The 81 Lawrence at midnight is the last honest bus in the city. Nobody on it is going anywhere good. It runs west from the Red Line through Albany Park, past the laundromats and the Filipino bakery with the lights off and the taquería with the lights on, and it stops every two blocks whether anybody is there or not, and the heater under the seats puts out a smell like burnt dust that gets into your coat and stays there until you wash it.
She got on at Lawrence and Racine with a company jacket over her uniform and a plastic bag hanging off her wrist, and she paid with a card in a case and said thank you to the driver twice, and then she stood in the aisle looking at the empty seats like a person deciding which one was allowed.
Small. That was the first thing. Not thin, exactly, but small the way some women are small all over: four eleven in sneakers with a hole in the canvas over the little toe, narrow shoulders, short arms, a body built close to the ground. The navy polo she had on was a company polo, with a logo on the chest that said BRIGHTLINE in white thread and a name tag clipped under it that said MARILOU. It was too long in the body and the sleeves came down past her elbows. Under it, cheap black trousers with an elastic waist, the kind you can kneel in.
Her hair was black and straight and pulled back into a low bun with two pins sticking out of it, and it had been in that bun since five in the afternoon, so the pieces that had come down were stuck to her temples and the back of her neck. Round face. Tired eyes with the skin under them gone violet, the way it does when a person has not slept properly since the nineties. Small flat nose. Full mouth with a chapped lower lip that she kept pulling between her teeth.
She was thirty-five, thirty-six. A thin gold band on her left hand, and she turned it with her thumb when she sat down. A gold cross on a chain at her throat. A bandage taped around one thumb, and hands that had been in water and bleach for twelve years, cracked across the knuckles, nails cut down to nothing, one knuckle on the right hand swollen. She smelled like lemon floor cleaner and baby powder, and the lemon was stronger than the powder, and both of them were stronger than it wanted to be.
She sat three rows up on the left with the plastic bag on her lap and her phone in her hand and her shoulders drawn in, and she looked at the door every time it opened.
Two stops later a man got on with a bottle in a paper bag and sat down across the aisle from her and started telling her about his brother. Not asking. Telling. He had a way of leaning into the space in front of her face that was not quite a threat and was not quite anything else either, and she had her chin down and her eyes on her phone and she was doing the thing that women do, which is to become very small and very polite and hope the situation resolves itself.
“Hey,” I said. “She is not talking to you.”
The man looked at me for a while, and I looked back, and he decided he had somewhere else to be, and he got off at Kedzie with his bottle and said something to the door on his way out.
She looked up. Her eyes were wet and she was not crying and she was not going to.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Sorry. Thank you.”
“You do not have to say sorry.”
“I know,” she said, and said it again anyway, and then, after a moment, she got up with her bag and moved down the bus and sat down next to me.
“Is okay?” she said.
“It is okay.”
Her name was Marilou. She had been in Chicago for twelve years and still said it like she was apologising for the number. She cleaned offices at night, six nights a week, the towers on Wacker and one building on LaSalle, and she had a husband named Nelson who worked the overnight at a food plant out in Cicero and two children, nine and six, asleep in a flat on Spaulding with her mother-in-law in the room off the kitchen.
“I finish at eleven,” she said. “Then the bus. Then I sleep. Then I cook. Then I come again.” She shrugged. “Is okay. Is good job. Is clean.”
“It is hard work.”
“Is hard,” she agreed, and then, because she was polite, “And you? You work the night also?”
“Sometimes.”
“You look tired,” she said. “Your eyes.” She said it without any flirt in it at all, just a fact she had noticed, the way she would notice a mark on a window.
She had her hands in her lap, and I put mine over them. That was all. Her hands were cold and rough and small enough that both of them fit under one of mine.
She did not pull away. She went completely still, and her breath stopped for a second, and then she looked at the door and then at the window and then at our hands and then, finally, at me, with an expression on her face like a woman standing at the edge of cold water.
“I am married,” she said.
“I know.”
“Twelve years,” she said. “Thirteen. In March.” She turned the ring with her thumb. “I am not — I am not this kind of woman. You understand? In my — where I am from, this is — ” she made a small helpless gesture with her free hand “ — is not possible.”
“We can stop.”
“I did not say stop,” she said, quickly, and then pressed her lips together like she had said too much.
The bus went up Lawrence past the cemetery and the sky was that orange Chicago colour that is not dark, exactly, just a darker kind of lit. She had not taken her hand back.
She turned it over under mine, slowly, and put her fingers between my fingers, and looked out the window the whole time like she was not doing it.
“I am scared of people here,” she said, to the window. “Always. Twelve years. In the building, at night, alone, is okay. The bus is okay if nobody talks. But a man talks to me and I am — ” she touched her own chest “ — is like this.”
“And now?”
“Now is worse,” she said, and laughed, one short breath, and put her other hand on my thigh.
We went two more stops like that with her hand not moving, just resting there, and then her fingers curled and she moved it up an inch, and then another inch, and then she got her palm flat against the front of my jeans and felt what was there and made a sound like she had been hit.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no.”
“What?”
“Is — ” She looked down at her own hand, then up at me, and her whole face had changed, the tiredness gone out of it and something else come in. “Is big. Is very big. Sorry. I am not — I am not saying that to be — ”
“I know what you are saying.”
“Is very big,” she said again, quieter, to herself, and then her hand was at my belt and she was looking up the aisle to see who was watching, and there was nobody watching, there were four people on the whole bus and two of them were asleep.
She got her hand inside my trousers and her fingers closed around it and she sat there with her mouth open and did not move.
“Marilou.”
“I cannot believe,” she whispered. “I cannot believe this. Is not possible.” She moved her hand down the length of it, all the way, and then back up, and her breath came out of her in a shake. “My husband — ” she stopped.
“Do not talk about your husband.”
“No,” she agreed, immediately, and did it again, slower. “Sorry. I am doing this and I am talking about — I am stupid.”
She was not stupid. She was starving. That was the thing I understood sitting there with her hand working slowly under my jeans on a bus at ten past midnight: this was a woman who had not been touched properly in years and had decided, somewhere between Lawrence and Kedzie, to stop pretending about it.
I put my hand on her leg. Her trousers were thin, that cheap polyester that shows everything, and I got my hand between her thighs and she clamped them shut on it out of pure reflex and then, deliberately, opened them again.
She was soaked. Not damp. Soaked, all the way through the fabric, so much that my palm came away shining, and she made a small horrified noise and put her hand over her own face.
“I am sorry,” she said, from behind her hand. “I am so sorry. Is — I don’t know why. Is not normal. Is — ”
“It is normal.”
“Is not,” she said. “Is not normal. Is — ” she dropped her hand and looked at me and her eyes were bright and wet and furious with herself “ — is because nobody. Long time. Long time nobody. My husband, he is — we are — ” she made a flat gesture, the gesture of a door that has been shut so long the hinges have seized. “Two years. Maybe more. He is tired. I am tired. We are like — ” she looked around for the word and could not find it and settled for “ — like two people in a bus.”
I moved my hand and she grabbed my wrist, hard.
“Not here,” she said. “Not — people — ”
“My stop is next.”
She held my eyes a second too long. Then she looked at the phone in her lap, and picked it up, and looked at the time, and I watched her do the arithmetic.
“I have until five thirty,” she said. “Nelson comes home five thirty. The children, my mother-in-law, she wakes at six.” She put the phone down. “I am a terrible woman.”
“You are a woman on a bus.”
“Is the same thing tonight,” she said, and stood up before the bell, and pulled the cord for me.
My building is a three-flat on Washtenaw with a stairwell that smells of somebody else’s cooking and a hallway light that takes four seconds to come on. She went up ahead of me with her plastic bag and her company jacket and her shoulders up around her ears, and at the top of the stairs she stopped and whispered, “Is your wife?”
“No wife.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Good. I mean — not good, I am not — ” she gave up on the sentence and went in.
She stood in my kitchen with her bag against her chest and looked around at the dishes in the rack and the coffee ring on the counter and the window with the paint coming off the frame, and something in her face relaxed, and she put the bag down, and took a cloth out of it, and started wiping the counter.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Is dirty,” she said, scrubbing. “Is — how you say — is sticky. Is from the — ” she pointed at the jar of honey. “Is one minute. Is nothing. I cannot — ” she scrubbed harder “ — I cannot stand it.”
I took the cloth out of her hand and put it in the sink, and she stood there with her hands up like a woman who had been caught, and then I got my hands on her waist and she came apart.
It was not a graceful kiss. She kissed like somebody who had forgotten how and was remembering it in a hurry, both hands on my face, up on her toes, making small sounds into my mouth, and then she pulled back and said, “Wait. Wait. One thing,” and took the pins out of her hair.
It came down to her shoulders, black and straight and flat from the bun, and she shook it out and looked at me and said, “Better? I look better?”
“You look like a different woman.”
“I am a different woman,” she said. “Tonight.”
I got the polo over her head and she let me, and then the undershirt, and then she was standing in my kitchen in her bra with her arms half up and her skin goosebumped from the cold, and she was small, and she was beautiful in the way that tired women who work with their hands are beautiful, which is not the way anybody puts on a poster.
Her breasts were small and low and soft, with dark nipples and the pale stretch marks of two pregnancies across the tops, and her stomach had a soft fold above the waistband and a scar low down that she put her hand over when she saw me look.
“Two babies,” she said. “Is ugly.”
“Is not ugly.”
“Is ugly,” she said, and I took her hand away from it and put my mouth there, on the scar, and she made a sound like something breaking and put both hands in my hair.
Her hips were wider than the rest of her suggested, and her ass was small and round and high, and her thighs were the thighs of a woman who had been on her knees scrubbing floors since she was twenty-three, and the skin on the inside of them was wet before I had done anything at all.
I got her trousers and her underwear down together and she stepped out of them and stood there with her hand on my shoulder for balance, and the crotch of the underwear was so wet it was transparent.
“See,” she said, miserable. “Is like a — is embarrassing.”
“Is perfect,” I said, and put my hand between her legs, and she cried out and then clapped her own hand over her mouth and looked at the wall.
“The neighbour,” she whispered.
“Let him hear.”
“No, no, no — ” and then I pushed two fingers into her and she stopped arguing and held onto my shirt with both hands and let her head fall back.
She was tight and hot and so wet that it ran down my wrist. I worked her slowly, standing up, in a kitchen at half past midnight, and she came in under a minute with her forehead against my chest and her teeth in my shirt and her whole small body going rigid and then loose, and then she said, into my shirt, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Is so fast. Is so fast, I am sorry.”
“Do not say sorry again.”
“Sorry,” she said, automatically, and then laughed at herself, and then looked up at me with her hair in her face and said, “Take me to the bed. Please. Please take me to the bed.”
She went down on me on the bedroom floor before I was even undressed, on her knees on the rug with her bra still on, and she did it like a woman who had been thinking about it for twelve years and had opinions. No hesitation, no ceremony. She got her mouth around as much as she could take and used her hand for the rest and looked up at me the whole time, and when she came off it she was breathing hard and her chin was wet.
“Is too big,” she said, delighted. “Is too big for my mouth. I like it. Is — ” she looked for the word again “ — is like a problem I want to solve.”
She solved what she could and then she climbed onto the bed and pulled me down and said, “Now. Now, please, I cannot wait, is been so long, is been so long I forgot what is like.”
I put it against her and she reached down and guided it in herself with two fingers, and I went in slowly, and she said “oh” on a rising note, and then “oh” again, and then nothing at all for a few seconds, and then she started to cry.
“Hey. Hey.”
“Is okay,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Is okay. Is good crying. Is — ” she laughed and cried at the same time “ — is like my body is saying thank you. Is stupid. Keep going. Please keep going.”
So I kept going, and she got loud. She had been worried about the neighbour and then she stopped being worried about the neighbour, and she said things in Tagalog into the pillow and then turned her face out and said them in English, which was worse, and she had her heels on my back and her hands on my ass pulling me in and she came again with her mouth open and no sound at all coming out of it.
Afterwards she lay flat on the sheet with her forearm across her face, breathing like somebody who had run up four flights of stairs.
“I have a question,” she said. “Is a bad question.”
“Ask.”
She took her arm off her eyes and looked at me, and her face was flushed and her hair was everywhere and she looked ten years younger and about to do something reckless.
“The other thing,” she said. “The — ” she made a small gesture with her hand, vague, and then gave up on being delicate “ — in the ass. I never. Never in my life. Nelson, he never ask, and I never — ” she bit her lip. “I think about it. Always I think about it. Is that bad?”
“It is not bad.”
“I want to try,” she said, all in a rush. “Tonight. With you. Because tomorrow I am a cleaner again and I am a wife again and I am nothing again, and tonight I am — ” she stopped. “Tonight I am this.”
I got the lube out of the drawer and she watched me do it and said, “Is that what is for? Is — oh. Okay. Okay.”
I turned her over onto her front and put a pillow under her hips, and she lay there with her cheek on the sheet and her ass up and her hands gripping the edge of the mattress, and I lubed my fingers and put them where she wanted them and she hissed through her teeth and pushed back against my hand.
“Is strange,” she said. “Is — oh. Oh, is not — is not what I think. Is better. Is — ” she moved her hips in a circle “ — is like it is connected to something.”
I took my time. Two fingers, then three, then the head of my cock, and she said “wait” and then “no, don’t wait” and then “slow, slow, slow” and then, when it was in, a long shaking breath that turned into a laugh.
“Is in,” she said, amazed. “Is all the way in. I can feel it in my — ” she put her hand flat on her own belly. “Is in my stomach.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Is full,” she said. “Is — no. Not hurt. Is full. Is like — ” she moved, experimentally, and her whole body jerked “ — oh. Oh, do that again.”
I did it again. And then again, and then I found the rhythm and she found it with me, and the noises she made stopped being words entirely. She got her hand under herself and worked her own clit while I fucked her ass and she came so hard that her knees gave out and she slid flat onto the mattress with me still in her, shaking, saying something in Tagalog that sounded like a prayer.
“Don’t stop,” she said, when she could. “Don’t stop, is — I want — ”
“Tell me.”
She turned her head on the sheet and looked back up the length of her own back at me, and her face was wet and her eyes were black and she said, very clearly, “Come inside me. In the ass. I want to feel it. I want to feel it for the whole bus ride home.”
That did it. I got both hands on her hips and finished inside her, and she pushed back against me the whole time and made a low sound like she was being told something she had waited a long time to hear.
We lay there afterwards, her on her front and me half on top of her, and she said, into the pillow, “I am going to hell.”
“Probably not.”
“Is okay,” she said. “Is worth it.”
She had a shower and I could hear her crying in it, and when she came out with a towel around her and her hair wet and flat, she was fine, and she looked at the clock on the stove and said, “Four fifteen. I have to go.”
She dressed in the kitchen, fast, the way a woman dresses who has done it in the dark for years: underwear, trousers, polo, jacket, hair up with the two pins, and by the time she was done she was Marilou again, tired, small, with lemon cleaner on her hands and a gold band on her finger.
She put her jacket on and stood at the door with her plastic bag and said, “I don’t know your name.”
I told her.
“Is a good name,” she said, and then, quietly, “I will not be able to look at my husband.”
“You will.”
“Yes,” she said. “I will. Is what I am good at.” She opened the door, and then stopped, and came back, and kissed me once, hard, with her hand on my jaw, and then went out and down the stairs without looking back.
She left one of the hairpins on the nightstand. I found it in the morning, black, with the little plastic ball on the end, and I put it in the drawer with the lube and the spare batteries and did not think about it again for a week.
The following Thursday she got on the 81 at Lawrence and Racine at twelve minutes past midnight, in the same jacket, with the same plastic bag, and she walked down the aisle past three empty rows and sat down next to me and put her hand on my knee and said, without looking at me, “I have until five thirty.”
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
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 #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
Sleepwalking Mom – Chapter.03 – Part.06 – Twins find out. Now it’s three on one
Sleepwalking Mom – chapter.02 – part.06 – Dad’s on travel, twins are away, Mom and Dex enjoy each other.
A Mother’s Worry – part 11
Sleepwalking Mom – chapter.01 – part.04 – College son spies on Mom’s sleepwalking escapades.
Sleepwalking Mom – chapter.01 – part.03 – College son spies on Mom’s sleepwalking escapades.
