AN: Just want to say THANKS:) for the encouraging reviews, and apologize for being a slow writer.

Daniel held the door. Women liked that. And this woman, he decided, was one he wanted to please. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something about Audrey. It might have been her brazen cynicism, or the way she talked like she didn't give a dan what he thought of her. Whatever it was, it was working for her. The woman was hot.

Outside the rain fell slowly and softly, each drop slinking stealthily through the moist air. Audrey and Daniel padded down the sidewalk. They wouldn't speak—they each had a reason to preserve Audrey's convenient pessimism—but they were both acutely aware of the other's presence.

Daniel felt the tension in every drop of rain. He saw his feet hitting the ground, one after the other, and thought even the cracks in the sidewalk were sexy, their swaggering paths through the cement crashing violently into one another.

Audrey was thinking, analyzing, calculating. He must have been at least a couple of years younger than she. His crisp white oxford would have aged him a year or two, but the jeans and Cons gave away his youth. The sketchpad indicated an artist, but there was something more polished in Daniel's appearance. Something neat, something orderly that she suddenly wanted to disrupt. (His feet never even landed on the sidewalk cracks.) She directed the promenade towards her house.

When Daniel realized he couldn't see Audrey's feet next to his anymore, he turned around. Now their toes were facing each other, and that seemed odd. It was a dare, a challenge. Her arms, jeweled with raindrops, were crossed in defiance and her eyes were wandering, searching.

They were following that raindrop, and Audrey couldn't help feeling a little jealous watching it glide down his chest and behind the second button of that white shirt.