One minute, Jules and Mae were walking back from the restaurant, laughing about something stupid, full of wine and the comfortable warmth of friendship. The next, the sky had cracked open and the city was drowning.
They’d run for cover, but the awning was too small, the street too empty, and the rain too violent. Now, Mae stood pressed against a brick wall under a flickering streetlamp, her thin blouse plastered to her skin, her hair a dark curtain of water around her face.
And Jules was everywhere.
The androgynous beauty had her pinned—not with force, but with presence. One hand on the wall beside Mae’s head, the other gripping her waist with a gentleness that felt like a question. Jules’s leather jacket was soaked through, water streaming down her sharp jawline, her short dark hair plastered to her forehead. But she wasn’t trying to shield herself. She was using her entire body to create a shelter around Mae, blocking the rain with her shoulders, her chest, her desperate, unwavering focus.
“Jules,” Mae started, but she didn’t know what came after the name.
“I told myself I wouldn’t do this,” Jules said, her voice barely audible over the rain, raw and hoarse and nothing like the easy, joking tone Mae had known for two years. “I told myself you were just a friend. I told myself the way my hands shake when you text me was normal. I told myself the reason I remember your coffee order and your favorite song and the way you bite your lip when you’re nervous is just… friendship.”
She leaned in closer, until their foreheads almost touched, until Mae could feel Jules’s breath warm against her cold, rain-soaked face.
“But the rain’s washing away every lie I built,” Jules continued, her thumb rising to brush a raindrop from Mae’s cheek—a touch so tender it hurt. “And I’m standing here wet and stupid and I don’t care anymore. I want you. I’ve wanted you since the day you smiled at me like I was the only dry place in a storm. I’ve wanted you through every brunch, every movie night, every time you fell asleep on my couch and I had to carry you to bed because touching you any longer would have broken me.”
Mae’s heart was hammering so hard she was sure Jules could feel it through the soaked leather between them.
“So either push me away now,” Jules whispered, her eyes dark and terrified and brave all at once. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you don’t feel this thing that’s been eating me alive for two years. Or…”
Jules didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.
Mae didn’t speak. She couldn’t find words that wouldn’t ruin this, that wouldn’t make it smaller than it was. But her chin tilted up, almost imperceptibly, and she felt the tears mixing with the rain on her cheeks—tears she hadn’t known she was crying, tears of relief and terror and yes, finally, yes.
Her hand lifted from the wall. For a split second, Jules’s eyes flickered with something like fear—like she thought Mae was going to push, going to run, going to end this before it began.
Instead, Mae’s fingers fisted into the front of Jules’s soaked shirt. She didn’t pull. She just held on, anchoring herself, her answer written in the trembling grip of her hand, in the way her eyes never left Jules’s mouth, in the silence that screamed louder than the storm.
Jules made a sound—something broken and grateful—and then her lips were on Mae’s, and the rain kept falling, and for the first time in two years, nothing was a lie anymore.
