10. Ralph
Ralph
She was ignoring me.
She held that silence like a swimmer on the blocks, coiled and refusing to break early, and if they handed out medals for freezing a man out, Emma Carrow would sweep the entire podium before the anthem finished playing.
I'd offered roughly eleven variations of I'm sorry on the four-mile stretch from Glendale Boulevard. She sat in the driver's seat, buried in a spare dry-fit training shirt and a pair of gray gym shorts I'd snatched from my locker.
Her waterlogged jeans were stuffed into a black plastic trash bag. Her wet hair left a dark, widening shadow against my leather headrest. She stared clean through the windshield, through the traffic, through the horizon.
I apologized while she parked. Nothing. Apologized while turning the deadbolt on the front door.
She blew past my shoulder like I was a piece of staging furniture left inconveniently in the foyer.
I delivered apology number eleven to the grain of the guest bathroom door, and the sharp, definitive click of that lock was the most articulate piece of communication she'd given me in twenty minutes.
I climbed onto the kitchen island and sat there with my heels hooked on the lower rung of a barstool, biting into an apple I couldn't taste, rehearsing number twelve in my head and wondering if there was a syntax in the English language she wouldn't treat like background static.
I wasn't going to pretend I hadn't earned the frost. But I also wasn't going to pretend it was some calculated stunt.
I hadn't gone face-down to play a prank.
That was a five-minute hypoxic hold I'd been running since I was a scrawny fifteen-year-old trying to expand my lung capacity.
It's a recovery drill—you empty the chambers, let the buoyancy take the weight of your spine, and just exist in the gray quiet beneath the surface.
It's the closest thing to an altar a guy like me has.
And lately, when I was down there in the dark, I'd been archiving it, same as I always did during those counts.
Memorizing the exact weight of the pressure against my ears. The bite of chlorine at the back of my throat, sharp enough to taste for hours after.
The way the light looks like shattered green glass from ten feet down. I was saving the files. There was a morning coming when the lights would go out, and I wanted the memories to be enough.
I didn't know she was tracking the lane.
I knew she was in the building—hell, she was the only body on that concrete deck I've cared about in half a decade—but she'd been sitting forty feet back against the cinderblock, aggressively pretending her phone was the most interesting thing in North America while stealing looks through her hair when she thought I was blind to them.
I saw them. My vision might be narrowing into a tight, dark tunnel, the world going soft and blurry at the margins, but my eyes found Emma Carrow every time.
I just hadn't accounted for the panic. And I sure as hell hadn't expected the splash.
She'd jumped.
Emma. The girl who hadn't touched a competitive pool since she quit. She'd kicked off her shoes and dove into twelve feet of water fully clothed, her stroke alive with an efficiency that scared me—that told me her muscle memory didn't give a damn about what her brain was trying to forget.
I was still processing the sound of her entry when I opened my eyes under the glare and found her face an inch from mine on the tile. Her wet hair dripping onto my collarbone, her small hand cupping my jaw, her chest dropping as she prepared to force her own air into my lungs.
I should've been the bigger man. I should've cleared my throat and said, "Hey, it's just a hold drill, I'm good."
Instead, my mouth curved into that stupid, instinctive smirk, because the sight of Emma Carrow hovering over me—flushed, terrified, and so fiercely alive I could feel the heat radiating off her skin—was the best thing I'd looked at in three years.
My brain shorted out before my decency could throw the breaker.
Yeah. I deserved every single millimeter of this silence.
The bathroom door groaned. She emerged with a towel draped over her neck, her hair damp and dark, wearing a fresh cotton shirt from her pink bag.
Her expression carried enough ice to preserve beef for the winter.
She marched into the kitchen holding two heavy bundles of fabric—the oversized gray hoodie from last night and the spare clothes from the pool—and rammed them straight into my breastbone hard enough to knock my heels off the stool.
"These are yours," she said, her voice clipped, sharp as a razor. "Take them. I don't want your things."
I set the damp pile onto the granite, clearing my throat.
"Em. I was an idiot."
"Finally," she snapped, her chin tilting up. "A moment of lucidity."
"I'm sorry. Seriously."
"You should be."
"It was a bad joke."
"It was a pathetic excuse for humor, Ralph. I've heard Theo give sponsor pitches with more comedic timing."
She held out the key fob. "Drive your own circus from now on. I quit."
She tossed them.
My right hand came up on raw, athletic reflex. But the keys came at a different angle, and they sailed straight through the shadow between my index and middle finger, clattering against the white tile floor.
The sound was massive in the empty kitchen.
Emma stared at the keys lying between my feet. Then her eyes drifted up to my face, then back down to the floor.
"Really?" she asked, one eyebrow creeping up. "Your catching skills have deteriorated in the last thirty minutes."
"Or maybe your aim's getting worse," I lied.
Whenever I dropped a pen or missed a handoff from a trainer, I used an excuse. She just thought I was clumsy from the training load. I reached down, scooped the metal up, and shoved it into my pocket.
"Suit yourself," she murmured, turning on her bare heel.
I slid off the counter and followed her. She was fast for someone who stood a foot shorter than me.
"Emma, stop."
She didn't look back.
"Em, come on. Don't do this."
Still moving. Her small feet slapped against the hardwood with a steady, furious rhythm that let me know she heard every single one of my heavy steps behind her and was intentionally pushing the pace.
She reached the threshold of the sunken entryway, her eyes fixed on the door, and her bare toes caught the sharp lip of the oak step.
She stumbled, her shoulder clipping the drywall with a dull thud, but she recovered before I could reach out, instantly straightening her spine, her chin staying parallel to the floor out of sheer spite.
I bit the inside of my lip to keep from letting out a breath. She whipped around so fast her hair slapped her cheek. She hit me with a look that could have curdled cream.
"Don't you dare laugh at me, Brandt."
"I didn't say a word."
She threw her weight against the front door, stepping out into the bright, blinding glare of the sun. I followed her out onto the stone porch, barefoot, still holding the half-eaten apple like a shield.
"Why are you this raw about it?" I called out, trailing her down the flagstone path into the heat. "Is it because you almost kissed me, or because you actually thought you'd lost me?"
She spun on her heel so fast I had to dig my toes into the grass to keep from running her down. The sunlight hit her dead-on, turning her eyes that electric, deep ocean blue I'd been memorizing since we were kids.
Her cheeks were flushed, an angry crimson that made her look sixteen again.
"Even if our lips had made contact," she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous whisper, "it wouldn't have been a kiss, Ralph. It would have been a state-mandated medical intervention."
I looked down at her. The distance between us was less than two feet, the air smelling of wet grass and the heat rising off the driveway. "Going by the strict physics of lip-to-lip proximity—"
"Going by the strict physics of you shutting your mouth—"
"I'm just saying. The intent was rescue, but the geometry was—"
"Then thank God I didn't waste the oxygen," she said, her fingers curling into fists at her sides. "Because I would absolutely hate for your massive ego to mistake an act of basic human CPR for some kind of romantic callback."
I held up both hands, the apple still clutched in my right. "Noted. Strictly clinical. Emergency services only. No subtext."
"None."
"Zero."
"Absolutely zero."
"Got it."
She burned me with another three seconds of pure venom, then turned and started walking toward the edge of the property line, chasing distance for its own sake, which seemed to be her default setting since last night.
"Emma." I caught up in two strides. My legs are twice the length of hers; keeping pace with her furious little march required me to walk at approximately a toddler's velocity, and the sheer effort of keeping that constraint out of my shoulders was taking years off my life. "Stop. Just talk to me for a second."
She didn't halt, but her shoulders dropped an inch, the speed bleeding out of her feet. When she finally turned to look at me, the heat had cleared out of her face. What was left underneath was worse. It was that hollow, defensive confusion I'd been trying to fight since I found her in the rain.
"What are you doing, Ralph?" she asked. "Why are you digging into my life like this? Why do you care where I'm sleeping or if I'm eating? What do you get out of this?"
She stood on my lawn in the glare, her hair still smelling faintly of my shower soap, her blue eyes searching my face for the hook she was certain was hidden behind the bait.
I could have given her the real text. I could have said: Because you handed me a grape popsicle when I was crying under Theo's tree.
Because you shoved an earbud into my ear when the noise in my head got too loud and taught me that comfort doesn't need translation.
Because you are the most generous person I've ever known and watching a man convince you otherwise makes me want to take things apart with my hands.
Instead, I took a bite of the apple, swallowed, and shrugged. "Beat me in a single lap."
She blinked, her brow knitting. "What?"
"Next time we're at Glendale. One lap. Freestyle. You touch the wall before me, and I'll give you whatever secret you think I'm hiding."
She let out a dry, incredulous sound. "I don't swim, Ralph. You know that."
"You swam well enough twenty minutes ago when you thought my lungs were full of water."
Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. "That was adrenaline," she muttered, looking away.
"Adrenaline doesn't fix a high elbow recovery, Em. Your form was flawless."
"My form was terrified."
"Your form was Olympic. I was looking through the water."
"You were playing dead."
"And you still came in after me." I stepped closer, dropping my voice until it was just a low rumble between us. "Think about why you did that."
Before I could press further, there was a chime. She pulled her phone from her shorts, her thumb sliding across the glass, and her entire face shifted in a single, silent second.
The frost dissolved. Her eyes went wide and bright, and for the first time since she'd landed on my porch, I saw real sunlight in them. It was joy.
"What is it?" I asked, leaning in.
"None of your business, Brandt."
I reached down and plucked the phone clean out of her fingers.
"Ralph!" She lunged immediately, her hands clawing at my forearm. "This is a boundary issue! You need to learn the basic definition of privacy!"
I held the phone straight above my head, because some dynamics don't change just because you've grown up, and she went up on her toes, reaching for it exactly the way she used to in Theo's old kitchen when I'd move the cereal boxes to the top shelf.
"Your reach is still tragic," I said, looking down at her.
"My reach is statistically average!" She jumped, her fingernails brushing the edge of the OtterBox case.
"You are an unnatural height and this is harassment! Give it back!"
I started to lower my arm, taking pity on her, but my depth perception misjudged her velocity. I brought my hand down too fast just as she launched into another small jump. Her entire body collided straight into my chest.
The impact was solid, sudden. My left arm snapped around her waist on pure reflex, catching her weight before the momentum could send her sprawling into the flagstones.
Her palms slapped against my shoulders, her fingers instantly bunching into the fabric of my t-shirt to steady herself.
We were close. Close enough that the world outside her hair simply ceased to exist. Her face was tilted up, inches from my chin, her mouth slightly parted as she pulled in air.
I could see the flush climbing from the hollow of her collarbone, traveling up the soft skin of her throat into her cheeks.
Her eyes were enormous this close, a deep, liquid blue.
She broke first. She stepped back, her heels hitting the grass, clearing her throat with a sharp, nervous sound.
"I got the side gig," she said.
"The side gig?"
"A job, Ralph. Some of us don't have corporate swim contracts to pay our property taxes." She still wouldn't look up, the red stain still lingering on the side of her neck. "It's… it's a voiceover contract. An audio project. I'll tell you about it later. I need to go inside."
She brushed past my shoulder, her bare feet moving quickly across the warm stone of the path.
I watched her go, her shoulders squared, her chin held high, her small hands balled into fists at her sides as she vanished back through the heavy front door. I stood out there in my own yard, barefoot in the grass, holding a half-eaten apple and the lingering scent of her hair.
Emma Carrow was back in my space.
And I was in so much trouble it wasn't even funny.