WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD.
This is part 3 of 9. As always, one should start reading a story at the beginning. So use the links to read the first parts...
Part 1
Part 2


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He met her on the subway, on the way home from the doctor’s office. It wasn’t really a “love at first sight” thing. He was just intrigued by her. She wasn’t a supermodel, by any means, but there was just some sort of inherent beauty about her. And her eyes! That was what caught him the most. He thought they were the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. They were definitely beautiful eyes, but that wasn’t even the biggest part of it. Looking into them, they seemed to go on forever. Most people were so easily readable by their eyes. Eyes are windows to the soul, and all that nonsense. But this girl’s eyes… they couldn’t be read. They were like some closely guarded secret that only she knew about. Watch out for that bum’s foot, don’t trip.

Eyes were what they usually picked up on. They would always whisper things to him about people. They usually enabled him to be a good judge of character, simply because they could read eyes easily, and they would pass information onto him. Upon seeing this girl’s eyes, though, they were completely silent. And it was obvious to him that they weren’t used to this situation.

At first he’d taken his normal seat on the sub. It happened that his normal seat was in such a place as to have a good view of the girl, and after awhile, he moved over to her side of the train and struck up a conversation. This was, as far as he knew, his first major act of defiance against them. They were obviously angry at not being able to read the girl, and they were used to getting their way. Even when they couldn’t come right out and tell him something, they were good at planting seeds and letting him come to his own conclusions. Or, letting him think he came to his own conclusions, at any rate. But this girl… she was different. They made their anger clear to him, and yet he talked to her anyway.

The girl only lived a few blocks away from him, and he was surprised that he’d never seen her before. Her job and his were in opposite directions, though, so he supposed it wasn’t all that unlikely that they’d never met. It wasn’t like he was living in a little town where everyone knew everyone else, or anything. Getting to know eight million people wasn’t exactly the easiest job in the world. But on this day, she’d gotten off work early, and made a few errands out in the general direction of his new doctor’s office. It was merely coincidence that they’d been on the same subway back.

By the time they’d gotten off the train and come to the place when it was time to split up and go down their individual streets, they’d already exchanged numbers and made plans for the coming weekend. It was really working out quite nicely, he thought. They didn’t seem to think so, but he had made up his mind that, in just this one case, he didn’t really care what they thought. They got their way so much of the time anyway, they could deal with not getting it just this once. Take the other street, it’s safer.

There was no sleep for him on that night. They saw to that. They were angry, and they kept him up all night yelling at him. It wasn’t his fault, but they seemed to think it was. Why did you take the goddamn subway?

---Jamin