Right Now | Rafe Cameron

33: paradise on earth.

THIRTY THREE

paradise on earth.

"I saved you dad."

"Rafe! No!"

"She was gonna kill him, yeah, yeah, she was gonna kill him. I saved dad. What was I supposed to do. I saved him."

Rafe jolted out of sleep by a ringing phone. He was drenched in his own sweat, tangled up in the damp white sheets of his hotel bed.

Catching his breath, he picked up his phone and turned the alarm off. Fuck.

The dreams had only recently started to come back. When he was in rehab he'd had them all the time, every night, over and over like a broken record. And then he'd had them a good few years, every night, after he was released. And now they were coming back. He saw his nineteen year old self ruin his life, ripping it into shreds, over and over. He felt the cold metal of the gun in his palm, saw the blood spreading on the tarmac of the airstrip from Peterkin's dying body. He could hear his sister's crying sobs. When he was in rehab, he could feel the effect of the drugs he'd been on that day, like his dreams were trying to persuade him to relapse. But then he pulled the trigger and he woke up screaming, shaking.

It had been years.

Ever since she left two months ago. The dreams had all started to come back to haunt him, the Rafe he was, like an eternal shadow looming over him, crippling him with shame and guilt.

He got up and got dressed. His car to the airport would pick him up in twenty minutes. He'd purposely given himself as little time as possible to get out of the room. He avoided being stuck with his thoughts these days. Hence, he'd been working constantly and spent as little time by himself as possible. But at night, it all caught up with him. The fear of the dreams kept him awake and when he eventually inevitably drifted off into his subconscious, they sunk their ice cold claws into him.

But there was another reason he stared into the ceiling through the pitch black night - words that seemed to bounce and echo on the walls of his brain.

Unknown

see you soon country club

***

"Alright... Do we have everything?" Billie looked around her one final time. Uma came into the room, balancing her laptop in her arms.

"The article just reached three million views. And... Fifty thousand comments. Most of them praising the writing. Here, 'the hard facts make me angry, but somehow Billie Routledge's article makes me conflicted,'" Uma read out loud.

Billie walked up to stand next to her. She scrolled down on the comment and scoffed.

"Uma, the rest of it says 'also because Rafe Cameron is smoking hot'."

"Still, they liked your writing," Uma muttered.

"We have to go, are you ready?" Billie pleaded. Uma stepped into her sneakers cockily while Billie rolled her eyes. At that moment, there was a knock on the door. Billie didn't make it there to open before Percy and Truman barged in.

"Let's go to paradise on earth, bitch," Percy exclaimed.

They were off. God help us.

***

"This is so exotic," Uma awed as they were standing on the upper deck of the ferry from the mainland. Billie was happy that she had been able to persuade her friends to be her buffers at the wedding. Sarah and John B had been ecstatic when she asked if she could bring them. Apparently, they had just assumed. In New York, Sarah and Uma had bonded over Billie's sexlife and John B, Truman, and Percy were apparently very tight. Billie wouldn't know, she left the bar with Rafe and passed out.