
Rafe watched her as she got out the rubbing alcohol, and poured it over a small pink towel. Like instinct, she started to bring it up to the wound on his head, then stopped.
She looked at him. All of the adrenaline and chaos of the prior moments hadn't given her the chance to realize how intimate this was.
And he seemed slightly taken aback by it too, by how she stopped herself. He kept his eyes on her, steady and focused, as she handed the towel to him instead.
After a moment of hesitation, he took it from her, and pressed it against his head.
"Shit." He squeezed his eyes shut, and let his head fall down in front of him.
And again, instinct took over as Cassie, wincing at the sight, found herself gently grabbing his wrists to try and relieve the amount of pressure he was putting on it. "Careful." She said quietly, inhaling sharply through her teeth as she gently lifted the towel back off to examine it.
In that moment, Rafe couldn't feel it at all. His mind was fully consumed by her. Watching how gently she approached him though he knew he was undeserving. How easily she dropped her cold front when he was hurt. To help him, to care for him. Because that's just how Cassie was. Kind, and gentle.
And she looked so odd now. With a cut lip, and a bruise already beginning to yellow on her cheek. If he weren't right there next to her as it happened, he would never believe how someone like her could get involved in a situation so bad, that she'd end up like this.
And somehow, despite it all, she was still pretty. Sweet, pretty Cassie.
"I don't know—" Cassie's focus had returned to the basket in her lap as she sorted through it. She looks back up at the wound for the moment, then back to the basket. "It actually doesn't look that bad, which is good." Shuffling through it, she hands him back the towel and tells him to keep pressure on it.
"You're a good doctor." He joked, keeping his voice low as her grandma slept down the hall.
Cassie cracked a smile. "A good doctor would probably give you stitches. Or, painkillers, but—" she looked up at him, and gave him a look that said 'but we both know how that goes.'
He scoffed a bit, leaning back slightly. He propped his shoes up on the toilet seat, mirroring Cassie. After a moment, he spoke. "Have you relapsed?"
It was a sudden question. One that she didn't really expect, but also wasn't thrown off by, given the fact that they held shared experiences with drugs. She shook her head. "Not since the cargo ship. Haven't really had much time to even think about it. Which I guess is a good thing?" She answered. "Have you?"
Rafe was quiet for a few moments. "I want to."
Cassie bit the inside of her cheek, then nodded slightly. "Yeah. I do too." She almost got a laugh out, at the irony of it all.
"Why'd you even start?" Rafe asked, the pink towel still pinned to his head.
"Doing drugs?" She asked.
He nodded.
Cassie shrugged. "My mom died. Well— she was killed. In a car accident. I was there too and really messed up my collarbone and my leg." She turned her leg to the side, bumping into his knee, to show the scar from her surgery. "So they put me on painkillers and stuff, which was just really bad timing, 'cause I was only eleven and in my head, I was like— oh, yeah, my mom just died, but when I take these I don't feel as sad. And so I just got so scared when my prescription was up, that I just started taking whatever I could get my hands on, and then— you know."
Cassie didn't even question the fact that she'd just dropped all of this on him. She didn't hesitate, didn't let herself think that she didn't feel comfortable talking about it with him. Because she didn't. There was something about talking with him, with someone who knew these feelings like she did, that held no shame.
"What about you?"
Rafe nodded, like he had been as Cassie spoke. Then he shrugged. "Yeah, my mom died too. When I was thirteen." He said. "She had breast cancer, and it started getting really bad right as I went into middle school. So—" he took a deep breath. "That just made it harder than it should've been. School, and everything. And she died kind of unexpectedly, too. The doctors had said treatment was going well, and then one day I was going to the batting cages with my dad, and then he got a call from—" he pauses, and takes another breath. "Sarah, and she was like— 10, or something, at the time. And she'd found her unresponsive upstairs. And, so—" Rafe looks at Cassie, then shakes his head quickly. "Anyways, I—"
"I didn't know." Cassie spoke quietly.
He shrugs again. "Yeah, I mean, my dad kind of acts like none of it ever happened, and so no one ever talks about her anymore. Like, I'm out, and I see people that were her best friends, or that worked with her, and they just act like she never existed." He narrowed his eyes, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of it all. "And my dad wasted no time in getting remarried. And it was really confusing for Sarah, too. Wheezie was too young to understand it at all, but I..." he trailed off, shrugging again.
"Took it hard?" Cassie asked, her eyes steady on him as he spoke.
He nodded, swiping his tongue across his bottom row of teeth. "Started getting into a lot of fights, and all that." He waves it off. "Got expelled my sophomore year for knocking a kid out, but my dad, he made a donation to the school and got me back in. And he just did so much shit like that, where he just ignored it and tried to cover it up, instead of sitting down and talking to me about why I was acting up so much. And he knew why, and I knew why, but— I was a kid, I didn't know how to—" he shrugs, shaking his head again. "How to deal with all of that shit? And so I just started drinking a lot. And partying, and started dealing, which just made it all worse."
Cassie blinked, overcome with this urge to repeatedly tell him 'I get it, I get it, I get it' because she did, she understood him so much, and understood even more so how lonely it made you feel. And understood how desperately she needed someone to tell her 'I get it, I get it, I get it'.
He twisted his jaw, his face contorting like he'd just reverted back to the side of himself that wondered why he'd just said all that. He started to stand from the tub, and Cassie dropped her legs down, worried that she should've been quicker to say something in response.
"I'm gonna head out." He says.
Cassie felt her heart drop, and she stood too, and shook her head. "Don't." She said.
He put the towel down in the sink, examined himself quickly in the mirror, and then shook his head again as he went for the door. "No, it's cool. I should—"
"Just stay the night." Cassie said, tired of beating around the bush, or speaking in code with him. "You shouldn't go sit in that house alone, not after—" a knot grew in her throat as she remembered what she'd been distracting herself from. "Today. And I don't want to be alone either. So just stay."
Rafe didn't say anything, thrown off by how unlike her this felt.
"I'm freaked out." She admits. "And I have no one else to go to about it."
And he'd been thinking the same thing, except he was too prideful to admit it.
"Okay."
Cassie was expecting to feel regret, or guilt, or for something in her mind to tell her 'stop, this shouldn't be happening'. But she was so shaken up, and scared, that all other thoughts were out of her head. However, she convinced herself that she would've invited anyone to stay the night given the circumstances.
Cassie shut the bedroom behind her after they walked in. "We don't have to whisper now." She says. "She can't hear anything over that machine."
Rafe nodded a bit, scratching the back of his neck as be watched her move about her room, turning on the lamp on her desk, and the lights strung around the ceiling.
"Cas—" He starts. "Cassie. You told those guys back there that John Routledge took the diary—"
"Yeah." Cassie huffs, pulling her curtains closed with a sigh. Not wanting to discuss it, but knowing she probably owed him an explanation.
"Was that the truth?" Rafe asked. "John B's dad? The one that died?"
She scratched her eyebrow, then shrugged. "Yeah, he's— alive, I guess. And also after the diary, which is convenient." She thinks for a moment. "But I guess that doesn't matter anymore since he took it, and we're screwed."
"We're not screwed." Rafe responds.
Cassie gives him a look that read as 'we definitely are', walking over to her closet. As she reached up to pull spare blankets off the top shelf, her shirt lifted, and Rafe could see how closely her skin clung to her ribcage, and the small bruises that lined her lower back from poorly healed cuts.
He couldn't help but wince, he couldn't help but wonder if she'd put forth any effort to get back to a healthier state. But how could she? The second she'd gotten back to the island, it'd been chaos. Not even just this last time, but when she came back from Kitty Hawk, too. It didn't feel fair. None of this was her fault, and yet, she suffered all of the consequences.
He walked over to the closet as she struggled to pull the blankets down without causing more things to fall, reaching over her and grabbing them for her.
She felt herself practically shrink into herself as Rafe towered over her. Cassie was tall, she always had been, but she felt tiny next to him.
She turned around and took the blankets from him, nodding slightly. "Thanks." She felt herself growing shy, the word barely audible. Clearing her throat, she walked past him and over to the bed. "Rafe, I—"
When he turned back around to listen to her, her train of thought quickly faded. She couldn't even begin to remember what she was initially going to say, but whatever came next felt a lot harder to get out.
"I don't know what's going to happen." She starts, then inhales sharply.
He heard the quiver in her breath, and knew that she was struggling to hold it all together. He wanted to be there for her. He wanted to remind her that he cared about her, still, and all of the mistakes he'd made were exactly that, mistakes.
He wanted to get back to the place they were before, where she didn't hesitate around him. Where she wasn't so cold with him. For her to look at him and see someone that cares about her, not someone who hurt her.
He didn't know how to get back there, though. He wasn't even sure if the first time was real. He knew very well the state they were both in, and he knew very well how good he was at getting what he wanted. So he couldn't help but doubt the ways he'd gone about it the first time.
"What?" He let out softly, stepping toward her when she started to cry.
She planted her face in her palms. "I don't know why I'm crying." She spoke, embarrassed, trying to laugh it off.
Rafe felt like he couldn't breathe. So desperate to understand how this girl worked. How someone who'd gone through so much could go about life in such a delicate way. How her mind so easily allowed her the grace to cry.
He gently grabbed at her wrists, careful to the touch like she was made of cracked porcelain, as he pulled her hands from her face.
Her cheeks were starting to flush, her eyes puffy and glossy as a tear slowly streamed down her cheek.
She wanted to finish her sentence, she wanted to tell him why she was breaking down, make up some excuse that felt less embarrassing than just being scared. But she couldn't, too distracted by the way he was looking at her. The way he gently held her hands away from her face so he could see her. Really see her.
And she wondered then, how someone whose hands held onto her with such a gentle touch, could have possibly been the same hands who'd pulled a trigger, and killed someone.
"Are you going back?" Cassie spoke quietly. "To Guadeloupe?"
Rafe hadn't thought about it. But he knew his family had no business in the Outerbanks anymore. He nodded.
Cassie felt her lip begin to tremble again. Afraid of losing the only person who'd gone through these past several days with her, the only person who felt that same innate fear just as she had.
"Will you just..." Cassie sniffled, taking a breath to try and calm herself down. "Just lay here? With me?"
And he did, they'd turned out all of the lights, and they lay in her bed in the darkness. Listening to the cicadas sing outside until they'd fallen asleep. And he held her, his arm wrapped around her head, pinned against his chest as she got out those last shaky sobs.
The odds would always be against the two of them. Their pasts had set them up to fail. And that's what everything had felt like recently. Failure. Failure to be a loyal son, and a loyal friend. Failure to be vulnerable, and failure to be unafraid. Failure to love, and be loved.
But who decided who failed? Who drew the line in the sand of right and wrong? Because why, after everyone told her how wrong this was, did being held by him feel so right?
It felt like she was in his arms for only a few moments, before her door swung open, and the bright sun poked through her curtains and forced her eyes back shut.
"Where's my car?"
She wasn't sure whose voice she was expecting, but it wasn't her grandma's. She pushed herself off of the bed quickly, trying to adjust to the morning sun, when she realized he was gone.
"My car, Cassie. I have book club at Annie Morrison's in ten minutes." Her grandma spoke urgently.
Cassie glanced around her room, her body falling cold as if a blanket had just been ripped off of her.
"What happened to your face?!" Her grandma said, concerned.
Cassie brought a hand to her lips, significantly more sore to the touch now. She blinked a few times, still coming to. "I ran into the—" for a moment, the idea that she dreamt it all crossed her mind. "The door, in the bathroom. It was dark and I couldn't see where I was going. What did you say?"
Her grandma took a frustrated deep breath. "I need the car."
Cassie slapped her palm against her forehead. "Shit." She got out, quickly scrambling out of bed. "Shit. Grandma— I'm so sorry. I left it at— I don't have it, but hold—"
"You don't have it?"
"No, my friend, he dropped me off, I didn't even think about it—" Cassie rushed over to her closet and slipped her shoes on frantically. "Let me—"
"Cassidy Jude." Her grandma rarely used her full name, and it filled her with a panic-mixed guilt.
"I can go ask Mr. Weaver next door if we can borrow his truck—"
Her grandma shook her head. "I think it's about time you look into putting down a loan on your own car. You're too old for this." Her grandma says, waving her off and turning to leave. "Now I'm missing the one thing that gets me out of the house during the week."
Cassie about chased her out into the hall. "I can call John B—" John B, where was John B? Was he even alive? Had they gotten to him yet? "Or Kiara—"
Her grandma turned around at the top of the stairs. "And you and I need to have a talk. You missed a wellness check-in with Kitty Hawk and they won't stop sending us bills."
"Bills? For wh—" Cassie stammers over her words. "Do they fine you for missing a check-in?"
"That, and that camp was not cheap, Cassidy. Already cost me almost entirely the money your Grandpa saved for your college." She scoffs, flailing her hands out frustratedly. "I don't ask much from you."
Cassie could barely breathe. "A lot has been going on, Grandma, I didn't do it on purpose—"
Her grandma got out a laugh, shaking her head as she continued her walk down the stairs. "Sneaking in boys? I'm not that deaf, Cassidy."
Cassie followed her. "It's not like that, we—"
And then her Grandma was out the front door, slamming it right behind her.
Cassie went to go after her, mostly afraid of how in the world she was going to get halfway across the island to Annie Morrison's house without a car.
But she watched her make her way down the porch, waving down Mr. Weaver who was trimming the bushes in his front yard.
Cassie wanted to scream. Still half-asleep, and already wanting to break down into a fit again. Instead, she let out a loud, frustrated groan that shook her whole body.
She felt a knot grow in her throat as she held back the urge to cry, turning back toward the stairs to grab her phone, trying to figure out how she was going to get that car back from Tannyhill.
Who would she call, Rafe?
Rafe who disappeared this morning without another word? Who was probably half-way to Guadeloupe?
The landline started to ring, and as she instinctively went to ignore it, she instead found herself heading back down the stairs to rip it off the wall as the ringing felt like it was getting louder and louder.
"Hello?" She spoke, coming off more unfriendly than she was used to.
"I'm looking for Miss Maybank?" The man on the other line spoke.
"You're speaking to her." Cassie said, and as she finished her sentence, she registered who exactly it was on the other line.
She could almost hear him smile. "Miss Maybank, good to hear your voice. I hope I'm not calling at a bad time."
Singh.
She pinned herself closer against the wall, eyes glued to the ground. "No." She responded. She tried to come off as kind, as if that would be what would have him spare her. But it was hard to be kind when you were this horrified.
"Great, great." He says. "How is the Outerbanks? Happy to be home?"
She could barely move. "Yes. I am."
"I will cut to the chase, Miss Maybank. I realize time is valuable, and I am not one to waste." He says. "I heard you had a bit of a run-in with my men yesterday evening, is that correct?"
Cassie felt herself nodding, then spoke. "Yes."
"I heard it got a little messy, and Miss Maybank, I apologize. My men were instructed to get that diary by any means necessary, I did not realize you would be there, too. I should have told them not to attack." He spoke, then chuckled. "They thought you were trying to steal it away from them. Had no idea you were working for me."
Cassie cringed at the words. She was never working for him. She was being blackmailed.
"Didn't think to maybe tell them that you had other people on the job?" She said.
It was quiet on the other end for a moment, and as every second passed, Cassie wished she didn't say anything at all. Singh took a deep breath, then spoke again. "Miss Maybank, I am calling to thank you."
She was quiet.
"I was informed that you gave us our next lead on the diary. That you know the man who has it now." He says. "My men went after John Routledge after I instructed them to do so. And while I haven't heard from them yet, I take it I'm one step closer to getting what I want, thanks to you."
Cassie was shaking her head, disgusted with herself. Disgusted with the fact that this man was thanking her for what she'd done.
"He had a gun pinned to Rafe's head." She whispered into the phone, angry. "What was I supposed to do?"
Singh let out another happy chuckle. "Well, I suppose it doesn't matter now. I am no longer in need of your services, Miss Maybank. This has gone farther than anything a child can assist with."
She wasn't sure what he meant by that. Wasn't sure if this was a trick.
"What?"
"You've pointed me in the right direction, which is more than I thought you'd do. I must say, I was fully prepared to uphold my promise, Miss Maybank, but I am feeling generous."
Her mind was spinning. She wanted to ask questions, wanted to ensure that what Singh was saying was the truth, but she was afraid of prying too hard and upsetting him. "And Rafe, too?" She said after a moment.
"Always thinking about others, Miss Maybank." Singh said. "I regret to tell you that when I called Mr. Cameron with the same news, he did not go out of his way to ensure you were going to meet the same fate."
Cassie was taken aback, not sure what to say to that. She wasn't surprised, either. But she couldn't help the feeling of her heart sinking, even just a little.
"You won't... kill him, right? John Routledge?"
"That depends on Mr. Routledge's ability to cooperate. And let me kindly remind you of what I am capable of if you do decide to interfere in my plans any further." Singh says. "Enjoy your day, Miss Maybank."
a/n
i just have to say that cassie would absolutely know laufey's discography inside and out. she is so laufey coded
while you were sleeping - laufey
promise - laufey
lovesick - laufey
falling behind - laufey
like come awn