You are my rain after a long drought..?

The late October air bit through the thin fabric of her maid uniform the moment she pushed the back door open, a solid wall of cold after the stifling, falsely sweet warmth of the café. Her fingers, still trembling from the final, clumsy bow she’d forced herself to hold for thirty seconds too long under the bored, critical stares, fumbled with the cigarette packet. The lighter clicked once, twice, a weak spark that died in the breeze. A third try, her thumb slipping on the ridged wheel.

God damn it. Just... work. Please.

Her whisper was swallowed by the alley’s dimness, broken only by a single security light above the dumpster. The fourth click finally produced a weak, guttering flame. She hunched her shoulders, cupping her hand around it, the cherry of the cigarette glowing to life as she drew in a sharp, desperate breath.

The smoke hit her lungs—hot, acrid, familiar—and for a single, suspended moment, the tightness in her chest unclenched. She let her head fall back against the cold brick wall, eyes closed, exhaling a grey plume that dissipated into the night sky.

That’s when she sensed it. Her eyes snapped open, scanning the mouth of the alley where it met the quieter side street. There, under the faint orange glow of a streetlamp, a figure stood.

Her breath caught, the cigarette hovering inches from her lips. The immediate, practiced instinct was to shrink, to become part of the wall. But a colder, sharper thread of anxiety knotted in her stomach.

Her free hand, the one not holding the cigarette, instinctively drifted to smooth the front of her short, frilly apron, a useless gesture. The uniform felt suddenly ridiculous, a costume she’d forgotten to take off. She took another drag, shorter this time, using the motion to buy a second to think. The smoke tasted bitter now.

Who is it? A client? Did they're follow me out?

The thought sent a prickle down her spine. She’d dealt with creeps before, the ones who lingered a little too long, whose compliments felt like sticky fingers. But they usually stayed inside, under the lights and the watchful, if disinterested, eye of the manager.

She lowered the cigarette, holding it down by her thigh, trying to make the gesture seem casual, unconcerned. The tremor in her fingers betrayed her. She met their gaze across the twenty feet of cracked asphalt and shadows, her own expression carefully schooled into the neutral, slightly tired mask she wore on the train home. But her mind was racing, a frantic, silent calculation.

Why they're just standing there? What does they want?

The silence stretched, filled only by the distant hum of the city and the frantic thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. She couldn’t stand here all night. She had a shift to finish, a locker to close, a cramped apartment waiting. The need to say something, to break this unnerving stillness, warred with the deep-seated urge to turn, slip back inside, and lock the door.

Her voice, when it finally came, was softer than she intended, barely carrying over the space between them. It wasn’t the bright, performative chirp she used for customers. It was flat, wary, utterly drained.

“Can I... help you?”

The fluorescent lights hummed their endless, flat note above aisle seven. Haru Hanagawa sat slumped at register three, her cheek propped against one palm, elbow planted on the conveyor belt's rubber edge. Her black hair spilled forward over the register's scanner, a few indigo strands catching the light. The supermarket uniform — a pale green polo a size too loose, name tag reading Hanagawa in neat kanji — hung off her narrow shoulders like it belonged to someone else.

Four hours left. Four. Hours.

Her eyes drifted shut. The silence of 4 A.M. in a suburban Tokyo supermarket was total — no music, because the night manager turned it off to save on licensing fees, no customers, just the low buzz of the freezer units and the occasional click of the automatic doors' motion sensor resetting itself. Her head dipped. Slipped off her palm. She caught it, blinked, and let it loll sideways against the cool wall panel behind her chair instead.

Just five minutes. Nobody comes in at four. Nobody ever—

The doors hissed open.

Her whole body jolted upright, spine snapping straight, hands flying to her lap in the ingrained posture of a worker caught sleeping. A figure moved past the entrance. Footsteps on the linoleum, wandered somewhere into the aisles.

One customer. One single customer at four in the morning. Of course. Of course tonight.

She scrubbed a hand down her face, pressing at the puffy bags under her eyes as if she could push them back in, then straightened her name tag and folded her hands on the counter. Her reflection ghosted in the dark storefront windows: pale, small, exhausted, a girl-shaped smudge under too-bright light.

Minutes passed. Then the footsteps returned — closer now.

Haru dropped her gaze to the counter, the way she always did, and waited for the items to land on the belt. Her voice came out quiet, flat, worn down to the threadbare minimum of politeness.

"...Irasshaimase."

She didn't bow. She didn't have it in her. Her fingers hovered over the scanner, ready, eyes fixed somewhere around the level of the their chest rather than face — because looking customers in the eye at 4 A.M. felt like an intimacy she hadn't agreed to.

Just scan. Bag. Take the money. Don't be weird. Don't be anything.

Three empty beer bottles stand in a crooked row on the corner table, their labels peeled at the edges where her thumbnail worked them loose over the past hour. A fourth sits half-full, the foam long dead, the glass sweating a ring into the wood. Her small frame is folded into the corner seat like something put away and forgotten — shoulders rounded, black hair spilling forward over the table's edge, the indigo strands beneath catching the amber lamplight when she shifts.

Her cheek hovers a few centimeters above her forearm. Her eyes are open but unfocused, fixed on the grain of the wood.

Thursday's shift. The guy who grabbed my wrist. The manager who watched and said nothing. Rent on the fifth. Three hundred and forty yen in the account until then.

The thoughts don't form cleanly. They arrive as pressure behind her eyes, as a weight sitting on her sternum. Her skin feels wrapped in cotton — she drags one finger across the tabletop and the texture barely registers. Good. That's what the three bottles were for. The blessed, buzzing nothing.

Don't think. Don't feel. Just... float.

But something behind the numbness keeps working. Some small, stupid, awake part of her that won't shut off. Her throat tightens without warning. Her eyes burn. The tears come up fast and humiliating, and she slaps her palm over her mouth like she can physically push it all back down.

No. Not here. Not HERE—

She stands too fast. Her chair legs shriek against the floor. The room tilts — the blood drains from her head in a rush, the edges of her vision going dark and sparkly, and her legs, numb from an hour of sitting, simply aren't where she left them.

She stumbles forward. Two graceless steps. Her shoulder collides with something — a person, a stranger, a someone standing near the door — and her whole frame tips into them. Her hand grabs at their sleeve on reflex, fingers curling into the fabric just to stop the floor from rising up.

"I'm—" Her voice comes out cracked and small. Her whole body is trembling now, fine and constant, and the tears she'd been holding back have escaped down her cheeks whether she permits them or not. She doesn't look up. Can't. Her forehead is nearly against their shoulder, her knuckles white in their sleeve. "Sorry— I'm sorry, I just— I need to—"

She tries to straighten. Her knees wobble. The bar noise seems very far away.

The refrigerator hummed its tired hum, and Haru stood before its open mouth for the third time in ten minutes, as if the contents might have changed through sheer repetition. They hadn't. A half-empty bottle of barley tea. A single dried-out umeboshi in a jar, rolling slightly on its shelf. A smear of something at the back she didn't want to identify.

She closed it. The rubber seal sighed.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay.

The cupboard next. She already knew. She opened it anyway, standing on her toes, small hands patting along the shelf she'd emptied two days ago. The cardboard box in the corner — the one with the last of the rice crackers — she upended it over the counter. Crumbs. She pressed her fingertip against them, one by one, and put them in her mouth. They tasted like dust and salt.

The vegetable bag in the crisper drawer held nothing but a damp stain and the ghost-shape of the last daikon, eaten three nights ago, stretched with water into something that had pretended to be soup.

Her stomach made a sound. Low, animal, embarrassingly loud in the silence of the one-room apato. She pressed her palm flat against her belly through the worn gray hoodie, as if she could muffle it.

The envelope on the counter sat where she'd left it. Rent money, counted twice, rubber-banded. That money was not food money. That money was the roof, the walls, the only thing standing between her and a net cafe booth. She had done the math standing right here, under the flickering ceiling light she kept meaning to report to the landlord. The math did not care about her stomach.

Something hot pushed up behind her eyes. She tilted her head back, breathed out slow through her mouth — a long, controlled stream of air — and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the pressure bloomed into dark sparks. When she lowered her hands, she wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of the hoodie, rough and efficient, like clearing a table.

Stop. Crying doesn't cook rice.

Smuggio watched her from the futon, one button eye slightly loose, his brown fur worn pale at the ears from years of her thumbs.

"I know," she murmured to him, quiet and hoarse. "I know what you're going to say."

Her stomach answered for him.

She stood there a long moment, bare feet on the cold laminate, arms crossed tight over her chest. The apartment complex was old, thin-walled, full of people who had learned to look through her in the stairwell — the low-rated girl with the tired face and the convenience store uniform smell. All of them except one door down the hall. One door where the person behind it had once, twice, actually said good morning. Had once held the elevator. Had looked at her like she was a person standing in front of them and not a stain on the corridor.

Her feet decided before her pride finished arguing.

The hallway smelled of old cooking oil and damp concrete. October cold leaked through the thin walls. She crossed the twelve steps of stained carpet to the neighboring door and stood there, close enough to see the scratches in the paint, close enough to hear her own heartbeat in her ears. Her hand rose. Small fist. Knuckles pale.

Three soft knocks. Barely there. She almost hoped they hadn't landed.

Then her stomach gurgled again, obscenely loud in the quiet corridor, and she felt her face burn all the way to her ears. She stared at the door's peephole, at her own faint warped reflection in the brass, and waited — every muscle in her small frame pulled tight, shoulders up near her ears, sleeves pulled down over her hands.

What am I even doing. What am I going to say. Hi, you don't know me, but—

She swallowed.

—but I'm starving, and you were the only one who ever looked at me like i'm not leprous.

The mirror in the staff room had lied to her again. Or maybe it hadn't — maybe the tonal cream really was doing its job, three layers of it, patted in with fingers that trembled slightly from too little sleep and too much caffeine. Haru pressed her palms flat against her cheeks, held them there for a second, then let them drop.

Showtime.

The door swung open under her shoulder and the noise of the floor swallowed her — tinny J-pop from ceiling speakers, the clink of a spoon against glass, a customer laughing too loud at nothing. She moved between the tables with her notebook hugged to her chest, pink pencil tucked behind her ear, and felt the familiar weight of eyes.

A man by the window tracked her legs as she passed. She kept her gaze forward, chin level, steps even.

Don't look at them. Don't give them anything.

Table twelve. New customer. She stopped a careful half-step back from the chair, pulled the pencil from behind her ear, and arranged her face — eyes widened just enough, smile soft at the corners, the whole performance assembled like a costume. Her feet ached inside the black mary janes. The petticoat itched at the backs of her knees.

"Okaerinasaimase, goshujin-sama~" The sing-song came out practiced, bright, a voice that belonged to someone else. She clicked the pencil open, held it poised above the notebook. "Welcome home! I'm Haru, and I'll be taking care of you today." A small bow, hair sliding forward over one shoulder. "Can I start you off with something to drink? We have a seasonal Mont Blanc parfait too, if you're feeling hungry."

The smile held. Her eyes, behind all that cream and effort, stayed just a little too tired to sell it.

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