Rain on Vinohradská
The storm arrived over Prague the way storms do in late summer — all at once, without negotiation. Ten minutes earlier the sky above Riegrovy sady had been the colour of weak tea. Now the gutters on Vinohradská were carrying half the district downhill and the trams had that hushed, underwater sound they get when the windows fog.
He reached the corner building soaked through from the shoulders down, which is the specific way you get wet when you have been carrying a jacket instead of wearing it. The heavy door gave, the way those doors always eventually give, and the noise of the city cut out behind him.
Inside, the hallway smelled of cold stone and someone's dinner. And at the far end, under a single bulb, the elevator was waiting with its door already open.
A Cage of Brass and Glass
It was one of those pre-war Prague elevators that look less like machinery and more like a piece of furniture that learned to travel: dark wood, a brass handle worn pale in the middle, a folding metal gate, and a mirror that had long ago stopped telling anyone the whole truth.
There was a woman inside, holding the gate with one finger.
"Going up?" she asked, in the tone of someone who has decided the answer in advance.
"If it will have me," he said, and looked down at himself, dripping.
"It has had worse."
He stepped in. The gate closed with a sound like a small, well-mannered decision, and the floor took his weight with a shrug.
The Stop Between Floors
Somewhere above the third floor the light dimmed, held, and the elevator stopped.
Not with alarm. More like a pause taken by someone who has just remembered something better to say.
Neither of them reached for a button immediately, and both of them noticed that neither of them had.
"It does this," she said. "Every evening, roughly here. The caretaker insists it is not a fault. He calls it a temperament."
Rain drummed against the shaft window somewhere above, a soft continuous applause for nothing in particular. The cabin was warm now in the way small spaces get warm — from people, not from radiators.
He was aware of everything at once, in the ridiculous, over-precise way you are aware of things when you have nowhere to look. The narrow strip of light along the brass rail. The rain still moving in her hair. The fact that she was watching him in the mirror, and that the mirror is a permitted place to look at someone for longer than the rules allow.
"You are staring," she said, without turning.
"I am being observed by a mirror," he said. "It is not the same crime."
"It is exactly the same crime. It is just better lit."
She turned around to say it to his face rather than to his reflection, and that turn cost her whatever distance the cabin had still been pretending to hold.
The Last Few Centimetres
He put a hand on the brass rail beside hers. Not on hers. Beside. The backs of their fingers touched and neither of them moved them away, and for a moment the difference in temperature between cold metal and warm skin was the only fact in the building.
"You are still wet," she said.
"I am aware."
She reached up and took hold of his collar — to straighten it, she would have claimed, if anyone had asked, and nobody did. Her knuckles were against his throat. He felt her not let go.
"I should warn you," she said, "that this thing can stay here for a very long time."
"I know," he said. "I have been counting on it."
He kissed her.
It was not a careful kiss, and not the sort that can be explained away over coffee the following morning. It was slow and certain and it took its time, and that was exactly what took her apart. Her back found the wooden panelling and stayed there. His palm went to her waist and then lower, to the small of her back, and closed the last few centimetres that had been hanging in the cabin since the ground floor.
She had a fistful of his wet shirt before she noticed her hand had done it. Somewhere in the middle of it her breath came out audibly against his mouth, which she would have been embarrassed about if she had had any attention left to spare. He bent to the line of her throat, just under the jaw, and stayed there long enough that she stopped holding on to the rail entirely.
The mirror opposite watched all of this with enormous discretion.
Above them the rain kept up its long soft applause, and neither of them stopped for it.
The Sixth Floor
The elevator resumed as quietly as it had stopped.
Six floors takes about twenty seconds. They did not let go for any of them. She turned her head once, only to breathe, and he used the opening for a second kiss that was noticeably less polite than the first. The cabin arrived. Clicked.
He pulled the gate open with one hand, because the other one was occupied.
They came out into a corridor where a tall window showed the whole soaked city — the rooftops running west, the castle somewhere behind the weather, the streetlights coming on one by one as if the town were remembering itself. She put her back against the wall beside her door and for a moment did nothing at all but look at him and get her breath back.
"You said sixth," she said.
"I did," he agreed, and did not look away.
She found her keys. It took longer than it should have, because her hands kept stopping holding on to him and then starting again.
The lock gave. She opened the door onto a dark hallway, took him by the shirt just above the first button, and walked backwards inside.
The door closed behind them.
Afterwards
His jacket stayed on the floor of the cabin long after the elevator had gone back down empty.
Some time before dawn the rain finally stopped, and from the sixth-floor window you could watch Prague switch itself off building by building — in the reverse of the order it had lit up in, and in exactly as little of a hurry.
The jacket was found three days later by the caretaker, who hung it in the cupboard under the stairs with the other lost property. Nobody ever came for it.
About This Story
This is fiction. It came out of a simple observation about Prague: the most charged moments in this city tend to happen in the places you are only supposed to pass through — entrance halls, staircases, tram stops, elevators. Prague is unusually rich in such places.
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