That night, the city felt quieter than usual. The rain had stopped, but the scent of it still lingered — petrichor and memory, clinging to the wind. Evan sat by his apartment window, sketchbook open on his lap, lamplight spilling softly across blank pages.
He tried to draw. He always did when his mind refused to rest. But tonight, every line he traced curved back to her.Liora.
Her name sounded strange and beautiful in his thoughts — like something both foreign and familiar, like a word he'd always known but forgotten how to say until now. He tried to sketch her face from memory, the curve of her smile, the quiet mischief in her eyes. But every time he drew her lips, he stopped. He couldn't get it right. It wasn't her he was drawing — it was the feeling of her, and feelings didn't stay still long enough to be captured.
Outside, headlights blurred past, painting fleeting streaks of gold across his walls. The world moved, indifferent. Yet to Evan, it felt as if time had folded in on itself since that morning. The rain, her voice, that glance — they replayed endlessly. He didn't even know why. Maybe it was the loneliness he'd learned to carry, the kind that made even brief warmth unforgettable.
On the desk beside him sat an old film camera. He picked it up, checking the empty reel inside, and imagined how it might have felt to capture her there, in that moment — hair damp, smile soft, the city dissolving behind her. A photograph couldn't hold the way she made him feel, but maybe it could remind him she was real.
He laughed at himself. "You met her once," he muttered. "You don't even know her last name."
Still, he flipped to a clean page and wrote a line beneath his unfinished sketch:
"Some people arrive like the first rain — unexpected, and impossible to forget."
Across the city, in a small café that stayed open too late for its own good, Liora sat by the window, stirring her tea. She wasn't thinking of the rain — or maybe she was. She found herself doodling on the napkin beside her cup: a single line sketch of a man holding a book, looking lost but not sad. She smiled faintly when she noticed what she'd drawn.
And then, almost like fate teasing her, a gust of wind slipped through the half-open window, snatching the napkin from under her hand. It fluttered out into the night, vanishing into the streets. Liora only laughed, shaking her head. "So be it," she whispered. "If I'm meant to see him again… I will."
Back in his apartment, Evan pressed his pencil to the page again. Somewhere deep down, beneath logic and reason, he already knew — this was not the last time their paths would cross.
And far below his window, the wind carried a small, rain-stained napkin through the streets — a sketch of him smiling, drawn by hands he had yet to hold.