Acid Rain

It’s only the fourth day of the government-induced lockdown, and I think I am already beginning to hate him.

He catches me staring at him as he looks up from his work laptop. I don’t lower my eyes like I might usually do. Instead, my gaze furrows into a glare. Then I look away before I can register if he’s amused or pissed off.

My boyfriend and I have been living together since last August, but our schedules never synced up. I work as a bartender at a shabby joint called Scooter’s. Ian—that’s him, the boyfriend—works as an administrative assistant for some tech company. With how busy we could get, the only times we seemed to meet were those moments we curled around each other in bed late at night.

Everything might have gone smoothly in just this fashion—until the acid rain started to fall last week. The raindrops, once harmless, were now toxic to human skin. I had seen the pictures on social media: some people had wounds and holes burned into them with just a little drizzle. It was maddening how something so simple could be so potentially deadly.

Needless to say, we couldn’t go outside until the rain stopped. The only people we saw were delivery people in hazmat suits, the government-proctored teams who went around and made sure people had supplies and provisions enough to last through the lockdown—however long it would last.

It was only the fourth day, and Ian was driving me to my last nerve.

“Hana,” he would say to me, all orderly-like, that first day, “you can’t just stuff everything in the fridge. We have to freeze some of the meat they gave us.”

“I’ll do it later,” I replied, and he gave me that look that told me I was crossing some kind of line.

“Why not right now?” he pressed. “I mean, you’re not working at the bar again for a while. You have the time.”

I swear, I wanted to rip his head off at that moment. But instead I smiled sweetly—all the while making a racket in the kitchen while he tried to concentrate on a group email he was trying to write. Every time he looked over at me, frustration alive in his eyes, I would smirk back like a cat who had caught a mouse.

By the second full day of the lockdown, I stared outside at the empty street beyond the living room window. It was eerie, seeing no one, and I was a little creeped out by it all. But Ian was working again, typing away on his laptop, until I finally sighed and returned to my tablet.

Then something brilliant came to mind.

“Hey, do you think I can order one of those hazmat suits online?” I asked, and I saw the look on Ian’s face—all judgmental—before it smoothed to an expression of blankness.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Why not? I could go outside then.”

“Nothing’s open.”

“But what if I had a dog I had to walk? I’d need a suit to walk in this kind of rain.”

“Hana, we don’t have a dog.”

I wanted to roll my eyes at him. “I know. But what if this happens again? And we have a dog? I’d need a hazmat suit.”

Ian actually scrubbed his hand down his face—which was looking a little scruffy. At least when we didn’t have the acid rain he shaved every day. I didn’t exactly like the look of Ian-gone-way-of-the-rogue. He looked like the kind of guy who would cheat on his girlfriend. And guess how I felt about that little mind trail?

“You can try to buy one, I guess,” he said, though he didn’t sound enthused at all, “but they’re probably sold out.”

You’re not the only crazy person out there, he probably would have added if he didn’t look so done with me by that time.

By the third day, I was looking at pictures of cats online and grading their looks on a scale from one to ten. With commentary.

Ian, who had a video meeting scheduled that day, didn’t seem pleased by my newfound hobby.

“Why don’t you go watch something in the bedroom?” he asked as I reclined on the couch, my tablet in hand as I perused photos of cats wearing bow-ties and little top hats. There was even one that looked like it was wearing a tiny tuxedo.

“But Ian! Think of how much money we could make if we adopted a cat and dressed it up in all kinds of outfits! We could have our very own brand empire with the right kitty cat!”

He groaned. “Hana, let’s talk about this once I’m done with work.”

And, of course, you can guess how that went.

Enter day four—the point at which I had vowed never to speak to my boyfriend again. As far as I was concerned, as soon as the acid rain cleared up, he could leave and go find a sugar mama somewhere. I’d fill the void by adopting three cats to begin raking in ad revenue for my billion-dollar empire—and then Ian would be sorry.

He didn’t look upset, though, despite the vibes I was emitting. Maybe I had been just too nice to him all this time where he couldn’t even tell when I was mad at him anymore.

I was such a good girlfriend, wasn’t I? He just didn’t appreciate me.

But soon his work day is done, and he chooses this time to go back to all sweetness, sidling up beside me on the couch.

“Babe, you know I love you, right?”

I look at him suspiciously because Ian’s not one for grand confessions of love. It took two years of awkward friend-flirting before he even asked me on a date. For him to use the L-word, he must want something.

“Sometimes,” I say, hedging, and he actually pouts at me like he’s a kid being denied candy.

“All I was saying last night is that you need to have some perspective,” he says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

I almost laugh. Hurt my feelings? He thinks too highly of himself.

“I’m not hurt,” I say.

“Maybe not, but I can tell when you’re mad,” he says. “I mean, aren’t there things about me that annoy you?”

That feels like a trick question. I narrow my eyes. “It...depends.”

Ian finally leans away from me and slumps back against the other side of the couch. “Hana! Just be honest with me.”

“Well, I do hate when you act all holier-than-thou with me. It’s irritating.”

“See! There you go!”

“And I don’t like when you laugh at me when I cry over animated movies.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“And you annoy me when you take over in the kitchen because you don’t trust me to get the recipes just right.”

“Okay.”

“And—”

“All right, all right, I think that’s enough,” he says. “But, really, you love me in spite of it all. Right?”

I want to answer, “Sometimes,” again—but something in his face makes me pause.

He almost looks nervous, as if I’m going to kick him out into the acid rain right then and there.

Sometimes I’m tempted. Like a few hours ago when all I could do was glare at him as he worked in his own little bubble.

But now…

“You’re lucky you’re cute,” I say, defeated, right before I sprawl back on my end of the couch. Ian’s laugh dances in the air.

“My charms win out again,” he says. And then he crawls to me, lying in the crevice between my body and the back of the couch. I fiddle with the heart-shaped locket sitting between my collarbones—the first gift Ian ever gave me.

In the quiet, where I can hear only his breathing, I murmur, “I didn’t realize living together in close confines could be so hard.”

Ian sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “We need our outlets away from each other, I think.”

“We better hope this isn’t the apocalypse then,” I say, half-joking, but the way Ian tenses against me tells me he might be worried about just that very thing.

I laugh. “Oh, come on, this isn’t the end of the world. It’s just a bad rainstorm, as simple as that.”

“I hope so,” Ian says. “Because I don’t know what we’ll do otherwise.”

“Are you afraid I’m going to kill you in your sleep?”

The question gets a chuckle out of him. “I’m more worried about the acid rain, Hana.”

“I don’t know. Don’t underestimate a woman who’s teetering between boredom and madness.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

And then he nuzzles his cheek against mine before his mouth finds my lips. We forget about the outside world and all its problems for the span of fleeting kisses.

Afterward, we both stare out the window that bears the tint where the acid rain is trying to eat through the glass.

“If this is the end,” I say, “then I’m glad I’m spending it with you, Ian.”

Ian smiles against my neck. “I feel the same way, Hana.”

But that’s the thing. The rain doesn’t end. It keeps coming, eating away at everything—eating away at us.

It’s a slow destruction—a little bit like falling in love, a little bit like falling out of love.

One blink, and everything changes, and you can never go back.

That’s the kind of apocalypse that destroys everything you thought you knew.