The 147 Outer Drive Express at half past eleven on a Friday is a bus full of people who have made bad decisions and are on their way home from them. I was on it because the Red Line had stopped running trains past Wilson and a man in a yellow vest had told forty of us to go upstairs and wait for the bus, and forty of us had gone upstairs and waited.
She got on at Belmont with a backpack on one shoulder and a phone in her hand and a friend still talking in her ear through it, and she came up the stairs loud, the way people do when they are eighteen and the night has been long and good.
“No, no, listen, listen,” she said into the phone, dropping into a seat two rows up, on the window side. “He was not even that cute, that is the whole point, I was not even into him, I was being polite. You know when you are being polite and then suddenly you are in somebody’s kitchen.”
She was tall. Five ten in sneakers, and built like the women in my mother’s family photographs, the ones from the seventies where everybody is standing in a garden and looking pleased with themselves. Full through the arms, full through the hips, with a chest that made the maroon university hoodie sit wrong at the front, the letters stretched and the drawstrings pulled tight and one shoulder of it slipped down over a black top underneath.
Her hair was in box braids pulled back into a heavy bunch at the back of her neck, with three small gold rings in two of them that clicked when she moved her head. Big gold hoops. A thin gold ring through one nostril. Dark brown skin with a shine on the cheekbones from the cold and from the walk up the stairs. Long lashes that were hers. White nail polish chipped on eight fingers out of ten.
She smelled like cherry lip gloss and somebody else’s cigarette and cold air, and she had a keychain on the backpack with a plastic bus on it, and a lanyard with a student card that said FIRST YEAR across the bottom in a font that was trying to be friendly.
She was not a kid. I want to be clear about that, because the lanyard made her look like one from behind and she was not. She was eighteen, and she talked like somebody who had decided to be an adult early and was still enjoying the discovery that it worked.
She finished the call, dropped the phone in her lap, looked up, and caught me looking at her chest. Not at her face, which is my mistake and my habit, and not once either. Long enough to be caught.
Most women do one of three things. They fold their arms, or they glare, or they pretend it did not happen and then get off four stops early.
She looked down at her own chest and then back at me and grinned, all teeth, delighted, like I had told her a joke.
“You are not subtle,” she said.
“No.”
“That is fine. I am not either. I am the least subtle person in my whole family.” She got up, crossed the aisle, and sat down next to me, which nobody had asked her to do on a bus that was half empty. “Hi. I am Tia. What are you doing tonight?”
“Going home.”
“Boring,” she said, and then, without any kind of pause, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “That is good. I have been talking to boys my own age for three months and I am so tired of it. They are all so — ” she waved the phone “ — like that. He asked me if I wanted to see his car. His car. At one in the morning.”
“Did you want to see his car?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I wanted to be in it later, though, I am not going to lie to you.” She turned sideways in the seat so her knee was against my knee and did not move it. “I am eighteen. I am a first year. I live in the dorm up at Loyola, on Sheridan, fourteenth floor, and my roommate went home to Naperville until Sunday. That is a lot of information.”
“It is.”
“I know,” she said. “I am doing it on purpose. I do that. I say everything at once so I do not have to be brave later.”
The bus came off the Drive at Sheridan and went north along the park, and the lake was out there in the dark doing nothing, and she was warm against my leg all the way to Irving Park.
She talked the whole time. About her roommate, who had a boyfriend in the city and was gone most nights anyway. About the dining hall. About her mother, who had cried at move-in and then texted her forty times in the first week and now texted her once a day and pretended it was about laundry. About the boy in her statistics class. About the fact that everybody at that school was from somewhere with a lake and she was from Seventy-Ninth and Essex and had never seen so many white people in her life.
Then she put her hand on my thigh, flat, over the jeans, and left it there, and did not say anything about it.
I put mine over hers. She turned her hand over and laced her fingers into mine, which I had not expected, and looked at me with her chin down.
“Okay,” she said. “I am going to say this once, and then I am going to be quiet about it, because I am trying a new thing where I am direct.” She took a breath. “I have been on this bus for twenty minutes and I am very aware of you. You know exactly what I mean. If you are not interested, say so now and I will go and sit at the front and we will both pretend this did not happen. If you are interested, then touch me like you mean it and stop looking at my chest like it is a museum.”
“I am interested.”
“Good,” she said, and let out a breath that was shakier than the rest of her had been. “Good. See, I am great at this. I am excellent at this. My heart is going like a drum, but I am excellent.”
I got my hand on her hip, over the hoodie, and pulled her an inch closer, and she came, and put her head back against the seat, and looked at me along her lashes with an expression I could not read and then could.
“Nobody has done that in a long time,” she said.
“Done what?”
“Pulled.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Boys my age grab. You pulled. It is different.”
I moved my hand under the hem of the hoodie and up her side, over the black top, and she made a sound that was almost a laugh and said, “Okay, okay, so that is happening,” and then I got my palm over her ribs and up, and she stopped talking entirely.
Her chest was exactly what the hoodie had been lying about and more of it. Heavy, soft, warm through the fabric, too much for one hand, and the nipple under the black top was already hard and stood up against my palm when I moved it. She leaned her head against the seat back in front of her and breathed out through her mouth.
“I am going to need you to do that again,” she said, muffled. “I am going to need you to do that a lot.”
Two stops went by. The bus swayed up Sheridan and she sat there with her head down and her hand on my wrist, moving it, showing me what she wanted, and I did what she showed me, and her hips started moving on the seat.
“Wait,” she said, suddenly, sitting up. “Wait, stop, stop for a second.”
I took my hand away. She looked at me, and then down at my lap, and then back up.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You are huge.”
“You do not have to — ”
“Do not,” she said. “Do not be polite at me. I am not a child and you are not doing anything wrong.” She put her hand on me, over the jeans, and closed it, and made a small interested noise. “It is so warm. Why is it so warm? How does it do that?”
“You are asking me how it works?”
“I am asking you everything,” she said. “I have been on this planet for eighteen years and I have done it twice and one of them was so bad I cried in a bathroom afterwards. I am not going to pretend I know things I do not know.”
She got my belt open before I had decided to let her, and got her hand in, and then she went still.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That is — that is a lot more than I was expecting. What am I supposed to do with all of that?”
“Whatever you want.”
“That is a dangerous thing to say to a curious person,” she said, and started to work her hand on it, slow, watching her own fist with her eyebrows up like she was taking a test she was going to pass.
The 147 went up past Irving Park and down again into the dark stretch along the park and nothing at all happened in the whole bus for ten minutes except that a woman in a nurse’s coat two rows back stood up and got off, and Tia leaned her head on my shoulder while she did it, and talked the entire time in a low steady stream.
“Does it feel good like that? Tell me if it does not. I want to know. Is it better slow? It looks like it would be better slow. My ex used to tell me I was doing it wrong and not tell me what right was, which I think is a character flaw.”
“It is good like that.”
“See, that is a useful sentence,” she said. “That is the kind of sentence I need.”
She got me close enough that I had to take her wrist and stop her, and she looked at me, startled.
“Not on this bus,” I said.
“Says who?”
“Says the driver.”
She looked up the aisle at the driver, at the camera over the door, at the two men asleep at the front, and she pulled her hand out of my trousers and sat back and said, “Fine. FINE. This is my stop in four minutes anyway.” She zipped me up herself, badly, and patted it. “You are coming up. I am not asking. I am telling you. My roommate is in Naperville and I have a single room to myself for two days and I am not spending tonight thinking about a boy with a car.”
The dorm lobby had a desk with a student worker behind it and a sign about guests, and Tia signed me in under the name Marcus Webb, which was not my name, in handwriting that a person could not have traced to her in a hundred years.
“He is my uncle,” she told the desk, and the boy behind it, who was nineteen and tired, did not look up from his phone.
The elevator smelled like popcorn. She pressed fourteen and stood with her back against the wall and her arms crossed and looked at me the whole way up, and said, “You are really quiet.”
“You are not.”
“Somebody has to say something,” she said, and then the doors opened and she took my hand and pulled me down the corridor.
Her room was small enough that two people could not pass each other in it. Two beds, one made and one not, fairy lights around the window, a poster of a singer, a mini fridge with a sticker that said FREE TAMPONS in somebody’s handwriting, a pile of textbooks with the plastic still on two of them, and a rug that had been bought at a Target on Elston by a mother who had cried at move-in.
She locked the door and put her back against it and said, “Okay. I am going to be honest with you. I have been talking a big game for twenty-five minutes and now I am nervous.”
“We do not have to do anything.”
“I know we do not have to,” she said. “That is why I am going to.” She pulled the hoodie over her head in one movement and dropped it on the floor, and the black top underneath was thin and she was not wearing anything under it, and I could see the whole shape of her through it, and she watched me look and did not cover up.
“There it is,” she said. “That face. I have been waiting all night for that face.”
She took the top off and stood there in the fairy lights with her arms at her sides and her chin up, and she was magnificent, and she knew it, and she was still nervous.
Her breasts were heavy and full and low, dark brown with darker nipples and a fine dusting of small dark marks, and the skin underneath had the pale shine of a body that had never seen a winter sun. A gold hoop in each nipple that had not been there in my imagination. A soft belly with a crease at the waist from sitting, wide hips, thick thighs that touched, and a small tattoo on the inside of her left wrist that looked like it had been done in somebody’s apartment.
“I got it in August,” she said, when she saw me looking. “It is my grandmother’s handwriting. It says be easy on yourself, which I am very bad at.”
“Come here.”
She came. I put my hands on her waist and pulled her between my knees, and she put her hands on my shoulders and looked down at me, and her lip gloss was mostly gone.
“Can I ask you something,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Is it going to hurt?” She said it quickly, like a person pulling off a bandage. “I am not scared. I want to know. Nobody tells you the truth about it. My friends all say it is amazing and one of them is lying, I know she is lying.”
“It should not hurt. If it hurts, tell me and we stop.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
She looked at me for a long moment and then said, “Okay. I believe you, which is insane, because I met you on a bus.”
She kissed me. She was not good at it yet and she knew it and did not care, and she kept talking against my mouth in between, which should have been annoying and was not. “I am going to be terrible at this.” “You are not.” “I am going to be a disaster, I am a talker, I cannot help it — ”
I got her out of the rest of her clothes and put her on the bottom bunk, and she lay there with her braids fanned out on the pillow and her hands over her face and then, deliberately, moved them.
“I want to see you too,” she said. “That is only fair.”
So I took my clothes off, and she sat up on her elbows and looked at me with the frank, unembarrassed curiosity of somebody at a museum after closing, and said, “Okay. Wow. Okay.”
She wanted to do everything. She wanted to hold it. She wanted it in her mouth, which she did badly and with enormous enthusiasm, stopping twice to ask questions, and then she wanted to be on top because she had read something and wanted to know if it was true.
It was true. She found out quickly, the way she found everything out, by doing it and watching my face and adjusting, and she sat up over me with her palms flat on my ribs and her braids swinging and her breasts moving and said, “Oh, this is — oh, why did nobody tell me it was like this, this is not the same thing at all.”
She came first, twice, in a way that surprised her so much she laughed in the middle of it, and then she slowed down and got serious and said, “Okay. I want to do the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The finish thing.” She climbed off me and knelt beside me on the narrow bed, which was too narrow for this, and got her hand around me. “I want to see it happen. Up close. Tell me when.”
She wanted to be told, so I told her. Faster. Like that. Do not stop. She did not stop, and she did not look away, and when it happened she made a small high sound of pure discovery and it went across her stomach and her hand and a stripe of it up between her breasts.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, it does that. It does that in stages.” She was still holding me, still moving her hand slowly, watching. “How long does it do that for?”
“A while.”
“That is so much information,” she said, and then she looked at her own hand, lifted it, and licked one finger, thoughtfully, the way a person tastes a sauce to see if it needs salt.
I laughed out loud. I could not help it.
“What?” she said, offended. “I have never done that. I wanted to know.”
“I know.”
“It is not funny. I am conducting research.” She looked at her finger again. “It is not what I expected. It is — salty. That is not a complaint.”
We cleaned up with a pack of makeup wipes from her desk, which she apologised for twice, and then she put on a huge t-shirt from some high school in Hyde Park and got into the bed and pulled me in after her, and the bed was a twin and it was ridiculous and she did not care.
“Ask me something,” she said, into my shoulder.
“What?”
“Anything. I want to know things. That is my whole personality, in case you have not noticed.”
So I asked her why she had come to Chicago when her whole family was on the South Side, and she said because the buses run all night here and she had wanted, since she was thirteen, to be a person who could get on a bus at midnight and go somewhere.
“And now?”
“And now it is Friday night and I am in my dorm and there is a man in my bed who has a job and a coat that cost money and knows what he is doing,” she said. “I am doing great.”
She fell asleep around three with one arm across my chest and her phone face down on the windowsill, and I lay there in a twin bed under a poster of a singer I had never heard of and listened to a radiator knock and a train go past four blocks away.
In the morning she made coffee in a machine her roommate had brought and sat cross-legged on the bed in the big t-shirt with her braids half out and said, “Okay. Serious question. Are you going to be weird about this?”
“No.”
“Because I am not going to be weird about this,” she said. “I am going to be extremely normal. I am going to text you on Tuesday like a normal adult person and ask you what you are doing on Friday, and you are going to say something boring about work, and I am going to say come over.”
“All right.”
“All right,” she said, and drank her coffee, and looked out the window at the lake, and then said, without turning around, “I am going to be so good at this by the end of the year.”
I still take the 147. She gets on at Belmont most Fridays around half eleven, loud, on the phone, and she sits down next to me without asking, and she always says the same thing first, and it is never boring.
“You are not subtle,” she says, and grins, and starts telling me about her week.
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
The Cunning Linguist – part-08
Colleen – chapter 03 – part-02
A Mother’s Worry – part 02
A Mother’s Worry – part 11
A Mother’s Worry – part 12
A Mother’s Worry – part 13
