The Last Bus Home

I want to tell you about the night I got stuck at the Millbrook bus depot at half past midnight over a pack of glitter and some glue sticks, because honestly, who has a story like that? I'm Jodi, I'm twenty-eight, I've been a nurse for six years, out here for three, and I can promise you that nothing interesting has ever happened to me at that depot before or since.

Here's how it started. My sister texted me at seven in the evening, all panic and exclamation marks, because her daughter needed glitter card and glue sticks for an art project due Thursday morning, and of course the only shop that still had stock was three towns over. So I finished my shift, grabbed a sandwich I didn't even eat, and went. Fine. Normal aunt behaviour. What was NOT normal was the journey home, because I missed my connection by four minutes. Four! The driver of the connecting bus actually watched me running across the car park in mismatched boots, and he just closed the doors and shook his head at me like I'd personally wronged him.

Oh yes, the boots. I should explain the boots. I'd popped into a charity shop that afternoon while I waited, because I have a problem where I cannot walk past a charity shop, and there was this pair of brown leather boots, left foot a size six, right foot a size seven, and somehow on my feet they both felt fine? They were three pounds. Three pounds! I bought them, changed into them in the shop toilet, and left my proper trainers in the bag, which felt like a brilliant decision right up until I was sprinting for a bus in footwear that didn't even match itself.

So there I was, Wednesday night, sitting on one of those moulded plastic seats that always have a crack in exactly the wrong place, under fluorescent lights that hum like they're being paid by the hour. Diesel and rain in the air. Ticket booth shuttered. Last bus due in thirty minutes. I had a plastic bag with glitter in it, a bag with my trainers in it, and a phone at nine percent battery. I actually laughed out loud at myself. The universe doesn't do this to people in films, it does it to nurses on school nights.

And then the doors opened and a man came in.

I noticed him because the depot was so empty that any second person becomes an event. He was tall, mid-thirties I'd guess, dark coat, dark hair going a little grey at the temples in a way that honestly worked for him. He walked straight to the timetable board like he had somewhere to be, and I thought, fine, another stranded commuter, solidarity of the abandoned, whatever. But then he didn't look at the timetable. Not once. He stood there with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, and he looked at me.

Then he looked away. Then he looked back. Then he drifted behind one of the big steel pillars holding up the canopy, and I swear to you, he was peeking around it. A grown man, thirty-something, playing at being behind a tree. I nearly laughed.

But here's the strange part, and I need to admit this properly because the whole rest of this story depends on it: I liked being looked at. Not just tolerated it. Liked it. I've known this about myself for a while, that being watched, being wanted from a distance, does something warm and wicked to me, and I'd never done a single thing with that knowledge. So when this stranger kept glancing at me from behind a pillar like a man in a very bad spy film, my first feeling wasn't alarm. It was curiosity, and under the curiosity, something hungrier.

Was it a bit odd? Yes! Was I a woman alone at a bus depot at midnight? Also yes. But I'm a nurse, I assess people for a living, and everything about him read nervous rather than menacing. The peeking was so shy it was almost apologetic. His hands stayed in his pockets the whole time, like they'd been removed from circulation. And he kept a proper distance, never drifting closer, which somehow made it worse in the best way.

So I did a thing. I'm not proud, I'm not ashamed, I'm just reporting the facts: I decided to test him.

I reached down and unlaced my left boot. Slowly. I pulled the lace loose one loop at a time, and I could feel his attention sharpen from ten feet away like a change in air pressure. Then I lifted my foot and drew the boot off, and I set it down beside my bag with a little care, like it was fragile. Sock on the cold concrete. Then the right one. Same ritual, same slow unlacing, and my right boot went beside its mismatched partner so that there they sat, a size six and a size seven, the most ridiculous evidence of my whole ridiculous evening.

And then I rubbed my socked feet on the floor. Not wildly, nothing that could be mistaken for anything but what it was. Just slow little slides, heel to toe, the wool whispering on the concrete. I stretched my toes. I crossed one ankle over the other knee, adjusted my sock, and looked straight at the pillar.

His breath hitched. I heard it from across the depot, that's how quiet it was, and I heard it catch and stop and start again. He turned his face to the timetable like the timetable had suddenly become the most fascinating document in the Midlands.

"Bit late for a timetable check, isn't it?" I called over. "I've read it four times. The last bus is the one I'm waiting for. There's nothing else on there but disappointment."

A pause. Then, from behind the pillar, sounding genuinely mortified: "Sorry. Sorry, I wasn't... I'll go."

"Did I say go?" I asked, and I was surprised by my own voice, how steady it came out. "You've been standing there for ten minutes. Either come sit down like a normal person or commit to the pillar, but the hovering is doing my head in."

He came out from behind the pillar with the posture of a man walking to a disciplinary hearing. Up close he was better looking than I'd given him credit for, tired around the eyes, and something honest in his face that I couldn't name yet. He stopped a polite distance from my bench, hands still pocketed.

"I really am sorry," he said. "That was... I know exactly how that looked."

"How did it look?" I asked, tilting my head.

"Like I was lurking," he said, and then, quieter, like he was deciding to be brave, "because I was lurking."

"Well, at least you're honest about it," I said, and I patted the seat beside me, far enough away that he couldn't take it as anything but an invitation to talk. "Sit. I'm Jodi. And you've got until the bus comes, so you'd better have a good story."

He sat. "Cyrus," he said, shaking my hand like we'd met at a garden party. "And the story is worse than you think, I promise you that."

"Good," I said, wiggling my socked toes on the cold floor just to watch him try not to look. "I love a bad story."

He sat on the opposite bench, actually, not beside me, which I found interesting. Most men would have closed the gap immediately. This one left a proper corridor of fluorescent-lit nothing between us and put his bag on the floor between his feet as a man at a job interview would.

"You've got a good story?" I asked.

"I've got an honest one," he said, and he pulled his hands out of his pockets at last, which felt as a small surrender would. "I work late at a studio two streets over. Podcast production. We mix on Wednesday nights because the building's empty and nobody bothers us."

"Okay," I said. "That explains the street. Not the pillar."

He winced. "Right. The pillar." He rubbed his jaw and looked at the shuttered ticket booth like it might rescue him. It didn't. So he just came out with it. "I've seen you here before. On other nights. You catch this bus sometimes when you finish a late shift, and I've noticed you, and tonight I saw you miss it and I..." He trailed off and shook his head. "I should have just walked past. I didn't walk past. I've been standing behind that pillar working up the nerve to say hello for about ten minutes, and instead I watched you take your boots off, which I promise I was trying very hard not to do."

"And how did the not-looking go?" I asked.

"Badly," he said. "I'm rubbish at it. Obviously."

Now, a sensible woman would have felt creeped out at this point. A man admitting he'd seen her at the depot on multiple nights, hanging around in the shadows? Textbook horror film