Rain Kiss

It has been raining for twenty minutes and neither of them has moved toward the car. Her hair is ruined. His coat has stopped being any use. Both of these facts are now irrelevant, which is exactly what the rain was for. The rain kiss is a set-piece with one job, performed with unusual reliability: it removes composure as an option. What it promises the reader is the collapse of managed appearance. Romance leads spend most of a book presenting a version of themselves. She is holding her face a particular way. He is standing at a particular distance. Rain defeats all of it within ninety seconds, and the two people left standing in it are visibly less arranged than they were, which is why the scene can carry a confession that a dry pavement could not. The make-or-break element is what the rain takes away from these specific characters. That is the diagnostic, and it distinguishes a functioning rain kiss from a wet one. If she is a woman whose control is her armour, the rain strips the armour and the scene is about her being seen ungoverned. If he is a man who has been keeping a physical distance he can justify, the rain gives him a reason to be closer that neither of them has to own. The weather should defeat the specific defence the specific character has been running, and the writer should know which defence that is before the first drop lands. The failure mode is rain as aesthetic. It rains because rain looks good and the scene has arrived at its kiss. Nothing about the water changes what either character can do or hide. Remove the rain and the scene plays identically, which means the rain was lighting. The tell is usually discomfort. In a weak version the rain is warm, soft, cinematic, and nobody is cold. In a strong version somebody is genuinely wet through and will be shivering in four minutes, and the kiss is happening anyway, and the fact that it is happening despite real physical unpleasantness is the evidence the scene is offering. There is a further point about the trope's reputation that is worth addressing directly, because it is one of the most parodied images in the genre. Its familiarity is not a problem to be solved by avoiding it. Familiar set-pieces work through variation, and the reader who reaches a rain kiss knows exactly what she has arrived at and is watching to see what this book does with it. Refusing the kiss at the last moment is a variation. Having one of them laugh is a variation. Having it be a bad kiss, mistimed and cold, and having them do it again properly indoors an hour later, is a variation. There is also a structural reason the scene tends to arrive where it does. Rain kisses cluster at two points in a romance: the moment before the third-act break, and the moment after it. Before, the weather forces an admission neither party is ready to be held to, and the story spends its next hundred pages dealing with the consequences of something said while soaked. After, the rain is doing repair work, and the physical discomfort functions as a small penance. A writer who knows which of those two jobs the scene is doing will write a sharper version of it. They get into the car eventually. The windows fog. Neither of them starts the engine. That is the set-piece. Not the weather. The moment two people stop caring how they look to each other.