Free Then and Always by Dani Atkins

aisle. In the perfect blackness of my window I saw a thickset and balding man sitting upright in his seat, uninvolved with the travelers’ usual pastimes of newspapers, iPod, or the like. No, this man seemed to have only one thing on his mind. Me. Although I made no move, he must have seen that I’d noticed him staring at me. Unabashed, he didn’t look away immediately, as convention demanded. Instead he seemed to intensify his scrutiny and then slowly, revealing ugly and distorted teeth, he began to leer. An ice cube of inexplicable alarm trickled down my spine.
    I pulled a magazine from my bag and in an instinctively defensive pose angled my body away from the rest of the carriage and toward the window. I flicked through ten or twenty pages before acknowledging I had no idea whatsoever what had been on them. I swear I could physically feel the intensityof his gaze upon me, and surreptitious glances into the reflection from the window confirmed this was still the case. The hair on the back of my neck prickled uncomfortably. It was unfortunate that during one such furtive inspection, he caught me watching him watching me, and gave again that slow ugly smile, followed by an almost imperceptible licking of his lips.
    That did it. A different sort of woman might have raised her glance and challenged him, either verbally or with a meaningful stare. I wasn’t one of those women. Feeling foolish, but working purely on instinct, I plucked my coat from the seat beside me and moved to a vacant place on the opposite side of the carriage some distance away. As I hurried down the narrow passage between the rows of seats, I thought I heard a low, dirty self-satisfied laugh from somewhere behind me.
    I chose a seat opposite a middle-aged woman engrossed in a book. I now had my back to the stranger and his reflection was no longer visible. But instead of being comforted, I almost instantly regretted the move, feeling more vulnerable than ever now that I couldn’t see his whereabouts. This was ridiculous. What on earth was I getting so worked up about? This wouldn’t be the first time I had had to fend off some undesirable male attention. And while I was certainly not in the same category as my old school friend Cathy, any passably attractive young woman could normally handle unsolicited male advances with scarcely a second thought. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that this stranger’s intentions toward me didn’t fall into that category at all.
    It was one of the most uncomfortable train journeys I could ever remember, but there was at least a reassuring safety in the number of people in the carriage. When the guard came through to check the tickets, I considered for a millisecondmentioning the man. But then, just as quickly, I dismissed the idea. However menacingly the man had stared at me, I really had no grounds at all to alert the guard. I could almost imagine the inevitable reaction to such a complaint: “… And he was looking at you ‘in a funny way,’ miss, is that correct?” Yet even as I swallowed back my complaint, there must still have been some betraying anxiety in my eyes that alerted the guard, for on returning my ticket, he stopped and scrutinized me carefully before inquiring, “Are you all right? You look a little …” His voice trailed off. I silently filled in the blanks:
paranoid/​manic/​crazy
. The woman seated opposite lowered her book and openly awaited my response. A little diversion from the monotony of the usual commute home. I was happy to disappoint her.
    “No, I’m just fine, thank you. Just concerned I’m going to be late for a special dinner tonight, that’s all.”
    “Well, we’re running right on schedule, so you can’t blame British Rail this time,” he joked. I joined in his laughter, which sounded, even to my own ears, over-jovial and forced.
    As the guard moved on to the quartet of seats directly behind me, I risked looking over my shoulder and was just in time to catch a