Table 7, Window

Chapultepec had that late-afternoon shine where the trees pretend they’re cities of their own. The café windows fogged at the corners; the barista was calibrating the grinder like a violinist tuning before the overture. I took Table 7—the one by the window that collects stories like lint.

She asked if she could share the table, camera slung across her chest and a coil of rain-damp hair at her temple. Photographer, by the posture; hunter, by the gaze.
“Only if you steal a picture,” I said.
“Only if you give me a line to go with it,” she countered.

The first drops tapped the glass like a light metronome. She set her camera down between our cups, the lens facing up as if it were listening. We talked with the casual carefulness of strangers who understand timing: she shoots mostly at dusk; I write mostly when the city exhales. She asked to see my notebook. I asked to see her contact sheet. We traded, and both pretended not to look too hard.

“Look up,” she said. Click. The shutter sounded like a soft agreement.
“Your turn,” I said, passing her my pen. She wrote on a napkin with the ruthless grace of someone who knows the frame before the shot:
‘Every storm needs a witness.’

Traffic lit the wet avenue into a page of red commas. She caught me watching the reflections. “You see paragraphs,” she teased.
“And you see apertures.”
“Same hunger, different tools.”

The rain gathered itself. She lifted the camera again, closer this time. “One portrait,” she asked, “the kind where the subject lets the weather in.” I let my shoulders drop, opened the window of my expression just a crack, and she stepped into that pause. Click.

The barista announced closing in ten. We packed slowly, like people who knew the scene was still happening. She flipped the portrait in her hands, the ink not quite dry, and wrote on the back:

Bring me a line I can’t crop.

I answered beneath it:

Bring me a light I can’t name.

We stood, two umbrellas, one decision. Outside, Chapultepec drummed its own percussion. She tilted her umbrella toward me. “Walk?” The avenue’s trees stitched a canopy overhead, and the city softened into something audible. At a red light, we paused like a paragraph break. I asked, clear, “May I?”
“You may,” she said—no rush, no theater—and the kiss was rain-sweet and deliberate, as composed as a long exposure.

No numbers. No handles. Only the print in my pocket and her napkin in my notebook, two artifacts of a scene that knew better than to explain itself. As we split at the corner, she called back without turning:
“Same table tomorrow. If it’s raining, even better.”

I walked home certain of one small law: if a city is generous, it gives you a witness and a window—and the courage to meet them at Table 7.