Love Has a Time Difference

Chapter 2 The Storm

The rain started on a Tuesday afternoon without warning, the kind of storm that turns a city into a blur of headlights and shared umbrellas. I was leaving a client meeting on the other side of downtown when it hit, and I stood under the awning of a coffee shop with my bag pulled tight against my chest and watched the street turn into a shallow river.

Lena called me from inside a car. I could hear the wipers through the speaker.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Downtown. Waiting it out."

"Julian sent a car."

"Of course he did."

"He heard the thunder on the phone and he just... did it. He didn't even ask if I needed one."

I looked at the street. I had not brought an umbrella because the forecast had said ten percent chance of rain. I had worn a light jacket, and the jacket was already soaked through at the hem. My shoes were not waterproof. My meeting had run twenty minutes long, and I had walked six blocks to the coffee shop, and now I was standing under an awning watching people run past me with their own umbrellas.

"Are you going to call Marcus?" Lena asked.

"He knows I'm downtown today."

"Does he?"

I had told him on Sunday. I had sent him the calendar invite. I had mentioned it again on Monday when we spoke, briefly, in the fifteen minutes between his last call and his dinner.

"I'll text him," I said.

I opened the message. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I typed: It's pouring down here. I don't have an umbrella. Then I deleted it, because it sounded like asking, and I did not want to ask. I typed: Stuck in the rain. He can't pick me up. Nothing. Then I sent it.

The message delivered at 4:12.

I stood under the awning and watched the rain fall. The coffee shop closed at five, and the barista came out to lock the door at 4:45, looking at me with the polite pity of someone who had seen this before. I moved to the bus shelter at the corner. There was glass on one side and the wind was coming from the other, and the rain found the gap between them and painted diagonal lines across my legs.

At 5:20, a car pulled up to the curb. I looked up. It was not Marcus.

It was a black sedan, and a man I did not know got out with an umbrella and walked past me to the building behind the shelter, where a woman in a red coat was waiting. He opened the passenger door for her. She got in. The car drove away.

Lena sent me a photo at 5:34. She was in the back seat of a car with leather upholstery and a bottle of water in the cup holder. The caption said: Julian's driver. Fifteen minutes. I'm never walking in the rain again.

I put my phone in my pocket and I stood in the shelter and I waited.

At 6:05, my phone buzzed.

Marcus: Take a cab home.

That was all. No question about where I was, no offer to come, no acknowledgment that I had been standing in the rain for two hours. Take a cab home. As though cabs were easy, as though I had not spent the last hour watching every car that passed, as though the storm were a minor inconvenience and not a thing that had soaked through my coat and my shoes and my faith.

I called him.

It rang four times before he picked up.

"Hey," he said. There was noise behind him, the clatter of a restaurant or a bar. "I can't really talk."

"I've been standing in the rain for two hours."

"I know, I saw your message. I'm sorry, things got busy."

"Marcus, I don't have an umbrella. I don't have a car. I told you I was downtown today."

"I know. I'm sorry. Look, I'll call you when I'm done here, okay? Just get a cab."

"There are no cabs. It's a storm. The whole city is-"

"Then go back inside somewhere. I'm sorry, I really have to go."

He hung up. I stood in the bus shelter with the phone against my ear and the rain coming in sideways and I listened to the dial tone until it stopped.

A taxi finally came at 6:47. I flagged it down and climbed into the back seat and told the driver my address and sat there shivering while the heater blew warm air into my face. The driver did not ask why I was soaked. He did not ask why I had been standing at a bus stop in a storm. He just drove, and I watched the buildings go by, and I told myself that Marcus was busy, that he loved me, that this was a bad night and not a pattern.

By the time I got home, my coat was ruined and my shoes were ruined and I had been wet for three hours. I took a hot shower and I sat on my bed in a towel and I looked at my phone.

Marcus had not called. He had not texted. The last message from him was still Take a cab home, and it had been sent at 6:05, and it was now 8:30, and I was still waiting.

Lena sent me another photo at nine. She was at Julian's apartment, and the photo showed two cups of tea and a window with rain running down the glass. She did not write a caption. She did not need to. The image said everything.

I put my phone on the nightstand and I lay down and I stared at the ceiling. The rain kept falling outside, and I kept listening for it, and somewhere in the middle of the night I fell asleep, still waiting, still cold, still telling myself that tomorrow would be different.