What I Imagine When a Stranger Sits Beside Me

My name is Renata, and I have a habit I’ve told no one about. Every afternoon, when I finish at the stationery shop where I work and get on the seven o’clock bus, I let my mind go somewhere I would never go with my body. It’s always the same scene, and I repeat it the way someone rereads a worn-out book.

The bus is packed at that hour. People go home with dull eyes, earbuds in, their phones lighting up their faces. I sit by the window, rest my temple against the cold glass, and watch the city pass by. And then it begins.

In my fantasy, someone sits down beside me. I never give him a face all the way; he is more the idea of a man than any specific man. I know he’s tall because he takes up more seat than he should, and that he smells good, of something clean and a little bitter. He doesn’t look at me. He looks straight ahead, like everyone else. But there is something in the way his thigh stays a centimeter from mine that changes everything.

I’ve never been with anyone. At twenty-eight, I’m still what they called in my village, in lowered voices, a decent girl. Not out of conviction, but out of fear, out of awkwardness, from having let the moments slip by. And maybe that’s why my imagination has become so precise: what I don’t live, I invent in obsessive detail.

That October afternoon, however, something went off script.

***

The bus lurched forward with its usual jolt. I was in my seat, by the window, my coat folded over my knees and my mind already halfway into the routine. I had begun imagining, almost by reflex, when someone dropped into the empty seat beside me.

I didn’t look. That is the rule of the game: don’t look, let the imagination fill in the blanks. But I felt the weight, the brush of a sleeve against my arm, that clean, bitter scent I thought I had invented. My heart gave a ridiculous thump, as if I’d been caught thinking out loud.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a hand resting on a thigh. A big hand, long fingers, a simple watch on the wrist. It did nothing. It stayed there, still, while the bus stopped at a light and started again. But I could no longer focus on the city sliding past the window.

Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. He’s a tired man going home, just like you.

The problem was that my body hadn’t read the warning. I felt heat climbing up my neck, a dull pressure between my legs that had nothing to do with the reality of the bus and everything to do with the scene I’d been rehearsing for months. I squeezed my thighs slowly, as if that might hide what was happening inside me.

And then he spoke. Very softly, without turning his head, looking straight ahead as the rules I thought I’d invented demanded.

—You’ve been holding your breath for three stops —he said—. Are you all right?

I was at a loss for what to answer. I felt my face burn. I could have said yes, that I was fine, put in my earbuds and closed the matter. In real life, that is what I would always have done. But something in the coincidence between what I was imagining and what was happening pushed me not to pull away.

—I’m fine —I murmured—. I was just distracted.

—Distracted —he repeated, with a little smile in the way he said it—. I get distracted on this bus too. You look out the window and end up anywhere.

I couldn’t tell whether he meant it in double entendre or whether it was me who put that into everything. I turned my head slightly. He was about forty, with a short beard, eyes a calm brown that didn’t match the stir he was causing in me. He was not the faceless man of my fantasy. He was someone real, with a crease between his brows and a poorly tied scarf, and that made it much worse.

***

The bus sank into a traffic jam near the bridge. The headlights of the motionless cars tinted the interior red. People, resigned, settled in for the wait. And the hand that had been resting still on my thigh moved, just a little, until the back of it brushed the edge of my folded coat.

—If I’m bothering you, I’ll move —he said quietly—. Just say so.

There it was. The polite question that would let me go back to being the decent village girl, the one who didn’t look, the one who only imagined. I opened my mouth to thank him and ask him to move.

—You’re not bothering me —was what came out.

I said it looking straight ahead, just like him, both our gazes fixed on the nape of the passenger in front. And I felt, more than saw, how his hand stopped pretending it was there by accident. It settled on my knee, over the fabric, with a firmness that left my throat dry.

Nothing was happening that a stranger couldn’t excuse as a mistake. A hand on a knee, on a dark bus, in an endless traffic jam. But I felt each one of his fingers as if they were marking me, and the pressure between my legs had become unbearable.

—What were you thinking about? —he asked—. Before, when you were holding your breath.

The truth is I almost made something up. Say I was thinking about work, about dinner, about some gray, safe thing. But the traffic jam, the dim light, and months of silent imagining loosened my tongue.

—About this —I said, and my own voice sounded чужая to me—. I was thinking about someone sitting next to me and guessing what I want without my having to say it.

I heard him exhale slowly. His hand rose a little, just enough to move from the knee bone to the inner curve of my thigh, still over the skirt.

—And what do you want? —he said—. Tell me this time. I don’t want to guess wrong.

***

No one had ever asked me what I wanted. In my head, the faceless man always knew everything, took me without questions, spared me the embarrassment of putting desire into words. This one, the one with the badly tied scarf, leaving the decision to me made it harder and, at the same time, more mine.

I lowered my voice until it was almost only breath.

—I want you to keep going —I said—. Slowly. So no one notices.

His hand obeyed. It slid under the hem of my skirt, warm fingers against my skin, and stopped high on my thigh as if asking for another permission I granted by opening my knees just a little. I kept my eyes forward, my breathing measured, pretending for the whole bus that I was only a tired woman waiting for the traffic jam to clear.

Inside, it was something else. When his fingers reached the thin fabric of my underwear and found it soaked, I heard him hold back a sound in his throat.

—I was right —he whispered—. You want it.

He didn’t move my clothes aside. He stroked me through them, with a slowness that was almost cruel, tracing circles that forced me to dig my nails into my coat so I wouldn’t give myself away. Every time the bus moved forward a meter and braked again, the jolt pushed him against me and tore an extra beat from my heart.

—Look at me —he said—. Just for a second.

I turned my head. And holding his gaze while his hand kept moving between my legs, on a bus full of people who saw nothing, was more intimate than anything I’d ever imagined alone. In my fantasy there had never been eyes. Now there were, brown and calm, and they looked at me as if I were the only person on the bus.

—If you want me to stop, say so —he repeated, and the fingers stilled, suspended.

—Don’t stop —I said, and I felt my voice tremble—. Please.

***

He moved the fabric aside just enough. The direct contact made me press my lips together so nothing would escape. He searched patiently, with two fingers, until he found the exact place where I came undone, and stayed there, insisting with a slow, firm rhythm that left me unable to think.

I rested my forehead against the cold glass of the window and closed my eyes. The city was still snarled outside, red and motionless, indifferent. Inside, my body was approaching an edge I only knew from my own hand, in my room, with the door closed.

—That’s it —he murmured against my ear, so softly no one else could hear—. Let go. No one knows. Only me.

And I let go. Pleasure rolled through me in a long, silent wave I had to swallow whole, biting my lip, my body rigid in the seat so no one would notice what was happening beneath the folded coat. It was far more intense than any ending I had ever invented, precisely because I hadn’t invented it. It was happening.

When the wave passed, his hand withdrew slowly, smoothed my skirt with almost tender care, and settled back on his own thigh, once again the innocent hand from the beginning. The traffic jam began to break apart. The bus moved forward. Reality returned as if nothing had happened.

—My stop is the next one —he said, no longer looking at me, once again the voice of any stranger.

I didn’t know what to answer. I had a thousand questions and none of them fit on a bus. He stood up, adjusted his badly tied scarf, and as he passed beside me on his way to the door, he leaned just enough for only me to hear him.

—Tomorrow I’m back at seven too —he said—. In case someday you stop imagining it.

He got off. I watched him cross the street through the lights, slip his hands into his pockets, and disappear around some random corner. The bus started up again. I stayed with my temple against the glass, my heart still racing, knowing two things.

The first was that that afternoon my months-long fantasy had finally become memory.

The second was that the next day, at seven, I would be back in the window seat. And that this time, maybe, I wouldn’t limit myself to imagining.