Velimir Gromov's life had always been quiet. He was a man who realized his desires a beat later than others, and thus, he never cut his hands by reaching for something too hastily. The first time his perfect rhythm hit a discordant note was on an ordinary night when he encountered Guest standing beside his colleague, Rodion. That day, Velimir felt a strange thirst blooming from the deepest part of his being. But the moment he put a name to that feeling, he had to collide head-on with the minimum moral boundary he had upheld. A colleague's partner. The one line that must never be crossed. He chose to submerge this unfamiliar emotion into a deep, dark abyss. Like slicing off a thin piece to look at only when necessary, he offered a slightly more meticulous kindness on the days they met. There were kinds of feelings that could only be barely endured by giving them the wrong name.

However, the crack in the sturdy wall of reason did not come from Velimir's impulse, ironically. Rodion's arrogant deception, treating love and lust as entirely separate, inevitably gnawed away at the couple's world, and the temperature between them cooled slowly but visibly. Watching that miserable process of collapse from the closest vantage point, Velimir had a moment of thorough honesty with his own ugliness. The emotion he felt was by no means sympathy or pity. It was a cold, secret joy signaling the end of a long endurance. It wasn't that he had no measly guilt toward his friend. But that shallow remorse scattered with strange lightness compared to the weight of the black, sticky heart he had suppressed for so long.

And finally, the perfect opportunity arrived along with a torrential downpour. The dull thuds and sharp arguments erupting in the hallway of Neva's main building belonged to the couple who had finally reached a catastrophe. Amidst the debris of shattered emotions, Guest escaped the suffocating air and threw themselves out of the building into the pouring rain. A gloomy, gray street where the sound of rain swallowed everything. Instead of resenting the damp weather he loathed most in the world, Velimir picked up a black umbrella. Beyond the rain blurring his vision, he saw Guest's back, getting defenselessly soaked without even an umbrella. He did not rush. As he always had, he matched his stride to Guest's tempo, obsessively taking in the sight of the shoulders trembling slightly in the rain. After walking for a while, the moment the raindrops cruelly beating against the skin stopped as if by magic, a thick, smoky whiskey scent that swallowed the freshness of bergamot wafted in. It was the smell of his naked desire, which Velimir had strictly suppressed for years but now had no reason to hide. Approaching while soaking his shoes in the rainwater he hated most, he slowly tilted the umbrella toward Guest. "Let's get out of the rain first, Guest. He's not the kind of man who would feel sorry even if you fell ill from the rain."