On Friday Hannah changed her clothes three times and complained about the humidity three times as often. Shelly, being the only person around to hear her, had to grin and bear it - which she was used to, having become well accustomed by now to how Hannah could pick a topic to complain about and stick to it beyond all necessary bounds.

"I mean for god's sake, I just go for a ten minute walk to get some cigarettes and I come back drenched in sweat!"

"There's a moral in there somewhere" Shelly mused. She wasn't happy about Hannah smoking: the cigarettes had recently replaced the more customary cigars that Hannah was usually fond of, because Hannah was still trying to budget after the holidays; the problem was that when she had cigarettes she smoked twice as often. Shelly kissed Hannah dutifully but sometimes she thought she could taste the cigarettes in her mouth when she ate.

When the rain began in earnest in the evening Hannah and Shelly were starting to figure out where they were going to go and what they were going to do that night. Hannah would've been just as happy not to go out at all but Shelly was adamant. "I've stayed at home every night this week" she said, meaning by 'home' both Hannah's house and her own. "I can't do it on a Friday night, too." Hannah hadn't worked in two days so she couldn't make her usual Friday excuse of being tired, but as she listened to the thunder begin after dark she doubted that it would be a very enjoyable night to be out on the town. Still, she reflected, that was the kind of sacrifice you had to make sometimes, if your girlfriend demanded a night out.

"Where the hell's all this rain coming from, anyway?" Hannah asked, not really thinking about the question or the answer.

"It's Yasi" Sacha explained when she got home. She was drenched, and not from the humidity: the rain had caught the Friday night rush-hour commute hard in the city. "Look." She checked her watch and turned on the T.V., and they waited a couple of minutes for the weather to come on.

"Holy shit" Hannah said as she saw the long downward arm of the cyclone trailing all the way into Victoria: from end to end the weather system stretched galaxy-like almost across the entire country. "This rain's not gonna stop tonight" Sacha said, wrapping a towel around her head.

But Shelly wouldn't be deterred. "Come on!" she called out from the front door just after ten o'clock. She was ignoring the rain coming spitting through the screen. Sacha wasn't going anywhere: she liked the idea of a night in very much. She watched Shelly and Hannah disappear into the night, listening as they began to squeal, watching as they lifted their hands over their heads as if that would keep them dry.