Special Episode: Rainfall (Part II)
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.
The rain has picked back up by the time they reach Port Sitka. Despite their drenched clothes, Ralph and Calla blend right in as they slip across the street towards the little hotel. Every person in Port Sitka with reason to be out this late is just as soaked as they are.
But it might not have mattered. Ralph and Calla are exceptionally good at attracting no attention. Calla isn’t sure that anyone saw them at all.
Both she and Ralph naturally stuck to the dark places of the street. They weren’t doing anything illegal - not at the moment, anyways - but when a squad car rolled by, they both automatically melted back into the shadows, waited in silence until it was gone.
Ralph used the moment to brush a lingering kiss onto the side of Calla’s neck, sending a vivid wave of shivers through her.
The flame that they kindled within each other, back in the forest - it was still burning, blazing bright. Calla caught a glimpse of it in Ralph’s eyes, the only thing she could see of him in the shadows. She knew it was showing in hers, too.
“I feel so hot,” she whispered to him, at a loss to explain it.
“You are hot.”
“Not what I meant,” she whisper-laughed, thumping his chest with her fist, then tracing her fingertips over her own forehead. “I mean literally, I - I feel like I’m burning up.”
Ralph’s dark green eyes blinked at her in the darkness, the moonlight catching on his wet blonde hair, the tiny bump in the bridge of his nose.
“Were we out in the rain for too long? You didn’t get sick, did you?”
Calla shook her head at him. “No, like… on the contrary, I feel…”
She trailed off, struggling for the words to describe what she meant, ultimately coming up empty.
This is the polar opposite of that vague, weary, overall dejected feeling of being sick. Calla feels charged up, full of heat and crackling with raw power, shivering with internal showers of light and electricity.
She catches sight of her reflection in a rainy window just before she and Ralph step into the hotel. She’s soaked through, her clothes clinging to her. Her cheeks are hot and burning with color, her eyes full of wild light.
She watches with her fingers pressed over her mouth as Ralph shamelessly walks right up to the check-in area - his clothes soaked and muddy, leaves caught in his drenched hair, grass stuck to his arms, Calla giggling softly behind him - and silently puts some cash down on the counter.
The sleepy check-in clerk wakes right up, opens his mouth to say something, then takes a better look at the expression on Ralph's face. He stops, shrinking back, his eyes widening in alarm.
He hurriedly catches a room key off of its hook and presses it into Ralph’s hand, all without a word.
“All I did was smile at him,” Ralph says innocently, when Calla swats his arm as they pad up the creaky wooden stairs together.
“You know full well that’s enough,” Calla giggles, treading out onto the landing. “He didn’t even ask for a name to register!”
“Good, ‘cause I got enemies. Shouldn’t be leaving my name around.”
“Oh my god,” Calla laughs, pressing her face into his shoulder blade. “And you call me a handful.”
Ralph flashes her a little grin over his shoulder, then unlocks the hotel room.
This little hotel in Port Sitka is roughly the opposite of the grandiose hotel where they pulled their heist on the State Attorney General. That place was enormous, dripping with expense, white marble floors. Rent-a-cops on constant patrol to make sure that the glittering merchandise and equally glittering guests made no contact with people below a certain net worth.
This hotel is a two-story wooden building, enwrapped in leafy vines. Old framed seashells and faded oceanic paintings dot the walls. The sea is so permanently a part of the place that the air tastes salty even inside, and the ocean seems to breathe through the floorboards.
Calla and Ralph’s room has navy blue stucco walls, and one white wall with a sliding glass door. Above the bed are some small, framed cuttings from Sitka spruce trees. Bluish-green spirals of pine needles still bristling out from them.
The room is tiny, but cozy. Intimate. The lights are soft and warm when Ralph flips them on.
Calla crosses to the sliding glass door. She pushes back the white cotton curtain and the door in the same movement. It opens onto a small wooden balcony, facing the ocean.
The storm clouds are spilling rain down into the sea. Calla watches from just inside the open door as the heavy droplets smack onto the balcony. The cold, misty air fills her lungs and pulls some of the heat from her cheeks. But it does nothing to dampen the fire in her chest.
Ralph hooks an arm around her from behind, rests his chin on the top of her head.
“Go shower and get warm,” he suggests quietly, smoothing his thumb up and down her stomach. “I’ll be right back.”
Calla freezes as he slips away and silently heads back out of the room. Her heart gives an anxious flutter, then rapidly begins to sink.
Her old fears make a sudden, swift stab at her, flinging into her head the type of painful thoughts that never crossed her mind before the breakup with the ex.
What is he doing? Why didn’t he say where he was going? Does he need to text someone else without me seeing, now that our plans changed and we’re spending the night together?
No, a different voice in her heart protests desperately. I know him. He’s not like that.
You thought you knew the ex, too.
Calla nibbles her fingernail anxiously, staring at the door Ralph just went out through, the rain rushing at her back. Then she gives herself a shake and sets off, heading for the shower.
This is stupid. Don’t freak out. Everything is fine.
Still, Calla can’t help but worry just a little… If something bad were to happen right now, when she’s feeling like this about him… when she’s feeling like this within herself…
Calla steps under the hot water, shivering as it pours down her body and chases the lingering chill of the rain away.
She closes her eyes and thinks of Ralph. The way he stares at her with that dark fire in his eyes. The expression that came over his face when he saw her standing naked in the lagoon. How he looked after, when he slowly lifted his head from her chest with that scorching blush in his cheeks.
The heat-glow in Calla’s chest rises to warm her again, spreading slowly through her limbs. Her heart beats faster at the memory of everything that happened in the forest, sending her a rush of electricity.
Calla is not going to let anything ruin tonight. Not even her own stupid thoughts trying to sink her. No fucking way.
She takes a deep, steadying breath, then another. By the time she steps out of the shower, there’s only the tiniest nervous jitter to her movements, the occasional nervous stumble of her heartbeat.
She dries off and hangs up her towel, then goes and hangs up her clothes near the dry heat of the radiator.
Then she goes back to the open balcony door and leans against it, looking silently out at the glimmer of the ocean. The wild beat and rush of it against the sand, the storm whipping up the surface. Moonlight and seawater spill into little cups formed by the rock pools at the edge of the sea.
She startles and whips around when Ralph comes through the door, shuts it softly behind himself.
He’s been soaked by the rain all over again, but he has one hand spread over something he’s holding, keeping it dry. He tosses his drenched blonde hair out of his eyes, then pauses when he sees Calla standing there naked, framed by the moonlit, slanting rain outside.
“Oh,” he sighs happily. “Perfect.”
“I don’t have any dry clothes right now!” she laughs, leaning into the hand she has braced on the doorframe. “Definitely won’t until morning.”
His eyes do a slow, adoring drag up her body.
“Perfect,” he breathes again, very softly.
Calla blushes, nibbling her lip. She’s not sure if he’s talking about her, or her body, or the fact that she has no clothes to put on. Or all of it, everything.
She drops her gaze and looks at what he’s got in his hand. It’s - a snow cone. Soft, frosty red ice heaped into a big snowball. Untouched by the rain, only just beginning to melt from the heat of Ralph’s hand protectively spread over it.
Calla lifts her questioning eyes to Ralph’s face as he comes over to her. He holds the snow cone out, offering it to her.
“What - for me?” Calla asks, caught by surprise.
“Yeah, because…” Ralph blinks down at the snow cone, then looks up at Calla again, confused. “Didn’t you say you felt all hot? I was gonna get you some ice cream or something, but the place next door is open late, making these, so…”
He fades off, looking at Calla with suddenly fretful, uncertain eyes. Like maybe he did something wrong.
This time she does cave and lean up to kiss that sweet, anxious little knit between his eyebrows.
It disappears instantly beneath her lips. Ralph is smiling warmly down at her by the time she draws back.
Calla takes the snow cone and samples it. Cherry-flavored.
She flashes a smile up at Ralph, blushing again. Suddenly she badly needs to get some air into her lungs. She turns and silently pads back to the sliding glass door. She slips outside, into the tiny corner of the balcony that's sheltered from the storm. Even here, the droplets mist her ankles.
She takes a lick of the snow cone, looking out at the rainfall. It’s spilling down in gauzy silver waves, making a whispering crash against the ocean. The waves are white-peaked and wild, breaking with brilliant moonlit sparkles against the rocks.
On any other night, Calla would feel exposed standing out here completely naked, while Ralph is so close by with all his clothes on. But because he’s close by, it feels different.
Calla feels dipped in starlight. Wearing the cold night sky like a silky dress.
Ralph stands behind her like a shadow, watchful and bright-eyed. Then he comes out and leans against the wall beside Calla. He can’t fit completely in the dry spot with her, and his shoulder is getting a little wet. But he doesn’t seem to care, so long as he can keep his eyes on her, stay close to her.
He lights a cigarette in silence. Calla catches the vivid orange flare of it in his eyes as he straightens up and shakes his drenched hair out of his face, watching her.
He nods at the snow cone. “Did it help?”
“No.” Calla lets out a soft, baffled laugh, shaking her head. “If anything, I feel more, like… I don’t know. Do you want some?”
“I do, actually,” Ralph admits, dropping his gaze to the snow cone.
“What - really?” Calla laughs, holding it out so he can have a taste. “Aren’t you freezing? You haven’t even showered yet.”
Ralph tastes the snowcone, then shrugs, his eyebrows dropping low in confusion as he straightens up again.
“I mean… I don’t know,” he says slowly. “S’weird, but - I feel kinda hot, too.”
Calla gazes up into his face, and instantly sees it. The deep flush in his cheeks. The same mixture of rich darkness and blazing light in his eyes that she saw shining out from her own.
It flickers and brightens the second her dilated eyes stare deep into his.
What is that? she wants to ask.
But Ralph looks like he doesn’t know, either. He and Calla are staring at each other in mutual, mounting, breathless confusion, both of them struggling to understand something. Neither of them are getting it, but whatever it is, it feels good. Ralph lets out a soft, bewildered, helpless laugh, his eyebrows knitted. Calla laughs quietly, too, staring up into his eyes, her expression a perfect match to his.
Ralph blinks rapidly as his burner phone starts buzzing. He and Calla left their phones in his car during the venture into the forest, so they wouldn’t be destroyed by the rain. He must have put it back in his pocket when they reached the hotel.
He slips it free and looks down at it, biting the inside of his cheek.
“Take it, it’s okay.” Calla frees the little spoon from the snow cone and digs it into the ice. “I know you wouldn’t unless it was something important.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mhm.”
Ralph hesitates for another second, staring down at his buzzing phone. Calla blinks at him, her eyes narrowed, then suddenly understands.
Ralph does talk to her about work stuff, but only in broad terms. Calla hasn’t been allowed to listen in on any specific plans or confidential conversations, and she can see that the call is coming in from Shawn, who Ralph recently made his second in command. It is about something important. She’s probably not supposed to listen.
She begins to slip around Ralph, so she can leave him outside to finish his cigarette and his phone call.
Ralph spreads a hand on her bare waist, stopping her. He gently pushes her back into place, then answers the call and lifts his phone to his ear.
“Hey,” he says quietly, leaning forward to check that no other hotel guests are out on their balconies. “How are we looking?”
“All set,” comes Shawn’s voice through the phone. “Plan’s in action.”
Calla can hear him clearly, where she’s standing. And she knows that Ralph knows that. She stares up at him with wide, startled eyes, the snow cone slowly melting in the warmth of her hands.
Ralph takes a long drag of his cigarette, then wraps his arm around Calla’s shoulders. “House is cleared out?”
“Everything’s ready. Go-time tomorrow around four.”
Ralph nods slowly. “Did you pick your people carefully?”
“All trained Warlord commandos. And you’re the one who trained them.”
Ralph breathes out a quiet laugh. “Good. Fine. No one gets hurt, yeah?”
“Copy that. You want to swing by and check on everything yourself? There’s still time tonight, if you’re not busy.”
Ralph glances swiftly down at Calla, then lifts his eyes to the rain again. His jaw works for a second, his dark green eyes deep in thought.
“No,” he says suddenly, in a determined voice. He drags his thumb slowly up and down the curve of Calla’s shoulder. “I’m in the middle of something important. I - I don’t need to control everything, anyways. You’ve got it. Just keep me up to date.”
“Oh.” The obvious surprise in Shawn’s voice isn’t lost on Calla. “Thanks, boss. I will.”
Ralph’s eyes flit to Calla as he hangs up. “Sorry ‘bout that.”
“No, don’t…” The vivid heat burning in Calla swells and billows through her body, dizzying. “Don’t be sorry.”
Ralph blinks at her, his eyebrows furrowing again. His eyes look deeper into her eyes, intense and searching.
Calla quickly turns her face away and gazes out at the rain falling into the sea. Searching for something to say.
She hesitates, then tries, in a playful voice - “The Warlord is less intimidating when I know he’s only wearing one sock because he lost the other one in the forest.”
“It’s worse than that,” Ralph laughs, his cheeks reddening. “I couldn’t find my boxers, either.”
“What-? Ralph!” Calla laughs, then gasps when she realizes that the snow cone is melting in the heat of her hands, spilling down her fingers in red rivulets. “Oh, shit! God, we’re a mess.”
Still laughing, she starts licking sticky cherry sweetness off of her fingers. Ralph watches her, suddenly motionless, silent.
“But I think that’s okay,” he blurts out, staring down at her nervously. “I - I think maybe this time, it’s okay.”
Calla stops and looks up at him, a drop of cherry red rolling slowly down her wrist.
She most definitely has been a category five mess in her life, and Ralph has, too. But never like this. This, to Calla, feels completely different.
It’s a mess. But she’s happy, happy.
~~~~
The rain pours down in glimmering waves beyond the windows and the open balcony door. The sea is storming against the rocks, crashing in a constant muffled rush and roar. The air is salty, cold.
But the bed is perfectly warm. So is the half-light, the golden dimness of the room.
Ralph and Calla lay stretched out on the soft downy bedding, laced half in light, half in shadow.
Calla is looking at Ralph’s muddy, heavy black boots, set by the door. Slowly realizing that the sight of those boots by the door could make any room feel like home to her.
She also likes the sight of his clothes drying by the radiator. His leather wristbands, which he carefully, meticulously dried off, are a gentle pressure point where his wrist rests against her. She likes that, too. She likes it fiercely, from someplace deep down within herself.
She puts her arms around Ralph and takes a deep breath of him. His skin is so soft from the warm shower. His hair is finally dry, and soft like golden fur between her fingertips.
He nuzzles his face deeper into her neck as she slowly walks her fingertips down his ribs. He flexes the muscle of his lean body, makes it hard wherever she happens to be touching. She smiles to herself when she notices that.
She finds a tiny green leaf left in his hair, starts to take it out, and changes her mind.
It’s still there as Ralph rolls off of her and onto his back, stretching out with a quiet, contented sigh. He’s tired like she is, after what happened in the forest, and then again when she joined him in the shower.
It’s a deep, happy, quiet kind of exhaustion. Bodies heavy with a warm and satisfying ache. Slow breathing, and slow blinking, too.
But the vivid heat Calla felt before hasn’t gone away, not at all. Only slowed down. It’s no less rich and powerful this way. Slow, so slow… it might even be more rich, more powerful, more intense.
Calla knows without looking that she still has that heat-glazed shimmer in her own eyes. She wonders if Ralph has it, too.
He bites his lip, then turns his head and looks at Calla searchingly again.
All at once, she finally understands what that color reminds her of. The stormy grey-green of Ralph’s eyes. It’s like the ocean shallows, in the rain.
She remembers that first night in the city after she moved away from Port Sitka. She went up on the roof of her new building and looked around, and felt wildly homesick. Because she couldn’t see the ocean. The ocean was so far away that it was completely out of sight. A sob nearly escaped her at the strangeness of such distance from the saltwater, the glimmer and rush of the sea.
She gazes deep into Ralph’s grey-green eyes. Two pieces of the ocean, for her to keep.
And the heat-glaze is right there, shining out from within them.
Unable to resist, Calla ghosts her fingertips over the soft, fine body hair on him. She tips down and presses an adoring, lingering kiss on his chest, feels his heart beating against her lips. Then she turns her head, softly rubs her cheek against him.
Ralph goes perfectly still, his pulse spiking wildly.
But Calla isn’t worried. He gets like this. Sometimes he seems completely bewildered by what Calla is doing, and he goes utterly motionless, even holding his breath. Like he has no idea what’s going on, but he’s terrified of accidentally making her stop. As if that would be good as fatal.
He’s always happy afterwards, so Calla has learned not to let it stop her.
The adorable, beautiful flush in his cheeks has grown deeper when she lifts her head again.
Ralph hesitates for a long, silent moment. Then, very slowly, he leans up and gently rubs his cheek against her cheek, like he’s trying it out for himself.
And now it’s Calla’s turn to go completely, utterly still. Her heart stumbles wildly as Ralph’s eyelashes softly, intimately brush against her skin, his hand gently pressing the base of her back, holding her in place.
A wave of sparks rushes up in Calla’s chest and bursts into scattered, molten heat that rolls slowly down her body like drops of sugary syrup.
Ralph pauses with his cheek against hers, then draws back hastily. Blinking fast, slightly shame-faced, but with a shy, radiant smile lighting up his eyes.
He freezes when he catches the look on Calla’s face.
He sits up, concerned, his face half in the shadows. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah,” Calla answers, in a dazed voice. She can hardly speak. “Yeah, I’m… I’m fine.”
The dim golden light with the storm raging outside, the salt air in her chest from the open balcony door, and Ralph slowly, slowly dragging his cheek over hers while that invisible white heat crashed through her… Calla feels absolutely certain, in some obscure way, that this moment left a permanent imprint somewhere within her.
She sits up slowly. She looks at Ralph, who’s sitting there with his arms loosely wrapped around his parted knees, his fingertips twisting nervously around the dark leather of his wristbands.
Calla smiles adoringly at him, moves between his knees, and places herself against him. She folds her bare thighs over one of his, flattening it to the bed. Ralph’s eyes fill up with immediate relief, his warm arms moving to fold around her again.
The two of them sit closely locked together for a few minutes. Calla’s heart is running wild the whole time.
She thinks she might be able to touch back down to earth if they just talk about something simple.
“Ralph, didn’t you say there was something you wanted to tell me about? You texted me that, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yeah.” Without letting her go, Ralph leans back and reaches over to the night table, snags his phone, and starts to unlock it. “Gotta show you this girl.”
Calla freezes in his lap, her heart falling as she hears the affectionate warmth rising in his voice, sees it reflecting in his eyes.
Girl, what girl? she nearly asks, and bites it back just in time.
“I’ve been watching her as a favor for Jamie, but now I’m thinking about - keeping her? I dunno. Wanted to ask what you thought about it.”
Ralph turns his phone around to show Calla a video. Her hands fly up over her mouth at the sight of the tiny white and silver puppy with the broken ear.
In the video, the puppy is leaning her head against Ralph’s knee as he slowly, gently pulls on her furry ear. She’s panting with bliss, tiny tail thumping peacefully on the couch. Ralph’s face isn’t in the video, but the dog is quite clearly staring up at him with adoring eyes.
“Her name is Tycho.” Ralph scrolls to a photo of the puppy asleep with her paws stretched out in front of her face, her muzzle resting between them. “Didn’t plan to keep her, but honestly, I’m having kind of a hard time thinking about giving her back.”
Calla slowly lifts her eyes to Ralph, half in disbelief. She wants to both kick him and kiss him for doing something to breathe more oxygen into the fiery heat, which was already reaching a level her body can barely support.
Kissing him wins out, so Calla does. He takes a sharp, startled breath at the depth and intensity of it, but kisses her back instantly and eagerly, dropping his phone.
“Is that - so - should I keep her?” he asks in a dazed voice, when Calla finally breaks the kiss off.
It ended with him pressed back into the pillows, his pupils blown out, his chest rising and falling fast. Calla lets out a sigh of pleasure at the sight, then sinks down to cozy up to him.
“Yes. Yeah. You have to, actually.”
“I don’t have to do shit,” Ralph laughs, folding his arms around her, the leather of his wristbands pressing into her back. “Nobody tells me what to do, alright?”
“Oh, okay. Cool story, big man. Did you see the way that dog was looking at you? Giving her back now would be a crime.”
“Oh no,” Ralph says, in a voice full of mocking horror. “A crime? Damn, thanks for pointing that out, hellcat. I would never commit a crime.”
Calla breaks into laughter, squeezing him tighter. “Even you wouldn’t commit that one, Warlord.”
“You don’t know what I would or wouldn’t do.”
Calla lifts her head and gazes down at him, her eyes full of everything she’s feeling. “I think I do know, actually.”
Ralph pauses, then catches his lip between his teeth, grey-green eyes hovering on hers. His shoulders give a little, concessionary shrug.
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Alright. Maybe you do.”
Calla cozies up to Ralph, meeting him where he is in the shadows. She closes her eyes contentedly, then suddenly opens them again.
It just dawned on her that she was already thinking about how Tycho will get along with the dogs in her family. As if she was planning on introducing Ralph to the family…
Every family has secrets, but the secrets in the history of Calla’s family need to be protected at all costs. That’s why she’s never brought home or introduced any of her boyfriends to them. Not even the ex, who she literally lived with.
And not Ralph, not yet. To do that would be trusting him with everything.
Ralph has trusted Calla with so much, though. More and more, all the time. Maybe… maybe it’s something to think about. Eventually.
“Hey,” she ventures, softly and tentatively. “Do you believe in magic?”
Ralph could take it as a joke - it seems like a fucking absurd thing to ask a man like him - but he reads in Calla’s voice that she’s serious. He falls silent, giving it serious consideration.
“I - don’t know,” comes the unexpected answer, out of the darkness. “Not sure. Maybe.”
Surprising, and promising.
Calla turns it all over in her mind, lost in her thoughts. Ralph lets her drift off into them, makes no attempt to hold her back. He’s right there with her in the silence, keeping her warm body held close to his.
Calla has a feeling that the trust she and Ralph are slowly building together is… special. Very different from the kind of trust she had with the men who came before. In a whole other planetary system, really. She never even thought about letting the ex in on the family’s old secret.
She desperately wants to know if Ralph feels the same way. She wonders what he might be willing to trust her with.
Her fingertips trail over his ribs, then stop on the huge set of angel wings tattooed there. The memorial tattoo he’s never said one word about.
Calla badly wants to know, but she’s never asked. She’s never dared to ask, and besides, she never thought Ralph would answer.
But in this place, with that shared heat flowing between them, the rain sheltering them, and Ralph sheltered in Calla’s arms… Maybe…
“Ralph,” she says, very softly.
He affectionately drags his knuckles in small circles at the base of her spine. “Mmm?”
“Would - would you tell me something?”
He eases her back, looks up at her with curious eyes. “Name it.”
Calla gathers her courage together, takes a deep breath, and asks.
“Who are the angel wings for?”
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