“We’ll just try and see this one.” I’m already opening the camera app on my phone.
“You still can’t see it. Maybe two of the letters.”
He’s right, but I don’t want to give in to it. I look around, as though some new route will open up, some new staircase to the sky that’ll let me get closer. This one, it feels important—the background a deep red; the oneWI can see has a drop-shadow, which none of the other signs had, and beneath that, I’m almost sure there’s a script. “What if I—”
And then it starts raining.
It’s not a drip-drop kind of situation, either. It’s the kind that starts right in the middle of things, big, soaking sheets all at once. People-scattering rain, and everyone around Reid and me is running to duck for cover, most of them cramming back under the scaffolding Reid was so relieved to be free of. One advantage to the massive, slouchy bag I carry is that I can put it over my head, though this feels pretty silly when Reid shifts his own bag long enough to pull out an umbrella. Even though he knows words likeasshole, he definitely isn’t one, because he puts it over my head instead of his own, and points across the street to a blue awning, where a short, harried-looking woman is tugging a rack of fabric bolts back into her store. As we jog, our feet slapping against wet concrete, our clothes misted by the cars we dodge, Reid stays a half step behind me. I can’t say for sure, but I think I feel the way he keeps his hand hovering at my back.
Not touching. But hovering.
When we’re finally undercover, there’s a few seconds where we’re both surveying the damage. My tights soaked up to the knees, my dress stuck wetly to my thighs. His suit blackened with moisture, his hair copper-brown. I look up at him, feel a solidarity smile spread over my mouth. It’sfunny, isn’t it? It’s funny how this went?
“You don’t have an umbrella?” he says, and it’s . . . not funny.
It’sscolding.
I stare at him, a long second of censure at his tone, at that haughty way he’s looking at me.
“Yes, Ihaveone. But not on my person, obviously.” I think about my crinkly bag full of stuff. On the train I reached in for my box of Altoids and found a single sock, one of those half-foot ones that you can’t see beneath sneakers. It’s truly appalling that I don’t have an umbrella in there, but it’s also truly appalling that he’s pointing this out.
“It wasn’t supposed to rain,” I say.
Reid mumbles something from beside me.
“What?”
“I said forty percent.”
I keep staring. There is a single droplet of rain quivering on the end of the hair that curls at his temple.
“Forty percent chance of rain,” he clarifies. “On my weather app.”
“Forty percent isn’t one hundred, is it?”
The drop of rain falls onto the collar of his suit jacket. He looks entirely confused by what I have said, and his jaw clenches again. As if we’ve been cued, both of us turn to stare out at the street in front of us, the rain coming down impossibly faster. There’s a slice of space between us that’s charged with the strange energy crackling between us.
“This new project,” he says eventually, his voice louder to compensate for the thudding rain on the awning above us. “Will you give up your clients, if you get it?”
A gust of wind blows a mist at us, and I take a step back, watching the pavement get wetter around the toes of my shoes. I feel defensive, prickly—the walk getting off track, the umbrella censure, the way I can still feel where he touched me.
I shrug, playing at a flippancy I don’t feel. “Probably not. I like working with my hands. But there’s only one of me. This job would give me a cushion, and new opportunities. I definitely could take on fewer clients.”
“Everything you do now, it’s freelance?”
I look over and up at him, but he’s giving me his profile, his eyes still on the street. “Yes,” I answer, slowly. Suspiciously. I don’t know how much longer I can play at flippancy in the face of this.
“What if you have a lean month?”
I purse my lips. On the one hand, I don’t want to sound like a pompous jerk. On the other, Reid is being one with this question. “I pick up work easily. I’m in demand.”
He nods. “But if there were lean times,” he says. “You have an LLC, or something? Do you pay yourself a salary out of that?”
Oh myGod. Whatever is worse than man-splaining, this is it. This is man-terrogating. Before, at the Promenade, his questions—they were blunt, too abrupt. But they didn’t feel this way, at least. These are vaguely accusatory and not-so-vaguely superior.
“Remember how you said you weren’t a business consultant?”
“Yes,” he says, grimly; then he goes quiet. But when there’s a long stretch of silence, the rain slowing to a steady but still serious shower, Reid clears his throat and speaks again. “What do you do for health insurance?”
