Once You Get Used To It at 8:41:00 PM

“Hey, hey, excuse me.” I stopped writing the text to Simone on my phone when I felt a small tugging on my arm. My eyes landed on a girl with side swept bangs, layered black hair that stopped roughly six inches from her shoulders wearing a white oversized oxford with the sleeves cuffed and a tiny pink mini skirt. She had thick, pouty lips and slender, slanted almond shaped eyes. “Excuse me, do you know how I can get to West Fifty...fifty uh Seventh street?”

“Huh? You trying to get to Seventh street?” I asked her not quite understanding. She looked frightened and worried. She was probably late going somewhere in a strange city. I pegged her to be no more than eighteen.

“No, no, uh, West Fifty-seventh street. Fifty-Seventh.”

“Oh, well you’re downtown. You need to go uptown. Fifty-seventh and what?”

“Uh...Eighth Avenue.”

“Okay, first you need to catch the subway uptown.”

“Okay. This one?” 

I followed her eyes when she pointed to the subway slightly behind us. When my eyes bypassed a man dressed head to toe in black as we looked ahead where she was supposed to be headed, the guy leaning against the space next to the doors to Bank of America I felt something inside of me stutter and then collapse. I hadn’t expected to see Maurice.

“No, um...” I shook my head and tried to shake the image of him out of my head. My heart pounded inside my chest and I felt my left arm grow heavy. “That’s gonna take you further downtown. Across the street is where you go uptown...”

I paused. Thought about a few things. Maurice. I could see him through my peripheral vision taking small glances at me every other second it seemed like. I could tell he thought he was being discrete, but he wasn’t. I caught him peeking just about every time. It made me nervous. Self conscious. 

“Okay, and then I...”

She was running out of patience. By her confusion I could concur that she wasn’t a New York native, she was most definitely in a rush somewhere like everyone else that lives in NYC. I couldn’t stop thinking about Maurice. He was just chilling across from me. I wanted to know how long he had been there. Did he even know it was me? Well, of course he did now. But before?

I sighed loudly feeling him was judging me.

“Take the C train in the same subway. That’ll drop you off on Fifty-Ninth. You can just walk through the station until you get to Eighth Ave and when you get outside you just cross the street to West Fifty-Seventh.”

“Will there be signs in the station?”

He slid his hands into his pocket and started taking slow strides. He was crossing the street. I almost lost my balance.

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