Ticket Home: Strangers on a Train Read online

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” she said finally.

  He sighed. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You should have, if you meant it.” There was a part of her that wanted to reach out. That wanted to stroke his cheek, to feel the rough texture of his skin, slightly blotchy from arousal. But she kept her hands to herself.

  “I thought at the time— It seemed like maybe you were…trying to push me into proposing.”

  She couldn’t help herself; she laughed out loud. “Really?”

  “Weren’t you?” It was framed as a question, but his body language, his crossed arms, his stern face were all accusation.

  Had she been? Not consciously. But she was well aware that very little was done consciously. She turned to the window.

  “Whatever I was doing,” she said, finally, “I seem to have put us in an impossible situation.”

  “Not impossible. Challenging.”

  She experienced a brief, almost blinding surge of hope.

  His phone rang again.

  He looked at her. She gazed steadily back. Her eyes stayed on his through eight rings. Then silence.

  She liked that, but she didn’t entirely believe it.

  He was still staring at her. “Can I—?”

  His expression was pained. Whatever he’d been about to ask, it wasn’t coming easy. Served him right.

  He sucked in a deep breath. “Can I get off the train with you?”

  She knew what he was asking, both the little question and the big one. He wanted to go home with her, make love to her in her bed. He wanted to step outside this perfect, protected realm and bring cold, hard reality into their peaceful interlude. He was asking her to be with him in the bigger, realer world.

  Could she?

  She had loved Jeff in the bigger, realer world. She had loved the little private things, the hummed lullabies and the ever-ready breakfast cereal. But she had also loved the way he was with other people, relaxed, at ease. The power he had to convey his own confidence, to make other people open up and spill themselves into the room. At parties, he could get anyone past small talk in under five minutes, a steady unreeling of questions that drew out a person’s essence while she stood nearby and listened. While she watched him, the strength in his face, the regularity of his features, and that gift he had for making people enjoy themselves from the inside out.

  He had done it to her too, once when they’d first gotten together, and again on this train ride—drawn her out of herself and into him.

  In her mother’s endless retelling of how her father had showed up in the living room and claimed his ill-fated second chances, she had often said that there were “real” and “fake” second chances. That some petitions for second chances were genuine and others a ploy. But how could you know which was which? What if she let him get off the train with her? What if she let him make love to her? What if she let herself fall in love with him? And what if when it was all over, he still wasn’t interested in compromise?

  She should make him commit first. Negotiate first. She should get him to agree that any outcome where he kept his job and she lost hers wasn’t fair. Because after he made love to her—

  Well, she was in a position of power now. He wanted her. She could see it in his eyes, dark and hungry. She felt a flare of answering heat at the apex of her thighs.

  After she made love to him, she would be the needy one. Making love to him had always had the power to reduce her to a pathetic state.

  She opened her mouth to tell him she couldn’t, not unless he could promise her more.

  And then closed her mouth, because she had realized something important.

  She wanted to make love to him even if he couldn’t promise her more. She wanted him inside her to a degree that stripped her of reason. And she didn’t want to issue an ultimatum she’d hate to have to enforce.

  “You’re thinking of your father,” he said flatly.

  Ha! “No. Well, I was. But no. I was thinking about—” She grinned, lowered her voice, and lied. “That thing you do with your tongue. The flick.” Her nipples tightened abruptly, the way they did when he took one firmly but gently between his teeth and flicked his tongue relentlessly back and forth over the tip. Gaah.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Was she really ready to do this to herself? To give up leverage and sanity and three thousand miles of hard-earned perspective?

  He leaned close, his lips touching her ear, his breath sweeping hot across the sensitive folds. “Do you like it better when I do it to your nipples or your clit?”

  She grabbed his arm hard, steadying herself, although she wasn’t sure if she was bracing herself against the movement of the train or the precipitous sense she had of falling into a void. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Yes, what? Nipples?”

  She shook her head.

  He lowered his eyebrows. “Clit?”

  She shook it again, and he wrinkled his forehead in confusion.

  She put one hand to her cheek. Her hand was icy cold, her cheek burning hot. She closed her eyes briefly and gathered her nerve. “Yes, it’s a yes.”

  Chapter Five

  The world outside the train and his head was a blur as they jogged up the stairs to cross the platform, then down the side toward the parking lot where she’d left her car. She opened the trunk, and he slung his bag in. He had so much to say that it crowded his chest, but he knew if he opened his mouth, nothing would come out. He wondered if she felt the same way.

  They both slid into the car. Even though they’d been physically closer on the train, this felt dark and intimate in a completely different way, and he could sense her presence, magnetic, beside him. He turned to look at her. She was looking back.

  They fell into the kiss, or that was what it felt like, anyway, like being drawn into some deep, dark void, into a velvet-hot center. Her lips were cool, but her mouth was scalding, and then her hands were on his shoulders. She slipped the fingers of one hand into his hair, and the familiarity of the gesture seared him. He grabbed her ponytail so she couldn’t pull away and set about exploring every tiny crevice of her. Until it got to be too much for him, the smell of her skin and the taste of her mouth, and he plunged his tongue in deep to show her what he wanted to do to her.

  She groaned and tried to pull him closer over the ridge of the parking brake, and they broke apart, laughing. “Trains, planes and automobiles,” she said. “Let’s get to a non-moving location.”

  “Drive fast.”

  She started the engine, then hesitated with both hands on the wheel. “I still have the IUD.”

  He nodded.

  “And—I haven’t been with anyone else.”

  Relief flooded him. “Me neither.”

  She didn’t look at him, but he saw her shoulders relax an inch and realized she’d been worried too. He wished he’d said it sooner.

  For a while, they were quiet in the dark. He absorbed the feel of the car, its enclosed, quiet smoothness after the jostle and life of the train.

  “The train is strange, don’t you think?” she asked.

  Of course. He had missed the way their minds worked in parallel, the way she’d sometimes voice his thoughts before they’d fully taken form.

  “We’re all going to the same place. Point to point. We’re all in it together. But then—we’re not, either. We have our different destinations in our heads the whole time. So it’s like, the train is bursting with all the missions of the people it contains.”

  She did that, kept quiet and then opened up with a little piece of philosophy, words that were almost poetry. He could only nod. If he said anything, his emotions would spill out over both of them.

  Maybe she knew, because she cast a quick glance in his direction. She reached out and touched his thigh. The muscle clenched involuntarily, and he made a choked sound.

  That brought out a definite, real grin. “Yeah. Me too.” She left her hand there, her fingers playing very slightl
y over the lightweight wool, a terrible, wonderful ticklishness. He kept an iron grip on the door handle, as if that would somehow translate to an iron grip on his self-control.

  The long, winding road they were on gave way to smaller neighborhood streets, any suburb in any town in North America.

  She pulled into the driveway of a small split-level, lit in front with a single bulb in a cast-iron lamppost.

  “Is your cousin home?” It was the first time logistics had occurred to him.

  “She’s out tonight.”

  He followed her up the stone walk. She unlocked the front door, and he went in behind her. She flipped a light switch, and they stood together in the tiny entryway, a wall-mounted rack of coats and sweatshirts looming behind them. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright. The life force in her moving at the surface of her skin. He took a step toward her.

  She drew back. “Do you want some food?”

  “No. Later. After.”

  Her eyes got bigger and darker, and her lips parted a tiny bit. The subtle show sent a swift rush of blood to his already hardening cock. He’d always loved that about her, how evident her desire made itself.

  He kissed her, hard, pressing his knee between her legs, easing her against the wall at the foot of the stairs. Under his hands, her body was warm, strong and supple. She arched her back, exposing her throat to him, and he nipped it, loving how concentrated the scent of her was there, reveling in the slight saltiness of her skin. She made a little noise, somewhere between a hum and a whimper, and the sound burrowed into him and took up residence as an ache. “We should go to the bedroom.” It would be a better venue for the kind of life-changing, mind-altering—fuck that, ragingly possessive—sex he wanted to have with her. He wanted her to know everything. His desperation, his fear, his determination. What she did to him, how she made him feel. “I didn’t get off the train with you so we could do this somewhere else half-assed—”

  But he couldn’t finish, because she reached up and locked her hands behind his neck, drew him down and ate his mouth like a starving woman. Nibbled, bit, licked, devoured him, sucking the breath out of his lungs. And he kissed back, wanting to pour himself into her. To make her believe what he believed. That this could work. Was working.

  She broke the kiss off. “I used to fantasize all the time about you doing me on the stairs in the townhouse.”

  Fuuuck. “You did? You never told me that.” It was a rush—his Amy, that revelation—like discovering that an object you’d always loved for its sentimental value was also eighteen-karat gold.

  “There was never time. You worked and worked, and then we went to bed, and we did it, and it was good, don’t get me wrong, and you always made sure I got mine, you were a total gentleman, but there wasn’t time to…figure things out.”

  Although he wanted to believe she was wrong, or that it was only her version of things, her wounded version of things, he thought she was probably right. There hadn’t been any time, and that was because he’d been so busy. So oblivious.

  He wanted to go back and undo it, but that wasn’t open to him, so instead he took her face in his hands and held her steady in front of him. “I was an idiot. I will make time. From now on. I promise. I swear it.” He leaned close and kissed her. Hard. Harder than he meant to, but she kissed back just as hard, sliding herself against him, rubbing herself on his thigh.

  He broke the kiss and asked her, “What happens? On the stairs?”

  “I’m wearing a skirt,” she whispered.

  Oh, that worked. That definitely worked. He had a whole set of fantasies involving Amy in skirts of varying lengths, with little to nothing underneath. How much fun could they have had on the train if she’d been wearing a skirt? Hmm, maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t. But here, now? “Go change.”

  He saw the heat flash in her eyes and felt his cock jump in response. In Seattle, they’d had great sex, but it had been vanilla—in the bed, him on top or her on top, usually. Once or twice when he’d asked, she’d let him take her from behind, but she hadn’t seemed terribly into it, which had diminished his enthusiasm. But now? “You like that, huh? When I boss you around.”

  She nodded, mouth pressed together in a tight line, like she was pleased and a little ashamed.

  It was a wedge, prying his heart wide open, and part of him wanted to grab her and hold her, squeeze her so hard it would probably break every bone in her body, but this new Amy was a temptation, and he didn’t want to lose the moment. “Go change.”

  She went up the stairs, her hips swaying a little before she disappeared down the hall. He heard drawers and doors opening and slamming, heard her mutter and swear, heard the sound of what sounded like two books hitting the floor—shoes, maybe?

  She reappeared at the top of the steps, and his body revved. God, she was so beautiful. She’d taken her hair down. It spilled over her shoulders, masses of dark silk he desperately wanted to have slip between his fingers and brush his face. She was still wearing the cranberry-colored blouse, but she’d put on a black velvet skirt that skimmed an inch or two above her knees, stockings, and black high-heeled sandals. His mouth got dry, and all the blood in his body drained into his cock.

  She came down the stairs until those sweet curves of hers were in his face. He reached out, grabbed her around the waist, and buried his face in her cleavage, breathing her in, kissing her, biting her. She yelped but pulled him closer. Roughly, he brushed the blouse and one lacy cup aside and did what he’d been dying to do this morning—took a mouthful of her. Felt the tightly beaded nipple on his tongue. His cock strained against his shorts and jeans, craving more contact.

  She took another step down, which made them almost exactly the same height, and he took advantage of the access to rub himself on her hip, on the soft-over-hard inviting juncture of her thighs. She moaned his name. Everything felt both familiar and foreign. She was so completely Amy—smelled like her, tasted—he had to stop and reassure himself of that, his tongue sliding along hers—yes, tasted like her, felt like her in his arms. But she was a different Amy, a bolder, brasher, naughtier, sexier Amy, so hot she burned.

  She turned away from him and rubbed her black velvet ass over the bulge in his jeans, and he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from coming. He had to make this good for her. He had to convince her, because nothing else he’d tried had gotten through to her yet. He had to make her see, feel, get that what was between them was not something you could set aside or replace. He wanted to overwhelm her, own her, ruin her for every other man.

  She knelt on the steps and put her elbows on another step, and there she was, waggling her black velvet self at him and—

  He closed his eyes, because taking a break from the visual marvel of her was the only way to stay in control.

  He ran a hand up from her knee and encountered a lovely surprise at mid-thigh. Her stockings ended there in an expanse of warm, satin skin, and he knelt behind her and put his mouth on her thigh, kissing her, licking her, sliding upwards until he felt the edge of a skimpy pair of lace panties. He slid them down, and she wriggled out of them until she could kick them off, and he put his mouth to the place where thigh became ass and found her pussy from behind with his tongue. Found and teased and played until she was mewling, bucking back against him, and all he could think was, Yes.

  She was sweet and butter soft and wet, and he was going to make her come in about half a second and follow her over the edge, so he said “turn around” in the same commanding voice he’d used earlier, because now that he knew she liked it, it had a corresponding effect on him, like a hand grabbing the base of his cock and squeezing. Steadying and provoking.

  She turned and looked up at him from under her eyelashes. It maybe should have been too porn-girl cute, but it did him in, because it was her, and behind the play and the silliness he could see wonder and joy, her surprise at what this was turning into, how much fun and how oddly sweet. He kissed her nose so she’d know he knew, then he took her hands and pu
t them on his belt buckle, and she unbuckled and unbuttoned and unzipped him, which made him feel unhinged, like someone about to catapult over an unexpected emotional cliff. Her hands slipped under the elastic of his shorts and around him and Christ—

  “Amy, wait, stop—”

  She laughed, a buoyant, delighted laugh that reminded him of how Amy she was, and he took her in his arms and kissed her all over her face and neck and ears and breasts. “Turn around again.”

  She did, presenting him with the sweet curves of her backside, and he knelt and kissed her inner thigh. He drew back and she gasped.

  “Don’t tease.” Her voice was muffled, her face pressed into her forearm.

  He hadn’t meant to tease. He didn’t want to tease. He wanted to give her exactly what she wanted. This. Everything. Whatever it would take to bring her home.

  He took his cock in his hand and brought the tip of it to her silky-wet opening and drew circles until she was begging. He eased his cock between her lips and let her rub along the length of him, backing herself up and moving forward, until she shuddered and cried out. On the surge of her orgasm, he buried himself in her to the hilt—it was like being thrown up on the shore by a particularly cruel tide, waves that wanted to wring the last bit of resistance out of him, and that was exactly what happened, his own orgasm wrenched from him on a yell, and he felt like he was turning inside out inside her, so that he was surprised when he regained the world and was still half-standing, half-kneeling behind her, more or less intact. He slowly lowered himself, covering her warm, slightly sweaty back like a blanket.

  She said something nearly indistinct into the hard wood of the stairs, but his brain picked the words out, like tracks in snow. She’d said I love you, and his chest tightened with joy. He’d been scared he’d never hear those words from her again.

  “I love you too. Give me a few minutes, and I’m going to vividly demo to you how much. In bed this time.”