Seven Rainy Tuesdays

The first Tuesday was an accident. The rain came down sideways and Marta ducked into the deep doorway of a bookshop that had closed for the evening, and found a man already there, shaking water from his hat. They nodded. They waited. The rain stopped and they went their separate ways.

The second Tuesday, the same thing happened, and they laughed about it.

By the fourth, she had started checking the forecast. By the fifth, she suspected he had too, because he arrived in the doorway two minutes before the first drops fell and looked distinctly pleased with himself.

They talked in fragments while the rain lasted. He repaired clocks in a workshop two streets away. She was an architect who hated the building she was working on. He liked the smell of wet pavements. She did not, but she liked the way he described it.

On the seventh Tuesday he brought a flask of tea and two tin cups, and they drank it shoulder to shoulder, watching the gutters overflow. When the rain began to ease, neither of them moved.

'It's stopping,' Marta said.

'It is,' said Tomasz, and did not step out.

She reached up, took off his wet hat and kissed him in the doorway of the closed bookshop, slowly, with the last of the rain dripping from the awning. His hands were cold on her face and his mouth was warm and tasted of tea.

His workshop was full of ticking clocks, and none of them told the right time, and for one long evening, neither of them cared.