Every human face tells a story. The woman boarding the bus is flushed from running, but there is another flush beneath that, a flush of excitement, of sexual excitement, of sexual late-for-work excitement. It is not the satiated look of a woman who has just been wonderfully thoroughly fucked, but the triumphant glow that straight women get from the thrill of seducing, and dominating, another woman.

She is short and tan, smooth of skin, short of sun-streaked dark brown hair, with just enough earrings, big blue eyes, and a suddenly guilty smile when she sees the young man seated in front of me, turning quickly and pretending she hasn't.

"What's up?" he calls. It is too late. The memories of her morning, of languid kisses and roughly pinched nipples, of beating shower water and forceful hands between widespread legs must be temporarily banished. Her smile shifts from pure guilt to joy mixed with the knowledge of having been caught. She steps down the aisle and stands beside him, glances at the papers in his lap, looks affectionately at his handsome face. Who is he to her? More than an interruption. A regular flirtation, an office romance, a fantasy, an obsession? I cannot read her face as well in profile, but her hand is playing with the nape of his neck, idle, familiar, and she bends down to inhale the scent of his close-cropped dark hair.

A block later he rises to leave and they kiss, fleeingly, softly, lip to lip. As he exits the bus by the back door she takes his seat, her back to me, her face and thoughts hidden, her hands folded demurely in her lap. It is only then, over her shoulder, that I see the diamond and the plain gold band on her left ring finger.