The Back Way

It is a Tuesday evening on a crowded Manhattan-bound C-train. The sun has long-since set. Rush hour is nearing it's end but there's still not an empty seat in the house.

I am standing, flipping through the pages of a novel for the short trip to DUMBO, where I have business. A couple gets on at Franklin Avenue. The man, a tall and gabby blue-collar guy walking with a cane is flapping his lips at about 100 miles an hour, seemingly about absolutely nothing. His woman is much shorter, maybe 5'3, a thick fair-skinned girl with narrow, almost Asian eyes, round hips and an ass that is the product of both Mama's genes and healthy eating, her head covered in bright blonde extension braids left open at the ends. She's a hood girl if there ever was one, there standing by her man. I kinda have a thing for the hood aesthetic here and there.

There's this vacant look in her eyes as her man drones and on and on. He's talking more at her than to her, his ego 100 percent certain that she always cares about what he has to say, that he is still the absolute center of her universe, that he is her deliverer from all that is wrong and inferior in this Rotten Apple of a world.

There are more of these kinds of men than there are of me. In some ways I've always wanted to be them in that their ignorance is complete bliss, that their bare bones, caveman approach to life is just what's expected of them. They don't even see the lines to read between. They just act, for better or for worse. I only act when it makes 100 percent sense, a worse problem in some ways.

Though I will on occasion, I generally try not to stare at taken women. I wouldn't want some other dude doing it to me (Though we're men. We all do it). So as her eyes travel from the ads above her to meet mine, I look away shyly, not wanting to begin any kind of staring match that could possibly pop up on ole' boy radar. This doesn't stop her.

She keeps looking, seemingly studying my face as if it holds the answer to some question. I see her out of the corner of my eye. I think about the ass behind her that I've already committed to memory. There's this part of me that craves nothing more than to step right in front of this cat and come with best game. Fuck it. Worse come to worse I'm brawling on a packed train for a few more stops. No DTs around. No uniform cops. I could ask for the digits, get them and clock him hard in the nose if he has any objections. But that ain't me, at least not sober, at least not without a real reason. I don't have a reason that makes it worth being him today.

He keeps talking though, not noticing the little grin on her face as she knows that I know that she knows. I imagine a slight moistening between her thighs. My own soldier begins to stir. Lafayette Avenue. Hoyt-Schemerhorn. Jay Street. We're still at it. My stops up next, but I'm stuck in this magnetic field we've created, knowing that I'm going to do nothing but wish I could do everything, traveling to netherworld where it might be acceptable for me to press her her against the train wall pull those stretch pants down to her knees and test the dexterity of her chosen pair of panties, right in front of this muthafucka.

He'd probably stand there just as oblivious, barely realizing that he's losing his girl to the emptying room they're living in. He's the last thing standing in it and I want him out.

I think I see her lick her lips. Then I think of licking them myself. Then the train slows. The doors open at High Street.

I fight through the crowd toward the doors, my crotch facing that beautiful booty of hers. Tab A brushes against slot B. She actually shudders. I hear and feel it but I don't look back. I rocket through the doors, trying to avoid the aftermath of my moment-long act of adultery. The doors close as I need them to and she goes back to the room she shares with her blabbermouth man. And I go down to the river East. God I love this town...sometimes. Out.