CONTENT WARNING: mentions of abuse & drugs

BLAIR WATCHED AS the tide moved out. The moon glistened over the ocean, illuminating her face as she watched the sea recede. She felt the warmth of the water leave her feet, the cool air replacing it. Her hands dug into the sand beside her, running it through her fingers and drawing shapes to distract her mind.

A delicately rolled blunt sat between her two fingers. She gracefully inhaled the drug and let the smoke waft out of her mouth. She felt her heartbeat slow and her mind slipping away from the nightmare she was living. She placed the blunt upright on the side of the half-empty cardboard pizza box, before grabbing a piece of its contents and replacing the blunt with the pepperoni pizza.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Blair flinched at the sudden noise, she had forgotten she wasn't alone. Her eyes flickered to the boy beside her, stretched out across the sand, putting the blunt against his lips and pulling the intoxicating smoke into his lungs.

She admired him, sitting there, so concerned about her— yet so unconcerned with the life around him. His hair glistened in the moonlight, as did those pretty steel blue eyes that swung their way towards her as she looked so gently at him.

Rafe was expecting an answer out of Blair, a murmur, a shrug, something. And yet when he turned to see if she had even been listening she was gazing at him so softly his frustration melted into sympathy.

"I'm not sure," she replied, a kind of fear clawed away at her on the inside. A fear that made her believe that if she talked about what had occurred, it was actually real.

At that point, Blair was moving on autopilot. Every move she made was not her own, every ounce of energy was given to racking her brain and picking apart every single occurrence that happened over the previous week.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me," Rafe's tone had morphed into frustration. Blair watched as his jaw tensed, a sign that his anger was growing.

Blair was infatuated with Rafe, the two had been dating for some time, and she seemed to fall more in love with him every moment. However, the love they had for one another often became clouded with circumstances that occurred outside of their relationship.

Rafe was the oldest Cameron, destined to inherit the family business, Tanneyhill, and the secrets that had been long kept through generations of his ancestors. Blair struggled with being the oldest as well, and yet she only dealt with the harrowing secrets of her family tree. And while she held all of her family's secrets deep within her, locked safely in a small box, she would never receive the family business, or her ancestral home.

Rafe Cameron struggled with being the eldest son, while Blair Whitmore struggled with being the eldest daughter.

In some ways, the two had been destined to find one another. They had the same friends, went to the same private academy, their parents had always been friends. Yet, the two had never quite clicked until a few months before their graduation from the Academy.

She remembered looking at him the same way she had been moments prior, her soft and mysterious eyes piercing into his wild ones. The same wild ones that watched her lips as she spoke that night on the pier with all their friends.

Simpler times, ones where she worried about how she looked in a swimsuit and shorts, moments where she fussed over her new-found crush and his soft lips. Nights that ended in bonfires on the beach and sleepovers on the floor in Sarah Cameron's room.

Those moments had morphed into the current one, sitting on the beach at dusk, smoking a blunt to forget the fact her world was crashing in around her.

"I think he did it," she couldn't believe the words coming out of her own mouth, an out of body experience as she watched herself say those five words that made everything a reality.

Rafe sat there, stunned, unable to think of what he might say to the confession his girlfriend had just uttered.

"Why?" he looked at her, so vulnerable in the moment, opening up her heart to him, the same organ that had been so carefully wrapped in thorns for so many years.

Blair felt as if she was being entrapped, entangled in her web of lies that had been morphing into a labyrinth throughout her life. She knew that the decade worth of protection she had encased her heart and mind with, would never recover from the blow she was about to give it.

"Somewhere in here," she made a motion to her heart, "I have this sickening pull, this churning gut feeling that he did it."

"So, it's just a feeling?"

"Not exactly..." She trailed off, unsure if she wanted to continue, unsure if she wanted to spill the secrets of her family, to unravel her web of lies.

"The last time I saw Scooter Grubbs, he left your house with my father," she admitted, bile reaching up to sting her tongue, a forewarning that the secrets she was about to share were filled with venom. A venom that would eat away at her insides.

"The night I got home, after dinner with your family, the two left on 'business', I knew it was bullshit," she continued, watching the lapping of the waves.

She remembered being awoken by car lights pulling up her driveway, the LEDs lighting up her room as if the sun was rising to kiss her bare skin good morning. The harsh light however, did quite the opposite, and it left her more barren and cold than before she had awoken.

The light creeping through her bay window had awoken her with a start, a gnawing feeling was eating away at her insides as she watched her fathers truck pull into the drive.

The alarm clock beside her on the table read 3:00 A.M. Her mind wandered to thoughts of the witching hour, as she slipped on her house shoes and crept downstairs.

She watched from the staircase as her father slipped into the silent house through the back door, ensuring he wouldn't be heard.

"Blair," his eyes widened as his daughter's presence startled him, his voice was merely a whisper, "What're you doing awake?"

In her mind she scoffed, though she wouldn't dare do it out loud. "I thought I heard something, I also needed some water." Which wasn't a lie, the weed and alcohol in her system had left her mouth parched and her throat scratchy.

"Get your water and go back to bed," Thomas demanded. His demeanor seemed more tense than usual.

It was apparent that he had been drinking, per usual, however his shoulders were not relaxed as they usually were, his hair was more touseled and there was something on his hands. In the glare of the moonlight Blair could barely make out the darkened skin beneath his fingernails, dirt or blood, she had not the slightest idea.

"Yes sir," she mocked, testing him as lightly as she could.

As she swept beside him, head down, barely making a sound, he grabbed her.

"Don't you dare talk to me that way you fucking brat," His teeth were gritted and his tone harsh. The fingers that wrapped themselves around Blair's throat clenched with every word.

"I've given you everything, and all you do to repay me is act like a fucking bitch, I am embarrassed to call you my daughter."

Blair could feel the veins in her head scream for oxygen, she could feel the blood pooling behind her eyes as the pressure was becoming heavier.

"Oh," he laughed, a terrifying, sinister laugh, "Now you have nothing to say."

He dropped her from his grip, and with a gasp she turned and walked back up to her bedroom, still trying to catch her breath.

The bruises around her neck were still evident, faint lines that kissed her tanned skin. She had tried to cover them up, but since her father's arrest, she could care less.

Rafe stared at the blonde girl before him, devoid of any tears or any emotions besides one, anger. He had been feeling the same way. If he had known sooner what Thomas Whitmore was doing to his daughter that night, Rafe would've been the one in jail at that moment, not him.

"It's not unusual for him to come home shitfaced, but that night there was something else there. The way he carried himself, the way he snapped..." Blair trailed off, subconsciously grazing her fingers over her neck. "I knew something had happened, for fucks sake i saw the blood underneath his nails and all over his shoes."

"Did you tell the cops this?" That was the only question Rafe could muster up, he didn't want to talk about what Thomas had done to Blair any longer. The more they spoke about it the angrier he got. The more he wanted to go to the Kildare County Sheriff's department and rip Thomas Whitmore apart.

"Some of it—" she began.

"What the fuck do you mean, some of it?"

"You think I want the entire Outerbanks to know my father almost choked me to death with his bare hands?" she laughed, "Yeah, fuck that."

"I told Brax though, he came into my room a few minutes after I had gotten back into bed, said he heard something downstairs and wanted to make sure I was okay."

Braxton had heard every word said that night, even the ones Blair hadn't. And, he told the police every fucking detail. As much as it pained him to see his father sent off, to be convicted of something so vile as murder, he wanted to watch him rot. In some sick way he wanted to repay his father for what Thomas had done to Blair, how he had treated her all those years. He wanted his father to suffer for what he had put their family through, the deception, the abuse, the betrayal.

"Did you know someone pulled a gun on him?" Blair had found a way to change the subject, taking another hit of the almost finished blunt, letting the high kick in as she watched the waves roll over her feet.

"Top mentioned it, we're handling it," Rafe moved the pizza box between them, scooting into her as she laid her head on his shoulder.

"You worry about your family, we've got the pogue shit covered."

"Please don't kill anyone, I can't have my boyfriend going to jail too," she laughed lightly, feeling better now that she was close to him.

"Maybe I just won't get caught then," a sly smile moved onto his face as they watched the last of the sun disappear and bring an end to a nightmare of a day.