This is just a short fic which came to me when I accidentally made eye-contact with a weird guy from my gym who was on the same bus as me one day.
Title: Constants and Variables
Disclaimer: I don’t own the characters, I don’t own the trains, blah blah blah.
Rating: Pretty much nothing. PG I suppose.
Note: My limited knowledge of the San Francisco transportation system/ city layout is gleamed from the official BART website. Any natives can nitpick errors with them. If you want to discuss Dublin’s crappy DART, then you can take it up with me.
There are constants in this life, and there are variables.
My life is mostly one of routine, of constants. From Monday to Friday I wake at the same time, eat the same breakfast, catch the same trains and drink the same coffee. The main variable in my life is the nightly decision over what country’s food will be my takeaway. It gets dull sometimes.
I mentioned one constant – my train. This, at least my morning train, is never dull. In fact, my day centres around my early-morning train journey. It’s not ideal, the high point of your day happening before 8 a.m., but what can you do.
Monday to Friday I catch the 7.42 train from Richmond to Montgomery Street. I get on the last carriage at the first stop and take my place on the fourth seat to the right of the left doors. At least six other people get on this carriage. The regulars. There’s the guy in the immaculate suits who never sits down, I imagine in case his pinstripes are misaligned by touching public transport seating. I can never figure out why he’s actually standing on the train with that mild look of distaste instead of being picked up by a limo or something. Then there’s the stoned guy in the corner who looks out the window in wonder as he eats his peanut M&Ms, though never the yellow ones. On the opposite site of the carriage is Johnny, who is the biggest sport fan I ever saw. I think he has at least one jersey from every sport in the world.
And then there’s her.
Tuesday to Friday (we’ll get to that), she sits facing me and down three seats. She gets off the stop before me. No, I’ve never got off to see where she goes, and I’ll swear blind that I’ve never contemplated it. But for 35 minutes, four days a week, I get to sneak peeks at her while I pretend to be engrossed in the paper. Her long blonde hair, her porcelain skin, her piercing blue eyes… Well, let’s just say she makes occasional cameos in my dreams too. And every week I thank the sweet Lord or whoever else it was that invented Casual Friday because – not that she’s not hot in her usual office wear, believe me, she is – she’s got these colourful tops that she wears with her tight jeans, especially this yellow one… It’s actually kinda worse when she wears that, because I’m left with that image for four full days until I see her again on Tuesday. What does she do on Mondays that’s so important that she can’t get the train for my sake? This is a question to which I have dedicated many hours to find an answer. She works a four-day week is the simplest option; she has a girlfriend in New York to whom she travels every weekend to have days of hot sweaty sex with is the most dramatic alternative.
Unfortunately, another constant in my life was my utter inability to ask this woman out. She did wear a rainbow ring during Gay Pride week, so that wasn’t the issue. In fact, I’ve even caught her looking at me plenty of times in the past as I tried to sneakily stare at her, so that wasn’t it either. I just froze every time I’d psyche myself up to sit beside her and get chatting.
But thank God for variables.
There I was, standing behind her waiting for the train, a location that coincidentally allowed me a fine view of her Casual Friday butt, when all of a sudden twenty high-school football players and their cheerleaders invade the platform, complaining about their broken-down bus. Then the train arrives, and the entire crew decides to disturb our regular seating by crowding on. So I’m elbowed out of the way by some jock, who then takes my rightful place. As I was about to get off and get onto another carriage with seats available, the door closed in front of me. So I resigned myself to standing, turned around and found myself squashed up against the nearest body. But that body… well, it wasn’t some jock’s gym-toned pecs. It was soft, and wearing a yellow jumper and if I managed to pull my eyes north, it was attached to the most beautiful face I’d ever seen. And maybe it was the waves of energy buzzing around the kids affecting me, but I was determined I wasn’t wasting this opportunity. I reminded myself of my ‘no pick-up line’ rule (a rule written after considerable failure with said lines). Just start a conversation.
“Hi.”
“Hey.” She smiled at me. She’d never smiled at me before. I panicked.
“So… do you come here often?”
