Pavement and glances

Have you ever had the sensation that by looking at someone, you’ve made them turn to look at you or felt yourself drawn to glance at someone who is staring right at you?

Stepping out of the shop a few paces ahead of me. Tall, graceful in a khaki dress swirling around her that’s too summery to hide her thong (did she wear a black one deliberately?) and a suggested strokableness, a bottom-for-cerebration-celebration, no less. She had my attention and my gaze I kept on her as I closed the distance between us, pacing fast up to her heat-savvy lope: our coincidental proximity. Not coincidentally watching her bottom and the thong curving over it, though. We were alone together on the pavement, no-one else near us and any sound my plimsolls made was easily concealed by the traffic. How could she have known when to turn her head as she did, what did her turning slowness mean? Turn fast is check-for-thief, right? Her turn-slow, holding her face in my direction; could she feel my attention sweeping over her, did she cue a smile from me? Why did she hold her head turned like that as I passed by her?

For an instant, I imagined a bubble of intimacy flow up around us as I gathered in her beauty. An opening of a new branch to my life, as her lover? as her husband? I paced ahead anyway.