You had left the ramen place too late and it had started to rain three blocks in and there had not been any cover between the shop and Diego's apartment. So you kept walking. The umbrella you had told him you did not need was in a bin somewhere behind you. The Shinjuku signs above the alley were already doing enough to reflect the water on your jacket. You were nearly to the corner when the light in your peripheral vision went out.
Not the streetlight. Something across your eyes. Cool. Snug. The strap of it was tight at the back of your head where you had felt only wet hair a second ago, and the hair was different now too — shorter under the strap, cropped clean at the jaw. You reached up. The cloth over your eyes was fabric. Silk. You could feel where the seam had been sewn against your temple. You did not take it off.
Something climbed up your arms. You felt it happen without seeing it. It went snug at the elbow and then past the shoulder. Gloves. The jacket was no longer a jacket. It was one piece with something else. Something taut across your chest that had gone forward against it. Your jeans were gone. Your calves felt tight to the knee, and then higher. Boots. The rain was hitting different surfaces on you now. Latex. Skin. Wet hair against the collar of whatever this was.
You could hear better with your eyes covered. The alley was a wash of rain and neon and scooter sounds you had known your whole life. Under all of it you smelled the miso from the vent behind the ramen place. That smell had followed you two blocks and it had not changed. Everything else had. Your feet in the boots stood differently. Balanced somewhere higher than they used to.
Footsteps came around the corner and stopped. You did not turn your head. You did not need to. He knew that gait. He had been listening for the sound of it half his life. It was Diego. He was three feet away in the rain and he did not know what to do because the woman standing in the alley in the two-B kit was you and was also not you. You wanted to give him a way in.
"You're late," you said.
Diego stayed where he was for another second. Then he came the last three feet. He did not ask a question. He did not touch you yet. He unlocked the door of the building behind him and held it, and you walked in past him. The lobby lights were fluorescent. You could not see them. You could feel them on your face.
He led you by the wrist up the stairs, counting five landings. You did not ask him to take off the blindfold. He did not offer to. The door of his apartment closed behind you and the sound was quieter than you remembered — thicker, muffled by the leather of your glove against the wood as you leaned there.
He came up behind you and put his mouth at the back of your bare neck under the cropped hair.
Your knees went a little on you. His hand went to your ribs through the latex and stayed there. His breath was at your ear.
"It's you," he said. His voice was low. He had figured that out.
"It's me," you said.
He led you into the apartment. You knew the layout by memory — his was mostly the same as yours had been an hour ago, three doors down. Two steps to the kitchen. Six to the bed. He walked you to the bed. He turned you around by the shoulders and sat you down. The mattress was firm under the boots.
He knelt in front of you. He did not undo the blindfold. He undid the collar of the leotard and the zipper of it down the front and pushed it open with both hands. The rain on the skin of your chest evaporated almost at once in the warm of the apartment. He put his mouth against the space between your breasts.
He got the latex down to your waist. He got you back onto the bed by the hips. The gloves stayed. The boots stayed. The blindfold stayed. You lay back and let him lift your knees.
You could not see anything. You knew where he was because you could hear him breathing and feel the mattress shift under his weight. He was on his knees at the foot of the bed for a minute. His mouth was there. You bit into the leather of the glove on your own wrist to stay quiet. You were not quiet.
He stood up between your knees. You heard the belt come off. The sound of it landing on the floor came from your left. He came down onto you and pushed in and you took a breath.
He held there. Then he started to move. The rain outside was loud again through the window he had cracked open the night before and had not closed. You could hear it. You could hear him moving in you at the same rhythm, which was slow at first and then not slow.
He got faster. His forehead was against yours over the blindfold. His hand went to the side of your neck where the collar had been. He pulled you up onto him and sat back on his heels and you ended up on his lap with the blindfold still tight, straddling him, your gloved hands on his shoulders for balance.
You could not tell where the ceiling was. You did not care. He moved under you and you moved with him and the sound of the two of you together was the only thing louder than the rain.
He shifted again. He turned and laid you back down and hooked one of your knees over his shoulder and the angle changed and you closed your eyes behind the silk.
You came with the boots pressed flat against his back. You made a sound you did not know your throat could make. He kept moving through it. His pace broke a minute later. He pulled out and finished on the black of the latex at your waist. The wet of it slid down the front toward the mattress.
He held there breathing against your temple. Then he lay down on the mattress beside you and pulled the blanket up over both of you. He did not take the blindfold off. You did not ask him to.
You listened to the rain against the window and the sound of his breathing beside you until the rain slowed and the neon outside dimmed by half a stop because a sign somewhere down the block had gone off for the night.