What I Imagine with the Stranger at the Bus Stop

There is a bus stop on the corner of Carranza Avenue and Almendro Street where time stops dead at exactly ten-thirty in the morning. It isn’t magic. It’s her. She always arrives at that hour, just hurried enough that her bangs lift away from her forehead, and leans against the shelter as if the whole day belongs to her.

I get there early. Always early. I sit on the bench on the right, the one with the shorter leg that rocks back and forth, and open a newspaper I don’t read. The words fall apart between my fingers because my eyes are elsewhere. They’re on the curve of her neck when she tilts her head to check the time. They’re on the way the morning sun cuts through her skirt and draws the outline of her thighs, and higher up, the soft bulge of her cunt pressing against the fabric when the air sticks her skirt to her skin.

She doesn’t look at me. Never looks at me. And I’m grateful for that, because if she did she’d discover everything that goes through my head every time she crosses her legs. She’d discover that I have a hard cock in my pants from the moment I saw her come down the corner, and that I press the newspaper against my lap to hide it.

I don’t know her name. I’ve given her one: I call her Adriana, though she could be called anything. Adriana sounds like the way she bites her lower lip when the bus is late. It sounds like the fabric of her shirt opened one button more than decency would demand, that channel of shadow between her tits peeking out with a naughtiness she pretends not to know about.

Because she knows. She fucking knows. A woman doesn’t dress like that to go to some ordinary office. The short skirt, the stockings that end exactly where the imagination begins, the first button surrendered. She doesn’t dress for me, that much is clear. She dresses to please herself. And in pleasing herself, without meaning to, she destroys me.

***

The first time I noticed her was on a Tuesday in October. It was raining, and we were sharing the few dry inches under the shelter. We were so close I could smell her perfume, something warm with a woody base, and the cold rain made her breath condense into little clouds that disappeared between us.

—Do you know if the forty-seven goes through the center? —she asked me.

And I, who know that route by heart, who could recite every stop with my eyes closed, went mute. I stammered a “I think so” that sounded like a lie. She smiled, a brief, almost pitying smile, and got on the bus without looking back.

Since then I’ve never spoken to her again. Not for lack of wanting. For excess of it. Because I know that if I speak to her, if I break the spell of this distance, I’ll lose the only place where she is completely mine: my head.

***

In my head, Adriana shows up late on purpose. She lets the forty-seven pass by, watches it disappear down the street, and makes no move to run after it. Then she turns toward me, slowly, and for the first time her eyes meet mine.

—I know you watch me —she says. There’s no reproach in her voice. There’s something else.

I don’t answer. In my imagination I can’t find the words either, but I don’t need them anymore. She comes up to the bench, sits beside me, and the newspaper I was pretending to read slips to the ground and neither of us picks it up.

—And what do you see when you look at me? —she asks.

I’d tell her I see the way the fabric of her skirt tightens over her thigh when she crosses her legs. That I’ve memorized the exact point where her stockings stop being stockings and naked skin begins. That I know the gesture she makes when she brushes her bangs aside and the tiny wrinkle that appears between her brows when the bus is delayed. That every morning, on this wobbly-legged bench, I undress her button by button while pretending to care about the news, and then I fuck her in my mind against the shelter with her skirt hiked up to her waist and her panties hanging from one ankle.

Instead, I put a hand on her knee. She doesn’t move it away. The shelter hides us from the avenue, the traffic noise turns into a distant murmur, and my fingers travel up her thigh with a slowness that is almost torture for both of us.

—Not here —she whispers, but she opens her legs a little wider.

The hem of her skirt gives way. The skin above the stocking is warm and soft, and when my fingers reach the elastic, she lets the air out through her nose, a held-back sigh that swells her chest and finally opens that rebellious button on her shirt. I keep going. I brush the lace of her panties with the pad of my thumb and feel the wetness already soaking through, a sticky heat that makes me clench my teeth. She’s wet. She’s been wet since before I touched her, and that certainty makes my cock so hard it hurts.

—You’re soaked —I tell her, and for the first time my voice sounds steady.

—I’ve been soaked for weeks —she answers, her mouth against my ear—. Every morning. Knowing you were watching me.

I pull the lace aside. Her lips are swollen, slick, and when my middle finger sinks between them, she gives a short moan she muffles against my neck. Her cunt grips me with an eagerness I hadn’t expected, and I feel it clench around my finger every time I curl it forward, searching for that inner spot that lifts her hips off the bench. I slide in a second finger. She bites my earlobe to keep from crying out, and I start pumping slowly, feeling the obscene splash of her wetness against my palm every time I press her clit.

—Take it out —she pants—. Take it out, please.

I grab her hand and bring it to my fly. She pulls down the zipper without taking her eyes off me, and when her fist closes around my cock, a shiver lashes up my spine. She starts jerking me off at the same slow rhythm with which I finger her, squeezing the tip with her thumb on every upward stroke, spreading the trail of liquid that’s already leaking from me with her palm.

—Get on top —I tell her.

She looks toward the avenue, toward the visible stretch of sidewalk, then turns back and smiles at me with an audacity I would never have suspected in the woman with the bangs. She hikes her skirt to her waist, straddles me on the wobbly-legged bench, and with one hand she pulls her panties aside while with the other she guides my cock to her entrance. The tip brushes her soaked lips, sinks in barely an inch, and she lets out a guttural moan before dropping her weight in one go and swallowing me whole.

The bench creaks. She stays still for an instant, pinned to the hilt, eyes shut and mouth open, adjusting to the invasion. Then she starts moving. Up and down at first, slowly, with her hands on my shoulders, and I can feel her cunt sucking me in every time she rises, tightening around me as if it doesn’t want to let go. I unbutton the remaining buttons, pull her bra down, and her tits fall onto me, hot, with nipples so hard they dig into my palms. I take one into my mouth, suck it, bite it, and she speeds up.

—Fuck me —she begs in my ear, in a voice I don’t recognize—. Fuck me harder, don’t treat me like I’m made of glass.

I grip her hips, dig my fingers into her flesh, and start thrusting up each time she drops down. The shelter echoes with the wet slap of our bodies. Her tits bounce in front of my face. I slide a hand between her legs, find her clit with my thumb, and rub it in hard circles while I keep fucking her with my fingers, and she starts trembling, squeezing her thighs, smothering little cries against my shoulder.

—I’m coming —she says—. I’m coming, I’m coming, God, I’m coming.

Her cunt clamps around my cock in waves, squeezing it with a force that almost blows my load right then and there. I hold on. I keep her steady while she shakes over me, bite her neck, and when she finally loosens, I lift her up, fold her over the back of the bench with her skirt over her waist and her ass bare, and drive into her from behind in one stroke. She screams against my forearm. I sink all the way in, pull my cock out to the tip, shove it back in, and with each thrust I hear the wet smack of her cunt and feel her ass slam against my belly. I grab a fistful of her hair, tug gently, and she arches her back to offer herself more fully.

—Come inside me —she pants—. I want to feel you all day.

I last three more thrusts and then I come apart. I spill inside her with a groan that rises from my stomach, shot after shot, and I feel my semen forcing its way through and soaking the already drenched walls. I stay inside until the last spasm. When I finally pull out, a thick strand slides down the inside of her thigh, crosses the elastic of her stocking, and disappears beneath the hem.

***

A car brakes with a screech on the avenue and yanks me back to reality. I’m still on the bench. The newspaper is still in my hands, crumpled against the hard bulge throbbing in my crotch. And Adriana is still three meters away, oblivious, checking her watch with that impatience that tightens her neck.

My mouth is dry. My palms are sweating despite the morning chill, and I couldn’t say whether I’m trembling from the cold or from what I’ve just imagined in such detail that I can almost still feel the heat of her cunt clamping around my cock, the taste of her nipple between my teeth, the smell of sex mixed with woody perfume.

She shifts her stance. She puts her weight on the other hip, and the gesture, so banal, so involuntary, seems to me the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Not because there’s anything obscene about it. But because my desire turns it into something it isn’t.

That’s the problem with desire when it has nowhere to go. It covers everything. It turns a bus stop wait into a scene of intimacy. It turns a stranger asking about a transit line into the protagonist of every night I spend awake staring at the ceiling with my hand under the sheets. I invent her whole: her laugh, the way she’d say my name, the exact way she’d surrender if I ever dared touch her, the face she’d make with my cock in her mouth. And the more I invent her, the less it matters to me that the real woman bears no resemblance at all to the one who lives behind my eyelids.

***

There are days when I invent variations. In one of them, it rains again like that Tuesday, and the two of us are once more sharing the shelter. But this time, when she asks me about the forty-seven, I don’t stammer.

—I’ll give you a ride —I tell her—. My car’s around the corner.

And she, against all logic, against everything a sensible woman would do, agrees. In the car, with the windows fogged by rain and our breathing, there’s no need to pretend anymore. Her hand finds mine over the gear shift. Her skirt rides up on its own when she turns toward me. And in the empty parking lot of a shopping center that hasn’t opened yet, I kiss her for the first time with a hunger built up over months of stolen glances.

In the fantasy, her mouth tastes like coffee and something sweeter. She unbuttons my shirt with a urgency that denies all her morning elegance, and I tug her bra strap down with my teeth while she throws her head back against the fogged-up glass. I rip off the remaining buttons, free her tits, and bite her nipples until she moans and digs her nails into my neck. She opens my pants with trembling fingers, slips a hand into my boxer briefs, and grabs my cock with a roughness that makes me gasp.

—I’ve wanted to do this for months —she murmurs, and leans over my lap.

Her mouth swallows me whole. She goes down to the base, pulls back, goes down again, and sucks me with an eagerness that doesn’t fit the image of the woman with the bangs. Her tongue twists around the head, her lips squeeze my shaft, and with her free hand she cradles my balls, squeezing them gently to the rhythm of each blowjob. I hold her hair, move it away from her face so I can see her, and she lifts her eyes without taking my cock out of her mouth, her cheeks hollowed by the suction, and that image alone nearly makes me come.

I pull her off before it’s too late. I lift her onto my lap, tear her panties off in one yank, and fuck her right there in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel digging into her back. The seat reclines all at once when she blindly reaches for the lever. Her thighs squeeze my hips. She starts riding me frantically, her tits bouncing into my face, and I slip a finger, wet with her own saliva, between her ass cheeks and push it in slowly. She cries out, clenches, comes with a long spasm that runs through her entire body, and I come with her, inside, groaning her invented name against the skin of her neck.

And finally, after so many mornings of silent desire, I stop imagining what it would be like to have her and have her for real.

***

The bus arrives on time and undoes the scene before I can finish it. The doors open with that hydraulic sigh I hate because it means she’s leaving. Adriana gets on, pays, looks for a seat. For an instant, only an instant, she turns her head toward the stop.

And she looks at me.

This time it’s not my imagination. Her eyes settle on me, on the man on the wobbly-legged bench, on the newspaper I haven’t turned a page of in twenty minutes. It’s a half-second look. But in that half-second everything fits: the question of whether she caught me watching her, the suspicion that I’ve been doing it for months, and something else, something I don’t dare name because naming it would mean having hope.

The bus pulls away. Her face slips behind the dirty glass and disappears up the avenue, toward a day I know nothing about and a life she will never belong to.

I stay on the bench longer than necessary. The next bus, mine, goes past because I don’t raise my hand. I’m in no hurry. My haste went away on the forty-seven. I still have my cock hard against the fabric of my pants, throbbing to the rhythm of my blood, and I know that when I get home I’ll lock myself in the bathroom, close my eyes, and fuck her against the shelter again until I come in my own hand thinking of her face.

***

Tomorrow I’ll come back. I’ll arrive early, as always, and sit on the bench that rocks. I’ll open a newspaper I have no intention of reading. And at ten-thirty, when she appears with her bangs lifted off her forehead and her skirt a finger’s width shorter than is prudent, I’ll undress her again with my eyes while pretending to care about the world.

Maybe one day I’ll dare. Maybe on some rainy Tuesday I’ll offer her a ride and find out whether her mouth really tastes like coffee, whether her cunt grips me like in the fantasy, whether she screams when she comes or does it silently, biting her lip. Or maybe not, and I’ll settle for this version of her that lives in my head and has never once told me no, because I’ve never given her the chance to.

What I know is this: there is a desire that feeds on impossibility. It grows stronger the less it is touched. And while Adriana is nothing more than the stranger at ten-thirty, she will remain perfect, untouched, infinitely mine in the only place where no one can take her from me, with her legs spread for me every night behind my eyelids.

The bench rocks under my weight. I close the newspaper. Until tomorrow, I think, even though she will never hear it.