Special Episode: Rainfall (Part III)
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.
For what feels like a very long time, Ralph doesn’t speak. There’s only the sound of the storm outside, and the thrumming of Calla’s anxious heartbeat in her chest.
She thinks she might have just made a mistake, asking Ralph about the angel wings.
She can’t see his face with hers tucked against his neck, and it’s impossible to guess what he’s thinking. But she felt him go very tense and stiff in her arms all of a sudden. His fingertips have stopped their gentle movements on her back. She feels his adam’s apple roll up his throat as he swallows hard.
The moments pass by in perfect silence.
“Don’t worry about that, alright?” Ralph finally says, his voice rough around the edges. “You don’t want to hear it, trust me.”
“Yes, I do,” Calla protests. “If you want to talk about it, then I do, too.”
“If I want…?” Ralph begins incredulously, then trails off, his voice suddenly uncertain.
There’s a lengthy silence as Ralph goes deep into his thoughts. Calla waits, half holding her breath.
“You - you don’t want me to drop some sob story on you, Calla,” Ralph murmurs, more quietly. “And I don’t like to see you sad. ‘Specially not on account of me.”
Calla sits up so she can look into his face. A dark blue veil of shadows is slanting halfway across it. Ralph shifts almost imperceptibly further back into it when her gaze falls on him.
“I’m asking,” she murmurs, cupping his cheek in her hand.
Ralph’s face has gone very white, the muscle of his jaw flexed. He saw that Calla meant it as soon as he caught the look in her eyes.
He swallows again, breathing a little strangely.
“Tell you what,” he says, trying his hardest to smile at her. “We can talk about it, yeah? Promise if you want to, we can, but maybe another - another time…?”
He fades off, looking at her with very stressed-out, begging eyes.
Calla quickly takes his face in her hands and presses her forehead to his. She thought Ralph might get mad, but it turns out he’s afraid that she’s going to get mad. That couldn’t be less true. Calla understands exactly how hard it is to trust someone the way she just asked him to trust her.
“It’s totally okay,” she says, putting all of her sincerity into her voice. “I get it. We don’t have to talk about that, alright? Forget I said anything.”
She snuggles down beside Ralph in the bed, presses a reassuring kiss onto his cheek, and wraps an arm around him. He puts his arm back around her, too, but keeps quiet. Determinedly staring out at the rain instead of looking at Calla.
Silence falls. Calla can almost hear Ralph thinking, but she has no idea what’s on his mind. She wants to just put that whole thing behind them, and she thinks he probably does, too.
“About the game I made you, by the way,” she says, in a warm, teasing voice. “Just want you to know that as the dev, I can see how many times you’ve played it. I think you undersold how much you liked it, based on the count. And you actually found the secret level I put in?”
“Yeah. On my fourth playthrough.” Ralph breaks into a small shadow of a smile, still not looking at her. “Couldn’t believe I’d missed it all the other times. I’m stupid.”
“Oh, I could kick the shit out of that statement, Ralph! I’ve got plenty of evidence to the contrary.” Calla gives him a squeeze, relieved to see him smiling. “Honestly, I didn’t expect you to find it at all.”
Ralph trails his fingertips slowly over her buzzed hair, smiling a little bigger. “But you put in all that effort for me, huh? Knowing I might miss it?”
“I - well-” Calla blushes, then lets out a helpless laugh. “Whatever! I wouldn’t have spent that time on anything else, anyways. I was so fucking distracted trying to work after that weekend we spent at your house. Couldn’t stop thinking about you. All the code I tried to write flunked the verifier. Just the dumbest mistakes I haven’t made since I was like, twelve-”
Calla cuts herself off in surprise as Ralph suddenly, swiftly sits up. He finds his phone in the blankets, then silently begins going through it, looking for something.
Calla sits up, too, trying to read the expression in Ralph’s eyes. But he keeps them firmly on his phone, his face tilted down in the half-light so she can’t see it.
She opens her mouth to say something right as Ralph turns his phone around and presses it into her hand. Calla blinks down at it, thrown all the way off.
Slowly, she takes it from him, staring at the picture pulled up on the screen.
It’s a scan of an old, printed photo. It’s slightly faded out from the sun, and the corners are worn down.
The photo is of a tall, lean young man. He’s wearing military fatigues, flight gear, and heavy black boots. His uniform is only missing the jacket, presumably cast aside to cope with the heat of the bright sunshine spilling down on him. He’s standing in front of a compact armored combat jet, on the runway of what looks like an air base. He’s smiling warmly, looking right at the camera.
Calla blinks hard and fast, brings the phone closer to her face. For one, completely bewildering moment, she thought that the man in the photo was Ralph.
It takes her a second to realize that Ralph is actually the laughing little boy clasped in the man’s arms.
Calla stares in disbelief at tiny Ralph, who has none of that haunted, heavy, world-weary look in his grey-green eyes. His face is lit up and happy, his eyes shining. One of his little arms is wound around the man’s neck, the other grasping a handful of his shirt and his dog tags.
Ralph is grinning brightly at the camera, his smile a perfect match to the man’s smile. Their blonde heads are tipped together in mutual adoration.
Calla slowly lifts her gaze to present-day Ralph, who keeps his stormy eyes looking anywhere but into hers.
He runs his hand over the inked wings on his ribs, clearly not realizing he’s doing it. Instinctively, like he’s cradling a bruise.
“My dad,” he says, so quietly that Calla almost has to read his lips.
She had a feeling that this might be who the memorial angel wings were for. Ralph told her once that his camera was one of the last things he had left that belonged to his dad, but Calla didn’t want to make any assumptions. That could have meant a number of different things.
The confirmation, especially in Ralph’s suffering voice, hurts. A lightning strike of pain flashes through Calla’s heart like pure fire.
Ralph swallows again, his eyes roaming around above her head, not stopping on anything for long. “Wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it’s the last picture I have.”
Calla stares at the photo, then looks up at Ralph, then down at the photo again, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Jesus, Ralph, you - you look exactly like him.”
Even in the photo, Ralph looks like a miniature version of his dad. But looking at the man he’s grown into, and comparing him to the man in the picture - the resemblance is staggering. One of the most significant differences between them is the little rugged bump in the bridge of Ralph’s nose.
“Yeah.” Ralph slips his fingertips beneath his leather wristbands, his eyes blinking fast, carefully not looking at her. “I know.”
Calla drops her gaze to the picture again, and spots them there. The leather wristbands, on the wrist of Ralph’s dad. Pressed against Ralph’s back, rumpling his little t-shirt.
“Oh,” Calla says softly. And then, because she can’t help it - “How old is your dad in this photo?”
“Twenty-five, I think.”
So, a little younger than Ralph is right now.
“And how old are you?”
“In that picture, probably seven. Maybe eight.”
Calla can’t seem to find a word to say.
She brings the picture closer to her face, staring down at Ralph and his dad, their matching warm smiles. Even through the photo, she can sense the immense depth of the love between them. She can see it in how Ralph’s dad is holding him, and in how Ralph is holding him back. Like they’re each other’s favorite people in the whole world.
“Looks like you two adored each other,” she says softly, looking up at Ralph again, fully aware of what an understatement that is.
“Yeah, he - I…” Ralph shifts almost imperceptibly in the bed, falling further back into the shadows, where it’s harder for Calla to make out the look on his face. “Probably sounds pathetic, but he was like, my - my best friend.”
His face is so hard to see, but something in his suddenly hoarse voice pushes between Calla’s ribs like a knife.
Ralph’s body shivers with a swift, unsteady inhale. He lapses into silence, letting the rush of the rain and waves take over the room again.
Calla bites her lip, then blinks in surprise when Ralph suddenly forges on, all in a rush.
“You know, my mom kind of loved me, sometimes. In moments. I think. I don’t know. But me and my dad, we were so close, for like, as long as I can remember… and then he was just - gone. Died doing something I never would have wanted him doing, if I had been old enough to see it clearly. Doing it for me, so I wouldn’t grow up like he did. And I - I - never got to see him again. And the fact that I never would had to hit me like, a thousand fucking times before it really - really sank in…”
Ralph falters into silence, cuts himself off with a short, jagged inhale. Breathes for a few seconds.
“Yeah, so…” He runs his fingers over his ribs, puts them to the wings. “Just - wanted a way to keep him close, even though he’s gone. Got the ink as soon as I had a passable fake ID. It was a long time ago, now. I’ve made peace with it. I just - still like to keep him close.”
Calla stares at Ralph with enormous eyes. His phone has gone dark in her hand.
“But - Ralph…” The natural rasp to Calla’s voice has gotten significantly more pronounced. Her throat feels tight. She spreads her hand on Ralph’s chest, blinking hard. “I know it was a long time ago, but that - that must have been so hard for you…”
Ralph is silent for a moment, gathering his breath. He’s still mostly in the shadows, and it’s near impossible to make out his expression.
When he speaks again, his voice is much steadier, firmer.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, his low voice coming to her out of the darkness. “Definitely made shit hard on me, beyond the obvious. Changed everything, pretty much in exactly all the ways I was afraid it would. And in ways I didn’t see coming. Whatever relationship I had with my mom got cut right the fuck off. It was like she couldn’t look at me. Think I looked too much like him.”
Calla winces, blinking rapidly, a knot gathering in her throat.
“Eventually I got real fucking mad about everything,” Ralph goes on, in that impossibly steady, quiet voice. “Everything just felt so fucking unfair. Felt like whatever I was supposed to be, there was no chance I was gonna get to be that anymore. Like a bunch of shit had been, um - stolen from me? Including - including him. And I got fucking furious. Couldn’t keep anyone around me like that, but also couldn’t help it.”
Calla holds perfectly still, her hand spread on his chest, her heart pounding against her ribs. The entire room seems smaller to her, centered closely and completely around Ralph.
“Yeah, so I ended up good and lonely. Had fucking no one.” Ralph drops his head a little, picking at his wristbands. “It’s weird, what that shit does to you. Gets you like - if some stranger on the sidewalk says one nice thing to you, if they ask if you’re okay after they bump into you, or something - suddenly you’re ready to fucking cry. Maybe you even sneak off and do just that.”
Ralph pauses, rubbing his jaw like it’s sore.
“I dunno. I was always alone. My friends were all imaginary for a real long time…” He trails off, then adds, in a voice touched with warm affection, “But then I met Aiden, with his endless supply of patience, and Noah, with his endless supply of faith. My brothers. Couldn’t hardly comprehend how after all that fucking time, life actually threw me a break. Threw me a fucking miracle, really.”
Calla breaks into a small smile, even with her heart full of pain.
“They don’t know what they pulled me out of,” Ralph murmurs. “What they got me through.”
Calla finally finds her voice.
“Are you telling me that Aiden and Noah don’t know about this, Ralph? Your dad, and…? You never told them?”
“No.”
He says it in this obvious, inevitable way, like - why the fuck would I ever do that?
Calla shakes her head, staggered. “Just - because - don’t you think they’d want to know why you were, um - the way you were?”
“What do they need to know that for? Doesn’t excuse the shit I said and did.”
“No, but that’s not the point. They’ve already forgiven you for that stuff, anyways. But maybe it would - help them understand? If they knew about what happened?”
“Why the fuck would it matter what…?” Ralph begins.
Calla waits for him to go on, but he just stops, looking faintly confused.
“Maybe,” he says doubtfully, after a minute. “S’just - not the easiest thing for me to talk about. Honestly, you’re the first one I - I’ve ever…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Calla has already figured out where it was going. She stares at him with huge eyes, aghast.
“The first one?” she sputters, in a strangled voice.
Ralph shrugs his shoulders, twisting his fingers through the wristbands, his face hidden in shadow.
Calla can only stare at him, stunned into silence. Her heart leaps back to the beaming little boy she saw in the picture. She imagines him alone, brokenhearted, and with roughly a decade ahead of him before he’d ever get to talk to anyone about it.
What Calla’s feeling in her heart must be showing on her face, because Ralph suddenly reaches out and hooks her around the back of her neck. His gentle, steady hand guides her firmly to him, until her forehead is pressed against his.
“Stop with the sad eyes, yeah?” he says, very softly. “No need for that.”
Calla can only manage a single nod in response.
Then, out of nowhere, she hears herself say - “I just - I wish I’d always known you.”
She said it without thinking. It came directly from her heart.
Ralph stops, then draws back and looks at Calla blankly.
She can see in his deep green eyes that he’s struggling with something. Like he’s fighting to try to take in what she said, but beyond confused by it. The blackness of the shadows keeps close to his face as he stares at her, his dark green eyes full of hidden things.
Calla is strangely, intensely absorbed in his gaze. Electricity sparkles at the base of her stomach, a rush of heat going down her limbs.
“Don’t go saying things just ‘cause you feel bad, hellcat. Things aren’t so bad for me these days. I’ve got a girl any man would kill for.” Ralph’s thumb drags gently over her mouth, his fingers curled beneath her chin, his eyes looking deep into hers. “What more could I ask for?”
“But I-” Calla begins, then breaks off, struggling over her unfinished sentence.
I wasn’t just saying that.
“Seriously, Calla, like…” Ralph takes her hands and locks them into his, gazes earnestly into her face. “You don’t know… Being with you feels so good, good like I’ve been waiting to feel good, for as long as I can remember, my whole life-”
Ralph stops sharply, biting the inside of his cheek. The alarmed expression on his face tells Calla that his mouth ran ahead, and his brain just caught up with what he was saying.
Ralph anxiously searches her eyes with his, a dark blush rising in his cheeks. But he must see that he didn’t say anything wrong. On the contrary.
He lets out a soft, relieved exhale, then nuzzles his nose into hers.
“Point is, don’t go feeling sorry for me, alright?” he murmurs, winding his arms around her waist, drawing her onto his lap. “I’m doing just fine.”
Silence falls for a couple of minutes. Calla strokes her fingers down the side of Ralph’s ribs, over the inky wings.
“Angel wings?” she asks softly, eventually. “You’re the last person who I would’ve expected to be religious.”
“Nah, I’m not.” Ralph takes a slow, shaky breath. “I just can’t take the thought that he isn’t anywhere. I - I gotta believe there’s someplace where one day I’ll get to see him again. Gotta hope that he’s living on, in some way or another.”
Calla hesitates, then slowly sits back, takes Ralph’s iron-hard jawline in her hand. She gently turns his face out of the shadows and into the light, until he’s looking into the mirror across from the bed.
Ralph blinks at his reflection in the mirror. He meets Calla’s eyes in it, but she shakes her head, gently tilts his head so that he’s looking at himself again. So that he’s looking at his own face, into his own eyes.
His expression slowly goes perfectly blank as he looks at himself. There’s a long, long silence.
Then a sharp, sudden, quiet little sound escapes from Ralph’s throat.
Before Calla can even look at him, he moves back into the shadows, retreating into the deepest darkness he can find. Pulling Calla with him, his trembling fingers desperately holding her to him.
She draws back, her heartbeat beating like hummingbird wings, and tries to look into his face. Ralph swiftly catches her jaw and turns her face aside, then buries his face into her neck, hiding.
Calla doesn’t fight him. He doesn’t want her to see, and that’s okay. She gets back on his lap and breathlessly winds her arms around him, holds him close to her.
He curls up around her in the darkness, his breaths trembling and uneven. Not crying, but she can feel that he has his lip caught between his teeth. How he’s not crying, Calla will never understand. Her own eyes are misted up, her breaths stumbling perilously.
“Don’t - don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Ralph stammers after a minute, in a rough, raspy voice.
“It’s okay,” Calla murmurs, stroking her fingers through his blonde hair, then kissing the top of his head. “It’s okay...”
“I’m s-sorry, I just-”
“Don’t be sorry!” Calla squeezes him tightly, her heart aching, her voice fracturing. “I’m sorry, I’m - I’m so sorry, Ralph. About everything that happened to you.”
He goes very still in her arms. After a moment, he silently buries his face deeper into the curve of her neck, holding her fast against him.
The quiet roar of the storm fills up the hotel room as Ralph and Calla sit together, bodies interlocked, hearts beating against each other.
Calla waits until she feels Ralph’s pulse slow down. Until his breathing softens up and slowly steadies out, and his head is resting on her shoulder in an exhausted, heavy way.
She understands that. She’s tired, too. It’s been a full night.
“Are you okay?” she murmurs, and Ralph nods tiredly against her collarbone.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?” Calla tries for a teasing, playful voice. “You want me to go get Aiden? You have no idea how far a hug from a big, beardy man can go. It’s a thing of true beauty.”
Ralph breathes out a soft laugh.
“Nah,” he says quietly. “I’ve already seen true beauty.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. She was out on the balcony, naked in a thunderstorm, eating a cherry snow cone.”
Calla goes silent, then leans back to finally look into Ralph’s eyes.
He meets her gaze, unwavering this time. And he looks piercingly beautiful to her in this moment, his eyes filled with their mixture of warmth and shadow, his blonde hair falling down over one temple, his hands spread on the base of her back. The rainy moonlight sliding down the wings on his ribs as they slowly breathe with his breath.
The heat spikes in Calla again.
Ralph’s touch suddenly feels like the touch of a hot massage stone, and then more than that. She half expects sparks to fly from the place of contact when he slowly pushes his fingers a little further up her spine. That one, infinitely subtle movement lit up every single one of her nerves.
Ralph goes motionless as he gazes up at her. So very, very still, like he’ll be motionless from now until forever. Looking into her eyes. Trying hard to realize something.
Calla is, too, and struggling just as badly as he is. Her heart is running like the wind.
Something’s going on, she desperately wants to tell Ralph. Can’t you see that I’m on fire? Look into my eyes and see that I’m burning. I’m burning for you.
Ralph swallows, then lets out another soft, helpless, bewildered laugh, brows knitted. Calla does the same, equally at a loss for an explanation.
She tips forward, snuggling up close to him. Resting her head on his shoulder.
“You tired?” he asks quietly.
When Calla nods, Ralph lays back in the bed, taking her down with him. He reaches out to pull the blankets over the two of them, then runs his eyes over Calla’s bare body stretched out on the sheets, and changes his mind. She laughs when he deliberately kicks the blankets further away before he cozies back up to her.
He bows his head over hers for a kiss, his soft blonde hair brushing her forehead. She can taste the last traces of cherry snow cone syrup on his lips.
He reaches over and switches off the lamp.
Calla waits for a long time, then silently reaches out and switches it back on.
She gazes at Ralph as he sleeps, his shoulders rising and falling slowly, his hair tumbling into his eyes. She slowly runs her fingertip down the lean muscle of his ribs.
Without waking up, he wrinkles his nose like that tickled, then clumsily takes her hand in his and holds it to his chest.
Something in Calla’s deepest self is trying to tell her something. The heat is running all over her body. Her heart is dancing around the wild heights of some massive white-hot bonfire as she stares at Ralph.
The feeling in her chest strikes her as so very, unusually, exceptionally beautiful. So much that it hurts. A sob rises in her throat. She catches her lip between her teeth just in time, the way Ralph did.
But she’s overflowing. The feeling within her can’t be contained to her body. Her mind casts out for someplace where it might fit. She thinks of the vivid expanse of rainy night sky overhead, the boundless crashing ocean.
She rubs her hand over her heart, in something like awe.
Calla has the serious, intuitive sense that whatever this is, it’s not something that ever dies. Not completely, not once it’s there. It’s gotten into her blood. He’s gotten into…
Calla stares silently at Ralph, his sleeping face, his cheek resting on his curled arm.
Calla has the breathless sense of standing right at the edge, at dizzying heights. The crashing of the waves, actually the sound of everything she built up to protect herself, breaking down, falling down all around her. She’s going to fall, too, if she’s not careful.
Or maybe she already has. For the first time ever, maybe she really has.
Calla swallows, then quickly reaches out and turns off the light. She nestles back down into Ralph’s arms, and he closes them around her in his sleep, letting out a soft, drowsy breath.
Calla lets herself succumb to the warm, sweet exhaustion left in her by the night spent with Ralph. Thank god it’s so easy for her to pass out in his arms. All she has to do is close her eyes, and she feels sleep already coming for her.
Good, because Calla doesn’t want to think anymore. She’s afraid to listen to that voice in her heart.
Afraid that she might understand what it’s trying to say.
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