Convenience Store in the Rain

The rain arrived without warning, which was the only thing it had in common with most of the things that had happened to Yuna today.

She had been two minutes from her apartment — close enough that she had looked at the sky earlier and made the calculation that she didn't need an umbrella, a calculation that the sky had apparently found amusing — when the first drops came down, and then the first drops became the second drops became a quantity of drops that no longer had a useful individual identity and was simply rain, serious and committed, the kind that had decided it was going to be here for a while and had made arrangements accordingly.

She ran.

The nearest shelter was the awning of the convenience store on the corner — a narrow strip of roof perhaps four feet deep that covered the entrance and approximately nothing else. She made it under it with her bag held over her head, which had protected her bag and not her at all, and stood there catching her breath and looking at the rain coming down in the yellow light of the store's signage.

Already under the awning: a man she didn't know.

He was perhaps mid-twenties, in a work shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled to the elbow, holding a convenience store bag in one hand and his phone in the other, looking at the rain with the expression of someone who had done the same mental calculation she had and reached the same incorrect conclusion.

They looked at each other.

"Hi," Yuna said.

"Hi," he said.

The awning was very small.

They redistributed themselves without discussing it — each taking a side, a foot of space between them, facing the rain with the mutual understanding of two people who had not chosen this situation and were going to manage it with reasonable dignity.

The rain showed no interest in cooperating.

Yuna checked her phone. Eleven forty-seven. The weather app, consulted too late, showed a solid band of rain sitting over the neighborhood with the settled confidence of something that had paid for its time and intended to use it.

"How long," the man said, not looking at her, clearly looking at his own phone.

"App says an hour," she said. "Minimum."

He exhaled through his nose — not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh.

"Of course," he said.

"Were you going far?"

"Three blocks." He held up the convenience store bag. "Late dinner."

She looked at the bag. "What did you get?"

He looked at her, briefly, with the mild surprise of someone who had not expected the conversation to go in this direction.

"Onigiri," he said. "Katsu curry cup noodles. Canned coffee."

"The canned coffee at this hour is going to keep you up."

"I have a report due at six."

"Ah," she said. "Then it's medicinal."

"Exactly."

She leaned against the wall beside the door and looked at the rain running off the awning edge in a thin continuous curtain. Inside the store, visible through the glass, the night staff — a teenager who looked like he would rather be anywhere else, which was fair — was restocking the drinks refrigerator with the mechanical efficiency of someone operating on autopilot.

"I'm Yuna," she said. Not entirely sure why. The rain, probably. The hour. The particular social pressure of sharing four feet of roof with a stranger.

He looked at her again. Seemed to decide something.

"Sota," he said.

The first ten minutes were awkward in the specific way of two people who had exchanged names and were now technically acquainted and weren't sure what to do with that.

Yuna checked her phone twice. Sota ate one of his onigiri standing up, which he did with the practiced efficiency of someone who had eaten many meals in inconvenient locations. The rain continued its commitments. A taxi went past without stopping, its light off, which Sota watched with the expression of a man briefly considering his options and then returning to his original position.

"Do you want the other one?" he said.

She looked at him.

He was holding out the second onigiri — tuna mayo, still wrapped. "I bought two out of habit," he said. "I'll only eat one."

"That's your dinner."

"I have the noodles."

She looked at the onigiri. She had not eaten since lunch, a fact her body had been noting with increasing editorial commentary for the past two hours, and tuna mayo onigiri at midnight under a rain awning was not a situation she had anticipated being grateful for and was.

"Thank you," she said, and took it.

They ate in the slightly less awkward silence of people sharing food, which was a different quality of silence than the one before it.

"Report on what?" she said.

"Supply chain logistics." He said it with the flat affect of someone who had been looking at the same document for too many hours and had lost the ability to have feelings about it. "You?"

"Graphic design student," she said. "Second year."

He glanced at her — at the paint on her left hand that she had not fully scrubbed off, at the tote bag with the sketchbook visible at the top.

"The paint gave it away," he said.

She looked at her hand. "I keep meaning to get that off."

"What were you working on?"

"Poster project. We have to design a campaign for something that doesn't exist yet — an imaginary product, a fake event, whatever we want." She peeled back the onigiri wrapper. "I've been working on mine for three weeks and I keep starting over."

"What's the problem?"

"I know what I want it to look like. I can see it exactly." She paused. "I just can't make what I make match what I see."

He was quiet for a moment, looking at the rain.

"That happens a lot?" he said.

"Every project." She ate. "My professor says it's normal at this stage. That the gap between what you can see and what you can make closes over time." She paused. "I believe her. It's just frustrating to be in the gap."

"Yeah," Sota said, in the tone of someone who understood this from a different angle.

She looked at him.

"Supply chain logistics isn't what you wanted to do," she said. It came out more directly than she intended — the hour, probably, and the rain, and the particular lowering of social filters that came from sharing an onigiri with a stranger.

He didn't seem bothered by the directness.

"I wanted to work in urban planning," he said. "Specifically — the kind that thinks about how neighborhoods work for the people who actually live in them. Not just infrastructure. The human part." He looked at the street, at the rain running along the gutter. "I interned at a firm the summer before I graduated. Did good work. They didn't have a position." He paused. "The logistics company had a position."

"How long have you been there?"

"Two years."

"Do you like it?"

He considered this with genuine seriousness, which she appreciated — he didn't deflect or perform contentment or give the automatic answer.

"Parts of it," he said. "I'm good at it, which helps. But good at something and wanting to do something are—" he paused, looking for the right word.

"Different lists," she said.

He looked at her.

"Yeah," he said. "Different lists."

The rain came down. The teenager inside had finished the drinks refrigerator and moved to the snack aisle with the same autopilot energy. A couple ran past on the pavement sharing one umbrella inadequately, laughing about it, disappearing around the corner.

Sota opened the canned coffee.

He looked at it. Then, with the deliberateness of someone making a small decision, held it out toward her.

"I only have the one," he said. "But."

She touched the can briefly — a shared sip offered, acknowledged, declined with a small shake of her head that said thank you rather than no.

He drank it.

"Can I ask you something?" Yuna said.

"You've been asking me things for ten minutes."

"A different kind of thing."

He looked at her.

"Do you think you'll go back to it?" she said. "The urban planning."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer. The rain filled the silence helpfully, its steady sound neither demanding nor indifferent, just present.

"I think about it," he said. "There are evenings — after a good day, when the work actually came together — where I think maybe it's fine. Maybe this is what working life is. You find the thing you're good at and you do it well and you build something." He turned the can in his hand. "And then there are evenings like tonight, writing a report at midnight, and I think — I'm twenty-six. If not now, when."

"When what?"

"When do I stop waiting for the right time to try again."

She looked at him.

He looked at the rain.

"That's probably more than you were asking," he said.

"No," she said. "It's exactly what I was asking."

He glanced at her — briefly, with the expression of someone surprised to have been understood — and then looked back at the street.

"The gap closes," she said. "That's what my professor says. Between what you can see and what you can make." She paused. "Maybe it applies to other things too."

"Maybe," he said.

The rain had lightened while they were talking. Not stopped — still coming down, still serious — but the quality of it had changed, the intensity stepping back from committed to considering.

Yuna checked her phone. Twelve nineteen.

"It's letting up," she said.

He looked at the rain. "A little."

"Five more minutes, maybe."

They stood in the almost-quiet of a rain that was reconsidering itself, and the city hummed its midnight hum around the edges of it, and the convenience store light fell yellow and warm on the wet pavement, and neither of them said anything for a while because the conversation had gone somewhere real and sitting with that for a moment seemed like the right thing to do.

The rain stopped at twelve twenty-four.

Not all at once — it tapered, the way things ended when they had somewhere else to be, the drops spacing out and slowing and then simply not arriving anymore, the sound of it fading from the awning and leaving behind the quieter sound of water running off everything it had landed on.

They both looked at the street. Wet and shining and empty, the streetlights doubled in the puddles.

"Clear," Sota said.

"Clear," Yuna agreed.

Neither of them moved immediately.

Then Sota picked up his convenience store bag and Yuna adjusted her tote and they stepped out from under the awning onto the wet pavement, and the air smelled the way air smelled after rain — clean and slightly electric, the city briefly rinsed.

"Which way?" he said.

She pointed left.

He pointed right.

Of course.

"Good luck with the report," she said.

"Good luck with the poster." He paused. "The gap closes."

She looked at him.

"You said your professor said it," he said. "I'm just—" a small gesture, returning the thing she had offered.

She smiled. "Yeah," she said. "It does."

He nodded once and turned right and she turned left and they walked away from the convenience store in opposite directions through the washed and quiet street, and neither of them looked back, which was the right thing to do, and also a thing that required a small and specific effort that both of them made without acknowledging it.

Yuna walked the two minutes to her apartment with the rain-smell in the air and the sea glass — no, the paint on her hand, the tote on her shoulder, the remaining half of the onigiri wrapper still in her pocket.

She got home. Unlocked the door. Turned on the light.

Sat down at her desk and looked at the poster project.

Looked at it for a long time.

Picked up her pen.

Started again.