The storm caught us halfway between two villages on the coast. The wipers couldn't keep up, so we decided to stop in the car park of a beach that would be packed in August and that October night was ours alone. We turned off the engine and the world shrank to the drumming of the rain on the roof.
There's something about rain that turns a car into a cabin. The windows steamed up in two minutes and the light from the only street lamp came through blurred, like a watercolour. She slipped off her trainers, put her feet up on the dashboard and looked at me in that way I've known for twelve years and that still disarms me.
We climbed into the back seat laughing, bumping into the gearstick, into the seatbelt that always catches where it shouldn't, with the clumsiness of two adults who haven't done this sort of thing in a long time. But the clumsiness didn't last long. The rest was breathing, the heat rising, the sound of the rain drowning out every other noise and her soft laugh in my ear.
At some point the rain stopped. We knew because suddenly we could hear the sea, huge, breaking a few metres away. We wound the window down a crack and in came cold, salty air that had us huddling under my jacket. We stayed like that for a good while, without talking, watching the glass clear and the lights of a boat appear on the horizon.
Before leaving we picked everything up, even a wrapper that had fallen on the ground in the car park. It's a habit of ours: nobody should know we were there. Only us, and now you.
