12B

The rain had been working the windows since four, and by nine Laurel had stopped pretending she wasn't listening for the street door.

Capitol Hill in November was all reflection — wet black stoops, taillights smearing red down the alley, stairwells breathing yellow onto the sidewalk. She'd had a word for this kind of sky since college, something she'd told him once on the Ave and no one since: return rain. Water coming back, all night, for everything the hill had ever let walk away.

She'd taken the picture at six. The spare buzzer, 12B, brass gone spotted with weather, and her finger had ended up covering the ring. Not on purpose. When she checked the shot, the finger where the gold usually lived was bare, and she looked at that a long time before sending. One line under the photo: 12B. Latch off.

A lawyer would have called it nothing. But a latch is a sentence if you know its grammar.

Her husband was in Portland until Sunday. Work trip. She'd helped him pack the good coat, kissed him at the door like a woman in a commercial, meant most of it. She was a married woman; she knew exactly what she was. What she hadn't prepared for was a conference program a friend forwarded on Tuesday — his name in it, a panel at two, a headshot with the same jaw and older eyes. The boy from UW who swore he'd never come back to this hill. He hadn't, for twelve years.

The tee came out of the closet box that same night, folded under sweaters she never wore — his once, some band that played a basement on Roosevelt, the name gone, the cotton gone soft as flannel. She hadn't planned to put it on. She put it on.

The outer door went at nine-forty. She knew that hinge. She knew the count of the stairs and how he'd take them now. She was at the door before knuckles could touch it, pulling it halfway open into the rain — stoop black and slick under her bare feet, water finding her at once, hair going dark and heavy at her neck, the old cotton clinging, thighs bare under her sleep shorts and cold all at once. The whole street could see her. She stood in the doorway anyway.

"It's you," she said, and heard how obvious she sounded, and didn't fix it. "You came."

He stood there a second, rain in his hair, no umbrella, the crease of a conference lanyard pressed into his shirt. Behind him, an app was counting down a car. He would tell her later that getting in would have turned all this into nostalgia — that his feet made the decision somewhere back in the alley.

"No umbrella… come in," she said. "Unless you want the whole block watching a grown man get rained out on my stoop. Your driver's going to leave a bad review."

He came in, and the rain came in with him, dotted across the floorboards in the hall light. Up close he smelled like wet wool and hotel soap and the same deodorant, and she had to look at the door for a second to remember what buildings were.

His eyes went to the tee — the cracked print, the way it sat on her, wet. She got there first.

"It survived the move," she said. "Don't read into it."

Her left thumb was already at her ring, turning it, a habit three years old that meant wanting or lying, and she couldn't have told you which tonight. The gold was warm. She made herself stop.

"He's on a work trip," she said. "Portland. Until Sunday."

A beat. The rain filled it.

"And you're only here tonight."

She heard the sentence land — half alibi, half open door — and let it stand there dripping on the mat between them.

That Kitchen

She gave him the beer she'd bought at seven, the same brand, twelve dollars of nostalgia in brown glass. He drank. She watched his throat work, then studied the fridge magnets instead. By the sink sat the little dish where the ring had rested since seven — off for the washing up, never put back on. She had been not thinking about that dish for two hours.

It happened the way it used to, mid-sentence, no decision anywhere in it.

Continue this scene in Return Rain →

The beer was on his mouth before he was — cold malt, wet glass — and then her teeth were on his lower lip, gentle, then not, and his hand came to the damp cotton at her waist, and the sound she made surprised them both: a short laugh through her nose, twelve years old, exact. Because it was that kitchen. The one above the laundromat with the bad seal and the loud rain. Same laugh. Same taste. A different ring dish on the counter.

She broke it first, for air. Foreheads together, his breath and hers trading warmth in the small space between them, the bottle in his hand sweating a dark ring onto the counter beside the dish. Neither of them said anything smart. The fridge hummed. The rain kept up its patient work on the glass, the kind that stayed all night.

"This doesn't have to be anything," she said, which was a coward's sentence and they both knew it.
"It was always something," he said.

His phone lit up on the counter — the car, arriving. Headlights swung slow across the ceiling and then across her face, and neither of them looked at the window.

"That's my ride," he said, not moving.
"Cancel it," she said.

The engine idled out there in the alley, patient as the weather, waiting on an answer neither of them was going to give it. It waited a long time. Then it gave up, and the tires pulled away through standing water, and the sound of it going made her stomach drop like a first step down. The wet street took the sound and gave back nothing.

She was not drunk. She wanted that on the record somewhere — with somebody, with herself. She was a married woman standing in her own kitchen, wide awake, and she knew precisely what she was doing, and the knowing was the whole trouble, because she wanted it anyway. Wanted it clear-eyed and until morning and without one single excuse.

His hands settled at her waist over his own old shirt, and it was ridiculous how well they still fit there. She let her head fall against his jaw, his pulse in her ear, and told him the truth like a schedule.

"You leave at ten."
"Then we have all the rain there is," he said.

She looked once at the little dish by the sink, gold gone from it since seven, and reached over and turned it face-down. The click was the loudest thing in the apartment. Then she stepped backward into the dark hallway — one step, then another — his hand finding hers in it, and the latch, for the first time all night, held nothing open at all.