Eye Contact
T.H.Sandal
Published by T.H. Sandal at Smashwords
Cover Photo: eyeart2 (detail) by Gokce Ozaslan
Copyright 2012 T.H. Sandal
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Eye Contact
I saw her first at Waterloo station, but I couldn't tell you when. Not on a particular day or during a specific occurrence. I must have seen her first at some point, but that wasn't how I remember it. I began to notice her and mostly because she began to take notice of me.
That's often how it works I've found: attraction is a response as much as a whim, she takes some notice of you and you reflect that back at her. No doubt some dutiful psychologist has done the work and would be able to tell you why that happens. Maybe they got a degree or something from it. Who's to say. It's something I've noticed that's all.
I'd been working as a ticket collector to earn money while I tried to write. It wasn't a skilled job but it could get pretty frenetic when the commuters came and went. You had to have your wits about you. Although it wasn't advised, I'd found it useful to establish a degree of eye contact when they came by if only because I thought anyone cheating the system would show it in their eyes.
It's since occurred that anyone who was really cheating and was good at it, wouldn't mind at all giving you a bit of eye contact. Politicians are good at that. Or else good at saying something apparently in denial but leaving themselves room to get out of it later.
Eye contact. That was the thing. And that's how I noticed her. There was no suggestion in her eyes that she was cheating – although I can't for the life of me remember much about her tickets to say whether that was really the case – what I did see was a certain intensity in the way she looked at me. That's what I noticed first.
More than the fact that she was attractive, she certainly was to my eye, but I'll come to that in a bit I suspect, it was all about how she looked at me. This wasn't something that she always did, I worked that out once we got to know each other, it was special and it was because she was attracted to me.
There, I've just given away a bit of the plot – that we would get to know each other – but I think you probably knew that anyway. It's hardly a surprise.
Once I'd noticed that intensity, then I would look out for it. I suppose it might have happened a couple of times before I worked it out, but we got to that stage when we both could recognise it, recognise that we were both waiting for that response, for that contact. Of course, I know that from later, but the point was that it soon became something more than an exchange between ticket collector and ticket holder, it was an interaction between two people who understood the nature of an attraction. The ticket, after a few days, had nothing to do with it.
This went on for a matter of weeks. I really couldn't tell you how long exactly and this isn't the place to embroider the tale with made-up numbers. But we'll call it four weeks for comfort. A month if you like. We'd see each other for the time it took for an examination of her ticket – only that didn't really happen you understand – we'd see each other each day for the time it took to exchange looks. And then she was gone and the next passenger was there.