First Impressions by Josephine Myles Page A

there was some kind of subliminal message he wanted to give me. He hadn’t leered again, so it must have been a low blood sugar hallucination after all. Our interactions were confined to a nod as I settled down into my seat. A few days into our routine and we were like an old married couple -- we’d just missed out the honeymoon and skipped straight from flirtation to habit.
    One Monday I missed my train, a pounding hangover after a late night with Kathy leading me to ignore my alarm clock for longer than usual. I got onto our usual carriage out of habit. There was an empty seat, of course. I knew that there would be, but that didn’t stop me imagining him filling the space, even once a large woman had sat down there. I superimposed him over her, like a double exposure; his charcoal pinstripes canceling out her floral dress. My mind filled with all the possibilities for the socks he could have been wearing that day. Not knowing what was covering his feet started to irritate me. I was worried that this was becoming a rather unhealthy obsession, but then again, I wouldn’t be the first artist to develop one. Fuck knows why I was so interested in a man who dealt with facts and figures, though, a man with no poetry in his soul.
    I pictured him in a repulsive pair of fluorescent orange toweling socks. The pair my Gran had given me for Christmas as a teenager. I couldn’t bring myself to wear them, so I used to wank into them instead, the thick fabric soaking up all the evidence rather than my bedsheets.
    ***
    I was half expecting him not to be on the train the next day, like I’d jinxed things by being late. I couldn’t relax on the platform, hopping up and down like I was busting for a piss or something. I got a few funny looks from the other commuters. Mind you, I was used to that. Being six foot two with blond dreads that reach down to my arse, I was always getting people staring. I just scowled at them until they looked away.
    I felt fit to burst with happiness when I saw his silhouette against the window. He gave me a smile as I sat down opposite, his lips curving up in a graceful arch and resculpting his whole face. I wanted to run my fingers across them. I yearned to know their texture, to reproduce it in oils on canvas. I’d use alizarin crimson, with a touch of yellow ochre and raw umber to knock it back, and just enough white to lighten it to that juicy pink. I wondered if his jaw was still smooth from the razor’s caress, or if his hair grew fast enough to have turned it to sandpaper.
    I started to notice things about his face. I’d taken up studying it, the way that fleeting emotions passed over it as he read his paperwork and scribbled his notes. Those tiny movements of his eyebrows that seemed to signal amusement, horror, sorrow, and more likely than not, disdain. It wasn’t really a plain face. In movement it was something else: fascinating, subtle and rich with possibilities. It was a face that demanded a portrait, although how I’d ever capture any of those rapidly changing expressions was bugging me. I was aching to take up the challenge, though.
    ***
    In the whole month I’d been observing him, I hadn’t seen the same pair of socks twice, which was weird as he only seemed to have two suits and a handful of ties. Maybe he was some kind of bizarre sock fetishist. Maybe he was sending me signals, like that crazy handkerchief code they used back in the seventies. If so, what was he saying? Unreliable? Experimental? Kinky as hell?
    He probably had one of those old-fashioned wardrobes with labeled shelves for shirts, vests and sundries, and a little container on the back of the door for cuff links, just like Granddad used to have. He’d come from the kind of family where you learned how to dress properly and knew your way around a formal dinner service before you were out of your nappies. My school had been full of them, and they always knew how to put you in your place when you were there on a