My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40

The 9:40 out of Thirty-Fifth Street is the last bus of the night that still has anybody on it. After ten, the 34 is me, the driver, and whoever has nowhere better to be, and there is nothing to look at but the back of a seat. So I take the 9:40 and not the 10:15. Forty minutes where the bus is empty enough to be private and full enough that a woman has a reason to sit close.

She got on at Forty-Seventh with a plastic Jewel bag against her hip and her work lanyard still hanging around her neck, and she had to swipe her Ventra card three times because her hands were shaking.

She was tall. Not the way models are tall — actually tall, five eleven in flat boots, with the long bones of a woman who spent her whole childhood being told to stand at the back of the photograph.

Dark auburn-brown hair, thick, past her shoulders, wet at the ends from the rain, pushed back off her forehead so many times that it had given up and stayed. A wide forehead. High cheekbones with the streetlight sitting on them. Dark eyebrows, heavy and straight, never plucked into anything polite.

Her eyes were pale green, almost grey under the bus lights, and tired in the way that has nothing to do with sleep — the specific tiredness of somebody who has been shouted at for eleven hours by strangers who are bleeding.

Thin mouth, slightly crooked, the left corner lower than the right. A smudge of mascara under one eye and nothing else on her face at all. Small silver hoops. A silver bracelet thin as wire on her left wrist, the kind a person never takes off.

Navy wool coat, collar up, belt pulled tight enough to invent a waist. Under it, a grey ribbed knit dress to the middle of her calves, black tights, boots with the heel worn down on the outside edge. The shoulders of the coat were dark with rain. She smelled like hand sanitizer and cold air.

She sat two rows ahead of me on the window side, put the bag between her feet, and let her head fall back against the glass.

Then her eyes came up to the reflection, found me in it, and stayed.

I did not move. That is the rule and I do not break it. If she looks and looks away, she does not exist. She did not look away.

Two stops. Three. The doors hissed open and shut and the bus emptied a little more. Then she stood up, came back down the aisle with the bag in one hand, and sat down across from me — not beside me, across, so that she could look at me properly while she did it.

“You have been staring at the back of my head since Forty-Seventh,” she said.

“I have been staring at the window.”

“Same thing.”

She laughed then, one short ugly bark of a laugh, and it rearranged her whole face, and I understood that she had not done it in a while.

“I am not going to be polite,” she said. “I have been polite for twelve hours. A man called me a bitch tonight because I would not get him a sandwich. So.” She turned in the seat to face me. “I have not been touched in a year and a half. I am not going home to sit in my apartment and think about my life. You have been looking at me like you want to do something about it. Are you going to do something about it?”

“This bus has a camera over the door,” I said.

“The camera is pointed at the door.” She had already checked. She had checked before she stood up. “The driver has a partition, and four more stops, and a radio.”

Then she moved and sat beside me, put the bag on the floor, and said, “One question. Honest answer. Is it as big as it looks?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said, and put her hand flat on my thigh under the fold of her coat.

Her palm was cold through the denim. It stayed there while the bus crossed Garfield, and then her fingers found the seam and walked up it, unhurried, the way you press on a bruise to find out how deep it goes.

I put my hand over hers. Not to stop it.

“Do not,” she said. “Do not be careful with me. I have had a whole shift of careful.”

So I let go, and she opened my belt with two fingers and a thumb, one-handed, without looking down, and pulled the zip down slowly enough that the sound of it went on for an unreasonable time.

When she got her hand inside and closed it around my cock, she stopped breathing for a second.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that is not fair.”

Her thumb found the underside and pressed, and my hips came up off the seat before I could stop them. She made a small satisfied noise and did it again. The bus swayed. The heater ticked. Somewhere behind us a man was watching a video on his phone without headphones.

“Look at the size of you,” she said, almost accusingly. “That is not a thing you keep in your jeans on a public bus. That is a thing you warn people about.”

“You asked.”

“I did ask.” Her hand was moving now, slow and deliberate, the way she probably did everything at work — no wasted motion, no panic. “I want to see it. Not with my hand. I want to see it.”

She looked up the aisle. There were four of us left: the driver behind his partition, a man asleep at the front, a woman with headphones in the middle, and us at the back. The bus was on Michigan now, running long and straight, and there was nothing to stop it.

“Do not push my head,” she said, and got down on her knees on the floor of the 34 South Michigan at 9:52 on a Tuesday night. “I will do it. I want to do it.”

She pulled me out into the air and held me at the base with her fist and looked at it for a second like it was a problem she had been given to solve. Then she put her mouth on the head of it, and her eyes came up to mine, and she did not look away that time either.

She was not gentle and she was not shy. She took as much as she could and gagged on it and came off coughing, and then went back down without wiping her mouth, and the sound of it was quiet and wet and completely obscene against the hum of the engine. Her free hand was braced on my knee. Her bracelet was cold against my thigh.

I put my hand in her hair and did not push. She made a noise around my cock that I felt in my teeth.

The bus stopped at Fifty-First. Doors opened. Somebody got on. She did not stop. She did not even slow down, and the idea of it — a woman in a navy coat on her knees in the back row while a stranger walked past four rows up — went through me like a shock.

I told her I was close. She came off me with her mouth wet and her chin shining and said, “Not in my mouth. I want to watch it.”

Then she had me in her fist, working it fast and hard and exactly right, her knuckles whitening, her breath coming short through her nose, and she was watching my face with the flat concentration of a woman reading a chart.

“Where,” I said.

“Here.” She pulled the neckline of the grey dress down over one shoulder and then the other, and her tits came out, heavy and pale, the nipples hard in the cold air of the bus. “Here. All over them. I paid for this dress and I am not washing it tonight.”

I came so hard that my vision went white at the edges and my hand closed on the seat rail hard enough to hurt. It went across her chest and her collarbone and one streak caught her under the chin, and she kept her fist moving the whole way through it, milking me, until I had to take her wrist and pull her off because it had gone past pleasure into something else.

She sat back on her heels and looked down at herself. Her tits were shining in the bus light. There was cum on her bracelet.

“Well,” she said. “That is the most useful thing that has happened to me all week.”

She stood up, dug in the Jewel bag, and came out with a pack of tissues and a bottle of hand sanitizer, and cleaned herself off with the efficiency of a woman who has cleaned up worse things than this on a much shorter break. She wiped her bracelet. She wiped her chin. She pulled the dress back up and buttoned her coat over it and looked, in thirty seconds, exactly like she had when she got on.

“Do not say anything nice to me,” she said. “I mean it. I will get off at the next stop and I will not think about this again.”

The bus pulled in at Fifty-Fifth. She picked up her bag and stood at the door with her back to me, and I thought that was going to be the whole of it.

Then, with the doors already open and the cold coming in, she turned her head. “If I ever see you on this bus again,” she said, “sit somewhere else.”

And then, over her shoulder, so quietly I almost did not catch it: “Or do not.”

She stepped down onto the sidewalk and the doors closed on the smell of hand sanitizer and rain, and the 34 pulled away with me still sitting in the back row with my belt undone.

I still take the 9:40. I sit by the window two rows up now, which is her seat, and I look at the reflection in the glass, and some nights there is a tall woman in a navy coat waiting at Forty-Seventh and my whole chest goes tight.

It has never been her. I look anyway.