Permission

There are benefits to being a passenger, beyond the obvious -- apart from the getting from one place to another place, getting where you want to go, or at least where you need to. Apart from spending small slivers of time nowhere, in-between (there is no Here I can sink into more than Nowhere). Sitting in the back of a taxi gives you permission to watch, to stare. (I don't really need permission, but it's nice, sometimes, to have it anyway.) His hands are elegant, long-fingered; his wrists. The tendons, stark, velvet-shifting beneath the skin; I want to drag the pads of my fingers over the low smooth ridges of them, follow with my tongue. A momentary flash of unfocused thirst, crave -- here, now gone; I blinked. (What would happen, if every fleeting impulse could be acted out? Press your lips, briefly, against the skin of a stranger without a word, fingertips like whispers. Every stranger, every second, a maybe single-serving slice of something sweet and oddly satisfying and intimate, in tightly qualified and time-restricted ways.) It's a short ride, and his voice is soft and kind when he uses my name to wish me a pleasant evening, and I never actually entirely see his face (and I never actually entirely need to).