Ticket Home (2 page)

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.

“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.

No.

Safely ensconced several cars down under the watchful eye of her new protector, Amy gazed out the window as her heartbeat steadied. The train ran express from here into the city, gathering speed and pouring itself along the rail until its rhythms synchronized with hers. She felt its hum in her bloodstream and in the soles of her shoes, and she watched the landscape change like video in fast forward, scraggly growth on the embankment giving way to an industrial landscape and then to the open plains that surrounded Co-op City, the buildings like quadrangular tumors.

The train began its elevated journey over the tops of the multifamily units in the Bronx, and she played the game she always played, trying to imagine the families that crammed into those boxy, exposed houses—the mothers who hung their underwear out for the commuters to see, the children who played on those balconies and back porches, some of which should have been condemned.

He had not followed her, and she breathed more easily.

They stopped at the 125th Street station. Here, the city finally began to edge in close to the tracks, and buildings crouched, blocking out the world. The train was packed now. A heavy woman with a frayed backpack sat down beside Amy. The woman and the backpack crowded her, but she didn’t mind. If anything, she felt safer.

Then they were underground. Inside the tunnel, features flickered into and out of existence, advertisements and station signs rushing past as Metro-North’s route merged with the New York City subway. She was almost there. He had not followed her. She prayed he’d given up.

Chapter Two

He was waiting for her on the platform at the end of the day, leaning on a pillar, a study in male nonchalance.

Her insides got tangled as her heart tried to leap at the same time her stomach tried to sink, and then she knew half of her had hoped he’d go back to Seattle while the other half had been hoping just as hard he’d be here, on the train.

Stupid workaholic Jeff with his stupid phone.

As she stepped through the sliding doors, he pushed himself up off the pillar, an uncoiling of muscle, and closed the distance between them. Aligning himself at her side, matching her stride.

She sped up, ran for the train, and he chased her, bounding on behind her and following her up the aisle.

There was, of course, no place to go. No way to get away from him. Unless—

There was a conductor at the end of the car, and she started toward him, but Jeff caught her wrist again and spun her around to face him. He was very close, so close she could see the circles under his eyes and the brown stubble on his jaw. So close she could remember the exact feel of that well-formed lower lip.

“No more games.”

It was a command. It was a growl. She felt it, everywhere.

“Do you know what I spent my morning doing?”

She shook her head. From behind her, someone said, “Excuse me,” and Jeff sat abruptly in an empty seat and tugged her down to sit beside him. A group of passengers went by and distributed themselves into the seats beyond.

She tried to get up, but he held her firm.

“You’re hurting me.”

He released her instantly, and she rubbed the place where his fingers had dug into her.

“Your little stunt this morning with the conductor got me detained by the transit police for questioning. Apparently they take ‘See something, say something’ very seriously in the year of the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.”

“Oh
God
.”

“It’s okay. It turns out I don’t have a police record or obvious links with terrorist organizations, and I haven’t traveled out of the country in the last couple of years.”

“Jeff, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well. You can make it up to me by not running away. Okay? Just talk to me.”

She shouldn’t have sicced the MTA police on him, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be trapped here with him. It didn’t mean she wanted to rehash bits of their relationship better left behind. And it definitely didn’t mean she wanted his body a few inches from hers, tension rolling off him like fog off the early-morning Pacific Ocean. If she let her eyes flicker sideways, she could see that his thigh was tensed, the muscle straining the wool of his dress slacks.

“I’m not playing games,” she said. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to fix things up. I want you to get off the train and leave me alone. It’s over.”

“And I want you to come home with me.”

He said it so simply, it stopped her dead. She eyed his soft, wavy hair, the lean strength in his neck, the rough line of his shoulder under his dress shirt, and she couldn’t move.

The train began to pull out of the station, gathering speed in the dark tunnel. Her own mind started moving with it.

It was too late to put him off the train. He was going to ride with her now, and no matter where she ran, she wouldn’t be able to get away from him.

I want you to come home with me
. Of course he did. He’d said as much this morning. But there was something about having it spelled out for her that made it more real.

“I’m not coming home. There is no
home
. There was, but there isn’t anymore.”

He turned his body more fully toward hers, his knees almost touching her thigh. His expression was earnest. “I had a lot of time to think today. And I decided something.”

For a brief, giddy moment, she imagined he was going to say what she’d always dreamed he would.
I want to spend more time with you. I’ve been spending too much time on work stuff. I’m turning over a new leaf.

“I’m not going home without you.”

It took her a few seconds to recover from her shock. “What, are you going to just ride the train back and forth with me until you wear me down?” As she said it, she felt a flash of panic. If that’s what he decided, there’d be virtually nothing she could do to escape him. She didn’t have the option of driving to work. She didn’t have a car.

“I don’t want to wear you down. I want to talk to you. About what happened.”

If he had any idea how easy it would be to overcome her resolve, she’d never get him off the train. “No, Jeff. No. It’s not an option.”

She had not expected this of him. Not the grand gesture of showing up on the train in the first place, not the willingness to stick it out after she’d sicced security on him. And definitely not the stubborn look he gave her now. This Jeff—this grand and stubborn Jeff—was a complete stranger to her, despite months of living with him in Seattle.

Yet now that she thought about it, she had known at some level that he had a stubborn streak. It was stubbornness, in fact, that defined his relationship with work. He insisted to himself that things couldn’t function without him, that the company that had so desperately required his nurture in its early days still needed him like a newborn needs its mother.

Ego, that’s what it was.

“I won’t change my mind,” she said again.

“I’ll change your mind.”

Ego.

“How will you do that?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to ride this train until I do.”

They were coming to the end of the tunnel, daylight visible ahead.

“What will you do about Streamline?”

Streamline was his company, his baby. The other woman at the distant end of the phone.

“I can work remotely. I’ll phone in.” He patted his pocket, where she could see the outline of his iPhone like a futuristic implant under the tight pull of his pants. And then, as if reflexively, he pulled the phone out of his pocket, swiped a finger across the screen, and glanced down.

“You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?” she asked.

It took a long time, the slow motion of a train-wreck disaster sequence, before he dragged his eyes off the screen and back to her face. There was a slight daze of concentration on his features as he asked, with absolutely no irony, “The slightest idea of what?”

Wednesday morning Jeff woke in his hotel room in New York City before his alarm went off, so eager to see her, a mess of nerves. He rode the train outbound, got off, crossed the tracks, and rode inbound to her stop, watching out the window as she boarded, tall and remote and beautiful. She chose a forward-facing seat, a two-seater. Today she wore a ruffled cranberry-colored blouse with a deep V-neck and cloth-covered buttons. Her hair was pulled back, the whole dark mass of it anchored in a low ponytail under crisscrossing black elastics. He wanted to tug it loose and bury his face in it.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked instead.

“You? Or you and your phone?”

After he’d taken out his phone yesterday, she’d refused to talk to him. He’d been unable to draw her out, unable to get her to so much as shrug her acknowledgement.

“Me.”

“Sure. Right.”

She was very angry. He deserved her anger, but he hated being the object of it. The way she had softened toward him yesterday—he had felt hopeful. A lightening of a darkness he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying with him. For the first time since he’d boarded the plane to New York, he’d believed his grand gesture might work after all. Then he’d checked his phone. And the shutters had closed, the gates banged down.

“I’m not going to talk on the phone.”