[color=D04931]"You think? That's a shame, the melted bits of the ice gave me some hope. Still, I guess I should've known better than to trust the temperature, Spring can be hard to pin down."[/color] Daniel delivered his reply in a distracted manner, his mouthing going on automatic as he first looked at his fellow passenger properly. She was very pretty, seemed polite, conventionally attractive and well dressed but there was something slightly off about her...

Was it the slightly askew eyeshadow, the conspicuously not brown hair sticking to the arm of her top or that she looked as flushed and flustered as he did on 99% of all morning occasions? Or maybe how despite being obviously hurried and possibly somewhat harassed by life, she seemed more than ready to have a banal conversation about the weather with a stranger? She should surely seem a little more bothered, given she was breathing like she had just sprinted to catch the train? From personal experience, Daniel knew that being accosted when you'd only just caught the train at a dead sprint was extremely jarring and almost annoying.

He couldn't tell exactly what it was and it put him enough off his normal conversational rhythm that he just nodded at her response and stared for a moment or two longer than felt casual. To cover it, he jerked his gaze back to the novel in front of him and tried to focus on the page. There was that itch, you know the one, to look at the other person in case they're looking at you. But you don't want them to see you looking at them because, well, then they'll either think you were staring at them or know you were trying to catch them looking at you. The mild irony of reading a book probably written for teenagers while engaging in the mental gymnastics required to not want to look at someone in case they were looking at you, something you wanted them to do, was not lost on him.

The time seemed to fly past on the train ride and through the rest of the day, Daniel's heart not really in the performance he growled, muttered and bellowed into the microphone. It was noted by the sound director but they were recording ambient lines for a video game character and, well, there was a limit to the level of commitment and performance you could drag out someone for something that would be heard but rarely and never be the focus of its intended audience's attention. It wasn't that Daniel was day-dreaming, exactly, and he wasn't really obsessing over the woman on the train, not [b]really[/b]. It wasn't an infatuation with her, he just couldn't work out why she had stayed in his head. Which, in turn, meant he kept on thinking about her.

[i]Still[/i], he thought as the bade his co-workers farewell and wandered towards the train station, [i]what were the chances of seeing her again[/i]?