Listener

There's a fine art to listening in on conversations, and Jacob was a Picasso in the field.

He had plenty of opportunities to practise his art; on the bus to and from work, in the elevator going up to his office. Restaurants were ideal. He'd even started playing a new little game with himself, listening to people talking on their mobile phones and inventing the other side of the conversation.

The trick, he'd discovered, was making yourself invisible. As long as you weren't noticed folks would talk about anything. He'd heard confessions of love and hatred, he listened in on plans for secretive rendez-vous. He learned about shady business deals and worried parents of sick kids. He'd heard it all.

The funny thing was, when he walked into the tiny grocery store he actually hadn't been planning to get in on anything - he'd really just come in for a pack of smokes and some aspirin.

He came through the door and immediately recognized the couple - he didn't know them, of course, had never even seen them before. But he knew that stance, he tweaked right off to the look in their eyes and the body positions that told him they were deep into it. Whatever it was they were discussing, it was heavy stuff.

Jacob moved to the back of the store and started to look for the aspirin when the two began talking again, in low, urgent voices. He couldn't quite make out what they were saying - he had to get closer. This would be tricky; it's one thing to pull it off in a busy diner, but there was no one else in the store and he'd have to put on a great act to convince them that he was absorbed in his own world, enough for them to keep talking openly.