Savior

The Boy in the Rain

It was raining the day I met Him.

A torrential downpour: the first of many in the early spring of New York. A slanting rain, unforgiving, and never ending –falling from between the iron buildings and blanketing the city with rivers in the street.

I was fourteen at the time. Fourteen and walking home from school in a blizzard of rain because no family had adopted me and foster care didn't exactly provide buses for transportation.

Nobody else was in the street because nobody else was stupid enough to walk twenty blocks back to their homes. Back to the orphanage.

My whole body was soaked to the bone; hair sticking to my face and my hand-me-down clothes dripping with water. I was already starting to sniffle and I knew that this was not going to end well, but I had no one to call.

No one at all.

It was when I was about to take cover in some ma & pop pie shop that I suddenly stopped being pelted by rain. It was still falling all around me, but I became free of its vicious assault.

When I look up it's a red umbrella over my head.

"Are you an idiot?"

I look from the protection above me to the man next to me and almost choke on my spit because he is blue eyes and messy brown locks and tan and tattooed and deep frown.

"I... Sorry?" And I'm fourteen and have only kissed one boy on a dare and all the other boys I knew were from the orphanage and are boys and this was no boy. This was a man.

"Walking in the rain and you're not even wearing a jacket. Are you just stupid or are you trying to get yourself killed?"

We've stopped by now at some park in the middle of the grass and I don't even know what to say because he is really pretty and because he actually sounds concerned and no one has ever really been concerned about me.

Even if he is a stranger, it's something. It means something to me.

"Do you always yell at strangers and follow them around with umbrellas?"

"Only the cute ones."

Okay, wow.

"Scarlett," I blurt because I think he is flirting with me and I don't flirt and he looks like he is in his early twenties and I'm just a teenager, "My name is Scarlett."

"Red, like your hair. How cute," He grins and my heart stops in my chest, "I'm-"

"Layla! Your pie is done!"

With a start I tear my eyes away from the café windows, away from the pouring rain both in the present and six years ago –away from Him.

With cerulean swimming in my mind and a heaviness in my heart I abandon my post at the window watching the rain slide down the glass and make my way towards the back. Eliza is there – sitting on a countertop with a lollipop in her mouth and her thumbs on her phone, legs swinging back and forth.

Sure enough, the whole kitchen is full with the smell of apples –warm and crisp. I let that familiar aroma clear my head of the one day, the small action that set my whole life into motion.

That brought me here.

"So," Eliza drawls and just by the tone of her voice I know that I am not going to like where this conversation is heading, "Harry is supposed to come home today."

And of course I know because it's Harry and it's all I've been thinking about for the last three days.

Where he went, what he's been doing, who he has been doing it with, when he's coming back, if I've crossed his mind... all these questions have been ruminating in my head for 72 hours.