A chance encounter

We said a difficult hello. In years to come we would be able to be warm with one another and not so long ago we had crackled with heat. Now we were cool and awkward.
Had it been a double decker one of us could have escaped upstairs, but as it was we sat apart, in view of each other, yet not looking, carefully not looking. 
It was dark on the narrow roads. The journey seemed to go on and on. I kept my view fixed middle distance while his head was turned to the side as the ashen trees bent past the windows.
After twenty minutes or so I began to recognise familar markings and scenes looming out of the darkness. We drove through the place that was strangely called 1066 and It reminded me that this route would be passing through the old village. 
The bus slowed right down as the winding road narrowed again. We stopped to give way to oncoming cars, whose lights picked out a thatched cottage. My heart gave a thump and without thinking I looked across the seats to where he was sitting. His eyes met mine and for a few seconds we simply returned each other's knowing gaze. A double rev, a scraping gear and the bus pulled off again, to continue into the High Street. 
After the village it was not long before we reached the south side of the town where I alighted from the bus. I strode away, taking a sharp left into my street as the whining cadences of the gear changes softened into the distance and he was gone.
Did he recall a band playing on a hot summer night in a country garden? People being sick, the girl hallucinating on the roof, the drinks that were slopped over the parents' antique furniture? Was he thinking about the two who slipped away to the room in the eaves, who blocked the door with a chair? 
Surely he remembered the boy who turned out the light, put George Harrison on the record player, removed his clothes hurriedly, then gasped as he turned to see the girl lying naked white on her side, dark hair fallen, her back to him, waiting to go all the way for the first time. 
The quiet rumbling of the bus had faded and I reached the gate of my house, wondering what happened to that throbbing, sobbing love, knowing that the silent space between us was all that remained.