Total-e-bound, £1.49, ISBN 978-1-906328-31-3
Contemporary Romance, 2007
Rain Fell Down is inspired by Heart’s hit song back in 1990, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, am I right? I’m amused that there are a few phrases here that are straight out of the song, as if Ms Davis wants me to start singing that song while I am reading this story or something. You know, the man is standing by the road with “no umbrella, no coat” and he accepts the heroine’s offer “with a smile”. Fortunately, she doesn’t “drive for a while” and the motel isn’t a place she knows well, or Ann Wilson will be sending Ms Davis a strongly worded email.
Our heroine Lacey has just broken up with her fiancé Dylan over the fact that she is unable to have children. While driving in the rain, she spots our mysterious stranger and gives him a ride straight to this motel where they both spend the night. The next morning, she leaves him a note. Which, by the way, doesn’t contain bad poetry like “I am the flower, you are the seed! We walked in the garden, we planted a tree!” How fortunate or else I will never stop laughing.
However, unlike the song where the heroine ends up having the stranger’s baby while remaining with her boyfriend, here Lacey has a happy ending with the stranger who, in a convenient coincidence that happens only in fiction, turns out to be someone she knows in a six-degrees-of-Kevin Bacon way.
I do wonder how the heroine can make out the hero’s face in the rain to determine that he’s cute when it’s supposed to be pouring heavily and this fellow will most likely be covering his head with a shirt or something. Something tells me that gravity and physics don’t work in this story the way it does in real life. Still, this is a very short story that is easily digested. Nobody does anything stupid and, barring the coincidence that is the hero’s identity, things aren’t too far-fetched or unbelievable here. I quite like how Lacey doesn’t beat herself up or whine that she is not a “complete” woman or something just because she can’t conceive.
But ultimately, Rain Fell Down is a very short story that doesn’t do much other than to provide some transient diversion from real life. Kinda like a one-night stand, come to think of it, although unlike that one in the song or in this story, I doubt I will remember this one in weeks to come.
