She loves the way J smells in the rain - clean laundry and expensive cognac, somehow. They’re standing together on the covered balcony, wringing each other’s hair out and unbuttoning clinging shirts.

J is saying something about how it should clear up in time for dinner, about how they could use a day in together anyway. She isn’t hearing. She’s breathing deeply with her fingers woven through the still-dripping curls at the nape of J’s neck, drinking in the air that runs off their skin and knowing. She’s knowing all about how, someday, she’ll be sitting pathetic on the floor of a laundry room, holding an open cognac bottle, breathing in and in. She’ll be imagining that she’s here again, in the late summer shower, being unbuttoned and wanted inside.

Meredith Phipps (she/her) is a current third-year undergraduate student at Barnard College where she studies English and works as a Writing Fellow. She writes a lot of poems and other stuff, and she is an experimental work editor at Wrongdoing Magazine. If you want to read her other work (she is very flattered) you can check out her twitter @merzi1999. You can also find her on Instagram @meredithphipps99.