As I was reading the final pages of an excellent sci-fi novel, I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. Looking up, I saw her boarding the bus. She was a small Asian woman, barely even five feet tall in her heels. Her pale blue top fit snugly over her torso, making her small breasts appear somewhat prominent. Adorned with a decorative beaded belt, the faded-blue denim skirt swayed nicely across her thighs as she made her way to an empty seat several rows in front of me. Her black hair rubbed just slightly across the top of her shoulders. Her eyes caught mine for just a millisecond as she took in us other passengers, and the dark gray irises made me think of someone I had seen before. Along with the backpack slung across her right shoulder, she carried two bags and appeared to have just come from the nearby mall.
I appeared to the other passengers to return to the book, engrossed in the adventures written in small type upon the four hundred pages. However, my mind was busy at work. I tend to think in images, and tend to remember most things that I see. So, my mind switched from imaginative mode to detective mode, flipping through the continuously-maintained catalogues of images scattered throughout my brain to try to discern why this person seemed so familiar.
About twenty minutes later, movement toward the front of the bus caught my attention. As the bus slowed on approach to the university, she stood. She looked past me toward the pair of obnoxious teenagers laughing loudly behind me, and I noted that she wore no make-up and no earrings, a bit unusual for the female students at the university. Placing her unpainted fingers on the back of a seat to steady herself as the bus rumbled over one of the city's many potholes, she made her way toward the rear door beside me, and also gave me a nice view of her lone piece of jewelry, an adjustable ring in the form of a snake wrapped around her left index finger. That was particularly unusual, and I added that to the search criteria as my mind continued reviewing the many catalogued images filling my skull.
During the rest of the commute home from work, my mind also worked on a second front: Given that she got off at one of the stops along the western edge of main campus, had I seen her in the university area before? Had I noticed her as I biked across campus one weekend? Did we accidentally bump into each other on a sidewalk? Did we both attend the same guest lecture series? Perhaps had I seen her in one of the many small coffee shops ringing main campus? Had we been on the same bus at some other time?
I got off the bus, thinking ahead to when I returned home. Perhaps I would find the answer online, or maybe even on one of my own hard drives. But once I did, then what? I somehow sensed that she was a junior or perhaps a senior at the university, which would make me nearly a full decade older than her – that did not leave much of a possibility that I would be successful if I were to somehow locate her and attempt to hit on her.
I returned to my apartment complex at last. After retrieving the day's bills and junk mail from the tiny mailbox, I made my way up the four flights of stairs to the place I had called home ever since I graduated from the very same university. Casting the mail and my own backpack aside, I took a can of Mountain Dew from the refrigerator and made my way to the computer, certain that the answer was in an electronic format. I set my favorite slide show program to the task of cataloguing every image on both the master and slave drives, and showing them in a perpetual random loop until instructed to stop. Knowing the amount of time involved in such a comprehensive image search on such an old computer, I set about fixing dinner, returning to the computer after having inhaled the rest of the leftover pizza.
Just as I sat at the computer, the image-gathering process came to an end, and the slide show itself began. I sat back in my chair and slowly savored the final drops of Mountain Dew as my eyes scrutinized each image before it was replaced 1.75 seconds later.
Over an hour later, the match was made. Quickly, I reached out to the keyboard to pause the slide show.
It was the same small Asian woman, no doubt about it. Only this time, she wore only a pair of thigh-high side-laced black boots polished to lovingly that they reflected the lighting almost as well as a mirror. Short silver chains connected her thick black leather cuffs with the eyehook attachments on the tilted red St. Andrew's Cross, ensuring she was kept in a spread-eagle position. Weighted vice-style clamps pulled her labia toward the floor, while a neon-orange vibrator or dildo emerged obscenely from the base of her bald torso. Her body glistened with sweat as tears streaked down her face, causing her make-up to run and create a rather wicked presentation. Her body was incredibly tense, her mouth open in what must have been a piercing scream of pain as, from the left side of the frame, the single vicious tail of a bullwhip added yet another beautiful welt across the front of her body.
