Riding the Pink Line
Isabelle Valentine
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Isabelle Valentine
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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I can’t believe I’m actually going to fucking do this. This was the thought which endlessly circled in Jen’s mind as she stared down the car for what felt like the millionth time. The man at the end- the one who had captured her attention for the better part of two months now- was in his usual seat in the corner, shaggy brown hair obscuring his face which pointed resolutely down towards the floor. The bright white wires of his headphones snaked down his wiry, muscular frame and disappeared into the pocket of his faded jeans, and for as many times as she’d stared at the man, Jen wondered what he was listening to that could absorb him so intently. Every time she’d seen him in the car, his attention refused to be stirred by anything but the shuddering stop which marked the end of the subway’s activity for the night, where the pair always parted ways into the wee hours of the night.
Jen noticed the man for the first time a couple months back- whether he’d been there before, she wasn’t positive, but she thought that she would have remembered him if he’d ever been on the car before. On the way back to her apartment from work, Jen typically occupied herself with a book, but ever since the man had become her unspoken partner on the late-night journey, her reading had fallen by the wayside, merely a cover for her constant, furtive glances in his direction. They’d never spoken, and only a handful of times had she even caught the man’s chiseled features glancing around at the surrounding environment- and of those times, only once at her. He studied her with a quizzical sort of look that lasted only a few seconds, but filled her imagination for days afterwards.
At first, Jen scolded herself- at twenty years old, she felt that she was far beyond the age where this sort of schoolgirl infatuation from afar should take hold. But in time, she abandoned her more well-reasoned and mature stance in favor of an endless series of daydreams and fantasies, which began innocently enough but quickly turned into deeper, more perverted imaginings which shocked her with their obscenity and made her unwillingly squirm in her seat whenever they’d arrive. Jen was at a loss as to why she had become so fixated on the man; he was handsome, sure, but not the sort of guy who would typically spark such a reaction in her, and beyond that, she knew literally nothing about him. But despite her logic and desperate attempts to push down the burning desire she felt in her belly, the thoughts always came back, and eventually forced her to cook up some sort of solution which would help her with her perpetual distraction.
Jen was jerked from her reverie by what should have been relatively minor: the mystery man glanced at her for the second time ever, at least as far as she had noticed. The look- which, Jen hopefully imagined, carried a hint of pointed, dark seduction- caused a surge of butterflies in her stomach which immediately slid down to settle between her legs. Oh God, Jen thought, does he know what I’m thinking?
After the two months of perpetual, gnawing curiosity, Jen came to the conclusion that something had to be done. The man had come to occupy her thoughts so much that her performance at both work and school were suffering, and nothing she’d done so far had managed to do anything to quell the insistent desire she felt. After a few weeks of hoping that he’d take notice of her, she began to try to draw his attention in progressively more outlandish ways: she moved closer to his place on the car, a seat between them removed every day, started to stand rather than sit, and after a while, even began to abandon her normally conservative dress in favor of clubwear borrowed from her roommate Stephanie, culminating in a tiny black skirt which barely covered her ass. On the walk back to her building, Jen had to contend with a seemingly endless series of wolf-whistles and comments from the men she passed, but apart from what she thought was a tiny, hidden smirk on her mystery man’s face discovered when she bent over to pick up her “accidentally” dropped purse, she was met with a frustrating lack of attention.