Wet Stars
I
I lean against the wall.
The sky is half torn open —
stars threading through broken cloud,
rain falling like it can’t decide
whether to drown the night or wash it.
The streetlamps along the sidewalk flicker,
surrendering one bulb at a time.
Below them, the puddles hold what’s left of the sky —
a smear of starlight and headlight,
no longer telling which is which.
Then she arrives.
The rain doesn’t care that she’s coming.
It falls as it would
on an empty street.
Her hand reaches me before her face does —
a cigarette held loose between two fingers,
nails long, lacquered a green so bright
it cuts through the rain.
She lifts the cigarette, and for a second
its ember is the one star on this street
that isn’t drowning —
small, orange, only hers.
I hear her before I see her shoes —
ankle boots, leather, six centimeters of heel,
striking the wet ground like deliberate clocks.
Her coat is long, black leather, soaked through,
and it doesn’t shine so much as exhale —
the smell of rain caught in old hide,
each step releasing more
of the storm she’s already walked through.
She walks straight toward me,
never breaking stride.
She sits beside me.
The smell of it pulls something loose in me —
two months ago, my uncle paid me
with a leather coat,
worn soft by someone else’s years,
and I carried it home like a small fortune.
My brother saw it before I hung it up.
“Will you give it to me?”
And I did — the way you hand over
the one warm thing you own
without deciding to.
I watched him wear it.
I watched it become his —
like an old door I keep forgetting is there,
until tonight, when it opened again,
beside her, in the rain.
II
Her fingers find my hand,
slow, like she’s not entirely sure
she’s allowed to.
We don’t talk.
We just look.
Then, without deciding, she leans in.
Smoke and the sweetness of her lipstick
reach me before she does,
mixing into something beyond smell.
When the gap between us runs out of room,
her mouth finds mine,
and I swear the stars hung lower,
trapped between the buildings, blurred by rain,
close enough to mistake for witnesses.
Then it’s over.
We pull apart too fast,
the way you let go of something hot
before deciding if it burned you.
She goes one way.
I go the other —
walking home under the same wet sky.
III
By morning, the puddles that held the sky are dry again —
no trace of the stars mistaken for witnesses,
no trace of us.
The city had room enough for the rain.
It never had room for us against the wall.
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