It rained the day Henry broke his own rules. Not with ceremony. Not with sound. But in the quiet disintegration of a world built from absolutes. Rain tapping the glass of the science building like errant thoughts, a soft percussion over theory and theorem, precision and pride.

You had taken shelter near the library’s steps, holding your umbrella askew. The fabric fluttered with the wind like some worn banner, the handle cracked from one of your many accidents. Your hair clung in damp strands to your cheeks. Your wide, unblinking eyes scanned the pages of a crime novel, barely flinching when thunder growled above.

You looked like ruin—wet and tired and entirely yourself.

Henry saw you from the upper windows, where whiteboards bloomed with algorithms and ink. He had been mid-proof. He had not finished. He would not return to it. Something in him had already pivoted, irrationally, against his own design.

By the time he reached you, his coat was soaked through. He hadn’t taken his umbrella. He hadn’t considered the rain at all.

You glanced up. "You look—" He didn’t wait for the words. He took your ruined umbrella from your hand and held it above both your heads, lowering his body awkwardly to your height so the crooked thing could cover you. It was absurd. It was embarrassing. It was all wrong.

It was perfect.

And you smiled. Not politely. Not out of gratitude. You smiled like you saw straight through him, like you knew exactly what kind of mathematical collapse had just occurred. Your soulless, enormous eyes—eyes Henry used to describe as “bulging” in his head with clinical detachment—now glistened in azure and affection, like tidal pools he had no name for.

Your fingers, damp and cold, reached up to straighten his glasses. They were fogged. He hadn’t noticed. He had only noticed you.

He stood still, trembling slightly, as you touched his face like it wasn’t sacred. Like he wasn’t a man carved from rules and rigor. Like you had no idea how fast his heart was breaking open inside that soaked cardigan.

He would later pretend not to remember the way you looked at him then. He would pretend he didn’t dream about your collarbone, the way it disappeared into the neckline of your green dress, the way your scent—vanilla and old paper and something more feral—coated his thoughts for days.

But he would remember.

When you walked beside him, your footsteps uncertain and graceless, Henry found himself watching your shoes, always turned slightly outward, one scuffed, one pristine. He had theories about your gait. He discarded them.

You sat in the economics wing with your knees tucked up, notebook pages flapping in disarray, your pen chewing through the corner of a syllabus sheet. Henry brought you lunch. Vegetarian. He had read the ingredients on three brands of falafel until he found one he approved of.

You never asked him to.

When you cried—because a professor mocked your handwriting, because a migraine flattened your resolve—Henry hovered. He touched your shoulder once. Once. And then again, as if testing the reality of it. You leaned in. He shook.

Not from shame.

From awe.

He had spent a lifetime categorizing, sorting, defining the world in loops and proofs and elegant patterns. But your world defied symmetry. You laughed at your own misfortunes. You hated long words but loved long sentences. You once fell down three stairs and got up smiling. And when you bled, it was always bright and too red, staining the white of your sleeves like punctuation.

He began to collect things: your receipts, your broken necklace, the napkin you used when you cried. He kept them pressed inside textbooks, tucked between formulas.

And when he kissed you—finally—it was during a blackout, inside a lecture hall emptied of ambition. He touched your lips like they were the last unsolved mystery. His breath shook. Yours didn’t. You held his face in your thick, warm hands and didn’t ask for explanation.