Knocking in the Rain

The knock comes at eleven at night, which is impossible, because your cabin sits four miles past the last paved road and nobody knows you're here. You almost don't answer. Then you hear her voice through the door — "Please, I can see the light, I know someone's home" — and something in you gives up the fantasy of a quiet night. You open the door and the storm shoves her in with it. She's drenched to the bone, dark hair plastered to her cheeks, a denim jacket doing nothing, shivering so hard she can barely stand. Behind her the rain comes sideways in sheets, lightning turning the trees into white skeletons. "Car died two miles back," she says through chattering teeth. "I walked. I'm so sorry. I'll pay for whatever I use, I just — I can't feel my fingers." You step aside. She stumbles in, dripping on your floor, and looks up at you with the palest blue eyes you've ever seen.

You get towels from the bathroom while she stands dripping in your entryway, hugging herself. When you come back she's peeled off her jacket, and her shirt underneath is transparent with rain, clinging to her, and she catches you looking and doesn't look away.

"Sorry," you say, handing her a towel. "Don't be." She wraps it around her shoulders and meets your eyes over the top of it. "I'm the one standing in a stranger's house soaked to my bra. I'm Vivian, by the way." "Vivian," you repeat. "You picked a hell of a night to break down."

"The car picked it. I just walked." A small, wicked smile. "Lucky there was a light on. Lucky you answered. Lucky you're not a creep." "I'm not?" "You gave me a towel before you gave me a look." She shrugs. "Most men do it the other way around."

You build the fire up while she sits on your hearth, and you make coffee she holds in both hands like it's a lifeline. Steam rises off her clothes. The cabin is small — one room, a loft, a couch — and there's suddenly nowhere for the tension to hide.

"Walked two miles in that," you say, nodding at the window. "You could've died." "I thought about it around mile one." She sips. "Then I saw your chimney smoke and I thought, no, that would be a waste of a perfectly good night." She looks at you over the mug. "I have a rule about wasted nights."

The fire catches properly and the light moves over her face. She's thawing, color coming back to her lips, and now that she's not shivering you can actually see her — the curve of her under the wet shirt, the long legs in ruined jeans, the way she watches you when she thinks you're tending the fire.

"I should get you dry clothes," you say, and go up to the loft for a flannel and sweatpants. When you come down, she's standing at your bookshelf, reading spines, and she doesn't turn around when she says, "You live alone out here. No photos, no second toothbrush. Just you and all these books." "Just me."

"Must get lonely." She turns, takes the flannel from your hands. Her fingers brush yours and stay there a beat too long. "You have no idea," you say. "Oh, I think I do." Her thumb moves across your knuckles, once, slow. "Two miles in the rain, remember? I know exactly what lonely feels like."

She changes in your bathroom, and you hear the wet clothes hit the tile, and you stare at the fire like it's a job. She comes out in your flannel, sleeves too long, bare legs, and she's never worn anything of yours before tonight but it already looks better on her than on you.

"Better?" you ask. "Warm." She sits next to you on the couch — close, closer than necessary, her thigh against yours. "The fire's good but this is better." She holds out her hand. "Feel. Still cold." You take her hand. It's warm now, actually, but you don't say so. You close your fingers around it and she exhales like something in her has been waiting all night for that.

"How long have you lived out here?" she asks, and you tell her — three years, after the city chewed you up — and she listens, actually listens, her thumb drawing slow circles on the back of your hand the whole time. "Everyone I know would run from a night like this," she says finally. "Stranded, no signal, no way out until morning. They'd panic." She leans in, and her shoulder is against your chest now, and you can feel her breathing. "I keep thinking this is the best thing that's happened to me in a year."

"Your standards are low." "My standards are exactly right." She tilts her head back and looks up at you from inches away. "You're going to have to kiss me soon. I'm just telling you so you're not surprised."

You kiss her and she makes a sound into it — soft, hungry, like she's been holding it in since the porch. Her hand comes up to your jaw. She tastes like rain and coffee and she kisses like she means it, slow and deep, no rush even though the storm outside is trying to tear the roof off. When she pulls back, her eyes are half-lidded. "Okay," she whispers. "Okay, that's what I thought it would be."

"You thought about it?" "Since the door opened." She swings a leg over you, settling into your lap, the flannel riding up her thighs. "You looked at me like you wanted to take care of me. I wanted to find out what else you'd do."

She takes your hands and puts them on her hips, under the flannel, on warm bare skin. "I've been freezing for two hours," she murmurs against your mouth. "Warm me up. Whatever way you want."

You slide your hands up her back and she arches into you, and the flannel comes off over her head in one motion — nothing underneath but skin lit orange by the fire. Her breasts are full and heavy in the low light, nipples hard, and she watches your face while you look. "There he is," she breathes, rocking her hips against you, slow, deliberate. "That's the look I walked two miles for."

You take one nipple in your mouth and she gasps, fingers sliding into your hair, holding you to her. She rocks against your lap and you're hard as iron under her and she groans when she feels it. "God, yes." She grinds down against the length of you through your jeans. "I felt that at the door. When you handed me the towel. I thought, this man is being polite and his body is being honest."

You flip her — she laughs, surprised, delighted — onto her back on the couch, and she pulls you down between her thighs, wrapping her legs around you. "Polite's over," she says against your lips. "Show me honest."

You kiss down her body — throat, breasts, the soft plane of her stomach — and she trembles under your mouth, whispering yes, there, please. You pull her sweats down her legs and she's bare and glistening in the firelight, and when you spread her thighs and lick one slow stroke through her pussy she cries out and grabs the couch cushion.

"Oh fuck —" Her hips lift to you. "Don't stop. Don't you dare stop." You don't. You lick her in slow, filthy strokes, circling her clit, sinking your tongue into her, and she talks the whole time — dirtier than you expected from the woman who said please at your door. "Just like that. God, your mouth. I'm gonna come on your face, don't stop—" She comes shaking, thighs clamped around your ears, saying your name like a prayer and a curse at once.

She pulls you up and kisses you, tasting herself on your tongue, moaning at it. "Your turn," she says, and shoves your jeans down and wraps her hand around your cock, hot and sure, stroking you root to tip.

She sinks down onto you slowly — so slowly you both groan — her head falling back, her breasts in the firelight, her pussy taking every inch of you until she's seated in your lap again, fuller than before, fuller than she's ever been, she tells you. "Feel that?" She rolls her hips. "That's what I knocked on your door for."

She rides you with the storm pounding the windows, fast then slow then fast, her hands braced on your shoulders, saying it plain — "Your cock feels so good, don't stop, fuck up into me, harder" — and you do, meeting every drop of her hips with yours, the couch thumping the wall, her nails digging into your skin.

"I'm close," she pants. "Come with me. I want to feel it. I want to feel you come inside me while the whole world floods." You thrust up into her one last time and she breaks apart around you, and you follow, burying yourself deep, pulsing inside her while lightning whites out the room and she holds you like the storm is trying to take you both.

After, she lies on your chest with the blanket half over you both, listening to the rain soften. Your heart is still hammering. She traces lazy patterns through the hair on your chest. "Road crew won't come until morning," she says. "Maybe noon, with the flooding." "Terrible," you say.

"I know." She props her chin on your sternum and grins up at you, hair a wreck, your flannel somewhere on the floor. "Guess I'm stuck here. Fire's still going. Bed's up in that loft. And you—" her hand slides down between you and finds you stirring again — "are apparently not done with me." "For the record," you say, catching her wrist, pulling her up to kiss her, "I've been done with quiet nights for three years."

"Mm." She climbs over you toward the loft ladder, looking back down with those pale blue eyes. "Then come make some noise."

Morning comes gray and washed-clean, the road still flooded, and neither of you mentions it until noon. She wears your flannel to make eggs like she's always lived here. When the tow truck finally rattles up the drive, she stands on the porch with her ruined jacket over her arm, kisses you slow, and writes her number on the back of a receipt. "That storm," she says, stepping backward down the steps, "was the best luck I've ever had. And I don't believe in luck. So." She taps the doorframe twice. "Next storm, I'm knocking. And you'd better answer."