#you were miiiiiiiine for the summer

[outerbankies]

the pool scene was SOOOO new light summer coded like right at the start ☀️ he comes to bring her her morning coffee and she’s like hmmmm can’t you just stay here and quit ur job pls!!!! and you know for a split second he’s considering it

OOPS!

new light: summer love

new light masterlist

a/n: also takes care of (caressing inner thigh then slowly leaning in to trail kisses) from the prompt celly! wahoooooo

You’re just about to doze off beside your parents’ pool, Gretchen stretched out on the chaise lounge beside you while Margot lazes on a raft in the pool, the thick July humidity and the shade of the gigantic oak trees covered in Spanish moss enough to lull you into a cat nap.

But your parents’ dog Wilbur, who’d taken refuge under your chair, scrambles out from under and bolts through the back garden and toward the house, causing the three of you to investigate the intrusion on your otherwise perfect, post-workout pool day.

“Ladies,” Rafe greets, emerging from rows of hydrangea bushes dressed in his business casual. You place a hand over your eyes to block the sun and see him better in his powder blue button-up, navy-patterned tie faltering in the slight breeze. He makes a beeline once he spots you, setting what he’d been carrying down on the unoccupied lounge to your other side: a cardboard tray of three iced coffees from your favorite shop in town, the one you happen to know is so out of the way if he left from his dad’s office.

You hadn’t even expected to see him today, the scheduling gods against you both, but here he is taking a seat right beside you on your own chaise, leaning over you just close enough you catch his cologne, before he pulls his wayfarers off and places them on top of his head.

“Hi,” he says, leaning down for a kiss. He lets it linger, or maybe you do, still a bit stunned to see him here right now. 

“Hi,” you finally answer, taking his face in your hands the red of your nails a contrast to his cheeks. “What are you doing here, Rafe?”

He shrugs, eyes flickering down to your lips, where you’d just reapplied your Laneige, before he steals another kiss. “Wanted to see you. How was pilates?”

“Spin,” you correct, still dazed, even as you feel your chair move when your dog dives back under it. “It was good. Still waiting for you to join us like you promised you would.”

“And I will,” he promises again, with another shrug. “Before the end of the summer.”

“Sorry to ruin your nooner, Cameron!” comes Margot’s voice from the pool. Gretchen and Rafe both laugh but you just groan, hiding your face in your hands as he twists toward her to make his reply, his tongue just as quick.

“All good, Margs. Brought you a coffee, if you wanna act a little more grateful,” he says, tilting his head toward the drink carrier.

Gretchen gasps as she sits up, up until this point laid back and watching you two with a sickly fond look, “Me too?”

“Of course,” Rafe replies. “I know Y/n/n is a fiend, but these aren’t all for her.”

She pats his shoulder, squealing on her way to pick up her drink, taking Margot’s too and walking toward the other side of the pool where the other girl floats, chancing a wink back at you as she leaves earshot. 

“I’m covered in tanning oil,” you say in warning, concerned for his pastel shirt and what Ward will say if he comes back from lunch covered in oily splotches, as you feel him sink further into your side.

“I’m very aware of what you are and aren’t covered in right now,” he murmurs. Rafe seems completely indifferent to all the places your bodies touch, giving you a once-over.

You make hands at the last drink in the carrier, humming in satisfaction when he hands it over and it tastes exactly how you thought it would. “You on lunch?”

He nods. “Didn’t realize I wouldn’t get to see you tonight, so.”

“I know,” you sigh. “I’m sorry I got the days mixed up, but the Boneyard should still be fun.”

You had an overnight babysitting gig a few neighborhoods over that you thought wasn’t until tomorrow, putting a bit of a wrench in the dinner plans you made with your boyfriend before you were supposed to ride with your friends to a bonfire.

You’d let him know as soon as you confirmed with the kid’s parents this morning, to which Rafe had replied a long (and dramatic) chain of sad faces. 

“It’s okay, baby. Might stay in anyway,” he says, kissing your cheek, then hiding his face there for a second. His lips brush the shell of your ear, “especially if there’s any possible way you sneak me into the Truitts’ tonight.”

When he pulls away to smirk at you, you grasp onto his tie, keeping him close to your face. “You’re not down.”

Rafe swallows, and you hate the way your eyes track the movement of his throat. “It would be worth the awkward run-in with Mrs. Truitt at the Island Club.”

“You can barely handle sneaking in here,” you say, your head tilting toward your bedroom window, which Rafe takes a second to look at wistfully, probably reminiscing on the times he’s nearly broken an ankle scaling the trellis for it this summer. “You jump every time you hear a creak in the night, thinking it’s my dad about to drag you out by your ears.”

“There are a lot of creaks at night,” he defends.

“Old house,” you challenge, releasing him and stretching your arms up over your head, settling down further into the chaise. “You should be used to it by now.”

The hand he’d been resting on your knee cap trails just slightly down your inner thigh. “I’ll never be used to this.”

You sigh, pressing our legs together, which budges his hand out from the area it’d been exploring. But Rafe’s touch doesn’t stray far, the metal on his ring finger resting on your outer thigh instead, his thumb stroking.

“You’re teasing me,” you warn.

His thumb hooks into the string of your bathing suit bottoms. “Oh, I’m teasing you?”

“Sure you can’t quit your job?”

“Be our coffee boy forever,” Margot calls.

“We tip!” Gretchen tacks on.

“Well with an offer like that…” he murmurs only for you to hear, suddenly as privy as you to the fact that your friends are probably listening in on as much as they possibly can. 

He still leans in for another kiss though, a few pecks trailing from your lips, over your jaw and down to where the strap of your bathing suit top rests over your neck, his face coming back to hover over yours as his eyes slowly open again. “Dinner tomorrow instead?”

You nod readily. “Dinner tomorrow. I’ll be free by the afternoon. I could come meet you in town? By the office?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I’ll come get you, sweetheart.”

You beam, pleased you already know when you’ll next see him again, even if it is over 24 hours from now. You couldn’t help it and neither could he; much to the chagrin of your parents and friends, the two of you were inseparable this summer. “Okay. And have fun tonight if you do go, alright?”

He shakes his head, collapsing back into you, his face hidden in your neck again.

“Nooo,” he whines. “On the real, if I did come to the Truitts—”

“Alright,” you laugh, getting your hands under his shoulders to push him away. “I’m pretty sure your lunch is over.” 

“Over when I say it is,” he says, not going without a few more kisses, one somehow ending up on your shoulder, right over a mark you’d had to cover up with clothes and concealer ever since he left it there. But he eventually does let you breathe, leaving a hand on your cheek while he checks the watch on his other wrist. “You’re right though. Shit.”

“Mhm,” you say, nodding into his palm. “Have a good rest of your day. I’m happy you came by.”

He kisses your forehead before finally standing again, readjusting his tie, looking down at it and then back to you. “I’m happy, too. How do I look?”

“Oh my god, fine, Rafe. Get outta here!” Margot shouts.

Over the sound of Gretchen’s laughter, you nod in assurance at him. “You look good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He just barely avoids a splash of water from the girls as he makes his way back inside, causing you to laugh around the straw of your drink, which you’d barely gotten to try. Rafe looks back from the hydrangeas as he puts his sunglasses back on, shaking his head with a grin splitting his face.

You don’t know how you’ll last ’til tomorrow.

[septembersghost]

I literally can't listen to Unchained Melody without fucking sobbing

this won't help because it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of story, and possibly you also have to know my dad, but imma tell it anyway - one time when i was a kid, and visiting him in the summer, the righteous brothers version of that song came on the radio in his truck. and i had just seen the movie ghost for the first time (which my mom regretted because she felt i was too young for it, but it was one of her good friend's favorite movie), and it had low-key freaked me out. not patrick swayze or demi moore or whoopi of course, but the malevolent spirits that, like, tear ghosts away? (i've seen it since, but it's been a loooong time.) anyway, i associated the song with the movie, so i asked him to turn the station. or maybe i had a tape with me, i subjected him to my music however i could haha. we were going to the grocery store. we shop, we get out to the parking lot, and he's going to take the groceries out of the cart, and he acts like he's going to ask me to do something, and instead launches into this very loud, very dramatic rendition of unchained melody. in the parking lot. my dad is a boisterous, gregarious (and can be confrontational) person (and my mom is a great people person, how they got a painfully shy introvert as a daughter is anyone's guess), and he loves to sing. at a volume. he's filled in for the cantor at shul. he never quite understood my stage fright with my own singing, and tbh a big dose of that fearlessness really would've helped me. but imagine being, idk, at most ten years old, and your dad is like, "ohhhhhhhh myyyyyy LOOOOVE MY DAAARLIN' i've hungered for your TOUUUCH a long, lonely tiiiime. TIIIIIIIME GOOOOOES BY so sloooowwwly and time can do so much, are you STILL *MIIIIIIIINE*?" deranged behavior. but i was basically crylaughing. and i'm like, what on earth, why would you do it that way? and he's like, it was good enough for the king 🤷🏻‍♂️

years pass and i somewhat forget about this, and didn't know the reference (i got the elvis part, but not the specific moment), and at some point as a young teenager, for who knows what reason, i run across the performance from june 26, 1977. as previously mentioned, i was an elvis dabbler growing up as far as the hits go, but didn't know a lot of specifics. his presence was always there in a diaphonous way. so this is...somewhere on the internet in low quality (not youtube! i looked it up, it didn't exist yet? maybe it was a fansite, this would've been around the time a little less conversation was remixed and having a moment), in the middle of the afternoon at my desk in my room after school. i can still picture that room, my chair, the bookshelf. (funny how certain moments are like that - music tends to cement things in my mind more than anything else. there's this lyric from a song called "this is one of those moments" in yentl - i will always remember this chair, that window, the way the light streamed in...). there's no real reason for me to have recall of this, but i do. in the intervening years, unchained melody had remained this hilarious, somewhat embarrassing, image of my father. and this video just...almost hurts too much to look at, it's so heart-shattering. it just had me in tears. and i thought...this isn't something i can delve into right now, and i put it away, as if it went into a box on a shelf in the attic of my head. and he sort of resided there. waiting for the day when it was time to take him down and understand. suffice to say, obviously, he's not waiting up there anymore. he's in the heart chamber now.

it's such a tremendous and yet tremulous performance, it's almost like something in him so incandescent had to blaze forth, had to give that, had to prove it, had to exude the full beauty of his voice, had to be able to smile at that audience in spite of everything. it's very near...how to phrase this? transforming it into a sacred song, it's like he made it gospel. because he had to.

the conclusion here being, yes, same. it breaks me. but the little girl in my memory can still also hear my dad and the giggling, and i don't actually think elvis would mind that part. i think it might make him smile in that same way. so maybe we can hold close to a bit of both. god speed your love to me.

[knuckles-bloody-for-me]

Okay wait this shit is "live" aka I have 16 hours to find a way to live through hearing "BACK when we were still changing for the BEtter, wanting was enough, for me it was enough. to live for the HOPE of it all, cancel plans just in CASE you'd call and say MEET ME behind the mall sO MUCH for SUMMER LOVE and saying us cause you wereN'T MIIIIIIIINE TO LOOOOOOOOOSE" without passing out from the sheer power of love colas for that?