Special Episode: Dream Catcher
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Ralph is walking up the path to Aiden and Jamie’s house. He’s… not sure how he got here. Why he came here.
Regardless, he’s excited to see Aiden and Jamie. He picks up speed as he gets closer to the door. He hears laughter from inside, laughter he recognizes. Noah, Raj, Ripley. All of the guys must be having a kickback. Ralph must be running late, or something. He speeds up more, anxious to join the others. It sounds like they’re having a good time.
Ralph stops at the front door of the house, staring at it in confusion. Where’s the handle? He could have sworn it was there a second ago, but it disappeared when he got up close. He’s locked out, stuck on the outside. No way for him to get in.
Jamie’s voice drifts out from the house through the front windows.
“I’m just glad that Ralph isn’t here,” he’s saying. “I’d hate it if he came over and ruined tonight like he ruins everything else he touches.”
Ralph goes very still, then slowly lowers the hand he’d been lifting to knock with.
“You don’t have to tell me,” comes Noah’s voice in answer. “I’ll never forgive him for the shit he put me through. What kind of a person can do shit like that? You gotta be dead inside, that much I know.”
Aiden’s voice joins the others. “If it makes you feel better, Noah, that’s why he’ll never get to be happy.”
“Yeah, since it’s why no one loves him, and nobody ever will. Hate to say it, but it’s too late. He’s ruined, that’s the truth. Too broken to be worth anything. He’s a fucking monster, nothing can fix that, and he knows it. He’ll be all alone in the end. But that’s what he deserves, anyways.”
Ralph backs slowly away from the door, the tears blurring his eyes starting to slip down his cheeks. He’s not even sure who said that last part. Somehow it felt like everybody said it at once.
“Who are we even talking about?” Ripley jumps in. “Have I forgotten about him already, or something?”
“Isn’t there some way you can just get rid of him?” asks a voice that sounds like Raj, although Ralph is getting too far away to hear. “He’s always in the way. Drop him off at the pound, already. He’s the only one who can’t see how much we all wish he’d just-”
Ralph doesn’t want to hear the rest. He whips around to run, then freezes again when he sees the person suddenly standing in front of him.
“Ralph?” She reaches out for him, her warm eyes wide with concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Calla!” He hates that he’s in tears in front of her, but he can’t help it. He throws himself into her outstretched arms, then drops his head to bury his face in her neck. “Oh my god, thank fucking god you’re here, I don’t - I don’t know what’s-”
Calla closes her arms tightly around him, strokes her fingertips through his hair. “What’s the matter?”
“Am I gonna end up all alone, Calla? Is that what’s gonna happen to m-me?”
“No,” Calla breathes, holding Ralph close to herself. “No, that’s not gonna happen. Trust me, I’ll be here. I’ll be here with you.”
Ralph takes a deep breath, leaning into all the trust he has in Calla, making himself believe her. He lets out a sob of sheer relief.
But when he goes to gratefully close his arms around Calla, he’s holding nothing.
His arms are full of empty air. All he can feel is a sharp, painful absence where Calla should be.
Ralph lifts his head and looks around. His eyes give him nothing back. He’s alone, surrounded by complete emptiness. Bright whiteness spreads on all sides, nothing else. Only the sounds of his panted breaths break the complete silence.
Ralph instinctively turns to look for the nearest shadow to hide in, but there aren’t any. This place is so bright that it hurts his eyes, and the relentless brightness reveals that there’s no one here with him, not in any direction. He’s trapped in the light, totally exposed, and all by himself.
“Calla?” he stammers, turning slowly on the spot, his eyes desperately searching the empty expanse around him.
He stops still when he finds himself facing a small, lit-up kitchen. It’s simply and suddenly there, in the midst of the emptiness. Completely on its own. Like a single room of a messy, broken-down dollhouse, but life-sized.
Ralph’s mom is leaning against the kitchen counter. She has a glass in one hand, filled to the brim with gin, and the now-empty bottle it came from clasped in the other. There’s a strange, dazed, blurred look in her red eyes, and she’s barely keeping herself upright, using the kitchen counter for support. Trembling and unbalanced, the same way she gets when she has particularly bad hangovers after a particularly long night out.
This is probably one of those, left over from this morning. She’s clearly trying to drink it off, although this is a lot for a night she didn’t go out to the bar. Pretty early in the night, too.
Ralph turns around to sneak past her. He hates the way she talks when she’s this deep into a bottle of gin. He’s hoping to drop off his backpack and get outside again unnoticed.
He tries to stick to the shadows where she can’t see him, but a slant of light from the hallway falls on his face.
“Ralph,” his mom calls shakily, spotting him from the corner of her eye.
She turns around to face him. It’s an ungraceful movement, knocking an empty can of tonic water and a squashed bit of lemon onto the already sticky floor, but Ralph’s mom doesn’t seem to notice. He watches as she throws back nearly half the glass of gin, splashing some onto her hands when she sets it back down on the counter. She wipes it off on her jeans, but Ralph still gets a big whiff of it when she motions for him to stay where he is. Her hand waves slightly to the left of where he’s standing, like her unfocused eyes are seeing a few of him.
“Wwwwait a minute, honey, I - I have sssomething I need to tell you.”
Ralph reluctantly steps back into the kitchen and silently looks up at her. She flinches, tosses her long hair over her shoulder, then snatches up the glass and finishes off everything that’s left. She closes her eyes, grits her teeth. Sets down the glass, then folds her arms tightly over her chest.
Ralph watches her uncertainly from the other side of the kitchen table, increasingly worried. Seeing his mom this upset makes him want to go and hug her. He knows better than to actually do that, but the unusual impulse is alarming, unsettling. Why does Ralph feel the need to try something like that, out of nowhere? For the same reason that his mom just called him honey, probably for the first time ever? Whatever that was?
Ralph is suddenly struck with a vague sense of deep uneasiness. He’s pretty sure there must be some seriously bad news if his mom wants to talk to him. Doubly so because of the honey thing. He doesn’t even know what happened yet, but - something about the way she looks at him multiplies the growing alarm in his chest, and all of a sudden it swells into an icy cold fear that takes over his whole body. Cold like he can’t explain, colder than the coldest day of his life. Nothing, nothing has ever felt colder than this.
Too late, Ralph suddenly remembers where he knows this feeling from. Why all of this feels so familiar.
“Jesus Christ, okay,” his mom mutters, without opening her eyes. “Let’s just get this over with… Ralph, listen…”
“No,” Ralph whispers hoarsely, slowly backing away. “Not this, please not this…”
He’s waiting for his mom to say - it’s about your dad.
Instead, she says - “It’s about Calla.”
Ralph freezes, staring at her, the lump in his throat cutting at him like a ball of ice-cold thorns.
“It’s about Noah,” his mom goes on, in the exact same voice. “It’s about Jamie. It’s about Tycho. It’s about Melanie. It’s about Ripley.”
Ralph flattens his hands over his ears, shivering everywhere. “No… no…”
“It’s about Raj. It’s about Nikita. It’s about Aid-”
“NO!”
Ralph snaps upright in bed, gasping for breath, his eyes wide open. He’s panting with his entire body, covered in a light sheen of cold sweat, his chest rising and falling hard. The world is swimming around him, echoes of tangled voices resounding in his head, the echo of his own shouting voice bouncing off of the walls.
He doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening. He looks around frantically, lost and bewildered, but his eyes are taking nothing in.
“Whoa, whoa - hey,” says a gentle, rasping voice at his side. “Ralph, hey, it’s okay! You were having a nightmare, I woke you up.”
Ralph recoils violently as someone touches a hand to his shoulder. He lets out a sharp snarl of words before he can stop himself.
“Get your fucking hands off of me if you want to keep them!”
His icy voice cracks across the room like a whip. Silence falls from the other side of the bed, and the fingers on Ralph’s shoulder fall away. Ralph turns away from them, panting hard, struggling to drag in more than a shallow breath.
“Not real,” he stammers to himself, trembling. “No, it’s not real - this is more - more of the - the-”
The hand suddenly catches his wrist, in direct defiance of Ralph’s order to stay back. An instant, automatic explosion of blinding fury overtakes everything else in Ralph’s mind.
The rage allows him one deep breath, one deep flood of badly-needed oxygen. He snarls out a sharp growl of anger and starts to wrench his hand away, but for all the strength he has, he’s apparently outmatched in agility.
The other fingers twist around, tighten their grasp, then give Ralph a hard yank. The room spins around him as the hand gripping his wrist uses it to whip him around, at the same time wrenching him flat onto his back.
Without releasing his wrist, Calla gracefully leaps over Ralph like a springing panther. She lands with a knee on either side of him, and her hands forcefully pinning both of his wrists to the bed.
“Does this not seem real to you?” she snaps, her hazel eyes blazing as they stare down into his.
Ralph stares up at her with wide eyes, panting, startled. The burst of rage had swept his mind blank, and now Calla is filling it up with - this.
His senses are all waking up in response to the sight and feel of her, and things are gradually beginning to reach him again. His surroundings start to fill in like a photo slowly exposing.
The quiet bedroom. The leather wristbands touching his skin. The soft chirping of distant crickets breaking the deep hush of night, and the whisper of the breeze coming in through the windows. The moonlight falling over the soft texture of Calla’s buzzed hair, the many glimmering piercings in her ears, her beautiful almond eyes.
The shadow she casts over Ralph, which wraps around him like a blanket. The warm, hard pressure of her hands pinning his wrists.
Ralph takes a real breath.
He’s in his bedroom. He’s with Calla. Tycho hasn’t come over from her dog bed to see what’s happening, but that’s because Angie gave her some vaccinations today, and they turned her into a sleepy ball of fur for the next twenty-four hours. Ralph’s girls are both here with him, both safe and accounted for.
It was a nightmare, a nightmare, just a nightmare…
“Do you need further proof?” Calla asks, then tips forward without waiting for an answer.
She gives Ralph’s lower lip a hard, sharp bite. He gasps, his entire body jolting, a deep blush kindling in his cheeks. Any remaining traces of sleep-haze left in his mind instantly go up in smoke.
He gazes up at Calla as she draws back, his chest rising and falling hard. She tilts her head to the side, looking deep into his infatuated eyes, then releases his wrists.
“You don’t scare me, Ralph,” she says, with fire in her soft, raspy voice.
Ralph exhales a heavy breath through his nose, then reaches up to gratefully stroke her cheek. “Yeah. Thank fucking god for that.”
He slowly sits up again, staring up into Calla’s eyes. He’s aching to hold her, but the nightmare is clawing at him, trying to imprint itself on his mind. He remembers vividly how Calla disappeared from his arms as soon as he tried to close them around her.
Ralph hesitates for a minute, then slowly folds his arms around Calla. For a split second he’s terrified, and then - he could sink against her in instant relief. He lets out a huge, shaky exhale against her. For all the surprising softness of her sleek, muscled body, she feels firm and solid in his arms. She might look like something out of a sexy daydream, but she’s real.
The gentle, steady thump of her heartbeat against Ralph’s ear is sweet music he could listen to forever.
She drops to sit on his lap, to snuggle up closer to him. He takes deep breaths of her, slowly calming down. The nightmare is starting to fade into confused obscurity in his head, but it’s making a few last swipes for him on its way out. He abruptly remembers some of the things the guys were saying about him in it.
A jagged, crushing stab of hurt slams Ralph’s chest and nearly makes his eyes fill up before he remembers that the guys never actually said any of that shit. In fact…
Isn’t there some way you can just get rid of him? He’s always in the way. Drop him off at the pound, already.
That’s not something Raj said. That’s… that’s something an ex-boyfriend of Ralph’s mom said, once. Talking about Ralph without realizing he was listening from the shadows, easily within range to hear him. And Ralph’s mom - failing to make the same realization - had let out a snort of laughter, then swatted the boyfriend’s shoulder and giggled, stop it! You’re so bad.
The people who Ralph is secretly starting to think of as his real family, they would never say that. It sounds like the last thing any of them would say. That was why it shocked Ralph so badly in his nightmare, wasn’t it?
He knows in his heart that none of his people would ever do that to him. They may not know how much they really mean to him, and maybe they mean more to him than he does to them, he doesn’t know - but they would never say something like that about him. Those words came from somewhere else, from Ralph’s past catching up with him in his sleep.
As for the rest of it, well… all that probably came from himself.
None of it was real, Ralph promises himself again, tracing his fingertips over Calla’s body. This is what’s real.
He takes another deep breath, holding Calla tight to him, and lets the nightmare melt away. When his anxious brain tries to replay it for him again, it comes up with a mostly empty reel. Just a faint, fading sense-memory of being terrified.
Ralph’s eyes flutter open anxiously as Calla shifts in his arms. He starts to tighten his grasp on her, afraid she might move away, but she was only leaning over to the night table.
She pushes his phone into his hand. “Your phone’s been blowing up, by the way.”
Ralph looks down at the slew of notifications on his screen, his heartbeat picking up in a rush of concern. He quickly scans the notifications for bad news, already mentally running through which runners he has moving tonight, who might have gotten into trouble. There’s always the possibility there was a no-knock raid on one of the op houses -
Ralph pauses, blinking down at the screen. This - isn’t his burner phone. It’s his personal one that has all of the notifications.
A few of them are individually from Aiden and Noah, but most of them are from the group chat with all of the guys.
It doesn’t look like anything serious is happening, though. Based on the fact that the most recent text sent to the chat was - inexplicably - a whole row of sweet potato emojis from Noah.
Another text pops up on Ralph’s phone while he’s still looking at it. This one is from Aiden.
Very excited for Ralph to wake up and bring some brain cells back to the chat. There are signs that the situation here is getting out of control.
And then, from Ripley - Wake the fuck up, Ralph!📢 We need your guess as to what Noah mistakenly thinks that emoji means. I’m really sure he doesn’t know it’s a sweet potato, based on the context.
Noah’s text pops up seconds later to replace Ripley’s. Bro, what? A sweet potato?
Oh, god, Raj responds. And at the same time, from Jamie - Yeah, Ralph, wake up, we need you! Tell us if you think we actually want to know what Noah thought it was, please.
Deep affection wells up in Ralph’s chest, warming him through and through. He finds himself staring down at his phone with grateful eyes.
He responds definitely not, then tosses his phone aside and looks up at Calla again, trying to pull himself back together. He’s finally got the ground back beneath his feet, but he’s still badly shaken, and his voice comes out in a hoarse whisper all the same.
“I’m - I’m sorry. For making you think I was trying to scare you.”
“Oh. Were you not trying?” Calla tilts her head to the side, then quirks an eyebrow at him. “You’ve got a natural knack for scariness, babe. It’s only that it doesn’t work on me. I already know how sweet you are inside, unfortunately for you.”
Ralph is startled by this answer, but it doubles the warmth in his chest.
“Your scariness works on me, just not the way you mean for it to,” he admits, then blushes instantly.
Calla lets out a soft laugh, winding her arms around his neck. “Yeah, I know.”
She pauses for a moment, then cradles one of her hands against her chest and rolls out her wrist, wincing a little bit. “You were holding onto me so tightly in your sleep.”
Now that the world feels solid around him, Ralph abruptly realizes just how badly he fucked up, in a myriad of different ways. His heart sinks all the way down.
Not sure what to do, he softly kisses Calla’s wrist where he held it too tight, bites his lip guiltily, then buries his face in the curve of her neck, overwhelmed with gratitude. He can’t believe he didn’t scare her. He can’t believe she’s not furious with him.
“I’m so sorry, beautiful,” he murmurs, holding her by her waist, stroking his thumbs over her sides. He doesn’t lift his head to look at her, sharply aware of the ashamed expression on his face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Guess - guess this counts as a bad day for me, huh?”
Calla and Ralph have both been through the shit and back, and they’re trying to heal together. They talked at the beginning about the good days and the bad days.
“I think what we should do,” Calla said to him, “Is enjoy the hell out of the good days. Together.”
“What about the bad days?” Ralph had asked, painfully aware that he would unavoidably have some.
Calla had shrugged her shoulders, smiling sadly at him. Like she knew she’d have some, too.
“We try to forgive each other for those,” she said. “Help each other get through them. Grow from them, if we can.”
Ralph has kept that comforting thought close to his heart ever since. But it hasn’t completely stopped him from worrying. There might be enough bad days that Calla gets tired of having to forgive him for them. Or there might be one very bad day that would put her off for good.
Ralph has tried his hardest to make sure that neither of those things happens. He wants there to be a lot, a lot more good days than there are bad days.
It’s actually a source of reassurance that Calla sometimes has her bad days, too. Ralph hates to see her upset about anything, but he’d feel guilty all the time if he was the only one who ever fucked up.
And sometimes Calla’s bad days unexpectedly transform into legendary good days.
Calla and Ralph are both trying to control their tempers better. Calla is definitely making headway, but she struggles with it sometimes, especially if whatever made her mad reminded her in some way of her ex.
She came over to Ralph’s place once after she’d had an awful day with her software engineering work. The people she had to work with on a project were being condescending, trying to teach Calla stuff she already knew, ignoring her suggestions. By the time she got to Ralph’s place, she was in a simmering rage that seemed dangerously close to igniting.
It wasn’t directed at Ralph, but then it suddenly was when he began by saying, “Okay, just calm down and-”
He might as well have tripped an explosive charge. Before he could blink, Calla was on her feet in front of him, her hazel eyes practically smoking, her gaze pinning him down to the couch. Bristling like a hellcat, bearing down on him with fangs bared and claws out.
“Ralph!” she hissed, her voice seething, her eyes like the flaming glare of a mythic Fury. “Do not tell me to calm down! Don’t say anything, actually! I’ve listened to enough talk today, so don’t you dare say another word!”
She seized a fistful of his shirt, then used the other hand to stab her index finger at the couch.
“Now throw me down on this couch and do everything you said you would in your texts, everything you said you wanted to do to me tonight! Everything, got that? Don’t stop until I can’t think anymore! That’s how you can help!”
Calla had stopped there, out of breath. She seemed to abruptly realize how many orders she had just issued Ralph, one after another. And what exactly those orders were.
She blushed a little, then lifted her chin defiantly, clearly prepared to meet the full force of Ralph’s own hair-trigger temper without flinching.
Ralph was sitting motionless on the couch, clutching the cushions tight with both hands. He can’t imagine the look that was on his face, but he knows that his eyes were perfectly round, his lips slightly parted.
Without knowing what he was doing, he drew in a sharp, shuddering breath, then flung himself to his knees in front of Calla.
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he breathed, panting eagerly, staring up at her with adoring eyes.
Calla blinked hard at him, then burst into startled giggles as he caught her around her thighs, spun her around, and wrenched her feet out from under her. She didn’t even have time to bounce on the couch before his hands were sliding up the front of her jeans, urgently feeling for the zipper.
Afterwards Calla gently explained to Ralph that telling her to calm down when she’s upset generally doesn’t help with anything, and please don’t do that again.
“You can just assume that I’m already trying to calm down.”
“Okay, that’s fair. I won’t say it next time, I promise.”
“Thank you. But I’m - I’m really sorry that I lost my shit on you like that. I’m trying to get better, but you know how it is… just - I’m sorry. Are you mad at me?”
Ralph had sat up on his elbows to stare at her, still panting, staggered and incredulous.
“You’re sorry?” he repeated, so startled that Calla dissolved into laughter at the expression on his face.
Ralph closes his eyes at the memory, flooded with guilt. He wishes desperately that his bad day had been more like that one. Instead of him probably startling the hell out of Calla. Holding her too hard, then trying to tear his wrist from her grasp. Snapping at her for being nice enough to wake him up from the nightmare he was trapped in.
Ralph drops his head, crestfallen. Fuck.
He wishes that his bad days could turn into good days, too.
Calla starts to pull back, clearly meaning to look at Ralph. He holds her to him to stop her, hiding his face better against her neck.
She bites his shoulder, a bite on the far side of gentle.
Ralph lets out a sharp exhale of surprise and pain, then draws a deep breath back in as a rush of electricity flares in his chest. A burning blush goes to his face, his pulse kicking up.
Calla always knows exactly how much force to use without actually hurting him. Just enough to send a spike of dizzying pleasure through him, to get his focus locked to her and nothing else. To get his senses peaked and supercharged to breathless, pinpoint awareness.
Calla knows not to hold back, and not to be afraid of leaving a mark. If she leaves Ralph aching afterwards, it’s a good ache, one he lovingly savors until it fades away. That ache means that someone wanted him so bad, it hurt.
Calla gives him every indication that she loves leaving him with those sweet little aches just as much as he loves getting them. Which is just about the only thing that could’ve made him love it even more.
Ralph let her draw back after she bit him, and now she can look at his face like she wanted to. Her lips quirk up in a smile when she sees the deepening blush blazing across his cheeks, put there from the bite. She touches a fingertip very lightly to the broken bridge of Ralph’s nose, then to his cheek, feeling the heat of it.
“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?” she murmurs playfully, squeezing Ralph with her thighs, first gently, then gradually harder.
The movement sends a vivid, intoxicating spasm of want through Ralph. He clamps his teeth, struggling to listen to what Calla is actually saying. The sultry rasp of her voice seems to dance across his skin as she tips forward to nuzzle his neck, and he can feel her smiling before she draws back and looks at him.
“Yeah, you are,” she giggles. “I can tell.”
“You’re distracting,” he stammers, staring up at her with smitten eyes. “To put it as mildly as humanly possible.”
Calla trails a fingertip down his jawline, then bends to leave a kiss on the muscle of it. Her hand drops lower, gently traces the angel wings on his ribs.
“Do you want to talk about the nightmare you had?” she asks, in a softer, more serious voice.
Ralph blinks hard at her, then has the realization out loud. “I - forgot it. I forgot everything.”
Calla arches an eyebrow, then lets out a soft ripple of sweet, raspy laughter. Ralph drinks it in, feeling a big smile spread across his face.
Calla runs her hand back up Ralph’s chest, her head angled to the side. “Are you lying?”
“Nope,” Ralph says, then lets out a helpless laugh of his own.
Calla’s beautiful lips turn up in a smile. They’re all darkened from kisses that Ralph left on them earlier in the night.
The sleek, delicate lines of Calla’s face turn the moonlight into magic where it hits her, soft and glowing. Ralph lets out an awed little breath, feeling like the luckiest man on earth just to get to look at her in this intimate way, from this intimate angle, with her lips shaded darker because his were pressed against them.
It’s a fucking miracle, one staggering in its magnitude.
He realizes he’s staring up at her with open eagerness and giant, worshipful eyes, nearly panting with enthusiasm. He quickly drops his gaze to the bedspread, struggling to pull it together.
He can’t help himself sometimes. He had no idea it could be like this, with someone.
God, Calla is so precious to him. He hates that he held her too tightly.
“You’re - you’re really not mad?” he asks softly, anxiously. “I’m so sorry, Calla. I feel dumb as fuck, letting a nightmare shake me up like that. You’d think I was a little kid. God fucking damnit, I’ve been trying so hard to be better… I - I’ll make it up to you, okay? I promise. But you’re not mad?”
“No.” Calla gently lifts Ralph’s face and puts her forehead to his, so that when she shakes her head, the movement shakes his head, too. “I don’t hold your nightmares against you. And you apologized, then promised to make it up to me, so - that is better, right? Better than you would’ve been before?”
Ralph absorbs that slowly, then exhales in relief.
Calla smiles, then presses a kiss onto the place where she bit his lower lip. It’s a little tender, a little raw. The sting of pain when Calla’s lips graze it, along with the sweet heat of her breath - it makes Ralph’s toes curl, throws a hail of molten sparks up through his chest.
“Snapping at me, though,” Calla murmurs, her lips grazing his with every word, “You’re gonna have to pay for that.”
Ralph’s breath hitches, and Calla kisses him again. Ralph makes the kiss last longer and grow deeper, unable to stop himself. Calla just does this to him. Switches everything else off - no, overpowers everything else - until all Ralph knows is the irresistible, insatiable, all-consuming hunger he has for her. Hunger like he’s never known before. The intensity of it catches him unprepared every single time.
Calla goes right to his blood like no one ever has, and lights it on fire. She becomes the only thing. Ralph would beg for this if she made him. Sometimes she does, and even though he’d never admit it to anyone, he loves that, too.
He’s already losing himself in sweet surrender, already forgetting about everything except the way it feels to have her on his lap like this…
Calla slowly breaks off the kiss and pulls away. Ralph looks up at her searchingly, but she doesn’t say anything right away. Their mingled, heightened breaths are the only sound in the room for a moment.
“Are you happy?” Calla asks abruptly, the soft rasp of her voice very quiet.
Ralph blinks at her in total bewilderment. He was just thinking to himself that it’s fucking ridiculous he somehow got to where he is right now. The idea that a beautiful girl with a beautiful heart might take any kind of a shine to him was a far-off fantasy before, looking more and more impossible every day.
Now he’s here, in this situation, with Calla.
Half the time when he’s with her like this he feels like he must be dreaming, because it’s too good to be true. Things were never this good even in his wildest dreams, and Ralph has spent a lot of time alone in his imagination.
Is he happy?
“I mean - yeah,” Ralph laughs, shaking his head in confusion, gazing up into Calla’s eyes. “What the f-? Can’t you tell?”
Calla gasps as Ralph takes her hips in his hands and teasingly rocks her on his lap. She lets out a little cascade of giggles, then bites her lip, the color in her cheeks heightened.
“That’s not what I mean! I mean like - just, generally?”
Ralph stares at her, half-laughing, taken aback. “Wait, what…? Why would you feel like you have to ask me that?”
Calla shrugs her shoulders, nibbling her lip.
“Just - I thought we had a really nice night together, and you seemed so relaxed when we fell asleep. I’m kinda surprised you had a nightmare right after. A really bad one, too, by the looks of it. You were mumbling something about, um - about not getting to be happy? And I know it was just a dream, but…”
Calla fades off, moonlight glimmering in her hazel eyes as they search Ralph’s.
Ralph suddenly remembers what the nightmare voices said about him. About how he would never find real happiness, never get to remember what it tasted like.
But that can’t be right, because…
“I am happy, though,” Ralph murmurs, as it slowly dawns on him. “I’m happy.”
He is. Not in a light, superficial way. This is the opposite of that. And he’s felt like this for some time, so maybe not in a fleeting way, either. After all the record lows, there have finally been record-breaking highs, and…
Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, Ralph has grown to be so happy that he was actually surprised when Calla felt the need to ask him if he is.
I’m happy.
Ralph stares straight ahead with wide, startled eyes, but Calla smiles down at him in relief.
“Seriously, I - I really am.” Ralph gives himself a shake, looking up at her again. “Trust me on that, Hellcat. If anything, I think the nightmare was because - maybe some part of me is - worried I’m getting too comfortable?”
Calla laughs, then groans sympathetically. She takes two handfuls of Ralph’s hair and tugs on them to playfully move his head from side to side. Like she’s trying to clear his mind for him, literally.
“Yeah, I know the feeling,” she sighs. “Your dumb brain is doing too much even in its sleep.”
“Nothing helpful, either. It’s not like it’s solving logistical problems for the business. All it does is fuck with me. It’s the only part of me still telling lies. And I’m the one they’re directed at.” Ralph leans forward tiredly, rests his forehead on Calla’s collarbone. “Might be that’s what I deserve. Maybe that’s why it’s happening.”
“Don’t do that,” Calla scolds softly. She locks her arms around Ralph, a pout turning down her full lips. “I hate it when you start talking about what you deserve. You never get it right. It’s one of those places where your brain is broken, so just trust me, please. If the nightmare was you torturing yourself because you think you deserve it, you can stop.”
She says it in a voice that Ralph knows it’s pointless to argue with.
“And don’t feel too bad,” she adds, after a moment. “It’s awful to see you that upset, but honestly, I - I’m glad I’m not the only one who has bad days.”
Ralph blinks hard, then smiles again, closing his eyes.
Once again, Calla has set that fire roaring to life in his veins. The one that makes him restless whenever she’s away from him, restless until he can have her back in his arms again. The one that sends his mind into memories of her every time he lets his thoughts wander for even a second.
He loves getting lost in memories of Calla. Each one is its own oasis. There are the breathless, pulse-racing ones that make Ralph crazy to think about. Calla licking her lips between wild little moans, her fingers digging into Ralph’s hair, her dilated eyes flooded with glittering heat.
And there are the serene, gentle memories. Like when Calla does that thing afterwards where she snuggles up close into Ralph’s arms, then lays with her body fitted to his as their panted breaths slow down. He loves the expression on her face, during that. Makes it seem like she could stay there forever.
Ralph is still a little confused and surprised every time that Calla wants to do that with him - no one has before - but now that he’s tried it, he knows that he definitely could. Stay there like that forever.
Letting his mind linger in memories like those, it feels like - rest.
But right now Ralph’s mind is working, thinking hard.
However Ralph has felt in the past, however he feels tomorrow, he is really, truly happy tonight. Nothing can take that away from him, and it all but damns the possibility that the nightmare voices were right about his happiness.
This moment, with Calla cuddled up to Ralph like this… it’s the proof. There’s been proof so many times over, now that he thinks about it.
Means that the nightmare voices could be wrong about other things, too. They tried to tell Ralph that no one really loves him, and no one can. Too broken for that.
But it can’t be true, right? Aiden told Ralph that he has a blind spot for love, and Ralph is trying to work on that. Now that he’s looking around, he really does think he sees it coming back at him. From his brothers, from his friends, maybe even from…
Ralph holds Calla close to himself, his heartbeat picking up. He’s not hoping, exactly. He’s not gonna let himself do something stupid like that. He just wants to know if it’s possible.
“Calla, you don’t think that people can end up so broken that no one can really love them anymore, do you?” he blurts out, all in a rush. “That you can get too messed up inside for that, lose something you - you just need?”
Calla’s answer is surprisingly slow in coming.
“I… I really hope that’s not true,” she says.
Ralph draws back in faint confusion. He doesn’t understand that answer from Calla, and he heard something strange in her voice.
He finds her gazing over his head, her eyes distant. She has the expression she gets when they’re talking about something abstract, hypothetical. It doesn’t even seem to have occurred to her that Ralph was talking about himself.
That’s what he was hoping for, but it strikes him as strange, honestly. He was pretty sure that she would instantly figure out that he was talking about himself, but for some reason it really seems like the possibility didn’t even cross her mind.
But at the same time, she also looks a little troubled by the question.
It hits Ralph like a strike of lightning that Calla is thinking about herself. Wondering if she could be one of the ones too broken.
He stares in stunned silence at her anxious face, at her hazel eyes lost in thought.
Jesus Christ, Calla, Ralph nearly says out loud. Can’t you tell that I-?
He cuts off the thought before he can get to the end of it, but it’s too late. He knows where it was going.
For a few seconds, he just stares at her. Shocked at himself, tipped off his axis, feeling helpless.
“I don’t think it’s true,” he blurts out, before he knows what he’s saying. “I’ve never seen any evidence to back it up. Think the voices in my nightmares might be some dirty liars.”
Calla’s eyes flit back down to Ralph’s. She looks at him for a long moment, then smiles again, this time with a touch of shyness to it. She nuzzles her nose into his, doesn’t answer.
“Are you happy, Calla?” Ralph asks, suddenly anxious.
Calla opens her eyes and meets his, a subtle, radiant smile glowing deep in them. Renders the little mhm she murmurs wholly unnecessary.
Ralph smiles in infinite relief, and Calla giggles as he squeezes her tightly, burying his face in her neck. Spreading kisses all over her throat. Savoring the feeling of her warm body in his arms, her laughter against his ear. Flying high.
Happiness. Real, solid happiness.
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