Well, you're on your way somewhere, though everyone says you're going nowhere. Radio static crackles out the story of your life when it can get a signal and hums in time with the rain when it can't. The rain doesn't hum, but it smashes down like the angry words that your parents throw at you, because you're wasting your life, don't you know by now? – you stare out of the window listlessly at a Manchester scene soaked with sorrow and sensuality.
She is next to you, she is driving and occasionally fiddling with the radio in a last-ditch attempt to hear music at the traffic lights, which glow such blurry shades of luminous reds and greens through the water that the air is filled with, droplets small enough that you can only see them in small sprays when car headlights shine into them and set them faintly alight.
You are ignoring her, or at the very least you are making the effort. It won't work; her presence next to you draws you in like some twisted gravity and you can constantly sense her form in the driver's seat.
Neither of you make conversation. Both of you revel in the downpour.
The car circles, splashing rainwater slightly, and you pay to park in a little rectangle where it is usually gravely and dry, but now as you open the car door and try to step over a large puddle, the surface looks more like wet plaster. She throws up an umbrella – not a fold-away or a designer covering, just a large navy sheet spread out on a strong skeleton to keep the owner dry – and you stand a little too close to her even though three could comfortably fit underneath it, because you want to.
You pick your way through puddles and out of the car-park together, and you are so cold with her warmth next to you. You try not to shiver, because you know she will move closer, and you're simply not sure that you could handle that at all.
The rain hammers lightly on the umbrella, and it splashes on the wet ground.
The edge of her jeans catches slightly in the shallow puddles – they'll be damp even when she gets home again.
You're not even talking, just stepping carefully over water together. The build-up of rain is all you can hear, punctuated by damp footsteps.
You wait to cross the road, and she presses the button on the pedestrian crossing, wiping the drips off her finger and onto her jacket. She smiles up at you a little.
You watch the blurry sign across the road between glimpses at her. Red man. Don't go there.
A double-decker bus cuts between you and your view of the traffic lights momentarily, then leaves.
A No. 371. God knows where that goes. It had an advert for a film on the side, which looked good. Maybe you'll go to see it when it comes out. The date is in two weeks' time.
Another thirty seconds – green – go.
In the middle of this rainy city, you turn to the girl you call home, ready to cross with her, and you find you're suddenly much warmer.
...
Hours later, her car is parked up on a kerb, a 45 minute drive away. Her jeans are drying on the radiator. Her umbrella is folded again. Her hair is wet from the shower now, not the rain.
She looks different in her dressing gown with little flecks of water running off her. Her hair hangs straight and dark, heavy with water. Her cheeks are pleasantly flushed with the warmth that the water gave her, and her lips unusually red without lipstick. The light material of the dressing gown clings to her frame, the curve of her hips and her slim legs, her collarbone and her breasts.
Softer. That's the word for it. Naked, vulnerable, at home, comfortable, open and unhidden. There's something motherly about the way she leans in the doorway, left hip against the doorframe on one side, right hand splayed out over it on the other, watching gently.
Even her eyelashes are damp. The curtains are closed, so you can't see the drops sliding and racing down the window, but you can still hear the rain outside, and the sound makes you glad that you're no longer out there.
You're too close to her again, because you know that nothing stays the same for very long, but you need this to.
Everyone tells you that you're going nowhere, but they're wrong.
You're going wherever she goes. To Manchester, to anywhere.
You trust her sense of direction, you think, and you'd follow her to the ends of the earth, not that you're being dramatic about it.
It's about this time that she turns to you, hair dripping, face pink, eyes steel, breathing steady.
It's about this time that she turns to you, and kisses you.