"If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." --Ernest Hemingway
She only ever comes to him when it rains. On sunny days, she's the scintillating editor-in-chief at Calliope Press, all rapier wit and brilliant beauty, the ideal match for her dashing husband, publishing heir and internet mogul Logan Huntzberger. The toast of the East Coast society set; they're the kind of people with whom he wouldn't even dream of associating.
But on rainy days when she's alone with him, he sees the cracks in her veneer, her delicate brokenness laid bare before him. He isn't good at comforting her, hasn't ever been. A long time ago, he shattered her heart and his own into huge, jagged shards and has never been able to mend the pieces. Yet when she needs to seek shelter from the perfect storm that is her supposedly charmed life, his caresses let her know that she doesn't have to pretend with him. He understands why she's here and lets her cry without judgment.
One cloudless day, he introduces her to his friends. "My step-cousin the editor," he says, and they fail to detect the irony in his voice. What aspiring writer wouldn't be awed by the presence of such a publishing powerhouse? She dazzles them, and he's proud of her, in some strange, detached manner completely foreign to himself. As if she really were nothing more to him than the small-town girl, cousin-by-marriage who had made good in the big city.
They have no appointments to rendezvous. No hopes, no expectations, and no disappointments. She simply shows up at his door, lets down her hair, and forgets for a few hours that she's obligated to be the resplendent Lorelai Leigh Gilmore-Huntzberger. She sheds the weight of the world off her shoulders when she shrugs a silken blouse onto the hardwood floor of his apartment. For those fleeting moments together she's his Rory again: geeky, shy, and oddly naive for a woman of the world. She's content just to curl up in his arms to read a book while he kisses her neck and listens to the rain.
Her skills of misdirection are surprisingly better honed than his. Though he grew up on the dog-eat-dog streets of New York, the last ten years have sharpened her adroitness for pretense in the appearance-obsessed, high society world of the Huntzbergers. Lies don't come as naturally to him as silence, and he leaves the talking to her when the family gathers in Stars Hollow for the holidays. Snow falls all around them, covering both his tracks and hers. They react to each other with perfect cordiality, and their relatives are relieved to find that no awkwardness lingers between them from their days of teenage turmoil.
She always takes off her wedding rings when they make love, an odd preservation of the sanctity of marriage, he thinks. But he's glad. He doesn't like to remember that she belongs to someone else, just then. They move together as one, synchronized by the rhythm of the rain.
He never asks her, when she's getting ready to leave him again, if she's coming back. The weather is out of his hands and hers too, despite the power she has in the eyes of others. Even less interested is he in an answer of whether she'll ever leave her husband. Mostly because he already knows the answer isn't one he wants to hear.
In the morning, he walks to the newsstand to pick up the paper and sits down at the corner café, perusing the headlines before he starts his writing for the day. He doesn't quite understand what possesses him to scan the society section, the waste of paper and ink that it is. When he finally comes upon a photograph of her and her golden godlike husband, beaming for the camera, fluted champagne glasses in hand and arms wrapped around one another, he folds up his newspaper to shield his eyes from the sun.
For a single, hopelessly halcyon day with nary a cloud on the horizon, he closes his eyes and wishes for strength to end the madness, sever their ties for good. He's chosen to leave her before, to find himself, but even in the years they spent apart, he never quite escaped the dark whirlpool of his desire for her. Now that he's experienced going under, he can hardly imagine breathing again. She is more to him than her mind, her body. She's his reason, his inspiration, his temptation, and his destruction all at once. Her soul is inexorably tangled up with his, the weather be damned.
Today, it is drizzling outside. She likes to read as he types, grazing his bare shoulder with her dimpled chin, twisting his words aloud with her tongue. Hearing his thoughts reprised in the cadence of her voice makes him hard. He struggles to focus and inevitably fails, instead choosing to channel his creative energy in other, more pleasurable ways. Later, when she's sated and asleep, he returns to his work with renewed tenacity. Odd, how words pour from his fingertips when he writes of passion and sorrow, and yet he's incapable of rendering a single story with a happy ending.