Chapter 4: Rain

The second date was a night walk through Jinli, and the rain came down at nine.

It did not start gently.

It dropped on the lantern-hung street, and the tourists scattered shrieking under awnings.

Jiang Lü stood in the middle of the stone lane with her face turned up and her arms slightly out.

"It is raining," she said, wonderingly.

"We should run!" Tang Yu shouted, laughing, and caught her hand.

They ran.

They ran past shuttered stalls and a dumpling vendor swearing at his tarp.

They turned a corner and went down three streets, until Tang Yu's building loomed ahead with its broken gate light.

They fell through the lobby door dripping and gasping.

They took the stairs two at a time, and Tang Yu's key shook in the lock.

Her one room was small and untidy.

A bed, a desk with two monitors, a rack of drying laundry, a laptop with a ladybug sticker on the lid.

"Sorry," Tang Yu said. "It's a mess."

Jiang Lü stood on the mat and dripped, her wet green robe stuck to her.

Her hair hung down her back in dark red ropes.

"It is the warmest place I have been in a hundred years," she said.

"It's a closet."

"It is yours."

Tang Yu laughed and went to get a towel, and found that her hands weren't steady.

She came back and began, because she did not know what else to do, to dry Jiang Lü's hair.

Jiang Lü went absolutely still under the cloth.

"You work late," she said, from inside the towel.

"Always."

"You write best at two in the morning."

Tang Yu paused.

"How did you know that?"

"You look like someone who does," Jiang Lü said, and her ear twitched under the towel, once.

Tang Yu was too tired and too warm to take it any further.

She lowered the towel and found Jiang Lü's dark eyes very close.

Water ran down the line of her cheek.

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