Until the Corner

The convenience store at the end of Souma-dori was the same as it had been the night before, and the night before that, which was the entire point of it.

Ren had a route. He didn't think of it as a route, exactly — it wasn't written down anywhere, it wasn't a system he'd designed on purpose — but it existed all the same, worn into his evenings the way a path gets worn into grass. Out at seven forty, after the after-work crowd had thinned and before the late-night crowd arrived, when the store was at its quietest. Down the stairs, left at the vending machines, three blocks to the store. In, basket, out. Something simple — onigiri, a can of something, occasionally instant noodles when he could tolerate the effort of boiling water. Home before eight fifteen.

It was a good system. It required almost nothing of him.

Tonight the rice balls were the same two flavors they always had at this hour, the popular ones gone, and he took the salmon and the plain one without really looking, the way you reached for things you'd reached for a hundred times before. He paid with exact change he'd counted out in his pocket on the walk over, said nothing beyond the necessary, and the clerk said nothing beyond the necessary back, and that was the whole transaction, the way he liked it.

It hadn't been raining when he went in.

It was raining when he came out — not lightly, either, the kind of sudden, committed downpour that arrived without the courtesy of a warning drizzle, the kind that made the awning over the store entrance suddenly very crowded with people who'd had no reason to think about umbrellas twenty minutes ago.

Ren had an umbrella. He always had an umbrella, folded into the side pocket of his bag, because the radio in his apartment had a weather report he listened to out of habit more than interest, and it had said something about evening showers that he had, apparently, actually absorbed.

He was unfolding it under the awning when he noticed the woman next to him.

She was maybe his age, in a light jacket that was already getting wet at the shoulders, looking out at the rain with the specific resigned expression of someone calculating distance against precipitation and not liking the math. She had a convenience store bag in one hand. No umbrella.

He didn't say anything. That was the first instinct, the strongest one — the one that had governed most of his interactions with the world for the last several years. Don't speak. It will pass. She'll wait it out, or she'll run for it, and either way it has nothing to do with you.

He took a step out from under the awning.

Then he stopped.

It wasn't a decision so much as a malfunction in the usual process — the part of his brain that handled withdrawing from situations simply failed to fire in time, and he was still standing there, half under the awning, half in the rain, holding an open umbrella, when he heard himself say, "I have an umbrella. If you're walking anywhere near—"

He didn't finish the sentence, because he hadn't planned the end of it.

She looked at him with mild surprise, the kind that wasn't about him specifically so much as about being spoken to at all by someone clearly as uncomfortable doing it as he was.

"Oh — are you sure?" she said. "I don't want to make you late."

"I'm not — it's fine," he said, which wasn't really an answer to the question, but seemed to function as one anyway.

She stepped under the umbrella, careful about the distance, the way you were careful around a stranger, and they started walking together into the rain with the particular awkwardness of two people who had to coordinate footsteps they'd never had to coordinate with each other before.

For the first block, neither of them said anything.

The rain was loud on the umbrella, which helped — it gave the silence a reason to exist that wasn't just two people unable to talk to each other. Ren kept his eyes mostly on the wet pavement ahead, adjusting the umbrella slightly whenever he noticed her shoulder drifting back out from under it, which happened more than he expected, because she kept trying to give him more of the shelter than she was taking for herself.

"You can stand closer," he said eventually. "You're getting wet."

"So are you."

He looked down. His left side was, in fact, getting wet, his sleeve darkening at the shoulder. He hadn't noticed.

"It's fine," he said again, which seemed to be becoming the entire range of his vocabulary tonight.

She moved a few inches closer anyway, which solved the problem more for him than for her, and they kept walking.

"This rain came out of nowhere," she said, after another block. "I checked the sky on my way in and it looked completely fine."

"There was a forecast for it," Ren said. "Evening showers. I heard it on the radio."

"You listen to weather forecasts?"

"Not on purpose," he said. "It's just on. While I'm doing other things."

She made a small sound that might have been a laugh, though a quiet one, more breath than voice. "That's fair. I never check until it's already happening to me."

They reached the corner where the street split — one direction continuing along the main road, the other curving toward the residential block where Ren's apartment building sat, close enough that he'd been able to see its outline through the rain for the last several minutes.

She glanced at the food bag in her own hand. "Convenience store dinner too?"

"Most nights," Ren said.

"Same," she said. "I always mean to cook, and then it's seven thirty and I haven't, and the store is right there."

"I go at this time because it's quiet," Ren said, and then immediately felt like he'd said something strange, more honest than the conversation had asked for, but she just nodded like it made complete sense.

"That's smart, actually. It's a mess in there around six." She shifted her bag to her other hand. "Do you live around here? I feel like I haven't seen you before, but I'm bad at noticing people."

"Close," Ren said. He nodded toward the building ahead of them, visible now through the rain, the entrance light glowing yellow over the door. "There. The one with the bike rack out front."

"Oh — that's barely anywhere." She looked at him, something working out behind her expression. "I'm just up that way," she said, pointing past the corner, toward a street that continued for what looked like another two or three blocks at least. "Past the bakery."

"That's still a while," Ren said.

"It's fine, it's not that—"

"Take the umbrella," Ren said.

She stopped walking. He stopped too, a half-step later, the umbrella tilting slightly as he turned to face her properly, which he realized he had not really done yet, the whole conversation having happened side by side rather than face to face.

"I can't take your umbrella," she said. "You still have to get home."

"I'm right there." He gestured again at the building, closer now, the rain blurring its edges slightly but the entrance light still clearly visible. "Thirty seconds. You have three blocks."

"Then you'll be the one who's soaked."

"I don't mind," Ren said, and was a little surprised to find that he meant it, that this wasn't a polite thing people said in this situation but an actual true fact about how he currently felt, standing in the rain holding an umbrella he was about to give away.

She looked at him for a moment — not suspicious, exactly, more like she was trying to figure out if this was a kindness she was allowed to accept, the way people sometimes hesitated over things offered too easily.

"Are you sure?" she said again, quieter this time.

"I'm sure," Ren said.

She took the umbrella when he held it out, her hand brushing his for a half-second in the transfer, and the rain that had been falling on both of them now fell only on him, immediate and cold through his hoodie.

"Thank you," she said. "Really. This is—" She seemed to be looking for the right amount of gratitude to express without overdoing it. "This is really kind. I don't even know your name."

"Ren," he said.

"Ren," she repeated, like she was filing it somewhere. "I'm Akari. I'm at the store a lot too, so—" She didn't finish that sentence either, but it hung there with a shape he understood anyway, the same shape his own unfinished sentence under the awning had had. "Maybe I'll see you. To give this back."

"No rush," Ren said.

She smiled — a small one, easy, not performed — and adjusted the umbrella over her own head properly for the first time since she'd taken it, and turned up the street toward the bakery and whatever was past it.

"Goodnight, Ren," she said.

"Goodnight," he said.

She walked off into the rain, the umbrella bobbing slightly with her steps, and Ren stood at the corner for a moment longer than he needed to before turning toward his own building.

The walk to his door was short, exactly as short as he'd told her it was, and by the time he reached the entrance light his hair was soaked through and his hoodie had gone heavy and dark across the shoulders, water finding its way down the back of his neck in a thin, cold line. He didn't mind it the way he expected to. It was just rain. It would dry.

At the door he looked back once.

Akari was most of the way to the corner now, a small shape under a familiar umbrella, the dark fabric catching the streetlight at its edges, moving steadily away through the rain toward a street he didn't know, in a part of the neighborhood he'd probably never walked.

He watched until she turned the corner and the umbrella disappeared with her.

Then he went inside, climbed the stairs, let himself into the apartment that smelled like it always smelled, and set his dinner down on the small table by the window.

He didn't change out of the wet hoodie right away. He sat for a moment instead, listening to the rain against the glass, thinking about the half-second when her hand had brushed his during the handoff, and the way she'd said maybe I'll see you like it was a genuine possibility and not just a thing people said to be polite.

It probably was. He did go to the same store, at the same time, most nights.

He ate his dinner cold, because he'd forgotten to heat it, and didn't mind that either.

Outside the window the rain kept falling, steady and ordinary, on a street that felt, for reasons he didn't examine too closely, slightly less far away than it had that morning.