There are two kinds of bus in this city and I can tell them apart from the sidewalk. The first kind is where everybody sits with their knees together and looks at their phone. The second kind is the one at a quarter past nine, when the Red Line has gone stupid again, when the aisle is full of standing people holding the rail with one hand and a bag of groceries with the other.
The second kind is where things happen. Not because of me. Because of the brake.
A crowded bus is the most honest place in Chicago after dark, because nobody has the room to pretend. The bus stops, everybody moves an inch and a half, and for about a second you find out exactly what the person in front of you is willing to do about it.
The 146 northbound, standing room all the way to the back doors. She was in front of me with one hand on the pole and a cardboard tube under her arm, and she was the only person in that bus who was not on her phone.
Thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Five nine in flat boots, and thin — the kind of thin that comes from forgetting to eat rather than from a gym. Sharp shoulder blades moving under a black turtleneck. Narrow hips. A flat arse you could have drawn with two lines. Small tits that would not have filled my hand, and she dressed like a woman who had long ago decided not to enter that competition: black turtleneck, black trousers, grey wool coat that was too good for the bus, no jewellery except four thin silver rings and one small stud in her ear.
Her face was long and angular, the jaw sharp enough to cut, cheekbones high, and a mouth that had been set in a straight line since before she got on. Blunt black bob with a heavy fringe, cut hard at the jaw. Thin rectangular glasses with one arm taped at the hinge with white surgical tape. Dark, quick, unimpressed eyes that did not miss anything and did not care about most of it.
She smelled of cigarettes and pencil shavings. There was a scale ruler sticking out of her coat pocket and graphite on her middle finger, and her hands were the most beautiful thing about her — long, bony, certain — with the nails bitten down to nothing.
I looked at her for four stops. She looked at me for three of them in the black window glass and pretended she was looking at the street.
Then she turned her head and looked at me properly, and her eyes went from my face to my coat to my hands and back up, slow, like a woman measuring a room.
“You are standing on my drawings,” she said.
I looked down. The corner of a printed sheet was under my boot, slid halfway out of the tube.
“Sorry.” I stepped back.
“Better.” She rolled the sheet back into the tube and capped it, and did not turn around again. “Most people do not even notice.”
“I noticed.”
“You noticed after I said it.” She said it flatly, without heat, the way she probably talked to contractors. “That is not the same thing.”
The bus came up to the light at Belmont and stopped hard, the way they all do, and everybody in the aisle went forward at once. I had my hand on the rail and my bag between my feet, and there was nowhere for my hips to go except into hers.
That is the whole of it. That is the entire hinge on which the night turned. She had eight inches of empty floor in front of her and she did not take it.
Neither of us moved. The light changed. The bus pulled away and the sway of it pushed me against her again, and her back was absolutely straight and her hand on the pole was absolutely steady and she was not breathing.
Then she did it on purpose. She shifted her weight back onto her heels, settled against me — deliberately, precisely, like a woman squaring up a drawing — and moved her hips once.
I could feel the whole length of me against the seam of her arse through two pairs of trousers, and she could feel it too, because her shoulders came down an inch and her head tipped slightly to one side.
She turned her face just enough that I could hear her.
“If you say one word about this,” she said, “I will break your fingers.”
“I was not going to say anything.”
“Good. Do not move.”
So I did not move, and the bus went north up Clark, and at the next stop four people got on and pushed the whole aisle forward, and my hand came off the rail and landed on her hip.
She did not break my fingers.
I left it there. Her coat was open and the wool of it was against the back of my hand and her hip was small and hard under the black trousers, and after a moment she took her hand off the pole, reached back, and put it over mine — not to move it away. To hold it there.
“Higher,” she said.
I moved my hand up under her coat, over the turtleneck, across her ribs, and she inhaled so sharply that the man beside us glanced over. Her ribs were going in and out like something trapped. I found the small soft weight of her breast through the wool and put my palm over it, and she pressed into my hand, hard, and let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
“That is not where I — ” she started, and then my thumb found her nipple through two layers of wool and she stopped talking entirely.
It was already hard. I rolled it slowly between two fingers, the way you would turn a pencil, and she put her forehead against the pole and her hips moved back against me in a slow circle and she made a small, furious noise in her throat.
“People can see,” she said.
“Nobody can see. Look around.”
She looked. Forty people staring at their phones, at the floor, at the advertisements. Not one of them looking at the thin woman in the grey coat with a man’s hand inside it.
“Fine,” she said. “Then do it properly.”
I got my fingers under the bottom of the turtleneck and up her bare stomach, and her skin was hot and her stomach was flat and hard and jumping under my fingers, and then I had her tit in my hand, skin to skin, and it was small and firm and fit exactly, and her nipple was a hard little point against my palm. She bit down on her own knuckle.
“Again,” she said, muffled. “Do that again.”
I did it again. I pinched it, and pulled it, and rolled it until she was rocking back against me in the aisle of a public bus with her teeth in her hand, and then I took my hand out of her sweater and put it down the front of her trousers.
She was so wet that my fingers slid before I had decided anything. She grabbed my wrist through the coat and held it there, and her hips were moving in short, tight, angry little strokes against my hand, and she was saying something under her breath that was not in English or was not words.
“Do not stop,” she said. “Do not you dare stop, I am — ”
She came standing up, at the Fullerton stop, with one fist jammed against her teeth and her knees going, and I got my arm across her chest and held her upright while forty people got on and off around us and the doors chimed. It lasted about four seconds and it took everything she had not to make a sound.
Then she straightened her coat, took a breath, and said, in a completely level voice, “This is my stop.”
“I know.”
“You are getting off at it.”
Her building was over a hardware store on Southport, and the stairs went up too steep and the banister was loose. She did not say anything on the way up and neither did I. Three flights, and her keys were cold in her hand, and she got the door open on the second try.
The flat was one room and a kitchen and it was freezing. Drafting table under the window with a lamp on it and a sheet half-drawn, rolls of paper standing in a corner like a forest, a scale model of something with a curved roof, a mug with cold coffee in it, an ashtray with two cigarettes in it. Nothing on the walls. No photographs of anybody.
She hung her coat on the back of the door, and then she turned around and looked at me the way she had looked at me on the bus, measuring.
“Take your coat off,” she said. “And do not be polite with me. I have had a very long week and I do not have the patience for polite.”
I took my coat off. She came across the room and put both hands flat on my chest, and kissed me hard and badly, all teeth, and got my belt open without looking at it.
She went down on me in front of the drafting table, and she was not good at it and did not care — she was too fast, too greedy, her glasses knocking against my hip, and when she came off she wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and said, “Christ. All right. That is not going to work.”
“Why not.”
“Because I am not going to be able to do that for very long without — ” She stood up and turned around and put both hands on the drafting table and looked at me over her shoulder. “Here. Now. And do not be careful with me.”
I got her trousers down over her hips and they were tight enough that she had to help, and under them she was wearing plain black knickers that came off with one pull, and her arse was small and bony and pale, and between her legs she was dripping down the inside of her thigh.
I put two fingers in her first and she swore at the table. She was so tight and so wet that it was almost nothing to get her there again, and she came with her forehead down on the drawing and her hands flat on the paper, and then she said, “If you do not fuck me right now I am going to throw something at your head.”
So I did. Hard, from the first stroke, one hand in the small of her back and the other in her hair, and the drafting table walked across the floor an inch at a time and the lamp rattled and the model with the curved roof fell over and neither of us cared. She was loud — much louder than the woman on the bus would have suggested — and she kept saying, “Yes — like that — do not you dare slow down,” in a voice with no air left in it.
I put my hand around her throat, not squeezing, just there, and she pushed her neck into it and came a third time, and this time she cried out and then laughed, one short, astonished laugh, and put her head down on the paper and stayed there, breathing.
Then she pushed herself up, turned around, and got down on her knees.
“I want to finish this properly,” she said, and took her glasses off and set them on the floor, and took me in her mouth with her hand around the base of it and her eyes on my face the whole time. She was better at it the second time. She had worked out what she was doing, which is the most her thing about her.
I told her I was close and she did not pull off. She made a small sound that meant yes, and stayed exactly where she was, and I came in her mouth with her hair wound around my fist and her fingers digging into my thigh, and she took all of it and kept going until I had to pull her off by the hair.
She stood up, walked into the kitchen, spat in the sink, ran the tap, and rinsed her mouth out like a woman who had just taken a pill.
“Well,” she said. “That was unprofessional.”
“Was it.”
“I have a deadline on Friday and a client who wants the stair to be glass, and instead I have — ” She gestured at me, at the room, at the table. “This.”
She picked her glasses up off the floor, checked them, put them on, and went back to the drawing like I had already left.
I got dressed. At the door she said, without looking up, “Thursday. The 146. Do not be early, I hate people who are early.”
“And if I am?”
“Then I will find a reason to be annoyed with you,” she said, and drew a straight line across the sheet, and it was the straightest line I have ever seen anybody draw by hand.
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 #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
Colleen – chapter 02 – part-06
Colleen – chapter 01 – part-04
Colleen – chapter 03 – part-08
Colleen – chapter 01 – part-07
Solstice Ch. 01-1
A Mother’s Worry – part 14
