Rain

The rain happened in October, and it was the kind of rain that has opinions. I'd been out. There was a thing for my course, a study group that turned into a not-study group, and I'd stayed too long because I was trying to be the kind of person who stays at things, and then it was half eleven at night and I was four streets from the flat and the sky just opened. No build-up. No warning drizzle. Just the whole sky deciding at once. I didn't have an umbrella. I never have an umbrella. By the time I got to our building I was soaked through, properly soaked, hair stuck to my face, shoes making a sound, and I was cold and a bit tearful in the way you get when you're cold and tired and nineteen and a long way from your mum. Kai was on the stairs. That's the bit I didn't expect. He was sitting on the stairs between the second and third floors, in the bad lighting, with his coat on. His coat. Like he'd been about to go out, or had just come in, except he wasn't doing either, he was just sitting there, and when he saw me come dripping through the door he stood up really fast. "You weren't answering your phone," he said. I got my phone out. It was dead. It had been dead since the not-study group, I just hadn't noticed. "It's dead," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Were you — Kai, were you waiting on the stairs?" He looked sort of caught. He pushed his wet-ish hair back — he'd been outside, then, at some point, looking — and he said, "It got really late and the rain came in really hard and I texted you and it didn't deliver, and I just — I don't know. I walked to the corner. Then I walked back. Then I figured I'd hear the door better from the stairs." He stopped. "That sounds insane. Said out loud it sounds completely insane." It did not sound insane. It sounded like the chest thing. It sounded like the slow song coming through the wall at the time I'd started waiting for it. I was standing in the hallway dripping a small lake onto the floor and I started, embarrassingly, to cry — just a little, just the cold-and-tired kind, not the dramatic kind — and Kai crossed the gap and didn't hug me, because I was a human puddle, but he sort of — he put his hand on the side of my head, on my soaked hair, this completely gentle thing, and he said, "Hey. Hey, you're okay. You're home." You're home. He said it like the flat was a place that wanted me. Like he'd decided that on my behalf the way he'd decided it on his own, back at the start, with the not-knocking. "I'm getting you wet," I said, into his coat, because somehow by then I had got close enough to his coat to be getting it wet. "I genuinely could not care less about the coat, Tessa." We stood on the stairs. The rain went on having its opinions outside. And I want to be honest, because I said at the start I'd keep an honest record: nothing else happened on the stairs. He didn't kiss me. I didn't kiss him. I was a soaked, snotty mess and the lighting was terrible and it was not that kind of moment. But he walked me up. And outside my door — my door, with the purple sticky note, with the heart, with the rule he had never once obeyed — Kai Mendoza stopped. And he lifted his hand. And he knocked. Twice. Soft. On my own door, with me standing right next to him, both of us knowing exactly how stupid and how not-stupid it was. "What was that for," I said. "That was me finding out," he said, "if I'm wanted." And I'm nineteen, and I'm new at this, and I had no clever thing to say. So I just looked up at him, dripping on my own doorstep, and I said, "You didn't have to knock, Kai." And his face did something I'd never seen it do, something better than the grin, and that — that's where the later starts. That's where the score I'd been keeping stopped being about the mugs.