The 22 Clark on a Saturday afternoon is a terrible bus for what I do, and I knew it when I got on. Daylight. Families. A man with a saxophone case taking up two seats. I got on anyway, because the girl in the mustard sweater was already by the window with a book, and I wanted to see what she would do when she noticed me noticing her.
She was small. Five two, maybe, in boots with a thick sole that were clearly there to make up the difference. Plump in the way that means soft everywhere — round arms, wide hips that pulled the seam of her jeans tight across her lap, short thick legs that did not quite reach the floor, a belly that made a soft shelf over her waistband when she leaned forward over the page.
Round face. Full cheeks with the cold in them. A small chin that disappeared into her neck when she looked down, which was most of the time. Pale skin with pink across the nose and a spot of dry skin at one nostril from a winter cold she had not quite shaken.
Her hair was that dark blonde that goes mousey in November, pulled up into a bun that was already coming apart, strands stuck to the side of her neck. Thick black frames — the kind that were fashionable about ten years ago and had been hers for all ten of them. One lens had a smudge on it that she had given up on. Behind them her eyes were small and dark and extremely serious.
Oversized mustard yellow sweater, the sleeves pulled down over her knuckles. Dark jeans. A navy peacoat open over the top, unbuttoned, slipping off one shoulder. A canvas tote at her feet with a paperback in it, a water bottle, a phone charger, and a banana.
The book she was reading was a fat thing with a cracked spine and a library barcode on the front, and she was two thirds of the way through it, holding it open with one thumb. There was a chewed pen clipped to the cover.
I sat down across the aisle and did nothing. That is the whole trick. I do not stare at women. I look at them once, properly, and then I let the bus do the rest.
It took her four stops to notice. When she did, her ears went red — just the ears, before anything else, like somebody had turned a dial — and she looked back down at her book so fast that she lost her place.
Then her glasses fogged up. She breathed on them, wiped them on the sleeve of the sweater, put them back on, and looked at me again over the top of the book, which is a thing that only works if you are not five foot two with a smudge on your lens.
The bus braked for a light at Division and she dropped the book.
I picked it up. It was a history of the Chicago River, four hundred pages of it, and the back cover said something about the reversal of the flow in 1900.
“You are reading about the river,” I said.
“I am reading about the river,” she said. She had a small, quick voice, the kind that gets faster when it is nervous. “I work at the library. At DePaul. I am not — it is not for a class. I just like the part where they dug it backwards. That is a real thing that happened. They dug a river backwards.”
“I know.”
“Nobody knows that.” She said it like an accusation, and then immediately looked horrified at herself. “Sorry. That was rude. I am not good at — I talk a lot when I am nervous, and I am nervous, because you are very — ” She stopped. She looked at the book. “Because you are looking at me.”
“I am.”
“Right,” she said, and her ears went redder. “Right. Okay.”
Her stop came and went. I watched the street sign go past and said nothing, and she watched it go past too, and neither of us said anything about it, and then the doors closed and she let out a breath that she had been holding since Division.
“That was my stop,” she said.
“I know.”
“I did not get off.”
“I noticed.”
“I am going to be in so much trouble,” she said, and put the book in her tote like she was closing a door.
We got off at my stop. It was cold — the kind of Chicago cold that comes off the lake and goes straight through a coat — and she stood on the sidewalk with her arms wrapped around herself and her tote against her chest and said, “I should go home.”
“You should.”
“I am not going to.”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Lead the way before I change my mind and also before I freeze.”
She talked the whole two blocks. About the library, about a patron who returned a book full of pressed leaves, about her roommate who was a nurse and worked nights, about how she had never done anything like this, which she said four separate times in four separate ways because she was terrified and could not stop explaining herself.
My apartment is on the third floor over a laundromat on Division, and the stairwell smells like fabric softener and somebody else’s cooking. She went up ahead of me and had to stop on the landing to breathe, and laughed at herself, and said, “Third floor. Great. This is going well.”
Inside, the radiator was going and the kitchen was not clean, and she stood in the middle of the room with her coat still on and her tote still over her shoulder and looked around like she had been dropped there from a height.
“I should say something,” she said. “I should say that I do not do this.”
“You do not have to say anything.”
“No, I do. I do not do this. I have done this once. It was not good.” She looked at the floor. “He was not very — he was not — ” She waved a hand in a vague, helpless circle. “You are very large. I noticed on the bus. I have been noticing for six stops.”
I took her coat off her shoulders and hung it on the back of the door, and she let me, and then she took her glasses off and folded them and put them down on the counter, and the whole shape of her face changed — softer, younger, her eyes smaller and blinder and wide open.
I picked the glasses back up and put them on her.
“I cannot see without them,” she said.
“I know. Keep them on.”
She blinked at me through the thick lenses. Then she kissed me, badly, too fast, catching the corner of my mouth first and correcting, and her hands went to my chest and then to my belt and then retreated, and she laughed against my mouth and said, “I am so bad at this.”
“You are not.”
“I am. I am historically bad.”
I got the sweater off her. Underneath it she had a thin grey t-shirt and no bra and she crossed her arms over her chest immediately, hard, the way you do when you have been laughed at before.
I took her wrists and put them down at her sides.
She was soft and heavy and pale, her tits full and low with wide dark nipples that were already hard, her belly round and creased from sitting, her hips wide enough that the jeans had left a red line across her skin. She stood there and let me look at her and her chin started to go, and I said, “Do not,” and she stopped.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She went down on her knees on the rug in front of the radiator, and she was clumsy about it — she got my jeans open and my cock out and then just held it, both hands, looking at it with her mouth slightly open like she had been handed something breakable. Then she took it in her mouth too fast and her teeth caught, and she pulled off and said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and I put my hand on the back of her head, not pushing, just there, and said, “Slow.”
She was better at it than she thought. She was slow and thorough and she kept stopping to breathe and then going again, and her glasses were fogging up and she did not care, and at one point she came off me and pressed her forehead against my thigh and laughed, a wet, embarrassed, delighted laugh, and said, “I have no idea what I am doing.”
“You are doing fine.”
“Tell me what to do.” She looked up. Her mouth was wet and her eyes were enormous behind the lenses. “I am serious. Tell me. I am not good at guessing. I need instructions.”
So I told her. Slow down. Take it deeper. Use your hand at the same time. Look at me when you do it. And she did every single thing I said, immediately, like a woman following a recipe, and by the end of it she had one hand braced on my hip and the other at the base of my cock and she was moaning around it, which she did not seem to be aware of.
I pulled her up by the arm and got the rest of her clothes off and put her on the bed on her back, and the window over the bed had the fire escape in it and the streetlight coming through the slats, and she looked up at me with her glasses crooked on her face.
“Is it going to fit,” she said.
“We will find out.”
“That is not — ” she said, and then I put two fingers in her and she stopped talking entirely. She was soaked. She came like that, with my fingers in her and my thumb on her clit, in about a minute and a half, with her palm pressed to her mouth and her hips coming off the mattress, and afterwards she said, “Oh no,” in a small voice, and then, “Do that again.”
I fucked her slowly at first, because she was small and tight and she kept going, “Oh — oh — okay,” in a rhythm that was not a rhythm, her hands on my forearms, her heels on the backs of my thighs. Then she got used to it, and something in her face changed, and she pulled me down by the neck and said, “Harder. I am not going to break.”
So I did. The bed was cheap and it complained. The radiator knocked. She was loud — properly loud, the kind of loud that makes you hope the laundromat is empty — and she kept saying my name, which she had learned from my mailbox downstairs, and then she stopped saying anything at all and just held on and came again with her whole body shaking and her glasses finally falling off onto the pillow.
I was close and I told her so, and she said, “Wait. Wait, get up. I want to watch.”
She found her glasses, put them back on with shaking hands, and got up on her elbows. “On me,” she said. “On my chest. I want to see it.”
I finished across her tits and her stomach and a little on her chin, and she watched the whole thing with her lips parted and her eyes going from my face to my cock to her own skin and back, and when I was done she said, “Oh,” very quietly, in a completely different voice than she had used all night.
Then she started to laugh.
“That was so much,” she said. “That was so much. There is — it is in my hair.” She wiped her glasses on the sheet. “I am going to be finding that in my hair for a week.”
We ordered a pizza and ate it sitting on the floor because the table was covered in mail, and she read me a paragraph out of the river book in a terrible documentary narrator voice, and the book stayed on the floor by the bed for three days.
She still takes the 22 on Saturdays. So do I. She sits by the window with whatever she is reading and her sleeves over her hands, and when she sees me come down the aisle she takes her glasses off, wipes them on her sweater, and puts them back on, which is her way of saying hello.
Last week she brought me a bookmark.
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
The Cunning Linguist – part-08
Solstice Ch. 01-2
A Mother’s Worry – part 11
A Mother’s Worry – part 20
A Mother’s Worry – part 12
A Mother’s Worry – part 29
