He had first seen her on the bus. It was moving, and off-balanced, he had almost fell and created an embarrassing scene. Their eyes had met, at the exact moment as he was adjusting his bearings, hand clutching his big bag tightly, with one foot firmly on the wobbly ground, the other suspended in temporal disbelief. They weren’t dark, smoldering eyes, not like those in romance novels. But they were beautiful, liquid, sparkling under the flashing light of a passing streetlamp. He had remembered those eyes; they had spoken to him, sung to him, mesmerized him in a thousand unspoken words of melodious notes he could not hear. They had dance around his head long after he had sat down, firmly willing himself to stare straight ahead, refusing to look into her direction, but still occasionally stealing a furtive glance towards the beautiful figure that had become a shadow, huddled closely near the window. At first he thought there was no reflection, only to see two glinting orbs that appeared then disappeared, sparingly, sometimes indifferently, in the shroud moving slowly from left to right.

‘How was the Barcelona match last night?’ Chris had asked. He couldn’t remember his mumbled reply.

When he passed her the poem forty odd minutes later, he saw the same look in her eyes. And this time, she looked at him, only him, for that one second, and for the next when he turned away, he knew that their time had already ended.