Rain, Rain, Rain

I am about to kiss her when it starts to rain. We are in Letna Park, sitting on a bench which overlooks the city. From here you can see for miles – the jumbled streets and the odd architecture of the TV Tower. Blue skies. Dark, high streaks of cloud.

The beer garden behind us is packed to bursting, but on the little path where we’re sitting there aren’t many people. She has just finished showing me her tattoos and is rolling down her sleeves. There is a weight to the silence that surrounds us both. When she’s done she turns to face me, very squarely.

For the last half hour we have been edging closer, turning ourselves towards one another. Now we are very close. We are touching, hip to hip. And I am leaning in to kiss her when the first drops of rain spit down on the backs of our necks.

She blinks. I pause. And in that moment the rain evolves from a light smattering to a warm rush, to a steady, striking downpour. The tarmac of the path darkens. Patrons in the beer garden shriek and scramble from their benches.

We sit staring at one another, stunned by the suddenness of it. Then we both break from the bench at the same time, cursing (me in English, she in Czech) and sprint up the path to the shelter of a nearby tree. By the time we get there we’re already drenched. We stand, shivering. Around us the rain falls in curtains, and we watch it with a kind of awe.

From where we stand we can look across to the beer garden. People cluster under trees, under the long marquees beside the bar, peering shell-shocked out at the sudden storm. The city has disappeared from view behind a sleeting curtain of wet.

We are cold and so we press together under the tree. It is a functional, awkward kind of embrace. She spooning into me, both of us shivering slightly. I am wearing only a t-shirt. Her dress now clings to her body and I can see the shape of her breasts, her narrow shoulders. Her in definition. I can’t help but feel her too – her soaked clothes cling to her skin, but we’re too cold and damp for it to be sexy.

Ten minutes pass. Twenty. A couple of taxis nose their way through the downpour to pick up soaked patrons from under the marquees. Little lifeboats. Eventually the torrents slacken a little and she turns to me. With her hair clinging to her face she looks lithe and alien. “I live not far,” she says. “You’ll come?”

When we break cover this time we are holding hands. We jog down the long avenues of the park and down the wide staircase to Čech Bridge. The river is covered in a layer of mist – a billion droplets splashing against the surface. The city on the other side is all wet lights and slick figures toiling along beneath umbrellas.

The rain intensifies again, and we run the last few streets to her building, arriving panting and drenched at the door. She fumbles for her key in the dark while the rain hammers down. There’s a fury to it now, as if it means to make up for its earlier reprieve. My shoes squelch every time I shift my weight. She rams the key into the lock and we tumble into the stairwell of her tenement. The big door slams shut, hushing the rain to a gurgle.

We look at one another. We laugh. Both of us are dripping as if we’ve just emerged from a bath, and I think about kissing her now, but the impulse is muted by our mutual dampness. I wonder for a moment why anyone ever thinks kissing in the rain is romantic. It isn’t. Not rain like this. Rain like this is just wet.

She tips her head towards the stairs, and we leave a trail of small puddles all the way up to her apartment.

It’s warm inside. In the doorway we perform an awkward dance of removing shoes. We clutch one another for balance. I peel off sodden socks – such a blatantly unsexy manoeuvre that we both break out laughing again. Once we’re in she reaches up under her skirt to peel her tights awkwardly down her legs. I see a flash of pale thigh. A brief moment of hipbone. She shivers, then turns her back to me and pulls aside her wet hair and offers the zip at the top of her dress.

After a moment’s hesitation I take it. It unzips further than I imagined it would, all the way down her back. There is the definition of her shoulder blades and spine. The straight lines of her bra and the top of her underwear, label showing. For a moment neither of us moves. The rain interrupted something. Drowned the impulse. But here it is again, still smouldering.

She shrugs out of the dress and pushes it down around her feet. It forms a sodden roll of fabric, which she picks up and shakes out and drapes over the back of a chair. She is in only her underwear now – matching red lace. Her back to me. I can see droplets clinging to her shoulder blades. The dark wetness of the fabric where her bra strap crosses her back.

She turns, arms folded over chest, expectant. And so I undress too. As I pull off my t-shirt and step out of my jeans she takes them and drapes them over the backs of chairs to dry. My hair drips onto my naked torso now. Without a shred of self-conscious pause she unclips her bra and shrugs out of it. Her underwear too, revealing a narrow track of downy hair arrowing between her legs. I copy her. I’m only semi-hard. There’s something undeniably unsexual to the nakedness. Cosy. But she is looking at my body and I am looking at hers nonetheless.

She pads into the bathroom and retrieves a towel. Returns with it and hands it to me. She is shivering still and there is water on her face. Trembling droplets. We are standing very close together, but not touching. I shake out the towel and cup the back of her neck and dry her face. Her neck. Shoulders. She turns so that I can rub the towel through her hair. And now there’s something. Now I’m hardening again. Like warmth returning to cold fingers. She raises her arms, each in turn, so that I can dry them, and her ribs, her breasts.

She parts her legs. I kneel. Dry each in turn, as intimate as my own body after a shower. As I straighten up she takes the towel from me. I stand still. I am taller than her and she has to reach up to dry my hair. A brief moment of warm roughness against my face. I can feel the pressure of her hands but not her fingers. I can feel her touching me but not touching me. She presses a knot of towelling into the centre of my chest. There’s rain on my skin that blotted through my clothes.

I let her take my wrists and move my arms so that she can dry each one in turn. Her hands are small. Can’t quite fit around my wrists. She notices my tattoo and stops to read it, but says nothing. She can’t have failed to notice that I’m hard now. The stray tail of the towel brushes against me down there. I watch her carefully and I see when she looks. Again, she says nothing. She kneels to dry my legs one after the other. Her face and her mouth inches from me. She doesn’t touch me there.

She leaves the towel on the floor and stands. We are both completely naked in the hallway of her apartment. She looks up at me. Her face as close to mine as it was in the seconds before the rain began. She reaches out and takes my hand. Her fingers entwine with mine. I realise in that moment that the two of us have never actually kissed.