This Tiny Feeling

He had been on the same metro every day for the past six months, at the same time, every day. By now, he knew the regulars. He knew what stops they got off at, where they got on, and had even the slightest inkling as to where they went after they exited. It was the unfortunate drag of college that kept him coming back every morning at eighty thirty promptly, returning home in the afternoon at three o’clock.

And today, something was different. Someone was different.

The regulars were here. They sat in the same places they did everyday, looking at the same spot they did everyday. Everything was normal.

Except for the new girl. She was different. She wasn’t a regular, a slave to the work and school world like every other person on the metro. No, there was definitely something different about this one that seemed to scream a hate for school and schedule.

All she had was a backpack. It rested on her lap, items seeming to protrude at all angles while still zipped safely inside. Headphones traced down from her ears where they disappeared into a pocket.

Tom sighed quietly, the lack of sleep in contrast to hours spent in school getting to him while he stood. The quiet buzz of the metro was all that could be heard while others slept or quietly talked to someone sitting next to them. Someone they knew. To an extent, Tom knew all of these people. He knew the basic gist of where they came from, might have lived. He knew where they could have went when they got off. He knew just a tiny piece of everyone’s life.

But he didn’t know hers.

Somehow, there were numerous reasons he wanted to. This tiny feeling that the only option he had was to talk to her. He wanted to know why she was traveling alone with a backpack likely to be stuffed with everything she owned.

And after five more minutes of gazing at the brunette, he could feel the train slowing as his stop came about. Just another day, come and gone. Like many more before it, and perfectly identical to every other after it.

His heart skipped about three beats when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stand up.

Breathing came naturally again once he stepped off the metro and onto the dirty ground of the station. She was right in front of him, the backpack slung onto her shoulders while the headphones were plucked from her ears and rolled around an iPod. By now she was four paces ahead of him while Tom watched her. She turned around the corner, heading in the exact same direction he needed to go.

Jogging a few steps around the corner to catch up with her, Tom found she was just about out of the station, heading towards the coffee shop he stopped at every day after school. It was the one place he could relax before heading home to the chaos of a brother in a band, the brother with endless friends.

With a quick mind and even quicker feet, Tom was behind her. Ripping a twenty pound note out of his pocket, he was tapping her shoulder before he could even draw in a breath, before he could even think of what to say.

She spun around to the foreign touch of someone else’s hands. Looking in this stranger’s eyes sent the air out of her lungs where it turned visible upon meeting the atmosphere.

“I think you dropped this,” Tom shoved out in one long, slurred word.

Her head cocked slightly to the side as her blue eyes widened. Stunning in their own, so she thought, but nothing compared to this stranger’s. His fast accent was unfamiliar to her American ears, the pitch and the speed hindering her overall comprehension of his statement.

He waved around the note with a small smile on his face, praying that his tactic would work. If not, asking her to have coffee with him in the shop they were standing right in front of couldn’t fail that miserably. Could it?

She picked up on what he meant as her eyes widened once again. “Um… I don’t think I--” she started as she swung the backpack around and checked every zipper, careful not to open the stuffed compartments.

Every zipper was zipped.

Here was this stranger, with the gorgeous blue eyes that gave the summer sky a run for its money, waving around twenty pounds. Was he offering it to her? Half of her was tempted to take it, to add it to the already insufficient funds she was trying to travel with. The other half just wanted to ask why in the hell he would do something like this. Something so kind.

Well, it was simple. He just wanted to talk. He wanted to know who this irregular was. The minute he spotted her, sitting on the metro in silence all alone, he knew she was different. That she wasn’t from here, because if he had never seen her, then by God, he was convinced she couldn’t possibly be from around here.

And this was before her accent gave it away.

“Look, I really don’t think I dropped that,” she admitted, casting her gaze down to the speckled concrete. Slowly though, she dragged them back up - all too willingly - to find him watching her in silence.

A tiny smile, barely even a smile at all, pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Are you sure?”

A small nod of the head was followed by an even smaller “I’m sure.”

Between them, a moment of silence overwhelmed while they looked at each other. Both of them so foreign to the other, but more than welcome in the moments they stood before each other.

“Well… As long as I have twenty pounds in my hand and we’re standing in front of a coffee shop… Do you want to get something?” he posed, looking to her with hopeful eyes. “My treat.”

“Alright,” she said, giving in with a smile of her own. He opened the door for her, swooping aside while she stepped in from the winter air.

“I’m Tom,” he added once they were inside, safe from the cold air. The twenty pound note in his hand soon to be spent on coffee and muffins.

“Chelsie,” she replied softly, looking up to him.

She was on the metro every day after that. And Tom wasn’t riding by himself anymore.

She was still different, but she was his.