The anchorman on the local news station had predicted sunshine for the next two days, but today it was gloomy. Raindrops fell on the sidewalks and rooftops of the small California suburb with an unexpected gusto; sometimes lightly and more often in immense sheets of speckled grey but since first light the storm had not once let up. Claire sat at her kitchen table looking out at the street outside through a large bay window, sipping a cup of green tea and listening to the pitter-patter of droplets as they impacted the roof of her quaint, one story house. Claire had never been particularly fond of rain, and this was due mostly to the fact that rain always decided to come at the most inconvenient possible times. She was a caterer by trade. She worked for a local organic foods company and was responsible for the setting up and managing of demonstrations at local events, such as fairs, parades, anyplace friendly to street food enthusiasts. She worked Monday through Friday setting up tents, organizing outdoor cook stations, hauling van-fuls of food and supplies from place to place, and in her profession stormy weather was considered to be an almost intolerable inconvenience.
That was why today, sitting in her favorably sized kitchen sipping hot tea and resting her elbows on her circular, exquisitely lacquered dining table, Claire felt a nearly overwhelming sense of relief. The dread she had felt the last two days upon hearing the anchorman predict an unseasonably beautiful weekend and heavy rains starting on Monday had melted away like frost after sunrise when the storm had come two days early and elected to start on Saturday instead. This meant that Claire would not have to leave her home at 6am instead of 7am to battle her way through the inevitable mob of congestion on the 101. This meant that Claire would not have to take special measures to cover and protect all of the equipment that made up her mobile kitchen, struggle to load them into plain white vans that would slip and stumble and groan all the way to the destination under the added weight and slick roads, and assemble her temporary restaurant while fighting howling winds and debilitating cold to serve the few street goers who were brave enough to venture out of their cozy little kitchens. Now that those factors were eliminated, Claire found herself strangely entranced by the steady drumroll of precipitation that she had been relieved from.
On the rare occasions that permitted her to shelter herself from the storm, she in fact found the rain very calming. It was like nothing else in the world, really. No matter how bad it got, the constant downpour that sounded like a continuous pounding on the rooftop could be broken down into individual parts. If you really listened, you could hear each drop impact the earth, but if you just let it happen, let it wash over you, the feeling was majestic. It reminded Claire of going to see a symphony when she was a girl. Her parents had both been high school music teachers, and insisted (though it seemed more like force to Claire at the time) that their daughter develop an appreciation for classical compositions. There was no rock music, no pop allowed in the household when Claire was growing up. She would hear names like Haydn and Chopin on an almost daily basis, but never once could Claire recall either of her parents utter the words "Michael Jackson". The only records they had ever let her buy as a teenager were old LPs etched with the great symphonies of the last two centuries past, and though she enjoyed a little light rock on occasion, a grand orchestra was all she really needed to get her blood pumping. And so it was, when she sat and listened to the rain pour down mere feet from her, she could hear the music it made. Each individual part, when combined together, suddenly becomes something much more whole and grand. A symphony of the type only Mother Nature can provide.
In her contemplation of the notes expressed in the raindrops outside, Claire had not noticed that her tea had gotten cold. In fact she had been so lost in her own thoughts that she had hardly finished half of it. She curled her lip at the thought of the wasted brew, but she still had some water left in her kettle, so she walked to the sink to dump her remaining tea and re-start the burner on the oven. She threw the used tea-bag away and stood at the sink under the bay window that had until a few moments ago been the portal into her subconscious mind, and in the reflection of the etched glass, she noticed Thomas for the first time since he had arrived. Thomas was her next-door neighbor, and they had been mutual friends since she had moved to the block almost a year ago. He was a tall man, in his mid-thirties, with a large build and a well-shaped body. Besides being an avid bicyclist, he was also an electrician, and Claire had called him over earlier in the morning to fix her cable box, which she told him wasn't working. She smiled to herself at the sight of him crouched down with his head thoughtfully examining the back of her television. He had been over for about an hour trying to find a solution to her problem, but Claire was confident that he wouldn't be able to fix it. She had unplugged it before he arrived, and so far her plan was coming together nicely.
Claire had been unreasonably attracted to Thomas since the day she first laid eyes upon him. Being only 24, she usually went for younger guys, but there was something about this man that had piqued her interest from day one, and had not waned in all the time since. She enjoyed the way he smiled, the way he could talk to her with the confidence of a younger man but a matured and refined charm that did not make her feel as though he was constantly thinking about what she looked like naked, although she could often see flashes of closeted desire in his eyes from time to time. She had spent almost a year wanting him, thinking about his lips moving slowly down her neck toward her shoulders, and what his penis might feel like when clutched in her hand, but for much of that time he had been living with his girlfriend, and Claire was forced to leave her fantasies inside her own mind. Now though, they were two months separated. Thomas caught her sleeping with another man three months ago, and after a few weeks of turbulent and futile attempts to salvage the relationship, she moved out and Thomas was left in an extremely emotional state. Claire had wanted to go to him then, to comfort him and express how much she fancied him, but she elected to let that conversation slide until he recovered a bit. Instead she called him once a week, just idle chat, and once they had gone out to dinner. It had now been almost a week since he made any mention of his ex, he was back to his regular, charming self, and Claire had decided that today was the day she was going to make it happen. So she unplugged her cable box, and while he worked, she pretended to pass the time in the kitchen like a regular client on a house call while she waited for the champagne sitting in an ice bath in the sink to chill, and was now watching him labor in a window reflection while she imagined what would take place in the next few minutes.
She had spent a full thirty minutes that morning deciding what to wear. She wanted to impress, but not give away her intentions right off. Full on lingerie might have made the wrong impression, so she settled on a knee high white summer dress, (because of the rain, of course), a black lace bra, and a quaint little black thong. It was still a sharp contrast to the black t-shirt and carpenter Levis that Thomas had arrived in, but it just functioned as a testament to why she liked him. Here was the perfect opportunity for him to seduce her: a rainy day, unlimited time to spend naked together, an entire house of possible love-making surfaces, and yet he still maintained his professionalism. He could have walked thorough the door and carried Claire to the bedroom without a word spoken between them, and she would not have protested. But she knew it would not happen like that, he was too modest to do something so brazen and unexpected, but she had no problem making the first move.
Claire could see now that Thomas was beginning to give up tinkering with the television and the cable box, and she sensed that he would soon come to her and ask to see the other connections in the house, where he would discover the simple answer that had been eluding him, at which point Claire's window of opportunity would pass and her goal would walk out the door. She had to take him now.
She quietly pulled two wine glasses from the cabinet to her right and set them on the counter. She then unraveled the metal wires that held the champagne cork in place and submerged the bottle in the water that had melted from the ice bath and popped the cork off underwater. The sudden exhalation of gas still made a muffled puff in the water and Claire looked back to see if Thomas had heard it and become curious. He was still examining the wires behind the TV and was doing something with a screwdriver that Claire could not identify so she turned back to the bottle of wine in her hand. She removed the cork completely and filled the two glasses with the bubbly, golden liquid. She placed the bottle on the counter, grabbed the wine glasses by the stem, and walked out into the living room where Thomas was working.
"Have you found anything interesting back there yet?" She asked innocently.
"Ill be quite honest, I am so far at a loss", he replied without looking back. "I've checked all the connections. All the leads are good, so it isn't a problem with the TV itself, but I meant to ask you if I can check your Ethernet connections around the house, maybe something came unplugged".
