I turn to read the scythe of his mouth, his milk-pale skin, his eyes like tatters of the noon sky. A foreigner, most definitely. Only outlanders court strangers in bus stands.

But I smile, nonetheless, a razorblade flash of enamel. Politeness mandates it.

“I’m sorry?”

He shrugs fluidly and lets one corner of his lips arch. His gaze flits from my countenance to my breasts, lingering where the dark fabric is stretched taut by fat. “You know the story, right? Long ago, your town let two old people get eaten alive by cats. The rest of the world certainly knows about it. Frankly, I’m amazed that this place gets as much traffic as it does.”

The man releases a silvery little laugh, as though enchanted by his own astuteness or, perhaps, the morbidity of his observation. He shrugs again, slotting hands beneath his armpits. I deliberate on an answer. There is time. The bus will arrive in precisely twenty-one minutes unless traffic robs it of precision. A rarity, but not an impossibility. Not with this season’s crop of tourists worming through the town’s gnarled streets, maggot-fat and crow-loud, staining the bricks red with their laughter.

“That story made headlines. ” His voice wedges between my thoughts, like a knee between resisting thighs. “Did you know that? What with the town being thousands of miles from the epicenter of interesting.”

I hold my smile. “We have television. And radio.”

“Yeah. I was just checking, you know?” He flashes a megawatt grin, the grin of a man accustomed to success. I do not reciprocate. His enthusiasm is too grandiose to be sincere, his voice too loud. This conversation is just foreplay, announces the jut of his hips, the width of his grin. This is just a formality before we progress to coffee, to alcohol, to salt-slick-skin-bruising sex.

I glance down the vacant street.

Nineteen minutes.

“I’m Frederic, by the way.” The syllables of his name turn to music beneath his tongue, clothing them with an unexpected exoticism. “Like Frederick. Except French.”

A blocky, bony hand stabs forward. I look down. The fingers are scar-brindled and ridged with calluses, the palm broad and brown. A laborer’s hand. A hand I could have been friends with were it not attached to the rest of him. I run my eyes up the line of his arm and find bared teeth waiting at its end. This is more than just courtesy. This is a demand for permission, for a sanctioning of pursuit. Briefly, I consider abandoning propriety and turning to clump down the road. The walk would not be so bad. The night might be deep but it is not unfamiliar. There are no dangers crouched in the gaps between streetlamps, no alleyway mongrels to fear, nothing to rationally dread.