The Shape of Rain

FIRST

It happened on a Friday, as if that should go without saying; it was never planned. Whatever it was, that is. Things with them were never supposed to be planned, and Mira had given up trying to understand them. It happened in the in-between, the accidental, the space that held their lingering coffee cups and the texts that appeared solely on Tuesday and the way his hand had fit so perfectly across hers as they sat on an otherwise nondescript morning that had stretched into a week and then into something else entirely.

Friday was no different, then. She was closing the store at seven in the evening, switching off the lights, arranging the chairs just so, the door dead-bolted behind her as she pulled on her coat. She'd heard the knock, three deliberate raps against the glass, the kind of knock that only one person would use, knowing full well she'd be closing soon. She opened the door.

"Hi," he said,

all smiles and something in his eyes that looked an awful lot like triumph, like he really had been knocking on her closed door for a reason. "Can I come in?"

Elliot was still in his scrubs underneath his coat, which meant he'd come straight from Saint Agnes. His hair was pushed back. The end-of-shift look she knew so well; a weariness that had settled to the very bones but hadn't yet broken him.

"I know you're closed."

"You're observant," she said.

"Can I come in anyway?"

She stepped back and let him in. He didn't ask to turn the lights back on; he just went to the corner and switched on the only lamp left on in the store, the one that made it look all warm and friendly and proper at this time of the day. He stood in the middle of the store and looked at her.

"I had a bad day," he said.

"Tell me."

"Maybe later." He shrugged. "I just... I needed to be somewhere else for a while. Somewhere that wasn't the hospital."

"Okay." She gestured to the chairs in the middle of the shop. "Have a seat. I'll get some tea."

"Mira."

She paused. He was watching her with that familiar intensity, the one she'd spent months assessing and never truly understanding, with eyes the color of storm clouds that had settled into something steady and unguarded for the first time since he'd decided to do this... decided to follow through.

"What?" said Mira

He crossed the room to where she was standing, and said nothing more. It wasn't like him to be theatrical; it wasn't like him at all, really, to do anything so unsubtle. And yet, crossing the room in the amber glow of the closed bookstore, hands in his pockets, was about as nonchalant as things had gotten between them in the last few days. He came close, but close enough.

"I've been waiting for the right moment to do this," he said. "And I think I've realized that there is no right moment. That there's only this." He sounded so much like her father she wanted to scream.

She looked up at him. "Elliot."

"I know," he said.

Like he did Tuesday. Before she finished saying it. Because he always knew. He kissed her, slightly hesitant at first but thoughtful. The kind of kiss one gives after thinking of it for a long time and knowing it's true. Then less hesitant, then completely without hesitation, she kissed him back.

Her hands found his coat lapels. His hands found her face, both of them cradling the other like something fragile. Like she was something he was grateful to exist. They paused when they were done, foreheads almost touching, both of them breathing.

"Finally," he said.

He laughed, really laughed, surprised out of him, a warm, genuine laugh. "Finally," he agreed.

They made tea; this seemed a fitting end to a set of events that stretched on for months, a set of Thursdays that led up to this. They were in the back of a bookstore kitchen making tea for two; Mira was filling the kettle, Elliot finding the mugs. It was a domesticated and mundane set of actions, but it had weight. It said something.

They sat at the back table with the tea and talked. Traded stories, told each other things. It wasn't an end or a beginning - it was the settling of something, a coming together of things that had been orbiting one another for some time. He told her about the day, a family he'd been seeing for three months, a little girl with a chronic illness who'd defied all odds that morning in a way that had nothing to do with medicine, nothing to do with him. He'd cried in the supply closet right after, cried for all of ten seconds before wiping his eyes. Then he put on his game face and went back to work.

"You cried in the supply closet," she said.

"I cry in the supply closet approximately once a month," he said. "It's a very good supply closet."

She looked at him. "I didn't know that."

"There's a lot you don't know about me yet."

''Yet.'' The word hung between them, bright and electric.

"Tell me something," she said. "Something I don't know."

He mulled it over. "I can't cook. At all."I once made rice that a colleague described as structurally ambitious."

"Structurally ambitious rice," she quoted.

"She was being kind."

"What else?"

"I still have the dinosaur drawing. From the patient. It's been three years, and I keep meaning to take it down, but I never do." He paused, looking at her. "Your turn."

She thought about it. "I'm afraid of bridges. Not heights, generally. Specifically bridges. I don't know why. I can cross them fine; I just think about them afterwards."

He looked at her like she'd done something wonderful. "Caroline builds bridges."

"I know. I didn't tell her."

"Probably wise." He paused, wrapping both hands around the mug. "What else?"

"I still have every book Marcus ever got me. I have no idea why. I don't like him, I don't like the books he liked, he had awful taste in everything really, but I can't bring myself to part with any of them."

"Because they're books."

"Because they're books," she agreed. "It's wrong to get rid of books, even bad ones." He nodded as she'd just said particularly wise words; to both of them, it was. They talked until ten pm; the tea ran out sometime, but neither of them bothered to prepare another cup as their conversation became more tranquil, more relaxed, like a conversation with no particular aim because being in it was the goal in itself. At ten, he told her he had to go; she walked him to the door as it was the custom. Except it was not the same now, and both of them knew it, yet no one wanted to say it, for there were certain things better left unsaid. At the door, he turned and looked at her,

"This is going to change everything," he said.

"It already has," she replied.

"Are you...?"

"Yes," she said before he could finish, knowing the answer herself and seeing him smile in recognition of an old habit. Then he kissed her again, but this time briefly and no less determinedly, and he left. She stood at the doorway and saw that the rain was still here just as always, calm and indifferent but also perfectly right, and she felt something she almost forgot existed, but not hope- hope gone beyond.

Arrival: there was her arrival at a place; she closed the door, tore out the final switch, lit the lamp in the corner to burn, climbed the stairs, and slept up there alone, above the books, in the dark, listening to the sound of rain and river and the radiator grumbling its complaints, and knew that she was finally present, wholly and completely, in her own life.