Meeting You in the Rain

It was now the weekend, and boy, was it a wet weekend. It had started raining nonstop since Friday afternoon. It was Saturday, but the storm outside had still not calmed down.

Lai was in her room, reading a BL manga. Yes, she was a fujoshi (according to Wikipedia, a fujoshi is a woman who enjoys fictional gay content such as any media works or fanworks with romantic relationships between men).

How she became one was purely by accident. She was in 11th grade at the time. The last period of the day had just ended, and students were leaving the classroom, some heading home, and others to cram school.

She was staring out the window, her chin resting on her hand.

"I can't wait to go home and read my manga," a female classmate told her friend as she packed her belongings in her bag.

Lai turned her head and stared at her two classmates, immersed in their conversation. The female classmates walked to the door.

When the one talking about going home to read manga lifted her bag and swung it over her shoulder, a manga fell out.

The student and her friend did not notice and walked out the door. Lai stood up from her seat and grabbed the manga, rushing to the door to stop the female classmate from leaving without her manga.

"Excuse..." she stared at the empty hallway, "...me?"

The classmates were already gone. She sighed and stared at the manga in her hand. To her shock, it had a cover of two young high school boys laughing together with their fingers entwined.

She raised her eyebrow at the picture. Walking back to her seat, she placed the manga on the table.

"The Alpha's Cold Omega," she read the title.

Curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the manga. She skimmed through the manga and gasped at one of the pages that depicted an explicit scene between the two boys.

She quickly closed the manga, her face flushing red. It was not like she was homophobic as she perceived herself as an open-minded person.

It was just not something she was used to seeing.

However, although she was shocked, she was curious about the manga. Since then, she had been curious about what other BL manga and novels were out there.

She preferred reading light-hearted BL's with fluffy and cute scenes. She was not so big on the explicit content part. That was how she became a fujoshi.

"Argh!" she squealed in her pillow, kicking the air in excitement, "Why is the uke so freaking cute? He reminds me of Little Teng."

She was currently alone in the house as she didn't work on weekends. Her father was nowhere to be seen since the day she received the job offer from Mr. Ying, which was Thursday.

Her mother also had no idea where her husband ran off to as he was not answering his phone. Her mother informed her that she would be home by 6 PM, so she asked Lai to buy ingredients for tonight's dinner.

It was now one o'clock in the afternoon, so she decided to buy the ingredients early before the weather worsened.

She walked to her closet and put on a black hoodie, changing her pajama pants to blue denim jeans with black converse.

She left her pajama shirt on as it was a T-shirt. She walked out of her room, placing her phone in her pocket. Wearing her belt bag around her waist, she grabbed an umbrella and headed out.

She was met with a strong wind that almost made her lose her balance.

"Woah! Better make this quick," she mumbled, hailing a cab.

When she arrived at Pagoda Supermarket, she quickly ran inside. She sighed when she was safely inside, away from the pelting rain and strong wind.

She then grabbed a trolley and pulled out her phone from her denim pocket.

"Let's see," she mumbled, scrolling through The Cube, a messenger app similar to WeChat or Line.

She found her mother's username, HappyNurse, and opened the chat. She scrolled to the list her mother had sent her at 10 AM.

"Found it!" she smiled.

Her mother wanted her to buy spaghetti, green onions, chives, chicken breasts, crushed garlic, and beef mince. When she had collected and placed all those ingredients in the trolley, she stood in the queue.

Paying for the ingredients, she walked out of the store and opened her umbrella.

As she was about to hail a cab, she heard laughter coming from behind the corner. She shrugged and lifted her hand to hail a cab but heard the cries of a cat.

Her eyes widened, and she turned her body, striding towards the cats wailing.

To her horror, she found three drunk men throwing stones at a cornered white cat. The cat had bruises on its body and face.

It had jumped out of the box it used to sleep in and ran to the corner of the supermarket.

"Hey, stop that!" she yelled, causing the men to turn their attention to her.

"Looks like we have another kitty that wants to play, boys," one of the men snickered mischievously.

"Get lost, bitch!" another man shrieked, clicking his tongue.

She stood her ground and glared at them. She placed her belongings down and walked past them, crouching beside the cat.

"It's okay, little guy," she cooed, "Come here. I won't hurt you."

She offered it her open arms. It hesitated for a few seconds but then jumped on her, traveling under her black hoodie and popping its tiny head between her cleavage.

She smiled and stroked its head, causing it to purr.

"Let's get out of here," she told the cat.

She turned around and started to walk past two of the men. When she passed the third man, he blocked her path.

"Who the fuck are you to ruin our fun, huh?" he snarled.

The man's breath was reeking of alcohol. She scrunched her nose in disgust.

"Fun?" she asked, raising her voice, "You call throwing stones at a poor little cat 'fun.' Seriously?"

She was utterly disgusted at their behaviour. The two men walked towards her. The one man joined the man who looked like the boss, while the other man stood behind her.

They blocked her path.

"You're not going anywhere," the man she guessed was the boss said.

The man behind her tugged her to the ground using her hair, and she shrieked in pain. The cat inside her hoody meowed piteously.

It dug its claws in her pajama T-shirt to prevent itself from falling out of her hoody. The man who had tugged her down had pinned her by the throat using a small knife.

"Now then," one of them said, licking his lips in a hungry, wolf-like manner, "Let's have some other worldly fun, shall we?"

With that, the man began to unbuckle his belt, and her hazelnut eyes widened in shock. Any other woman would be freaking out or sweating buckets.

But not her.

'Like hell we will,' she thought, glaring at him.

She had to defend herself using Kekil, a primarily defensive martial art style she learned that focuses on disenabling your opponent.

It takes advantage of every opening in your opponent's defense.

The primary focus relied on both foot sweeps and chokeholds and often the endurance and stamina of yourself and your opponent.

This was the martial art style Lai was taught by Master Lin of the Shaolin Dojo. She had asked him to teach her the martial art style to defend.

And protect herself from her father's loan sharks.

Her most significant strength of the Kekil martial art style was knowing when and where to strike and doing so with incredible precision.

She managed to loosen herself from the man's firm grip and stood up with clenched fists.

"You wanna have fun?" she asked them with a disgusted expression, "Let's have fun then shall we?"

By exploiting the blocks of the men, they became frustrated as none of their strikes hit her. This allowed her to gain the upper hand.

On the other hand, the biggest weakness of Kekil was that it was a purely one-on-one style.

When facing multiple opponents, one's weaknesses may suddenly become very apparent to your opponent. Since she had no funds to pay for her martial art lessons, she offered to clean the Dojo.

When Master Lin saw her eagerness, he agreed to teach her. And so, she learned the Kekil martial art style. That was how she could subdue Wen's crazy ex-boyfriend, who came to the café years ago.

'Thank heavens they were drunk, so their punches and kicks were a bit sloppy,' she sighed, crouching down and staring at the men who lay on the wet floor behind her.

They were battered and bruised. She felt the rain travel all over her body as her hoody was now drenched.

She pulled the cat out, covering her with her hand to prevent her from getting even more wet.

"Sorry you had to witness that, kitty," she smiled at the cat.

Just then, a strange figure stood next to her, holding her umbrella over her crouched, drenched, and aching body.

Confused about why she and the cat were no longer getting hit by the rain droplets, she looked up. Her umbrella was covering them.

Raising her eyebrows, she turned around to look at the strange figure that was shielding her and the cat from the rain with her umbrella.

When her eyes met the figure's eyes, she blinked slowly in surprise.

"Mr. Ying?"