This actually happened to me tonight on my commute from work. Well, everything up to the characters getting off the bus, anyway. The rest is a fantasy. I wrote it all in a burst after getting home, so it might be a little rough, but maybe it has the immediacy of what was going through my mind. Your comments or private message are always welcome.
I was reading my book on the bus, and I wasn't really paying attention when I noticed a guy slide over into the seat that was facing me.
"Yuh like video games?" a voice asked.
I looked up. There was a young black guy sitting across from me, about eighteen or nineteen. Hair in cornrows under a baseball cap, large sunglasses covering his face, thin little mustache.
"Sorry?" I asked.
"You like video games?" he repeated, this time a little more clearly.
"Mm, not too much," I said, looking back down at my book.
Is this guy trying to sell me something?
I wondered. I tried to return to my reading, but I was distracted by the presence of the guy across from me. The back section of the bus was empty except for the two of us. He had put his earphones on, and as we drove down the street, he non-nonchalantly pulled out his wallet and leafed through it, pulling out a package of rolling papers before setting the wallet down on the seat beside him. He dug into a pocket of his oversized jacket and pulled out a plastic baggie. To my surprise, he started rolling a joint, right out in the open. It was an elaborate construction that involved joining two papers into a skinny j twice the length of a cigarette.
As he smoothed it out, I tried not to watch him too openly. Then he leaned back, and I half-heard him say something and saw his lips moving. I looked up, and it took me a half-second to decide whether he was talking to me or just rapping along to whatever he was listening to. He leaned back, and I tried to keep my eyes on my reading, though the fact that his crotch was right in my line of sight above the top of my book was distracting.
A few stops later, he stood up to get off. As he stepped down to open the back door, I looked over to his seat and noticed his wallet still sitting there.
"Hey!" I said. But with his headphones on, he was already stepping off the bus.
Without thinking, I stood up, grabbed the wallet and bounded down the steps. Right after I hit the sidewalk, the bus door closed and it rolled away. The guy was headed away from me a few steps down the sidewalk. I had to hustle to catch up to his long strides, and I tapped him on the shoulder.
"Your wallet," I said, holding it up.
When he first turned around, he was giving me a
what-the-fuck
look. But when he saw the wallet and realized who I was, the menace went out of his expression.
"Shit," he said as he took it from me. "I woulda been
fucked
without that." He put it in his pocket.
He looked me over, seeing a white guy twice his age -- shorter, but with about forty pounds on him, mostly in the belly.
"Thanks bro." He looked around. "I owe you big time. You want some smoke?"
I looked him over. Standing beside him now, I could catch his odor. He smelled like he hadn't showered that day -- or like he was one of those guys who thought they were God's gift and didn't need to use deodorant. I looked around. We were on a quiet stretch of sidewalk with traffic rolling by behind us. There was a townhouse complex in the direction he'd been walking, and ahead of us, a path led down to a parkland ravine.
"I don't mind some smoke," I said. He nodded and stepped toward the path leading down to the ravine. I figured I'd try this now, while we were still more-or-less in public. "There's something I'd like more, though."
He paused and half-turned toward me. "Yeah? What you want?"
I looked at him. "You like to get your cock sucked?"
This was the dangerous moment. I knew a lot of black guys were very homophobic, and I wasn't what sure what he'd do if he didn't like the suggestion.
"Oh. You're one of
