Inside her Corolla, the young lovers waited out the downpour. Each drop made a circular impact announcing their high-born alien names; each drop blended into the next. Soon the windows showed a world in watercolor, a mere portrait melting around them.
"I've been after you since I saw you reading," the young man said.
"I wasn't reading. Well, sometimes. I was mostly writing what I was thinking and reading them back to myself." The girl replied almost automatically, as her true attention flickered far away in that watercolor portrait of reality. He stayed in her periphery whenever he sat with her, and something when he did not.
He chuckled, a pleasant throaty sound, one of the rough layers she liked to rising to the surface. "Okay, writing then. But you were reading and alone, and you looked so sweet and quiet. Hardly anyone paid attention to you."
"Alone?" she said. Her alto voice rose to a shrill. "My friends were there. Our friends. I was drowning in people. I had to get away - I needed to think."
"About us?" His lips fired the light nerves in her right ear.
She inhaled the deep scent of his lye-washed hair, the radiating heat he gave off without knowledge or volition. "Sometimes," she admitted, breathing a cloud into the cabin space of her Corolla.
Conscious of the scent of her breath mingling with his warmth and available to him, whatever defense posted within her tightened. He usually made that impression on her when he asked her questions like no one else had in her life. Balled up inside her, she carried a hunk of shields and walls and treasures as vices and vices masquerading as crowns.
He had been smiling at her and she barely noticed. Her only clue was his eyes gleaming in the cold blue shade cast by pounding rain. "Ah, sweet." His smile spread slowly. "Come here, love."
She did as he bid her, and soon his kisses entered her consciousness, next to the rain melting every fabric it touched, and the hollow pounding of her heart between the ill-fitting walls.
