Ticket Home: Strangers on a Train Read online

  Dedication

  To Mr. Bell, for whom I would cross a continent.

  I am grateful to Donna Cummings, Samantha Hunter, Ruthie Knox and Meg Maguire for being my partners and cheerleaders. I’m thrilled to debut among such talented writers. Ruthie and Sam also deserve extra hugs for being there on a daily basis to keep me—wait for it—on track.

  Thank you to Anne Scott, a terrific editor, and to Nalini Akolekar who advised and supported me.

  The denizens of Twitter, especially the early-morning crew, have been invaluable. Thank you, Edie Harris, for your astute comments on the manuscript, and the Wonkocrew and the New England Chapter of RWA, for your support.

  To Ellen Price, who believed first, and to Brad Parks, who gave me my mantras—you are among the prime movers. And my mother is the original prime mover—I know that some days if you could send back the genetic gift/curse, you would, but thank you—THANK YOU—for the words.

  And last, but by a very large margin not least, thank you to my family, Mr. Serena Bell, Miss A, and Mr. C, who have borne the trips to Fictionland, the unwashed dishes, and the ups and downs, and are still enthusiastically contributing titles and book ideas. I love you guys and couldn’t have done it without you.

  Chapter One

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Amy had been dozing, her head lolling on the vinyl train seat, a victim of Metro-North’s gently rocking progress over the aging tracks on the way to Manhattan. The sweet shug of well-fitted metal on metal and the slight hitch in the train’s forward motion had soothed her to sleep like a fully grown baby in an industrial-strength swing. But at the sound of that male voice, her eyes flew open, and she looked up into a pair of eyes that were more familiar than her own.

  “Jeff!”

  His name burst out before she could bite back the joy in her voice. If he hadn’t surprised her, she would have said it coolly, would have pretended away the shock and, yes, elation. She would have held him at bay. But it was too late now. All her excitement, all her hope, was right there in her voice.

  His smile told her he’d heard it.

  He’d come for her. Six months too late, but he’d crossed the three thousand miles she’d put between them and come for her. He loves me, she thought, drinking in his long-lashed brown eyes, strong jaw, and dark brown hair that had gotten longer since she’d seen him last, long enough to fall over one eye.

  “Hey,” he said. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.”

  “Yeah. It’s…good to see you too.” That was the understatement of the century. “But—what—? You’re on my train. What are you doing on my train?”

  “I flew in last night. I didn’t want to wait until tonight to see you.”

  She felt a rush of pleasure at that, melting warmth she’d forgotten he could call up at his whim.

  “Your cousin told me where to find you. I got on at White Plains. I couldn’t— I wanted to talk, Ames.”

  Ames. No one had called her that in six months. She could feel herself softening like caramel on a sunny day, as she had so many times back in Seattle. But she made herself be patient. He had apologizing and explaining to do. Recanting and reforming. She was supposed to be angry at him.

  Where have you been all these months?

  Why didn’t you try to stop me when I left?

  Why wouldn’t you at least entertain the idea of my taking this job?

  Because that was what had precipitated all this: their breakup, her flight across the country, these months of separation. She had gotten a job offer in New York, a chance to move from financial aid officer to director of financial aid, to work for her alma mater, and when she’d told him—

  She could still see his face when he said it. There’s no way that could work. Pure dismissal.

  He couldn’t have made it any clearer.

  It wasn’t just that she was supposed to be angry at him. She was angry, the memory of it returning with a fast, brutal strength. Hardening her against him.

  She was grateful for it. She needed that hardness, because without it, he broke her heart, over and over.

  Yet it was surprisingly difficult to sustain her anger. To be as cold and clear and unmoved as she knew she needed to be. For one thing, even without looking at him full-on, she was aware of the muscles moving in his upper arm and shoulder beneath his suit coat as he clung to the metal bar above his head. She wanted to ogle him, to remember the exact nature of that shift and bunch, muscle and sinew.

  “Amy—” He swayed as he loomed over her, suspended from the metal rail above. His eyes were luminous and dark under those gorgeous lashes, filled with something big he wanted to say to her. Hope expanded like a brilliant bubble in her chest. “I’m so sorry, Ames. If I could go back and do it differently, if I could go back and hear you out, and not be such a stubborn son of a bitch, I’d do it. I don’t know why I reacted the way I did. I don’t know why—”

  A head poked out from the seat in front of hers, and a thick Brooklyn accent said, “D’ya mind? You’re not the only ones on this train.”

  Jeff made a sound that might have been a laugh. He leaned closer, close enough that she could see the day’s beard growth clinging to his jaw, and asked, “Can I sit with you?”

  She hesitated. She was afraid, afraid of her own susceptibility to his physical presence. Afraid if she let him slide into the seat, if he sat that close and smelled like Jeff, she would fall back into her old ways, forgetting that she had ripped herself away from him, Band-Aid from skin, and crossed an entire country to escape exactly this weakness in herself.

  People had stacked up behind him, waiting to get by, and she still hadn’t moved from the edge of the seat, so he sat diagonally in front of her. When the other passengers passed, he turned around in his seat and tried to catch her eye. “I was so surprised.” His voice was low but clearly audible over the train’s clack. “You never said anything about wanting a different job, let alone one in New York. And you never mentioned you were applying for anything.”

  Guilty as charged. She had clobbered him over the head with the news that she’d gotten the job, but everything had happened so fast—she hadn’t had any choice. And that didn’t excuse—

  “It’s not an excuse. I know you hate that.”

  Ha, he remembered. She did. She hated an apology followed by an excuse.

  He frowned. “I was harsh. I was dictatorial.”

  “You were medieval.” Her voice surprised her. Louder than she’d meant it to be.

  “Guys,” said the heavyset dark-haired guy in front of her. “I can watch all the reality TV I want at home. Can you save it?”

  There were chuckles from some of the other passengers. Amy blushed.

  Jeff leaned across the aisle toward the commentator. “Tell her she should let me sit with her. If I sit with her, you won’t have to listen to our conversation.”

  “Don’t push your luck, dude,” the guy told him. “On the other hand—” He twisted around to address her. “Lady, can he sit with you? Please? For the good of the rest of us?”

  She willed Brooklyn guy to vanish. Jeff too. Hell, she wanted the whole goddamned train full of laughing observers to disappear. “I’d rather he didn’t.”

  But Jeff had risen from his seat and planted himself on the padded vinyl beside her, and she had to scoot away from his muscular thigh. She’d been chilly a moment earlier, and now she desperately wanted to sink into his heat. To press the side of her body to his, turn to him and draw every last ounce of his warmth into her skin. Her mouth.

  Instead she slid herself as far into the corner as she could, against the cold molded plastic and metal trim. She brought her knees up to get more dista
nce from him. Still, she could smell him over the ambient train smell of vinyl and disinfectant. He smelled like—like him. Like freshly dry-cleaned wool suit and dry-erase markers and Old Spice deodorant. Like power and success. Not, she told herself firmly, like home.

  Not unless he’d changed.

  “Amy.”

  She didn’t turn toward him. She was terribly afraid that on top of all the heat and nearness, the sight of him so close would be too much for her.

  “Fine. I’ll talk. You listen. Or don’t listen.”

  It was impossible not to listen, of course. His mouth was a foot from her ear. His voice was a low, dark baritone that had always weakened her knees. She could scramble the words in her head, but that voice would crawl inside her and twine itself around her vulnerabilities and wear her down.

  “I was medieval,” he said. “And it was inexcusable. But—”

  She sighed, the whisper of it loud over the train’s shushing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I want— I want us to talk about it. Now. What happened. About working things out between us.”

  There was a sound in his voice she’d never heard before. She thought it might be desperation, and she found the possibility tantalizing. He had always been the alpha partner. He was older, he was established. He earned more money. He had influence outside their immediate sphere—the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the business community, the larger world of technology. He went to conferences, gave talks. Their apartment had been his. Most of their friends, the people they saw regularly, were his friends first. She liked the idea that she was now in control, that she now had the power.

  “Your hair is different,” she said, without looking at him, without thinking.

  She liked how it hung in his face. How it had begun to wave. It was soft, and it softened him. Not that anything could blunt the edge of his jaw or strength of his chin.

  “Yours is exactly the same.”

  She put a hand up to touch it. It was long and dark and straight, pulled into a ponytail. Exactly the same as it had always been. But she was different, inside. She had decided not to live with a man who wasn’t there for her. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s different.”

  She turned to the window, watched the edges of another town rise from hills to cubes and spikes and fade back to hills, like time-lapse photography.

  “I was wrong. I was wrong to do that. I was wrong not to talk to you about it.” His voice was lower now, in the register where it vibrated in her chest and her thighs. She put her hand on the cold exterior wall to steady herself against the sensation.

  “Amy?”

  He was waiting for a response from her. She felt the suspension in the air, a thick, potent thing.

  “I accept your apology. And I owe you one. I didn’t mean to blindside you. It happened so fast. Not an excuse,” she added hastily.

  “Still, once I got over the initial surprise, I shouldn’t have been so—”

  “Medieval,” she repeated. She saw the quick flash of her own white teeth in the window and clamped her lips shut. No smiling. That way lay capitulation on a scale she didn’t want to consider.

  He took a deep breath. “So…?”

  “So what?”

  “Can we talk? Can we work this out?”

  “Why are you here now, asking me this, after six months?” She stared out the window. The sky was nearly light, a gleaming pale-blue tribute to morning over the increasingly urban landscape.

  He shifted, and the seat creaked. “Are you asking me why it took so long for me to come out here?”

  She nodded.

  “If I answer that, will you tell me why you left without trying to work things out?”

  She pressed her nose to the window. “I didn’t think there was anything to work out.”

  Not a lie, but not the whole truth either. She hadn’t believed he could change. And she hadn’t wanted to hear him claim he could. Hadn’t wanted to listen to him lie about that.

  “We had a good thing, Amy. A really good thing. God—”

  The way his voice broke off then, the tension, made her think of the weight of his body and the short, harsh sound of his breathing when he was inside her.

  No, it didn’t. It couldn’t.

  “It doesn’t always feel that good.” His voice was hushed.

  So he’d been thinking something similar. She closed her eyes and tried not to see his face, drawn and straining, his fair skin gleaming in the dark. His expression tender and solicitous, his attention fixed on her, a thread she could grab and follow wherever she needed to go.

  “I should know. I’ve been in enough relationships to know.”

  She’d left a patch of foggy breath on the window, and she used her thumb to draw a zigzag line through it. She was losing her will to resist him. Maybe she should tell him the truth. That she couldn’t be the second most important thing in his life.

  She opened her mouth, but as she began to speak, his phone rang. That distinctive, slightly musical, real-phone sound he liked so much.

  She saw the look that crossed his face—close to panic—and for a split second she thought maybe he wouldn’t take the call. Then he pulled out his phone, and the bubble in her chest burst, leaving flat, dark emptiness in its wake.

  “I gotta take this.”

  She shrugged like it meant nothing to her. Meant nothing that he always took the call, would always take the call.

  She turned away as he answered the phone. “Yeah?” The single word clipped and impatient. Out the window she saw the Bronxville station fly by, one of the platforms the express didn’t stop for. Behind her, he spoke a flurry of words, dictating to-do items to one of his many underlings. She could hear a nervous woman’s voice on the other end, and she guessed it was probably his admin and knew the conversation could go on for a long time, each of them remembering things they’d forgotten.

  Amy had eaten a lot of dinners like this, sitting across from him as he spoke urgently into his phone. She had learned to lose herself in her own thoughts so she wouldn’t be impatient, waiting for him to come back to her. She did it again now, letting her mind fly out into the world beyond the confines of the train. Just to remind herself that there was a world out there. That she had a choice.

  She didn’t have to sit here. She didn’t have to be with him. She didn’t have to let him remind her, over and over, that she came second in his life.

  Hoisting her bag, she slipped out past him, ignoring the brush of her leg against his. Ignoring the startled expression on his face.

  He put out a hand to stop her, but she shook it off and jerked away from him, breaking into a near run once she was clear of him and in the aisle.

  She looked back, but he hadn’t followed, and for the first time since she’d looked up to see him, she filled her lungs with air.

  She took a seat several cars up.

  A few minutes later, she heard the hitch and slide of the door at the end of the car. She peeked back, and there he was, carrying his briefcase and suit jacket. The phone was nowhere in sight.

  People didn’t change. How many times had her mother said that very thing? People don’t change. Not really.

  “Ames,” he pleaded.

  She ignored him.

  “Amy, please.”

  “Jeff, no. Just no. Go home.”

  There was a rustle as the people in the seats around her began to display their displeasure with the noise. They’d left the Brooklyn guy behind, but it was only a matter of time before someone would berate them for bringing their fight on the train.

  She heard him sit. He was diagonally behind her, and she sensed him leaning forward.

  Her breath seized. She had to get away from him, far enough away that she couldn’t feel his presence. Far enough that she couldn’t smell him, because as candle-faint as his scent it was, it had a grip on her like a determined hand. And for God’s sake, far enough away that if his stupid phone rang, she wouldn’t hear it.
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  “Excuse me?” she called to the conductor. He was standing a few seats forward of her, punching tickets, a white-haired man with a trim mustache and a cliché of a cap.

  “Yes, miss?” He slid a ticket under a leather strap and approached her seat.

  “The man sitting diagonally behind me?” She kept her voice low so Jeff wouldn’t hear.

  “Yes, miss?”

  She clutched her computer bag to her chest. Her mouth was dry. She lowered her voice more. “I’m going to change cars. Would it be possible for you to ask him not to follow me?”

  “Follow you?” The conductor frowned.

  “Yes. I’d— I’d like to move to another car, and I don’t want him to follow me.”

  His eyebrows formed a sharp upside-down triangle. “Has he been following you?”

  She’d somehow, foolishly, thought this would be simpler. The conductor had reminded her of a British butler in a BBC drama, so she’d assumed he’d be all discretion and eagerness to please. This guy was more perplexity and alarm.

  “Never mind.” What did she think she was playing at? She was making things worse. “No. No, he hasn’t.”

  The conductor peered at Jeff, his eyes hard. He set his chin. “Go ahead, miss. I’ll do what I can to keep him from following. And we should talk to security when we get to New York.”

  God, no—what a disaster that would be. “Oh, no. No, no, no. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “But his behavior is suspicious?”

  “No. No. His behavior isn’t suspicious. I know him. He’s fine. I just don’t want him following me.”

  “Miss,” he said gently. “I have to report this incident. See something, say something.”

  “No. He hasn’t done anything wrong. You can’t report it.”

  She and the conductor both peeked at Jeff. His dark brown hair hung over one eye, and he swiped it back. Her breathing hitched.

  The conductor must have heard the hitch and taken it for fear. He turned to her, his face determined. “Let’s get you out of here. Come with me.”

  She hesitated, but her need to get away overrode everything else. She took her laptop case and followed the conductor, not looking back but feeling Jeff’s gaze on her neck. Trailing down the length of her spine, following the flare of her hip, teasing its way down her thighs. Yes.