Ticket Home: Strangers on a Train Page 5

  His phone began to ring.

  Chapter Six

  She listened to the phone ring. Her body was still spasming around his. Her heart was thudding. His too, strong and fierce against her back.

  The phone finished ringing, paused long enough for her to start to catch her breath, and began to ring again.

  She already wished she hadn’t said what she’d said. That he hadn’t said it back. That—that she’d stuck to her guns. Let him onto the front porch, and he’ll find a way to talk himself in the front door, her mother had said about her father. Let him in the front door, and he’ll find a way to talk himself into the living room. Let him into the living room, and he’ll find a way to talk himself into the bedroom.

  Behind her, he withdrew, and all of a sudden, she hurt. All over. Her neck and shoulders from the way she’d braced herself on the stairs. Her knees. Her back, which she’d arched as she pressed against him.

  “You can get the phone.” It had stopped for the second time.

  “I don’t want to get it.”

  She stayed where she was, partly so she didn’t have to look at him and see the struggle in his face.

  “You can take it. Really.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  She stood up, straightened her clothes. When she turned around, she saw that his dress slacks and shorts were still around his ankles. Otherwise, they were both fully dressed. That had seemed insanely sexy a few minutes ago. Now it seemed sordid. “Someone doesn’t call twice in a row like that for nothing.”

  “Probably wasn’t even the same person.” The phone began its refrain again.

  “Just take it.”

  He looked for a moment as if he were going to fight her, then sighed and turned to dig his phone out of his computer bag. He produced it, frowning at it. “Oh, crap.”

  She wasn’t angry. Or disappointed. Except in herself, for letting him on the train. Or not working harder to get him kicked off. She should have told the MTA police he’d harassed her. She should have told them he was a known terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda. She should have told them he’d asked her to plant a bomb in Grand Central Station.

  “I gotta get this.” As if she might care. “I’m pretty sure it’s about the new client. I asked the office to handle it and only call me if things got out of control, so the fact that they’re calling me means it’s probably pretty serious.”

  She shook her head. A secret thread of heat began to trickle down her thigh, the wasted, pointless not-gift of him.

  The phone began to ring yet again, and she turned away. Climbed the stairs and went into the kitchen, leaving him at the bottom of the stairs, phone in hand, pants around his ankles. Ridiculous.

  “I’m so sorry, Amy,” he called. The agony in his voice was real. She heard it, and she understood it, but it wasn’t good enough.

  Then he said, in a completely different voice, “Hello?”

  He was silent for a long time. “I can’t, Rob. Not right now. Maybe in a couple of days.”

  More silence.

  “It always has to be me. Make them understand I’m not always there at a moment’s notice. I have a life—” A pause. “No. I’m sick of this. Everything’s an emergency with them.”

  For a moment, she held her breath, almost hopeful. She let it out with a rush as he said, in a voice closer to the one in which he’d spoken to her—one filled with confusion and indecision—“Yeah, I know. Okay. Thanks for booking me. I’ll be on that flight.”

  He pulled his pants up, buckled his belt and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. She was busy making toast and wouldn’t look at him.

  “I’ve gotten them into the habit of believing I’ll come when they call. It’s not an easy habit to break. But I will break them of it.”

  She peered into the toaster. Her face was still flushed from their lovemaking, her lips a dark red that made him want to grab her, spin her around and kiss her until she was forced to acknowledge him, if not at the level of conversation, in a deeper, more primal place.

  “We’ve made so much progress, Amy. Don’t clam up on me now.”

  She wouldn’t talk to him. She grabbed the toast when it popped up and put it on a plate, buttered it carefully, spreading the butter evenly and into every corner and crevice. She ate the toast, bite by bite, studiously not looking at him.

  “I wouldn’t go if I thought there was anyone else who could handle the situation.”

  She surprised him by raising her head and meeting his eyes. “I know.” For a brief moment, he thought things were going to be okay. Then she asked, “What time’s your flight?”

  “Five thirty a.m.” He peeked at the kitchen clock. It was a little after eight. There was enough time for them to eat and go to bed together. He’d have to be up by two, but there was time. He let himself fantasize about taking it slow the next time, making love to her languidly, like people moving through warm water. Watching the slight impact of each stroke shimmy through her and show on her face. If she wasn’t too mad. “Amy. You could come with me.”

  She held his gaze, studying him. She held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

  Unsure, he handed it to her.

  She swiped it open, searched briefly, tapped something and handed it to him, already ringing. He looked down at the screen. GO Airport Shuttle.

  “It’s over,” she told him.

  He took the ringing phone, too shocked to refuse. He put his ear to it, and when the cigarette-smoke-clogged voice at the other end of the phone said, “GO Shuttle reservations, how can I help you?” he booked the shuttle.

  She kept up her manic puttering. By the time he hung up, she was scrambling eggs. He watched her, neither of them speaking. She was graceful and efficient, as if she cooked all the time, instead of approximately never. A thin corkscrew of pain had begun at his temple, making it impossible to think.

  She set the plate of eggs and Canadian bacon in front of him, placed two slices of toast beside his plate. Drew his chair out and gestured for him to sit.

  “Amy.”

  “It’s over.”

  When the eggs were done and he set the plate in the sink, he tried one more time to reason with her. “I’ll be back. I could be back by Friday. Monday at the latest.”

  “Don’t come back.”

  “Amy, be reasonable. Sometimes the job is going to need me.”

  She turned away from him. She walked out of the kitchen and down the hall and shut the door to the bedroom. He followed her and knocked, but she didn’t answer. He tried the knob and found it locked.

  Then he got angry. Because it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, for her to ask him to choose between her and his job. He couldn’t be who she wanted him to be. She’d known all along how important Streamline was to him, how invested he was in its success. There were going to be times work needed him. If she couldn’t live with that—

  “What do you want me to do, Amy?”

  It came out almost a shout, and he took a deep breath and tried again. “Amy, what do you want me to do? I own the company.”

  Silence from behind the door. Not even the sounds of Amy changing clothes or quietly weeping. Nothing. As if she were holding perfectly still and waiting for him to leave.

  “It’s my company,” he said to the door.

  He gathered his things and went to sit on the front steps.

  A light went off inside the house, and he sat alone in the dark.

  When the car showed up, he was glad. Grateful. He wanted to get away. Away from her and her unreasonable demands.

  The car took him away from Amy, relentlessly inserting miles between them. The car smelled of some terrible kind of air freshener mingled with the driver’s potent body odor, and Jeff had to breathe through his mouth to keep from feeling sick. The peculiar quiet jarred his mood too. He had hardly registered the train’s sounds until they were gone—the shugga-shugga of train on track, the wobble and shift of things moving in the older cars, doors swinging open and shut,
people shuffling and speaking. The car whispered over the surface of the road, and the driver didn’t try to drown the silence with the low drone of talk radio. So there was just the silence. Dark and absolute.

  They were almost to the airport before he remembered that he’d left another suit hanging in the hotel room closet. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt and his briefs sitting in the anonymous hotel dresser.

  Fuck it. He’d call the hotel and have them send his stuff along to him. It was time for him to get the hell out of here. There was only so long you could ride a train to nowhere.

  Chapter Seven

  “Hey.”

  It was Porter’s voice at the other end of the line, solid and comforting.

  “I’m at the airport,” Jeff said. “On my way home.” He was the only one at his gate, slumped down in a black vinyl club chair with all his electronics arrayed on the arms and the floor in front of him, charging merrily away. He’d sleep here, with his head resting on the back of the seat, until the gate woke up tomorrow morning.

  “Is Amy with you?”

  Jeff had told Porter and Sasha about his mission. They’d been fully in support. They missed Amy almost as much as he did. Well, no, nowhere near as much as he did, unless there was something he didn’t know about their nighttime fantasies and dirty dreams, but when they’d heard his plan, they’d said, effectively, Thank God you’ve come to your senses! Bring our girl home!

  “No.”

  There was a dark silence on the other end of the line.

  “Look. I don’t want to get into it.”

  “Don’t think you’re going to get away with that, man,” said Porter. “No way. What happened? You said things were going well. You—I’ve got the text here. You said, direct quote, ‘I love this girl. And I’m pretty sure she feels the same way.’ That was fifteen hours ago. Are you trying to tell me you managed to go from that to ‘I don’t want to get into it’ in fifteen hours? Jeff, man—”

  “Don’t.” There was an ache in his gut, like heartburn, only worse, that had lodged there around the time Amy handed him his ringing phone. It wasn’t food poisoning. It was the feel of life without Amy. He knew, because as soon as it had settled in there, he’d remembered it. He’d spent the previous six months with it there, and it had only abated the last few days. Only when he’d ridden the train with Amy, her slim body a solid warmth beside him. Even when she’d been angry at him, she’d been with him. Right there.

  God, he missed her. As angry as he was with her for her unreasonable expectations and demands, he missed her.

  “What happened?” Jeff could hear the stubbornness in Porter’s voice. He wasn’t going to give up until Jeff answered him. That was the goddamned thing about having a best friend. They knew.

  He stood up, pacing to the end of his expensive white electronic tether. “She kicked me out.”

  Porter was silent. Jeff checked the charge level on his phone. Getting there. The silence went on for so long that Jeff started to think maybe Porter was going to leave it at that. Spare Jeff the gory details. But then his friend asked, his voice only slightly accusatory, “What changed?”

  Fuck it. He’d rather tell Porter the whole thing now than have the details drip out under interrogation later. “I told her I had to go back to Seattle to deal with the Global Four fuckup, and she flipped.”

  Jeff watched as a man about ten years older than him wheeled a black carry-on into the gate area and began to engage in the same technological charging ritual as Jeff had twenty minutes earlier. Cell phone. Laptop. And what was that? Kindle, Jeff guessed.

  “Wait a minute,” said Porter. “You’re on your way back here to deal with Global Four?”

  “Yeah. Rob said—”

  “Rob’s full of shit, Jeff, you know that.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But what, Jeff?” Porter sounded pissed.

  “I knew you and Sasha were in Madison, and someone—”

  This time the silence was bigger and deeper, and Jeff wasn’t sure Porter was still on the line.

  “—someone had to step in,” he finished. His voice echoed in the nearly empty gate area.

  He could hear Sasha’s voice in the background. “Who is it, Porter?”

  “It’s Jeff,” Porter said, and Jeff could see them clearly in his mind’s eye—the two of them probably in their PJs, curled up together in a hotel room in Madison, his phone call an intrusion into a world they’d created. A world where whatever Rob Akres thought was so urgent was as inconsequential as a flea on a buffalo’s back.

  And he realized Porter hadn’t asked him what Rob Akres was on about. What was going on with Global Four. Ten years ago, five years ago—hell, a year ago—that would have been the first question out of Porter’s mouth. Christ, man, what is it? And the two of them would have powwowed all night, if that’s what it took, bending their minds around solutions to whatever business problem they’d gotten themselves into.

  When had Porter moved on? When had he stopped caring about the minutiae of Streamline’s progress?

  Once upon a time, their hard work, the fruits of their late twenties and early thirties, their late nights really had been the only thing standing between Streamline and failure. Their labor, their devotion, had been the thing that could make their dreams real.

  But that had been a long time ago. Before Sasha.

  Before Amy.

  It didn’t have to be that way anymore. Porter was proof of it. Porter and Sasha. At some point, without Jeff’s noticing, Porter had left behind the old days. He hadn’t stopped caring about Streamline, he’d only decided that Streamline didn’t need his undivided attention.

  He’d understood that the company would march along without his undying and constant vigilance.

  “How’s it going?” Sasha asked in the background, and Jeff imagined Porter rolling his eyes or signaling her to hang on or pipe down just a sec so he could finish up with Jeff the crazy loser who couldn’t manage to convince the woman he loved to be with him. Because he had the staying power of a goddamned chipmunk.

  With a falling sensation as distinct as lead plummeting in his gut, he remembered that just yesterday, he’d promised Amy he’d ride that train with her until he convinced her to come home. Only he hadn’t, had he?

  God, no wonder she was pissed. Not demanding. Not irrational. She was right. Exactly fucking right.

  He was a workaholic cretin who didn’t deserve her. Didn’t remotely deserve wonderful, sexy, creative, expansive, sweet Amy.

  His Amy. His second chance at really living. Not this crazy late-night-airport-inhabiting run-when-they-call crap he’d come to take for granted as life, but the long, slow, leisurely comings and goings he’d briefly experienced on the train with her. A promise of what life could be if you hung up the fucking phone.

  But it had been hard enough to convince her to give him a second chance. How would he ever talk her into letting him near her, let alone giving him a third chance?

  What if she couldn’t forgive him?

  His heart contracted agonizingly, the fear of losing her as big and dark as the windows that looked out on the nearly deserted runways. He looked over and saw the other lone businessman rest his head on the back of another, identical black vinyl seat. This life stretched out forever in front of him—this set of dead-end choices.

  The phone had drifted away from his ear, and he clutched it back to his head. “Porter?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  Jeff didn’t want to think about what Sasha was doing over there to give his best friend and business partner that abstracted sound to his voice. “Can you do me a big favor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you call Rob in the morning and tell him he’s in charge of working this one out for himself?”

  Suddenly, he could tell, he had Porter’s undivided attention. “Hell, yeah,” his friend said. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.” He could hear the smile in Porter’s voice.

  “And Porter?”
>
  “Yeah?”

  “Thought maybe I’d take some of the vacation I have coming.”

  “Good man.”

  “You can manage without me?”

  “Hell, we’ll have divided up your computer equipment by the time you get back.”

  Jeff laughed, sharp relief. Took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in years. “And can we set up a meeting when I get back? To talk about bringing in that management team?”

  “You serious?”

  “Never been more serious in my life.”

  A deep intake of breath on the other end of the phone that Jeff sincerely hoped was a result of Porter’s joy at the thought of bringing in reinforcements, and not whatever Sasha was so quietly up to over there.

  And then Porter said, “Holy fuckin’ hell, yeah!” and Jeff figured he’d better hang up on that note while there was still enough ambiguity to go around. He had work to do. An early-morning train to catch. Miles to go, and promises to keep.

  Amy’s head was full of television static, white and gray snow. Her eyes burned, and her lids were heavy. She hadn’t slept at all, because the noise in her head had kept her awake. It wasn’t voices or recriminations. It was the sound of the train on the rails and the sound of Jeff’s phone ringing.

  Now she was on the commuter rail, and she could hear the shush of the train, which made sense, and the phantom trill of Jeff’s phone ringing, which didn’t. She wondered how many nights you had to go without sleeping before you started hallucinating.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  The guy with the heavy Brooklyn accent who’d harassed her and Jeff knelt up suddenly in the seat in front of her. Great. Just what she needed. A total stranger interrogating her about her relationship with Jeff when all she wanted to do was hide in a corner and cry over what she’d lost and regained and lost again.

  “He went home.”

  Brooklyn raised both thick black eyebrows. “Did you forgive him?”

  Was he for real? “Why are we having this conversation?”