Rainfall & Red Lipstick

Rainfall & Red Lipstick

“A stormy night, a smudged kiss, and the truth she couldn’t take back.”

It always rained when Maya lied.

She didn’t mean for it to become a habit, but the weather never let her forget.

On the night she left him, the sky cracked open like glass and poured out everything Maya couldn’t say out loud. Every thunderclap sounded like a door slamming behind her. Every raindrop hit the pavement like a word she swallowed instead of speaking.

It was 11:42 p.m. when she stood at the corner of Langdon and 5th, soaked in her red trench coat, hair curling at the ends, lipstick smudged on her trembling lips. A cab idled nearby, waiting with the patience of someone who knew too much.

Maya looked at her reflection in the window. She didn’t look broken. Not exactly. But she looked like someone who was about to become a memory.

His name was Julian.

He loved books more than people. He always said Maya’s laugh was his favorite chapter. He collected Polaroids of forgotten things — half-burnt candles, raindrops on glass, her lipstick on a teacup.

They weren’t perfect. But for a while, they were enough.

Until the silence between them grew louder than the words they tried to fake. Until Maya started lingering too long after work. Until her red lipstick showed up on someone else’s collar — a collar that wasn’t Julian’s.

She’d never meant to fall for someone else.

But when you spend your nights pretending you're in love and your mornings pretending you’re not guilty, it becomes too easy to believe a lie — especially if it smiles back at you.

His name was Eli. A stranger with a voice like dusk and hands that held her like a secret.

He never asked her to leave Julian.

He didn’t have to.

Now, standing in the rain, Maya replayed her goodbye. How Julian’s eyes didn’t widen when she told him. How he didn’t shout. Didn’t cry. He simply looked at her the way people look at a thunderstorm — as if they'd known it was coming all along.

“Was it the lipstick?” he’d asked quietly, after a long pause.

“No,” she whispered. “It was the silence that came after it.”

He nodded once.

Then turned and walked into another room — the way you walk away from a house that’s already burned down.

Back in the cab, Maya slid into the seat, avoiding the driver’s eyes.

Her phone buzzed.

One new message.

From Julian.

It said only:

"You left your red lipstick. It always told the truth before you did."

She stared at the screen, biting her lip until it bled. Her reflection in the rearview mirror looked like a stranger. A woman who wore truth like perfume — something others noticed, but she never really felt.

The cab turned down Greystone Avenue, and Maya whispered: “Stop here.”

It wasn’t Eli’s street.

It wasn’t Julian’s.

It was just a place where the rain sounded like forgiveness.

She stepped out, coat clinging to her like a wet apology.

She reached into her bag and pulled out the red lipstick.

The one Julian bought her when they first kissed under a library archway.

She twisted it once.

Then scribbled a message on the back of a water-streaked receipt, pressing it into the mailbox of a stranger’s home, as if putting a secret into the world would somehow make hers lighter.

The note read:

“I once left love behind in a storm. I hope you don’t.”

Years later, Maya would walk past Langdon and 5th again.

The bookstore would be gone.

So would the cab stand.

But the rain would still fall the same — heavy, honest, unafraid.

And on the wind, if you listened closely, you might hear her laugh.

The kind Julian once called his favorite chapter.

The End