The County Bus

Michael saved the window seat with his scarf and then worried that this looked too deliberate.

He moved the scarf to the aisle seat. That looked worse. He put it around his neck, where scarves traditionally went, and stared out through the coach window at the rain on the bypass.

“Is this taken?”

Declan stood in the aisle carrying two coffees and the expression of a man who already knew the answer.

“No,” Michael said. “I mean, yes. For you.”

“Good recovery.” Declan handed him one of the cups. “No sugar. I remembered.”

The supporters' bus was half full and entirely loud. Somebody at the front had begun an argument about midfield selections before they had cleared the town. Behind them, two teenagers were ranking every county ground by the quality of its chips.

Michael and Declan had met on this bus in March. They had since attended four matches, exchanged several hundred messages and gone for dinner twice without agreeing that either dinner was a date.

“We're going to lose,” Michael said.

“Almost certainly.”

“By six.”

“Optimist.”

The coach joined the motorway. Fields slid past in wet green squares. Declan rested his elbow on the narrow armrest between them. Michael did the same, and neither moved.

“My sister asked who I was travelling with,” Michael said.

“And?”

“I said a fella from the bus.”

“Accurate.”

“She said, ‘The fella from the bus?’”

Declan considered this. “Capital letters?”

“Definitely.”

“We may have a brand.”

At the ground they stood under a roof that covered most of nothing. The wind drove rain onto their backs. Their county scored twice in the opening ten minutes and not again for twenty-seven.

Declan shouted at a misplaced pass. Michael shouted at Declan for shouting. The woman in front turned around and told both of them to save their energy for something useful.

Late in the second half, with the match level, Michael caught Declan's hand between them. It began as balance when the crowd surged. Then the crowd settled and the hand remained.

Nobody noticed. Or somebody did and found it unremarkable. Michael could not tell which possibility felt better.

The winning point came in injury time. The stand erupted. Declan hugged him with both arms, coffee and caution long gone.

On the bus home the argument at the front had become a celebration of the same midfield it had condemned two hours earlier.

Michael put his scarf on the window seat.

“Taken?” Declan asked.

“Yes.”

Declan sat beside him anyway.

“My sister will ask again,” Michael said when the lights went down.

“What will you tell her?”

Michael watched their reflections in the dark glass: two men in county colours, shoulders touching, travelling the same road home.

“The fella from the bus,” he said. “For now.”

Declan smiled. “Capital letters?”

“Obviously.”

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