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18 Mayıs 2023, 02:05
She could feel him watching her but every time her eyes flicked to catch his, he?d be looking down at the tattered day-worn Metro in his hand. Even from ten metres away, the paper looked scuffed and dirty, and it?d been folded in half since the man had first picked it up.They?d both boarded the train at Liverpool Street with the late-commute crowd. 18:27. Two strangers in a crowd of dozens more. A wet night. The air outside had been fresh and damp, an earlier thunderstorm having faded into a typical London drizzle.Winter. Glowing yellow-white streetlights. Car headlights and pattering rain. Smoke misting from exhausts. The kind of scene that?d look cosy in pictures or on Christmas cards. But it didn?t feel cosy when you were running along the dirty streets, car horns in your ears and rain chasing you down the stairs into the hollow commotion of the underground station.Ella sighed, still content to have caught the train, and leaned against the metal pole beside her. She tucked a loose strand of damp hair behind her ear and glanced at the man again. Still reading the Metro, apparently. The train had already made four stops, handfuls of commuters trudging from the carriage off into the night. And this man apparently hadn?t read more than half the sports page.Ella wondered. She shrugged in her head and turned her attention back to her phone. And two seconds later he was looking at her again. She knew it without even checking. She felt it like a person feels the weather. Not a sixth sense. More tangible than that. More obvious. Like the first elusive notes on a radio betraying the warmth of an entire song. Something. Ella frowned at her phone, resisting the urge to try and catch him in the act again. He?d be too quick and then maybe he?d assume she might be interested.Distractedly, she blinked at the screen of her phone. Small bold news headlines glared at her accusingly. Wars. Bombs. Murders. Ella let out a breath. Don?t think about it. She swallowed and her throat was so dry it hurt. Ironic. Dehydrated on the wettest night of the year. She almost smiled but caught herself.She chanced a look at the stranger again. He seemed totally focused Escort Yakacık (http://yakacik.t2bro.net/) on his newspaper. But he still hadn?t unfolded it. A damp satchel hung from one of his broad shoulders and she could see the cap of a water bottle poking out from inside. Her throat clenched a little. How could she have gotten so thirsty without realising?Her eyes went back up his arm and to his face. He looked up then. Made eye contact and didn?t break it. But he didn?t smile. He just looked at her in the most physical way one person can ever look at another. It felt violent. For a few long seconds, the shock prevented her reacting. And then heat surged. Anger? Embarrassment? Why should she be embarrassed?She tore her eyes away and busied herself with searching through her bag for water she knew wouldn?t be there. Her pulse raced and, for a while, she couldn?t hear anything else. Did he want sex? The idea seemed implausible. Commuters had a silent, unspoken code of conduct but then, he didn?t look like a regular. And she?d never seen him before. She?d definitely have remembered a man like him. Tall. Check. Handsome. Double check. His eyelashes looked like they were an inch long, even from such a distance.Ella rolled her eyes inwardly. It didn?t matter. It wouldn?t happen. She abandoned the water search and glared at her reflection in the train door. Sex. No time. Never any time. Not now. Not ever. Life. This life. Something she?d been instrumental in creating. How could she have let it happen?Every little thing had stacked up into a teetering pile and it seemed like one small imbalance could make it all fall apart. Too tired. Way too tired. Too much running around, chasing elevators, killing time at the photocopier, filing and fetching and coffee and lunch orders and reapplying lipstick and killing herself with her own bright white chirpy telephone voice.And his eyes were on her again, and she knew it and he knew she knew it and he looked at her like he wanted to fuck her. Oh god. Was she getting ahead of herself? Did he want her? How could he?Everything that could happen and everything that couldn?t happen. And it Atalar escort (http://atalar.t2bro.net/) could. It wouldn?t take very much. Catch his eye. Walk over. Ask him what the hell he wants. She had the words in her mind, but they were in disarray, unable to form a logical sentence. You. What. Why. Fuck. Fuck. Because maybe it?d all be a misunderstanding. Maybe he?d mistaken her for someone else or maybe he was looking at her the way people look at things in the distance; looking but not seeing; just a point where a person?s eyes rest so their mind can get on with whatever the hell it needs to get on with.But it wasn?t that kind of look. She knew it. He knew it. And she couldn?t do anything about it. Just a man. A stranger. Jeans and a t-shirt and rain wet hair. And six stops until her station. It seemed like the journey would take forever. Maybe he?d leave first. She didn?t know. She couldn?t tell. The way he stood seemed so comfortable and yet so unimportant like he wouldn?t make a sound if he walked away.The sentences began to form.What are you looking at? (Too childish.)Is there something I can help you with? (Too whorish.)What?s your problem? (Too confrontational.)Ella blew out a breath. Fuck it. Just fuck everything. It didn?t matter. None of it mattered. All she?d wanted all afternoon was to get home, shut the door, slide the bolt across, spend half an hour under a hot shower and then eat popcorn, ice-cream and whatever the hell else she?d saved up for a day like this. At least, that had been the plan. But now there was another part to the equation making it so much harder to figure out. The way he looked at her.He was doing it again and she didn?t acknowledge it but she felt it and her stomach almost hurt. Some kind of hungering appreciation. Nobody had ever looked at her quite that way. Nobody. Not even the guys she?d been naked with. There?d been a sick futility to all her relationships. Doing things for the sake of doing them. Just another part of the weekly routine. Like work. Like eating.And this man who?d never touched her, never spoken to her, never even been in the same room as her, was looking at her in Kadıköy escort bayan (http://kadikoy.t2bro.net/) a way that made her feel so wanted it was dirty. A kind of desperate reverence. He wanted to fuck her. It was an assumption and yet it was so obvious she felt people might laugh if she?d denied it. But what people? The crowd on the train had no idea. They didn?t see her and they didn?t see him. Absorbed in phones, in books, in music, in their own heads.It suddenly felt like she saw them for the very first time. Like she?d been one of them only yesterday and now something had dragged her out of that dream and this was real-life, glaring and obvious and it?d never been something she?d ever thought of as beautiful but it seemed that way now.He looked at her as she looked at everyone else and she wondered why. Why her? Exactly why? Why is anyone more important than anyone else? Beauty isn?t the way a thing looks but the way you see it and why was he seeing her and did it even matter? Shouldn?t she just accept that he was?She forced herself to look at him. Not at his face because she knew she didn?t have any hope of holding eye contact. His dark t-shirt. His arms. The kind of arms one might feel safe in. Ella blew out a breath and fought the urge to hate herself. Her eyes dropped to the front of his jeans. His cock. Was that a more reasonable thing to think about?The train stopped again. Passengers exited. Marble Arch. Three stops until Notting Hill. And then what? She?d get off. Chances were, he wouldn?t. And this was all it was ever going to be. Some wordless, pointless connection on the Central line. Unless. Well. Unless she made it into something more. She considered it whilst knowing she didn?t have the nerve. She thought of his cock again, trying to imagine it with nothing to go on. Thoughts were harmless, after all. Nobody would ever know what was going on inside her crazy mind.His eyes were still on her. She turned her back on him, ejected thoughts of his anatomy from her mind and tried to remember which flavour ice-cream waited patiently in her freezer. The train drew to another stop. People moved, leaving and boarding, jostling past. She glanced back at where the stranger had been standing. He?d disappeared. But there was a sudden presence right behind her. Not touching, though if she took a step back, they?d have made contact. Close enough to feel without feeling.She didn?t turn around. She looked to her side, saw the edge of his bag.