Regret10 min read
I Came Back in the Rain — and He Shut the Door
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I came back on the hottest day of the year and the sky hated me for it.
“I’m soaked,” I said, standing in the elevator lobby, my suitcase wheels puffing steam. “Of course I’m soaked.”
A man in black opened the stairwell door and the rain punched the corridor into a waterfall. He stepped out like he owned the storm. He had a cigarette between his teeth and a corner-of-the-mouth smile that used to be mine and his.
“Harrison?” I heard myself say before my brain stopped working.
He didn’t flinch. He pushed the door shut like it could keep me out of the life he’d decided to live without me.
“Don’t—” I started.
The door slammed. The sound made my chest hollow.
“Good evening,” I said to the air where he had been. “Very mature.”
Then the apartment door opened and Jen came barreling out in her pajamas, hair wild like she'd slept on it stylishly. “Qing—Jess! You’re early!”
“Surprise!” I said, clapping the wet suitcase down because I had to do something other than drown in my hoodie.
“Oh my god, you’re soaked!” Jen shouted and launched herself at me. I pushed her away at the last second—herself a walking, loving hurricane—and I pointed at my drenched shirt. “No hugging, Jen. I’m a swamp.”
“You fell in a puddle?” she asked as if puddles were a rare botanical phenomenon.
“This is called rain,” I said.
“Rain? In June? Who knew.” She laughed, then started a new stream of gossip about her brother as if that would dry my shirt.
“Did you see him when you came in?” she asked.
“I saw him,” I said flatly. “He saw me.”
“And?”
“He didn’t see me.”
Jen’s mouth dropped. “What? He just walked past you?”
“He closed the door.”
Jen blinked. “Wow. That is… intense.”
I forced a smile and shrugged. “Let him be dramatic. I can survive another five minutes of weirdness.”
“You always survive,” Jen said, and went to rattle the doorknob again for no reason I could see. Her room smelled like travel-size shampoos and thrift-store perfume. I walked down the hall and into the second bedroom she’d made into a surprisingly cute guest room. There was a set of blue sheets—my favorite color—and an air conditioner set to the perfect degree of civilized human life.
“You came prepared,” I said, already planning sleep. I hadn’t remembered how much I loved the small plain comforts that made me feel like an actual person again.
Jen’s phone buzzed. She checked and then looked over at me, eyes wide as coin slots. “Did Harrison send you food?”
“He did?” I peered into the kitchen; there was a mountain of food on the table steaming like a peace offering.
“It isn’t for me,” Jen said, half smug. “He said—he said he didn’t send it for you.”
I laughed in a way that sounded brittle. “Of course.”
“He’s been weird lately,” Jen said, grabbing her camera to announce she’d go live. “He’s been checking on me every morning and sent a cleaner. I think something’s up.”
“Or he likes being controlling,” I muttered.
“You’re always dramatic.” She hopped into the shower and left me to sleep.
I slept like a log.
When I woke, the smell of food was a friendly alarm. Jen popped her head out of the bathroom. “You awake, queen of puddles?”
“I am,” I said, blinking the sleep out. “Who ordered the feast?”
“He didn’t tell me. He told me to tell you not to eat without waiting.”
“He didn’t send it for me.”
“You’d think, but I checked the labels—they’re all your favorites.”
I opened the fridge and stared at the mountain of dishes as if they would confess something. “He left it?”
“Yes,” Jen said. “He left it and then he left.”
We spent the afternoon gossiping and filming a few clips for her followers. Later a courier in a black suit walked in with a heavy insulated box.
“Delivery for Miss Guerin?” he asked, polite as tea.
Jen squealed. “Heath!” she said. “Who ordered this?”
“He doesn’t like attention,” Jen said as she opened the lid. “But he likes an audience.”
Harrison called then, and the single cold word he used to cut the conversation made Jen freeze. “Not for you,” he snapped. “Not your food.”
Jen stuck out her tongue at the phone and then mimed, “He’s an idiot.”
I slept. I woke. At night, the rain started again. I walked to the stairwell window and watched the water, and then there he was—Harrison—leaning against the stairwell doorframe like he’d been waiting for me in a bad movie.
“Don’t be weird,” I warned him.
He opened a cigarette slowly and did not look at me with anything resembling softness. “Don’t be here, Jess.”
“Don’t be anywhere,” I shot back. “Why did you close the door? I literally said 'don’t close it.'”
He looked away, and a small sound escaped me—some combination of laughter and bitter air. “You really did it. You left.”
“I left,” I repeated. “You kept your promise.”
“Your promise?” he scoffed. “I told you I wouldn’t be friends with you if you chose him.”
“You said that like it would only be a month,” I said. “You were dramatic then.”
“You never listened,” he said, finally looking at me. “You didn’t just choose him. You chose someone who left.”
“You left,” I said because it’s stupid to fight about past deserts. “You left me. You closed the door on me. It’s okay. I’m fine.”
He watched me and didn’t say anything at all.
That night Jen and I got drunk enough to think a karaoke machine was a good long-term investment. We went to a bar—“Shoreline” was its name, neon like a diagnosis—and the world here was loud and liquid and the past felt like a TV that we could change the channel on. I drank more than I should have, because when I drank it dulled the loud parts—the memory of doors slamming, the quiet of someone I used to be able to find everywhere.
“Harrison!” a voice called. “You here, man?”
Wade leaned over the table like a human exclamation point.
“What are you doing here?” Wade asked me, half-delighted.
“You found me,” I slurred. “Happy?”
“He found you,” Wade said, which is how it always felt—he was the friend who made trouble into a party. “You two should be a soap opera.”
“He’s a soap that refuses to be written,” I said.
“Harrison is soft,” Wade observed. “In private. Terrible in public. But soft.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” I said, the alcohol making honesty smell safer.
The bar spun and spun. I remember Harrison came in looking like a man with two lives sewn down one seam: police uniform on the weekend, darkness on the other. He scooped me into his arms when I teetered at the doorway and carried me like I weighed nothing. My head lolled and I murmured, “Put me down, you dramatic idiot.”
“Can’t,” he said.
I kissed his jaw because I was both brave and nonsense. He froze but didn’t push me away. Then Wade yelled from a table, “If this is a movie scene, I demand more popcorn!”
Harrison put me down gently and walked me to his car like a soldier shepherding a lamb. He got me home, and I slept, and I woke to the universe being sticky and mosquitoes wanting in.
He had saved me twice now. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or furious.
“Why'd you carry me?” I asked once my head stopped rolling.
“Because you were going to fall,” he said. “Because you were drunk. Because you were mine when I could make you mine.”
“You’re not my—” I started.
Harrison cut me off, still careful like he balanced on thin ice. “Don’t call it that. Not like that.”
“So what are you?” I asked. “Brother? Friend? Enemy? Something that smells like a cigarette and guilt?”
He laughed once, and it was all sound and no heart. “I’m me.”
We argued like siblings until he drove away at speed. He left like he always left: fast and with his name in the wind.
One week later, he called in on duty. A man with a gun was on the run in the hills outside town and Harrison and his squad lay like a net in the darkness. I watched from somewhere that felt far. I read the police dispatches and the small, anxious lines of messages he left unread.
“Jess,” Wade said into my shoulder, “he’s in the field.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means he can’t text you back right now. It means he could be scarred. It means—” Wade shrugged. “It means he risks things we watch on screens. It means he loves people in ways that break him.”
When the news came back that a teammate had been wounded and Harrison had stayed in the hospital like a rotated moon through the night, something in my chest tightened like a binding wire.
I went to the hospital. I sat on a bench under palms and waited until I recognized his shape, smaller and slanted now, like a man who had been put through a sieve.
“Harrison!” I said the second I saw him.
He turned. The man I’d known since we were kids—smaller then, braver then—looked like a man who had been given tasks he could not refuse. He smiled by mistake. “Jess.”
“You came,” I said.
“I come,” he said. “I come when things are broken.”
“Why didn’t you answer me? You got my messages.”
“I was here,” he said, and then he didn’t tell me anything about how it felt to hold a friend who had been shot. He didn’t tell me about waiting rooms, or how the world smelled like desinfectant, or how he lived like a man who lived on rationed sleep. Instead, he pretended to be a normal man and I pretended to believe him.
“You look tired,” I said.
“I look like a man who held someone’s life in his hands all night,” he said.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Let me buy you lunch.”
He swallowed and the thought of food seemed like the most reasonable truce in the war staged between us. We ate like people who had kept too many small feuds and decided now might be the time to stop.
“I have something to say,” I told him suddenly, the words like a small lightning bolt. We sat across from each other with the noise of lunch around us.
“What is it?” Harrison said, careful as a man who had learned how to get hurt.
“I—” I took my breath and plunged. “Harrison, will you be my boyfriend?”
He froze. The world held its breath.
“Jess,” he said very softly, and then he said the thing that felt like a blow straight to my ribs. “I can’t. I don’t feel that way.”
“Are you serious?” I said, because maybe my ears were puddled from the rain and I’d misheard.
“I’m serious.” He looked at me like he was trying to choose words as if they were fragile things. “You’re everything to me, but not like that. Not in that way.”
“You always were the person who would choose the wrong words,” I snapped. “You always do that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, quieter.
I laughed, because crying would have been too easy. “So you want me as a sister? A roommate? A convenient person you can hand lunch to and then drive away from?”
“Not convenient,” he said. “Essential. Protector. Family.”
“I don’t want to be family,” I said, and then I said something I didn’t mean to but which felt honest as rain. “I’m tired of being the well-behaved friend.”
“So am I,” Harrison said, and the air moved like a fault line. “But I made a choice.”
“You chose absence,” I whispered.
“I chose to protect you,” he said. “From what might be worse.”
“What’s worse than not being together?” I asked. “You mean a life where you might not be able to hold me when—I don’t know—something happens? You mean I’m a risky thing and you prefer quiet?”
“I prefer not to be selfish,” he said. “I prefer to be the one who keeps quiet and safe, even if it kills me inside.”
“Is that noble or cowardly?” I asked.
“Both.”
We sat in a silence that felt like a verdict. I groped for something and then blurted: “I’ll be brave then. I’ll go get what I want.”
“You don’t have to be brave,” he said, almost pleading.
“I already am,” I said, standing up on a shaky wave of determination the size of a wave wall. “I will not wait for you to decide if I’m allowed to matter.”
He took two steps forward as if to stop me and then he stopped. “Jess—”
“Don’t say it,” I said. “I know why you’re doing this. It’s your job. It’s your scars. But I won’t be kept down behind your fence.”
He watched me with an ache I could almost taste. Then he reached out, very carefully, like a man trying not to break glass, and brushed my hair back from my forehead.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I will,” I said, and walked out.
I didn’t know if I was running away or running toward anything. But I knew this: standing where he was, bound by duty and heavy loyalty, was not the life I wanted to make for myself. I wanted to choose the messy, imperfect person who messed up but tried. I wanted someone who could be scared and still hold my hand—not someone who loved me only by not taking me.
Days passed. Harrison's messages were briefer. Jen said he had tasks. Wade said he told him to stop being dramatic.
Then one morning Harrison’s mother, Celine Mason, called and invited me to tea. “Your friend needs you,” she said, and I went because a mother’s tone sounded like it might be important and because I wanted to know what people who loved Harrison thought.
“You're a brave girl,” she said when she saw me. “He talks about you like a north star.”
“I told him to tell me where he stood,” I said.
“He’s stuck,” she said. “Some men think their duty is a fence, not a bridge. He thinks by keeping you out he’s protecting you. He does not know he’s hurting you.”
“I don’t blame him for everything,” I said.
“You can’t fix him,” she said. “You can fix you.”
And so I did. I stopped waiting. I started living like the woman who would not be a footnote. I took a job, I taught a class, I learned how to sign up and show up for myself. I stopped letting Harrison’s absences define my worth. I stopped arranging my life around a man who called me ‘sister’ because it was easier.
We still collided occasionally—at hospital corridors, at bar doors, at birthdays—but the narrative had changed. I was no longer someone who arrived with a suitcase and got shut out of an apartment. I was someone who wrote her own knocks.
One night at the bar, Wade shoved a napkin into my hand. “You know what to do,” he said. “Make the scene dramatic. Make him regret not choosing you.”
I laughed. “You always are for a spectacle.”
“No,” he said. “I am for you.”
So I planned less and lived more. I learned how to make my own midnight noodles and how to accept that sometimes people are courageous in small ways and cowardly in large ones. I learned that my heart could still be brave without Harrison's permission.
The last time I saw Harrison alone, under a different rain, he looked at me as if trying to read a map he had no right to.
“Jess,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I said. “And I forgive you.”
“Do you mean it?” He looked hollow and terrified at once.
“Yes,” I said. “Because forgive is not a permission. It’s a place that lets me live.”
He touched my hand like a man who had learned to be delicate but late.
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“You too,” I said.
The rain stopped. The city breathed. My suitcase remained at my feet, still useful for trips. I closed it only when I had somewhere to go that wasn’t him.
I kept the memory of his arms like an old photograph—precious, a little faded. I kept the hard lesson: love is not always an answer; sometimes it is a question you must answer for yourself.
The End
— Thank you for reading —