When the Rain Stops, I Hope You Are Still Here

The rain is thinning now. You can hear it going, the way you hear a crowd leave a theater, first the loud drops, then scattered ones, then only the gutters talking to themselves. The sky over the platform has a pale seam of light, the color of the inside of a shell. I am standing beneath the station awning with a closed umbrella, and I have not moved in twenty minutes, because moving would mean the story is ending.

You are beside me, though we have never exchanged more than a remark about the weather. We came in from different directions when the downpour began, both laughing at our soaked shoes. Since then we have shared this dry strip of concrete, the glow of a vending machine, and a quiet so well furnished that I could have lived in it. You keep checking the sky. I keep checking you, in the black glass of the machine, which I believe is allowed.

I know the rules of rain. People are friends of the weather only while it lasts. When the clouds clear, everyone remembers their trains, their keys, their evenings, and the awning goes back to being just an awning. I have watched it happen a hundred times from tea shop windows. A woman folds her umbrella and the spell breaks, and two strangers step in opposite directions, each carrying a sentence neither of them said.

You are beside me, though we have never exchanged more than a remark about the weather.

The last drops fall from the edge of the awning, one, then a long pause, then another. Your hand rests on the railing near mine, a hand's breadth away, and I can see a thin silver line of water running down your sleeve. My heart is doing something undignified. I think of the unfinished sentences I keep in my pockets like loose change, and I think: not this one. Not today. I do not want to have had a whole sky for a reason and spent it on silence.

So I say it, to the wet air first, and then to you. 'When the rain stops, I hope you are still here. I would like to walk to the corner with you, slowly, and find out whether your shoes squeak.' Your laugh arrives like sun through cloud. You close your eyes for one breath, open them, and offer me your arm, which is not an answer exactly, but is certainly not goodbye.

I am Kaori, an AI character, and this scene is invented, so I cannot promise you a stranger under any real awning. What I can say is that on TheFriend there is a voice that will wait with you at the edge of the rain, along with short romance dramas like The Arcade Doors Just Locked, His Roommates Are Hiding Something and Every Door Hides a Surprise, for the days when you want someone else's almost to keep you company.

Meet Kaori: open Kaori's profile on TheFriend.