The train, crossing the crossing tracks, approached the station with a loud noise and after a while finally stopped with an unpleasantly sharp whistle.
"The City Tour Express has just arrived at the ninth track at platform number six and ends its journey here. Dear passengers, welcome to Dublin…" rang out through the station and Tabby lightly jumped down onto the platform. She slung her travel bag over her shoulder and tucked her sunglasses into her hair. She had a rather complicated journey behind her, because the airline she had chosen ended for serious technical reasons in the port city of Dun Laoghaire, where Tabby barely made it to the train connection to Dublin. She stretched slightly and yawned, then took a damp handkerchief from the pocket of her jeans, with which she tried in vain to clean the coffee stain she had bought on the train from her white T-shirt. Unfortunately, she only smeared it and the work of destruction was complete, as she created a not very large, but rather disgusting-looking mark in the middle of her breasts. With a silent curse, she nodded her shoulders in resignation, looked around uncertainly and then walked briskly out of the station building. After a while, she found herself in the noisy whirlwind of city life and sighed sullenly.
"Great, I'm definitely going to get lost here..." She bought a map of the city at the newsstand to be sure, and with hope, her gaze wandered to an old man sitting nearby on a lonely bench. She walked up to him and asked.
"Excuse me, sir, I'd like to get to the Saint James Hospital building..."
"Then you have to go to the bus stop here, number forty-one goes there. I think it's the second stop. But what, so young and already sick?" Tabby laughed at him in amusement at first, but then became serious when she realized what she had to say.
"But no way, I've come to see my...er...father, he works there."
"Then I won't keep you up, miss. Goodbye," the old man smiled and went back into his thoughts, puffing on his cracked pipe.
Tabby thanked him and headed for the bus stop. There were only a few people standing there, so she figured she would have to wait a while. She put her bag on the bench and took her cellphone and headphones out of her pocket, intending to listen to a few songs in the meantime.
She closed her eyes and began to tap the city map rhythmically against the palm of her other hand, when after a while she felt a light touch on her shoulder. She opened her eyes sharply, turned her head in that direction, and frowned. Next to her stood a strange, slender young man, his slightly swarthy face, framed by long, mischievously tousled dark chestnut hair, a white smile shining at her, and he held a beautiful butterfly in two fingers.
"Excuse me, but I can't help it that it chose your shoulder as its refuge. It's a Caligo telamonius, a rare species. I really don't understand how it got here..." he spoke thoughtfully, more to the object of his interest than to Tabby. He watched it with strangely pretty, but a little sad eyes, in which warm brown regularly mixed with spots of the color of autumn oak leaves, and lightly stroked it with the index finger of his other hand over the beautifully colored velvet wings, in the center of which stood out a colorful spot, a little resembling an eye. Tabby found herself stopping frowning and staring at them both with her mouth open as if at an apparition from another world. She really wouldn't have expected this here, but she recovered immediately.
"Um...it's okay, I don't know much about butterflies, they all look the same to me..." she mumbled quietly, but then she would have slapped herself for such a stupid answer, she must have touched him. Her eyes wandered to his neck, on which he had a strange necklace of small carved wooden ornaments, the same ones were on the bracelet on his right wrist.
"That's okay, not everyone has to care." Then his gaze slid for a moment to her coffee-stained neckline, which she carried with great displeasure, and to the map she held in her hand.
"Are you in our city on a trip?" he asked, taking off his slightly worn designer khaki backpack from his shoulder with his free hand and pulling out a small box with vents, as if catching rare butterflies in the city was a common thing.
"Maybe, a bit... I came... to see my father..." Hm, another amazingly stupid answer... she thought angrily. She didn't recognize herself, witty eloquence was her strength. And now her throat was full and her head was empty. She was almost angry with him for being able to throw her off so brilliantly after just a few minutes of meeting her.
"Welcome to the land of the Vikings, Ireland is beautiful, you'll definitely like it. But I don't know if waiting for the bus is a sensible choice, the timetable is a useless thing for them and they don't really exaggerate with speed either, it's better to walk. Well, it was nice to meet you and I hope you have a nice stay..." he said with his usual smile and put the butterfly into a box that he hid in the side pocket of his backpack. He looked at Tabby strangely for a moment, it seemed to her as if he wanted to say something more, but then he just waved his hand slightly, slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked away with a swaying step without looking back.
She stared after him for a long time, she found herself even liking it. He had a rather handsome figure with broad shoulders, his narrow hips were trapped in washed light jeans, which only looked cheap, as did his shoes and the carelessly tucked safari shirt. She just felt like something was bothering him, judging by the darker shadows under his eyes. Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of an approaching bus.
With a sigh, she got in and sat by the window, but she never saw him again. Great, she would meet a pretty cool guy in a strange city and he would disappear like steam from a pot after five minutes. But what was she really surprised about, it was a pretty normal occurrence in her life. Although her friends sometimes envied her symmetrical, petite, athletic figure and the mane of raven hair that she tried to tame at least a little by braiding it and that framed her pretty face with gentle features, she still hadn't found the right one. She had a lot of friends, but only one loved her, a freckled, skinny boy from the neighborhood named Robby, with glasses whose thick lenses resembled the bottoms of bottles. She smiled at this memory, because he was the only one who never forgot her on her birthday and always had a bouquet of daisies ready for her...
Tabby leaned her shoulder and head against the window of the bus, which started moving with a slight jerk.
A month ago, everything had seemed so far away, but it had passed like nothing, and now she began to mentally prepare for her inevitably approaching meeting with her father…