#you fucking idiot you've called me wife so much i didn't even think twice about it until i reread the ask

[lee-hakhyun]

every hour is wife missing hours orz why must i be so busy

i need to reject your advances on principle, but you have my full consent to message me whenever you want and i will get back to you. on any platform

[heresathreebee]

Brackish and Briny Waters (five)

[Ralph Lamont x Female Reader]

Summary: Ralph apologizes and you've got baby brains, but sometimes life does nothing but kick you down. Previous Masterlist Next

Tag(s): 16+ | 1.7k words | more angst, baby fever, alcoholism, ghostly vibes

AN: GODDAMN Part 5 took me a lifetime to finish. As always no beta readers just poorly side eyeing this by myself and hoping it makes sense

THE NEXT MORNING

You barely stir when you hear the door open. You've all but forgotten last night, and yet you flinch when Ralphie tries to cuddle with you. He sighs somewhere near your ear and hugs you from behind anyways, lips brushing the nape of your neck and breath fanning over your back as he simply lies there, quiet as the grave. 

There's no bruise but you can still feel his hand gripping your arm from last night. "You're being a huge dick…" 

"... I know." 

That is not good enough. You roll over to face him and watch his face twist when he notices the tract marks of dry tears on your face. He swallows and almost unconsciously takes your hand, smoothing his thumb over the back of your palm in a way that was meant to comfort him rather than you. 

"I'm sorry." He opens his mouth again but he flounders for words. After a deep breath he continues. "We can't call Reagan. Because he won't do anything for us…" 

You wait impatiently for him to explain. 

"Sweetheart, if we called Reagan last night, he would have fucking laughed at us. It is step one down that slippery slope to the couple who cried wolf." He put a hand on your shoulder and looked you in the eye, "do you really think he would have done something?" 

You think about it. If Ralph hadn't stopped you from calling him, what would you have said to Reagan? 

I smelled exhaust fumes. Not an emergency, he would say. 

I think he found us. What do you want me to do about it, too late now, he would ask.  

We're in danger. I'll send a squad upstate, they should be there in 4 hours, he would joke. 

"It was real," you insist. "I smelled fumes." 

"I know. I believe you." 

You squint at him threateningly and he doesn't give an inch. He doesn't seem like he's mocking you. 

Ralph could be an asshole, but Reagan was infinitely worse. At least one of them gave a shit about your safety. The realization Ralph was right scared you more than anything. You were alone in this… 

Well, alone together. 

You sigh and bury your face in his neck. Your hair is tangled as shit and probably tickling his face, but your husband simply wraps you up in a tight embrace and holds you against him. It's all the apology you need. 

END OF THE FIRST MONTH

Adjusting to your new life hit you like a sack of bricks early on a Monday morning. You woke up from a dream where you still lived in your tiny little apartment two minutes walk from everything. In a reality which felt more like a fever dream, Ralph was late for work, donning a tie and tweed jacket and kissing you goodbye for the day. 

You never realized how much space there was in the new master bedroom. In the apartment, a queen sized bed nearly touched the walls and barely left room to creep around two night stands and a dresser, but in the new house you had room to lay on the floor and stretch, maybe put another piece of furniture in here like a bookshelf or something. 

And the whole damn house was like that. You had an entire second floor to claim as your own! There is almost too much space… too much space for just the two of you. 

God there's that thought again drifting into your mind unbidden, unfurling like a fern at the first droplet of sunshine. How many people does it take to turn a house into a home? Three should be plenty, your mind offers. 

You busy yourself with measurements, regrouting the loose tiles in the kitchen floor, and scrubbing the blackened hell out of that downstairs bathroom. It seems to come to life beneath your hands and you can feel yourself getting excited to show guests the improvement. 

The thoughts of turning your little twosome family into three persist over and over until you can't stand it any longer. Maybe it's finally time… 

Ralph's late getting home by 5 minutes instead of 5 hours but he still looks tired. No mud tracks on his pants or hard set eyes. He's halfway up the stairs before you realize he's probably going to bed early. 

"Hey!" 

Ralph stops like it pains him. His head sags and his hold on the railing is tight like he'll fall if he lets go. The way he's wobbling he might. He is barely able to meet your eyes as he glances over his shoulder and when he does he simply grunts. 

"I made dinner," you squeeze your hands together behind your back, "angel hair pasta and that sauce you love." 

Ralph's eyes flicker in thought. "Be down in a second." 

You wait nervously to see if he does come down. What if this is a bad idea? What if he doesn't take you seriously? Oh god what if he hates it, what if he calls you an idiot for even considering it? 

Ralph does come back downstairs, hair wild from running his fingers through it. He seems to gain a small amount of energy while eating, not wanting to talk himself but asking how your day has been going. 

You're definitely rambling right now. Ralph listens and listens, chuckling along but at some point he grows concerned and envelopes your hand with a worried expression on his face. "Jesus, I've never heard so many words come out of your mouth at once, it's like you're writing a dissertation over there. Are you OK, baby?" 

You snap your mouth shut. God, you hadn't even come close to talk about kids for all your rambling. And then there was that weird smell… 

Your blood runs cold as you recognize it. You lean a little closer to Ralph and he almost instinctively flinches away. If there's one thing you are sure of, one thing you could swear on god– Ralph Lamont has never flinched away from a kiss before. So he has something to hide. And that something has a sharp scent and explains his slow reactions and tired eyes better than anything else could. 

"Have you… have you been drinking?" 

It's the way he can't meet your eyes when you ask him. You know. It's beyond out of character, so much so that it's confusing and a little frightening for you. 

A little drink here and there is, to you, to be expected especially considering the wealth of your new company. So why hide it? Is there something else he's not telling you?

You suddenly feel sick and too hot, ripping your hand away from his and getting up to leave the table. 

He knows you get in your head sometimes and practically yells your name to stop you. "I'm… I don't know why I…" 

Ralph sighs and buries his face into his hands, ashamed. All this suspense is twisting knots in your stomach. You sit back down gingerly, taking deep breaths to calm yourself down. 

"Ralph," you warn, "you had better start explaining yourself right now before I lose it." 

Ralph stares a hole into the table and worries his lip. The truth is he doesn't know what to say because he doesn't know why he did it. The students are easy, you are easy. Even in the toughest of times, at his lowest, he didn't drink so… what the fuck was coming over him?, he asked himself. 

Something clicked. It rolled like fire in his belly given dry wood, smoking curling to the top of his throat and out of his ears. "They hate me." 

"Who? Who hates you?" 

"Everyone." 

You looked him in the eye for the first time tonight and saw something dark looking in there. It makes you uneasy. "What makes you think they hate you, baby?" 

Ralph's grip on his fork tightens until his knuckles are white before he gingerly sets the dishware down and deflates. He clicks his tongue and shakes his head with a sardonic grin. 

"You wouldn't understand… and how could you? You never leave the house." He looks at you and there's a growing instability rising in his movements. "You… you don't see it. It started out as little nothings that I could ignore because it didn't matter that they didn't like me: I was new.  

"Then it became lots of these little nothings. Staring and whispering and hushed silences. Tip toeing language and poking and prodding and testing me and my limits and it just… it just… it never got better…" 

Rumors. It dawned on you that his frustration seemed intimately familiar to you as you had had to change schools once or twice due to a few terrible rumors that snowballed and got way out of hand. And you can imagine the sort of rumors that accompany a man with little interest in making friends who has a wife nobody knows anything about. 

If you wanted to stay here long, you would need to change a few minds. You set aside your fear for a moment and make him look at you. You can see the unshed tears in his eyes and feel pity for him. 

"I want to do that dinner party," you announce. "With all that's gone on, you probably didn't have the grand introduction you deserve. Let me show them how much you mean to me." 

Ralph's shaking his head but he already knows you'll win this fight. For him it feels like begging for something he doesn't even want. He agrees because he already promised you could when you were ready and you needed to find new friends asap. 

His sleep that night is fitful and the room's shadows seem to reach out like claws seeking his immortal soul. When the haze of whiskey finally dies down in his system he sleeps dreamless and wakes to feel somehow more hollow with despair than before. 

Ralph Lamont has the distinct feeling things are going to get a hell of a lot worse before anything gets better…

@werwulfy @fundamentally-lazy @escape-your-grape @mimiscappinisideblog @go-commander-kim

[keithjmurphy]

I Can't Believe I Said That # 1

It was the morning of the 7th of March 2013, me and Carla had arrived at the Coombe Maternity Hospital around 8am. Today Carla was getting induced and we were going to be parents for the first time. I worked nights so it was the first time I ever seen 8am on a clock, I was absolutely shattered. I kept saying how tired I was until Carla completely lost it and grabbed me saying "I'm about to push a human out of my vagina, I don't give a shit how tired you are".

At 9am they set us up in a delivery room where they plugged Carla into all these machines and checked her bloods and vitals. Then they checked on the baby, a big thumbs up from the nurse and everything was perfect.

They broke Carla's waters at 10:30am. Now call me optimistic, but I was expecting as soon as they broke her waters that the baby would come flying out on a surf board with a pair of sunglasses and a boombox on the shoulder listening to Thunderstruck. If you haven't had a baby yet, I'm sorry, as fecking cool as that sounds, that doesn't happen. What really happens is the clock starts ticking in slow motion, your stuck in this horrible white hospital room holding the hand of a woman who would love nothing more than to beat you to death with a shoe for putting her through this. And you can see how much discomfort this is for her so all you can do is put your head down and feel guilty as hell for doing this to her. And don't mistaken these nurses around you for the ones in a general hospital, because these nurses hate you just as much as your wife right now. And whatever you do, don't ask the nurse if she knows the score of the match while your wife is in the height of labour.

Carla decided weeks in advance that she wanted to have a natural birth, so when the nurse offered her the epidural she bravely declined. All around us you could hear new borns coming into the world. You could hear the nurses in other rooms screaming "push, go on push, great stuff, now one more big push", then followed by the soft cry of a new born baby. But then from the room next to us we heard something really disturbing, "Ahhhhh fucking hell. The fucking pain, I'm splitting in half. Please, please, ahhhhh, my fucking vagina, get me the fucking epidural". At this point Carla had gone completely white in the face, so I told her it's not too late for her to get the epidural and it's not going to make her any less brave if she does, so she decided it's best that she got it.

It was getting late in the evening now, and the contractions were getting painful. Carla had being stuck in the bed for nine hours now. The conversations can get very weird very quickly when your stuck in a delivery room that long. It started off great, we were talking about baby names, if it's a girl or boy, who the baby will look like. Then when the contractions get stronger it turns to "you should be lying here with a finger shoved up your c***". Then you got back to talking about how your going to decorate the baby room, the little football babygrow that you seen in the shops. Then another strong contraction kicks in and the chat turns to "I'm going to burn all your clothes in the wardrobe, then I'm going to burn those clothes your wearing, with you fucking in them".

At 8pm we had been in the delivery room for twelve hours. The nurse came in and asked Carla to lie on her side, that the baby keeps falling asleep and we need to keep it wake. I asked the nurse if she had any painkillers because the bright lights in the room was giving me a headache, she just pointed at my wife and said "are you for fucking real", then left the room. She never came back with the painkillers so she must have forgotten them.

The delivery ward was absolute carnage that night, it was during the height of the babyboom. The ratio of patients to nurses was about 9 to 1 on the ward, so they had these students brought in to sit in each room and to just keep an eye on things. At 8:35pm the student nurse said "I think its time, I'll go get the nurse".

Ten minutes later the student nurse came back in and said "The other nurses are busy, looks like we have to start without them". I grabbed Carla's hand and said "are you ready?", and she replied with a nervous nod. Then the student nurse said "okay dad, can you grab your wife's legs and hold them up", I turned and looked at her like a meerkat, "excuse me? I thought I was meant to hold her hand, stand by her side, staying up this end of the bed?". The nurse didn't bat an eyelid at me, "change of plan Dad, now grab those legs".

Now I'm not good when it comes to blood, sure I got a paper cut in school once and passed out, even on Halloween I couldn't stomach to dress up as a vampire, just couldn't do it. But here I am with Carla's legs up in the air, shes screaming in pain, the nurse is beside me saying "your doing great, push". I just kept my eyes on the ceiling, I picked a spot on the ceiling and I fucking stared at it until I was told to stop. The nurse was saying to me "look dad, shes crowning, theres babies head". I remember thinking "just get fucking babies head and body out then I'll look at it". My eyes eventually strayed onto the clock on the wall, it was four minutes to nine when the nurse said to Carla "come on one more big push", and Carla like the warrior she was gave one last big push, it was amazing, a beautiful baby born at exactly three minutes to nine.

Me and Carla had made a little deal with each other, if it's a boy then Carla names him, if it's a girl I name her. Then nurse looked at me and says "dad do you want to cut the umbilical cord" and completely running on adrenaline I said "not a hope in hell, you can do that", when she cut the umbilical cord the blood squirted up and hit the ceiling, I almost fainted, but then she said "it's a girl", and handed her to Carla. We were so emotional and overjoyed, just looking at this beautiful baby we created, this beautiful baby that literally just came out of Carla's body. Carla said to me it's a girl so you get to name her, I looked at Carla, then i looked at the blood on the ceiling and said "after all that, I think I'll leave the name to you".

The main nurse arrived into the room and said "congratulations mammy, shes gorgeous", she never even looked at me. Okay the baby is out you think that's it, nobody told us that you have to literally give birth to the afterbirth. A little baby cot was wheeled in and the baby went for a little clean down. The nurse told me "dad go get yourself a drink of water up the hall, mammy needs stitches", she didn't have to tell me twice.

I stood at the water cooler for ten minutes barely believing I was now a brand new father, it was a life changing experience. I remember saying to myself "that's it Keith, your now a man, you've got big responsibilities now and it's time to grow up. No more being selfish, you've got three mouths to feed now". I walked down the corridor with a new lease of life, my head was much higher and I walked prouder than ever. As I got to the door of the delivery room the nurse was coming out, "dad there is toast and tea in there", I looked in the door and seen it on the table, "no thanks I'm not that hungry", she looked back at me with fire in her eyes "it's not for you, it's for your wife you idiot", oh right, I knew that.

I got in and there they were sitting on the bed, Carla was holding the baby in her arms and they just looked beautiful. As I got to the bed Carla said "Look Emily, here comes daddy".