just this once, be my savior

1/3

one.

It's not that Ryan is the kind of guy who needs to keep tabs on where his girlfriend is every minute of every single day – he isn't, honestly. Callie has weird boundary issues that he'll never really understand, but that's cool. He has things he doesn't talk about either. Still, they've been together a couple of years now, since the spring when Callie was a freshman, and sometimes Ryan can't actually believe that means three years.

She wants to be an actress, "Or something," she says, always making sure to tack those extra words on. "I don't know if I'm good enough for the real thing." This is usually accompanied by a ducked head and the swoop of her auburn bangs falling in her face, shielding her cheeks.

Her eyes always light up when she's on stage, though, and her skin glows when there's extra applause just for her. She's been in three plays in the past year alone, and Ryan's gone to every night of each, standing and clapping and cheering the loudest. Callie always knows where to find him in a crowd and her smile is always the brightest for him.

She's supposed to recite her Helena monologue in fifteen minutes, and she's been practicing for weeks – Ryan's had to hear her practice for weeks, so he knows how important this is, it's why her absence makes no sense, he'd talked to her the night before and she hadn't said anything about skipping.

He tries her cell again – the fifth time in as many minutes and twists around in his seat to look at the double doors at the head of the auditorium. Mrs. Miller is going to be here any second, and Ryan's a second semester senior heading off to a good school on a full ride scholarship in the fall, it's not like he'll be penalized for being a few minutes late. Callie's just a junior though, and they don't have it anywhere near as easy.

"Hey Sheryl," he whispers, leaning back against the wooden seat, making eyes at the girl sitting behind him. "Callie's late." She rolls her eyes at him, snapping her gum out of her mouth with a loud pop and raising her pierced brows.

"You think?" Her eyes are tiny blue slits with horrendously applied eye shadow, and Ryan tries to keep from grimacing but fails kind of miserably. "It's your fucking fault anyway, asshole." Her eyes widen a little, like she's almost shocked that she spit the words out, but she's gotten herself under control after a second, her face a comical mask of horror as she realizes she's said something she shouldn't have.

Ryan's not paying attention to that though, doesn't really care about Sheryl Hersey or the different ways she can contort her face. She has the fixings to be a good character actress if she sticks with it, but that's none of Ryan's business or his problem. "It's my fault that she's late? How the hell is it my fault?"

"Because you're the one who got her pregnant in the first place. God. No wonder she skipped to go get it taken care of." For as long as he lives, Ryan will remember this moment, the way his skin aches with a crackling awareness that seems to settle over his body, the tightness in his shoulders and how even his fingers feel cramped and useless.

"What?" he asks, and she stays silent, almost sneering in the row above his. "What clinic, Sheryl?" He's hissing out the words, body on auto pilot as he angles himself towards her, and he doesn't know what it is that makes her eyes go wide, but they do, and she tells him, the words falling clumsily past her lips.

He's up and out of his seat in less than a minute and no one spares him a glance as he pushes out of the auditorium. He's a senior, but it's not only that, he's Ryan fucking Ross. He's responsible, he knows what he's doing and if he's cutting class, he sure as fuck must have a reason to.

--

It doesn't take him long to find, not really. Still, Ryan's shaking, thinking about all of the seconds, minutes, hours it's been since Callie went in there, if she's still waiting, if they've done it and it's over, and something that belonged as much to him as it did to her is just gone from the world.

He parks in a handicapped space in front of an innocuous looking brick building off of Center St. and has to blink because it looks more like a dentist's office than an abortion clinic.

It's easier to get in than he'd anticipated, although to be honest, he'd been terrified of some sort of resistance at the door, as if someone would have been there, waiting to stop him, as if someone would try and hold him back. There's barely anyone in the waiting room, which is the first thing he sees when he comes in through the glass doors. Callie's sitting in the chair closest to the reception desk, dressed in sweats and an old hoodie of Ryan's from his hockey days.

He's pretty sure she sees him before he sees her. He's pretty sure she's expecting it when he falls to his knees, tugging her hands into his, but her face is closed off, and the swoop of her bangs falls across her eyes, shielding them when she looks down. He's got to give her credit; she doesn't ask him what he's doing there. She's crying though, big fat tears that stream down her cheeks and cling to her lashes; tears that make her nose red and push hiccups past her throat.

"Cal," he says, because he doesn't know what else to, doesn't, except for how there's only one solution, really. "Cal, I'll take care of you, I promise." She drags in a breath, pushing her bangs away from her face and forces her eyes open. They're rimmed and red, but she's nodding at least, and that's something.

"Will you -- " Her voice is tiny, so small that he can barely hear it, and by then, the words are already out of his mouth, hanging in the air around them, waiting to shatter the silence. "Marry me." She blinks, eyes going wetter still, but she stands when he does, and when he smiles at her, the way she twists her lips is enough to help him to believe.

--

It's quiet. It's completely quiet, a tiny little ceremony; just him and Callie, his dad and her two sisters, packed into a tiny little church that seems mammoth around them. Ryan's not religious, not even a little, but he feels it in his gut when the pastor tells him to love, honor and support Callie for the rest of forever.

From the front and from the back she's not showing, not at all, but sometimes when he catches glances at her from the side, just out of the corner of his eye, he can see a tiny little bump where nothing but flat used to be, and he feels something in his stomach, heavy, but not leaden, proud, if not excited.

Callie cries, tiny pinpricks of tears sliding down her cheeks, but her lips quirk up for him, eyes shining as he slips the simple gold band his dad helped pay for onto her finger. Her hands shake where his had been steady, but that's to be expected, he thinks. She's the one having the baby; he's the one who get them in this mess in the first place.

Afterwards, she calls her mom from the pay phone outside of their room, body angled inwards, so that even if he'd wanted to, Ryan wouldn't have been able to hear. He goes inside with a touch to the small of her back, and when he lies on the creaky motel bed he counts at the cracks in the ceiling and tells himself that it'll be okay.

He's asleep before she comes inside.

--

It's not like it's a secret, but by April, Callie's showing enough that heavy sweaters and heavier jackets no longer conceal her condition. People at school notice, they must, but they don't comment on it, and Ryan is just grateful that they can have this, that if there are whispers, they're behind closed doors, and anyway, they're married. They're married and they're in this together, and he'll protect her if she needs it, but she doesn't seem to.

Callie wastes away a little as she enters her sixth month, all the sparkle and shine that had drawn him to her in the first place lost in the downward curve of her lips and the way even touching his hands seems to be too much of an effort for her.

They're living in the little apartment above Ryan's garage, and it's nothing special, but it does have its own door, and for the most part, they're left alone. It's not like they can get into much more trouble and besides, they did the right thing, the responsible thing.

It's not like they'd never talked about it in the early days, Callie wound tight around Ryan's middle, head pressed against the beating of his heart, whispering things about love and forever and all of the promises words like that entailed.

After college they'd said, the words whispered against Callie's neck with Ryan's face pressed into the crook of her shoulder, mouthed against the skin of his stomach, implied by the twist and tilt of their hands and the way Callie would smile at him big and bright whenever the subject of college came up and she could proudly say, "Ryan's not going to be that far away. We're going to stay together."

She doesn't say things like that anymore because she doesn't say anything at all. There are no whispers or linked fingers, and they're like strangers now, lying side by side with nothing more to say to each other than, "Excuse me," and "When you're done reading, could you please turn out the light?"

Ryan graduates in May with the rest of his class and doesn't even bother to check the bleachers for family or loved ones. His dad pulled an extra shift at the casino so that he'd be able to take the day of the baby shower off, and when he'd left that morning, Callie had been complaining about the heat, skin stretched over her swollen belly, hair covering her eyes, shielding them from Ryan and the things she didn't want him to see.

"Will I see you later?" He'd asked, because all seniors had a five–pack of spaces available for their guests, and people had been asking him to share his for weeks. She hadn't said no, but Ryan doesn't look for her anyway. It's easier to deal with disappointment when you aren't expecting anything at all. He doesn't stick around campus once his name is called, even though pomp and circumstance dictate that he should at least toss his cap into the air.

He doesn't, just unzips his robe and pushes it into the backseat of his car when he gets to it, tossing his cap onto the seat next to him, turning the music up high because Callie isn't in the car telling him not to, to be careful, to watch the baby, because maybe beings that aren't fully formed can't quite comprehend the brilliance of Blink 182.

He makes it home in record time, which makes sense because everyone else in town is at graduation and when he lets himself into the apartment, he's even smiling. Callie isn't there, which shoots off something low and funny in his stomach, something that he hasn't felt in months, not since before holding her hands so tightly that they'd bruised, since before he'd promised her his forever and it had been for real.

He feels free.

The phone rings, next to the bed, and it's the spare line, the one Ryan's dad had spent an entire Saturday rewiring so that it would be only theirs, so they had everything they could have ever wanted up here, so that it could really be home until they got on their feet.

"Ryan -- " and it sounds like Callie, but it isn't, it's her sister, Amy, the youngest, panic and worry laced into her voice like needles, pressing onto his skin and drawing blood with every word she tumbles over in her hurried speech. "Ryan, Ryan come quick. The baby. The baby's coming – it's early, it's early and the baby's coming."

Ryan can't breathe, but you don't need to breathe to be able to drive a car.

--

Ryan's well aware that he doesn't have a great deal of experience with the whole procreation process, he's the only child of an only child, so his understandings conceptions of pregnancy and birth are fairly limited to the decades old video shown to giggling classes of awkward eleventh graders during the one week of health spent on sex ed that equated to one big glaring sign saying "Don't Do It."

Still, the title of the video, "the Miracle of Life" has stuck with him and it seems like the whole process should maybe have a feeling of awe and holiness to it. Babies are miracles; surely their arrival should feel miraculous, especially to the parents.

It doesn't, though, not really.

Ryan ends up standing beside the bed with one hand on Callie's knee, mumbling soothing nonsense under his breath that she probably can't even hear over the louder encouragement of her mother and sister and the directions of the nurses and doctor.

He feels like an intruder onto the scene, watching helplessly as Callie cries and screams, digging her nails into her sister's hands until her knuckles gleam white. The room is small and crowded, too hot, and Ryan can feel prickles of sweat rolling down his back underneath the dress shirt he'd carefully ironed the night before so it'd be ready for his graduation.

Any other time, he'd be able to see the irony in him becoming a high school graduate and a father on the same day, but he can't get past the little voice in the back of his head whispering that he did this, he caused this.

It happens so fucking fast; Callie's arching up off the bed as the doctor tells her to push just one more time while Ryan stares at her stomach, then there's this monumental shift he can see roll beneath her skin and Callie's eyes go huge, big and blindingly, beautifully blue.

Then, God, then the doctor's holding this little red, wriggling thing, tiny arms and legs flailing and saying, "It's a girl. You have a daughter."

Callie drops back on the bed, gasping hard, and Ryan catches her eye. For a moment, they stare at each other and the rest of the room drops away, her mom and sister, the doctor cutting the cord and the nurse cleaning up their daughter, and it's just them. She's shaking and crying and Ryan thinks, in that moment, that she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life.

The baby, their baby, is laid into Callie's arms, still crying, but softer and, after a moment, Amy steps back so Ryan can sit down on the edge of bed and slide an arm around Callie's shoulders and look at what they have created.

She is red and still covered in what Ryan calls slime in his head, though he knows there has to be a less middle school word for it. She has a thatch of reddish hair and eyes gleaming an indistinct, unfocused blue. She has a trio of freckles on the back of her hand and a little circular birthmark on her chest.

"Hi," Ryan whispers, hesitantly laying one finger in her hand. Her fingers close tight around it and that part, that part feels miraculous.

The nurse behind them looks apologetic as she breaks the moment, taking the baby gently and giving her to yet another nurse, heading for the infirmary, probably. Callie's eyes are dazed as she looks up at him, and Ryan can't exactly blame her, he would never be able to survive something like this. "Have you picked out a name yet, love?" The nurse's voice has an accent to it that Ryan can't place, but it's lovely and lilting, and her eyes are warm.

Ryan blinks. They haven't, they've barely even talked about it, but Callie's practically comatose, and Ryan's pretty sure the baby would hate them for the rest of their natural lives if they named her Baby. Jesus. "Cal," he whispers, and her lashes flutter but her eyes don't open, and her cheeks are flushed. "What're we gonna name the baby?" She makes a noise low in her throat, burrowing into the thin hospital covers they'd just thrown over her, eyes still closed. "Cal, come on," he whispers, voice low, a desperate sound.

That seems to get her, and her eyes open just the barest sliver of an inch. "I don't really care, Ryan." He flinches, even though he doesn't mean to, and she must see it, because her face changes a little bit. "I'm just. I'm so tired. And she's healthy, right? That's all that matters." She closes her eyes again, and there's this cold, dead weight in Ryan's stomach that he hadn't even realized was there until right then.

The nurse is still standing there, a few feet back, sure, but constant. "Ella," Ryan says, voice clear, surprising himself. "Her name is Ella. Ella Grace Ross." He tries not to collapse at the weight of the words, not ever fully realizing how big and important a thing like a name really is. The nurse is smiling at him, and she touches his arm, lightly. "That's beautiful, love. She's beautiful."

Ryan wipes at his cheeks, pushing away the tears that had pooled in his eyes and manages to whisper, "Thank you."