The Singer

Any foreign teacher who has taken the ride home from school on the bus with students knows how lonely this ride can be, especially to the teacher who is new and speaks nothing or nearly nothing of the local language. Even the best students, no matter how well-spoken and eager to talk with the teacher during the school day, will ignore the teacher's presence on the bus, and who's to blame them for that? No child should be expected to make an effort to relieve the sufferings of the adult. A very rare and special child that would be.

So on a Friday bus ride home I was more than pleased to hear a mature voice come from behind me. But rather than speak to me it sang, right along with me, as I had developed a habit of quietly humming or singing to myself to get through the half hour or more it usually took to reach the stop where left the bus and walked the rest of the way home.

(Now, as it happened, this mature voice was also female, so the pleasure was doubled. I'm sure this fact went without saying, but there you have it...)

I turned and we locked eyes and kept on singing our duet of strangers.

"You're just too good to be true/ Can't take my eyes off of you..."

She smiled, and I did the same. I stood and she sat down. The singing stopped, as acquaintances were about to be made.

I should say here that I have an awful habit of not noticing people and the things about them. Call this habit what you will, but there's no sense in my trying to make myself sound better than I am. For the most part, people slip by me, hour after hour and day after day, and it has been on more than one occasion when I met someone for what I thought was the first time only to be reminded that we had met on one -- or worse, more than one -- occasion already. I never fail to feel embarrassed and ashamed at those moments, and here was about to be another one.

"I'm sorry. I don't think we've met," I said to her, offering my hand.

She took the hand but immediately took on a curious look. It is not quite polite here to point out another's social faux pas, but she was far from normal, I was to find out.

"But we have met. You teach my students. I'm the homeroom teacher for..."

And so she was, and so we had met. In my eight weeks at the school, I had been in her classroom possibly fifty times, and here I was, at it again, about to ruin an otherwise completely pleasant encounter with a 'stranger.'

But to my delight and surprise she would have none of it. "Don't worry about that," she assured me. "My English is so poor I've never spoken to you, either." (Her English was in fact splendid.)

Off we rode, having a delightful time. We discussed songs and anything else we could think of (except school or students). The half hour home could have taken the rest of the evening, and neither of us would have objected. When it was time for me to say good bye and depart, I'm sure my face registered the same disappointment as hers. It was only after I left the bus and started walking home that I realized we had forgotten to exchange telephone numbers. Oh well... Monday was another day.

But I did not see her Monday, nor did I see her Tuesday, not until the bus ride home.

"I didn't see you yesterday," I said.

"On Mondays I stay in school late."

"Oh, well, I'm glad then that today is Tuesday."

"I never ride on Tuesday, too."

"Oh, well..." She was looking at me when she said this, and then she turned to look ahead. Unlike Friday, we did not talk much on this trip. And unlike Friday, she rose to leave the bus just as we got into the city. (Our school sits far out in the countryside.)

"Well, good night," I said to her.

"No," she turned to look at me. "You're coming with me."

I was surprised, but not stupid. I followed her off the bus. We headed down a busy street. It was a neighborhood I knew well.

"You know, I go to movies here," I said.

"Yes, so do I. And that's where we're going now."

I kept following to the ticket booth and then up the escalator. She went to the ladies' room then waited as I bought drinks for us. The lobby was almost empty. She answered before I asked.

"I like to come here on this night, not Friday or Saturday, because there are no students here."

"Excellent point," I agreed, (and meant it, wholeheartedly, as I abhor social interaction with students outside the campus.)

We went inside and sat in one of the top rows. Only three or four others were in the theater, and they were what seemed miles from us. As the movie started, she took my hand. I thought some words might be in order, but there were none from either of us. She held my hand lightly and a few minutes into the film I felt a tickling in the center of my palm. One of her fingers was scratching my hand ever so gently.

I leaned closer to her, trying to touch shoulder to shoulder to let her know I approved, but she did not meet me. Instead, she let go my hand and reached for my legs and then between them. Finding me aroused, she quietly began opening everything. The feel of her fingers around me was exquisite. She gripped me tenderly for just a second, then with more force than I was prepared for. But it did not hurt. Quite the opposite.

"I knew," her voice quite suddenly whispered into me ear. "I knew it would be big. I knew, and I always wanted to know."

I simply stared at the movie screen as she began to work her hand up and down, never feverishly but rather always in delightful control. I never once felt her move into a position to allow me access to anything on her body. (How I wanted to, of course! But under the circumstances, there was nothing to complain about, really...)

Of course, it didn't take long for the end to come. As I swelled and she pumped, the throbbing inside me became more and more palpable. I could never recall having been so excited or having ever wanted to reach a climax. As the first gasp left my lips, she did the unthinkable -- she moved quickly to place her mouth over the head of my cock. Her hand accelerated. her mouth widened and contracted in wet, loving motions that sucked the entire length of me into her mouth then expelled me out again. Finally I touched her, placing mu hand on the back of her head as I came. Her entire face and head sank to the base of me, where she remained until I was nothing more than gasps and heaves. For a few moments after I was all spent, she never moved. When she finally came off of me, she sat upright and never said a word.

We watched the rest of the movie. Outside the theater, she re-visited the ladies' room as I went and straightened myself and had that first, exquisite piss men have after a sexual ejaculation. I even splashed some water on my face before I went back out to meet her. I was surprised, looking in the mirror, at how flush my face still was, and must have been all through the film. Properly refreshed, I went back outside to wait for her.

Which is what I did, for a long time. The patrons had all gone into the theaters for the second showing when I realized she was actually gone. All that was left for me to do was to take a taxi home. In the back seat I reflexively reached for my phone and prepared to push the buttons to call her when I remembered we had never exchanged numbers. I put the phone away and wondered then if we ever would.

She never rode the bus again. I went on teaching her students, and she went on not being noticed by me. In time, as will happen to men, the memory of all but the movie theater incident faded from me. There was nothing left on the surface of the bus rides, or even the songs we shared the first time we really met. I even struggled, eventually, to recall her name.

Some years after I left that school, I met a man who wore a t-shirt with the school's name on the breast. We talked, and just as we were about to part, he called back to me, "Hey, did you ever know a teacher there, a woman, I think her name was T---?"

I stopped and thought hard for a moment, but that name seemed to mean nothing to me.

"No, I don't think I knew anyone by that name."

"She really liked to sing," the man said. "I can't remember her name, but I met her on a bus one day, singing."

I can't say for sure, but I must have smiled some before saying anything.

"Ah, yes........"