Run with the Rain

The first time they met, it was raining.

Not a soft drizzle, not a romantic mist—but a full, thunder-shouting downpour that turned the sidewalks into rivers and the sky into a drum.

Nina stood under a rusted bus shelter, her coat soaked through, mascara melting like forgotten ink. Her umbrella had surrendered to the wind blocks ago. She clutched her phone like a lifeline, watching the battery tick toward zero.

That’s when he appeared.

Running. Laughing. No umbrella. Just wild curls plastered to his forehead and soaked sneakers slapping against the pavement like a heartbeat. He skidded into the shelter like it was home base in a game of tag and looked at her with wide, shining eyes.

"Nice weather for a swim," he grinned, water dripping from his lashes.

She stared. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed.

That’s how it started.

His name was Eli, and he claimed he loved the rain—not in the poetic sense, but in the real, ridiculous way. He said he ran in storms to “feel like the sky was alive.” He said puddles were for jumping, and thunder was nature’s applause.

“Don’t you ever feel like rain is trying to wash something off you?” he asked. “Like maybe the world’s just starting fresh?”

Nina didn’t know how to answer. She usually hated rain. It made her late, made her cold, made her remember things she didn’t want to.

But she didn’t say that.

She just asked, “And what if you get sick?”

Eli shrugged. “Then I get soup and a good story out of it.”

They talked until the storm softened to a whisper. The bus never came. He offered her his scarf—soaked and pointless—and she took it anyway.

They saw each other again a week later. By accident. Then again, on purpose.

Their love didn’t explode all at once. It unfolded. Like the sky after a storm, slow and shifting, each moment stitched together by laughter and long walks and a shared addiction to midnight pancakes.

But always—always—the rain followed them.

It rained on their first kiss, under the train tracks while a distant horn howled.

It rained when he gave her his favorite book, corners dog-eared and full of scribbled notes.

It rained when she told him about her mother, about the silence after the cancer, about the way she used to cry when it thundered.

Eli just held her hand tighter and whispered, “Then let’s keep running. Always.”

They ran in rainstorms like kids with nowhere else to be. Through parks, empty lots, past blinking stoplights and gas stations that never closed. He told stories about lightning dancing, and she told him how the sky reminded her of her mother’s lullabies.

People thought they were strange. A little reckless. Too poetic for real life.

But Nina felt alive in the rain.

Because in the storm, the world softened.

In the storm, they weren’t broken people trying to figure life out.

They were just bodies, hearts, and laughter under a weeping sky.

Then came the night it didn’t stop.

The forecast called it "historic rainfall." The city called it a flood.

Nina called Eli, but it went straight to voicemail.

She tried not to panic. He probably went running again, she thought. Maybe he was out in it—laughing, soaked, invincible like always.

But something felt wrong.

She found him near the river.

The water was rising, and he was trying to help a stray dog trapped between two collapsed fences. Mud clung to his knees, and his face was streaked with panic.

He saw her and yelled, “You shouldn’t be here!”

“I could say the same to you!” she shouted back.

The water surged, a roaring brown wall, and in that moment, everything blurred.

They saved the dog. Barely.

They sat on the roof of an abandoned laundromat afterward, shivering, holding hands. His fingers were cut. Her cheek was bruised.

“Promise me something,” she said, her voice raw. “Next time it rains like this... we stay inside.”

Eli grinned, teeth chattering. “Deal. But only if you make the soup.”

She kissed him, there on the rooftop, beneath a sky split with silver.

And that’s where they always returned.

Years later, long after the storm, after the city dried and the stories faded, Nina would walk in the rain alone, a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck.

People would stare. She didn’t care.

Because somewhere in the storm, she still heard him.

In the wind, she felt his laugh.

In the puddles, she saw his footsteps.

In the rain, she remembered the boy who taught her how to run toward the storm instead of away from it.

Their love was born in the rain.

And it would live there—forever.