Those Two, Over There
In the Kingsway bus shelter at 5:07pm, there isn’t room to move. Especially when the Siberian high is smiting your long underwear and chemical handwarmers with 60-click gusts and a shitload of snow. Everyone’s in here. The old guy with a bottle-a-day Johnnie Walker habit. The svelte young professional femme with the Coach purse and woolen coat. The chocolate bar eating after-workers. It is those two – those two youngsters kissing over in the corner – that everyone looks at with the corner of their eyes. Their tongues are everywhere. She: Maybe Grade 10 with a black dye job, pale face with a tincture of dagger. He: Likely her junior, hat perched on head, baggy ass, vague look – like he knows he’s lucky to be with suck a looker, and that she’ll be gone in no time. She kisses like a girl her age should – tongue sloppy technique and mouth open too wide. He kisses like an anteater might; unsure of what to make of this raven sucking the mouth off him. They go at it with a few gropes thrown in, a tit grab maybe, a hand on a crotch. It’s gratuitous given the locale, but there is an admirable honesty to this display. Everyone standing here shivering under the shitty electric heaters wishes they could be that brazen again. The buses are always late when the white stuff is crazy like this. My bus is nowhere in sight. Neither is theirs, it seems. They go at it for a few minutes more before the 8 pulls up. They get on holding hands, and I catch the boy wiping lipstick from his lips.