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“Are you going to check your voice mail? Your email? Your texts?
Twitter?
”

He shook his head.

“What if it’s an ‘emergency’?” Her voice was laced with sarcasm.

“Even then.”

“I think this is the part where I’m supposed to feel grateful.”

He kept being surprised by these gusts of anger. He’d been such an idiot to think that flying across the country would be enough to win her back. After what he’d done. After what he
hadn’t
done.

“Sit.”

Startled, he looked down at her. The hard lines around her mouth had softened just a little. He had always loved to kiss those lines. He had loved being able to distract her from the thing that made her angry.

Now he was that thing.

“Just sit,” she repeated. “You can’t hang out in the aisle forever.”

He noticed she didn’t shrink into the corner as she had yesterday morning. You could consider that progress, even if she was staring straight ahead, refusing to meet his eyes.

“How’s the job?” he asked her. “Still enjoying stealing from the rich and giving to the poor?”

She looked startled, like she hadn’t expected him to remember. “It’s good. I love being a director. I feel like Tom Cruise in
Minority Report
with the fancy computer, fingers on everything, moving all the pieces around, seeing things come together.”

The job was the reason he was here, stalking her commute. She’d been doing financial aid at the University of Washington, going along perfectly happily, until someone at NYU had gotten the bright idea to recruit her. Then he’d pulled his medieval act, and here they were.

“The food is great. A catering company does lunch every day.”

“Intensifying the impression that you’re the Prince of Thieves?”

She didn’t quite smile, but the corner of her mouth quirked. “Yesterday it was sloppy joes. On the softest egg rolls I’ve ever eaten.” She bounced a little on her seat, something she did when she was excited about a song on the radio or chewy chocolate chip cookies. A habit of hers he had always loved, because it was like watching her enthusiasm burst out at the seams. That big Amy life force, the vibrant, buoyant essence of her. Of course she would love what she was doing. It was who she was. You could plant her anywhere and she would thrive, leaf and flower and, before long, grow roots.

Roots that would keep her from coming back to him. The thought made him queasy.

“How’s…” she appeared to be struggling for a topic to keep the conversation going, “…your sister?”

“Good,” he said. “Jake’s nine months. So cute. Not walking yet. Going back to work was stressful for her, but I think she’s pretty happy with her balance now.”

They were talking. It was so much better than the fighting had been.

“How are Sasha and Porter?”

Porter was his partner in Streamline, and Sasha his girlfriend. The couple were their closest friends. Before Amy had left, they’d had sushi with them almost every single Friday.

He hesitated. This was trickier territory. Porter had bought an engagement ring and started talking about popping the question.

“That bad?”

Because she was staring straight ahead as she spoke to him, he had an opportunity to drink in her beauty. The sleekness of her hair, her noble forehead and regal nose, and the surprising sensuality of her mouth, which seemed out of place with the aristocratic rest of her. Watching her made him antsy and aroused, his lips and tongue craving the softness of hers, his fingers recalling the silkiness of her hair and the satin feel of her skin under his hands. “No. No. Things are good. They might get married.”

A little hitch, as if in the regular forward motion of time, and then she laughed bitterly. “Good for them.”

They sat without speaking, the disturbance of Sasha and Porter’s success in the face of their own failure heavy in the air. The two couples had gotten together around the same time, and Sasha and Amy had commiserated about their boyfriends’ preoccupation with Streamline’s needs.

The train chimed and slowed to a stop in Hawthorne. Amy tapped the window. “There’s a good diner here. Sometimes when I’m too hungry to make it all the way home, I stop.”

“I haven’t eaten anything except breakfast cereal, eggs and takeout since you left.”

“So you do miss me.”

Time stopped.

Her face got pink, streaks of color on her cheekbones. She hadn’t meant to say it, he could see. “Only at breakfast,” he said lightly. “Otherwise, nah. The apartment’s a lot cleaner without you in it. Well—a lot less cluttered, anyway.”

She smiled. That pleased her.

What he hadn’t said was that the apartment was also a lot more bare. She had taken away the scarves and posters and cushions, the vases and tchotchkes whose names he didn’t know. Once, he had made fun of her for those things, even as he’d secretly admired the way she could take those disparate objects, those unrelated bits of girlish fluff, and turn a series of blank white boxes into rooms with personalities. Now—

He missed it, the way the rooms breathed paisley or floral or slightly fringed, this one almost a Renaissance feel, this one firmly Pottery Barn circa 2002. All Amy.

He sought, again, the lighthearted tone he’d been trying for. “I open the mail every day instead of once every three weeks.”

“I opened it more than once every three weeks!”

“Are you sure about that?” he teased. “I remember some pretty big stacks. I distinctly remember not being able to find at least one of the kitchen counters. For quite some time. It’s a good thing neither of us actually cooked.”

She grinned, guilty as charged. “Yeah. And also that no one ever needed to get in touch with us.”

“But think of all the Publishers Clearing House lotteries we won and missed out on.”

“We could have been rich,” she said, in a mock-dreamy voice.

“Yeah. I’ve been getting rich since you left. But on the downside, it’s possible the toilets haven’t been cleaned in six months.”

“Eew!”

“And I’m pretty sure you could do an archeological dig through the dust.”

They were both laughing, leaning toward each other, all the anger gone.

“Amy.”

“What.” A statement, not a question.

“I miss you. Nothing’s the same without you. The apartment feels big. I don’t feel like going to any of our old haunts. Nothing’s right.”

He heard her exhale, a cross between a sigh and a sob. “Don’t do this.”

“Amy, please. Listen. I was an idiot. I was wrong. I need you to forgive me.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“You keep saying that. Is it because of your dad?”

She glared. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You never talk about him.”

“Because he’s not worth wasting the breath on.”

“So is that why you ran away?”

“I ran away,” she said through gritted teeth, “because you were an asshole.”

He held up a hand. “Okay. I’m sorry. Yes. I was an asshole. We both agree on that. But—your dad, he was an asshole too, right? The original asshole?”

She smiled a little. “Yes. The original asshole.”

“The asshole against whom all other assholes are measured?”

Now she was definitely smiling. “You gave him a good run for his money.”

“I did. But—” He took a deep breath. “I’m really sorry.” And then he blurted out, “Why did you leave?”

She turned and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“No, I mean, I know what I did was obnoxious. But why didn’t you just yell at me? Why did you leave and go all the way across the country?”

“You were a fascist, Jeff. You acted like it was a crime against nature for me to suggest that my career might compete with yours in importance.”

She was angry again, that tight, hard sound in her voice. The anger poured off her in waves, as if her muscles were tensed so tight they were giving off a particular UV heat spectrum.

They’d been doing so well. He should have kept going with the niceties. But God help him, he wanted to have a real conversation with her. He wanted to know what she was thinking and what she was feeling. He wanted to crack her open and suck out all the sweetness. Or all the venom, if that’s what it would take. He could do that.

“So you should have said, ‘You’re a fascist, Jeff.’ You should have yelled at me. Not packed up and moved out and gotten on a plane.” And there it was, plain as day—his anger. Anger he’d suspected was buried in there somewhere, but that caught him off guard anyway, the heat and depth of it.

It had apparently caught her off guard too. Her eyes were big, almost scared. Now would probably be a good time for him to shut up. But apparently, once the anger was out, it was like the proverbial genie. “So why don’t you tell me what you’re so mad about, really? What you were so angry about that you had to fly all the way across the country instead of having a conversation with me?”

There was a long silence, silence that seemed to have spread over the whole train car, which probably meant a good number of their fellow passengers were avidly listening. Great.

“I think you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

She sighed.

Something about the fatigue in her sigh calmed him enough so he could say, “Whatever it was, I know it was a big deal to you. And I know the thing with the job was the final straw.”

She fidgeted with the fabric of her pants. “There wasn’t. There wasn’t anything else. Not anything you could do anything about.”

He wanted to pound the seat in front of him. What she had said was in the same category of awful relationship utterances as “It’s not you, it’s me” and “I think we’d be better off as friends”. There was a flaw in him that made it impossible for her to love him the way that he loved her. And that—that sucked so much. “Oh,” he said.

If that was the case, the smartest thing he could do would be to get off the train at the next stop, take a cab to the airport and fly home.

Except the way she was looking at him now didn’t seem to match what she’d said. She eyed him gravely. Her eyes full of heat and interest.

His heart started to thud. She was staring at his mouth, he was sure of it.

She looked away, and it was as if none of that had happened.

What
the fuck
?

The race of heat under his skin told him he hadn’t imagined it. But there was no hint of it now.

“It’s the work.”

“What?”

“The work. I got so sick of it, never seeing you. All the phone calls at the worst possible moments, not ever being able to go away on vacation.”

Dread crawled under his skin like a thing under the bed at night. Not the work. Streamline needed him, now more than ever as the company gathered momentum. Porter wanted to hire in a new management team, had even talked about cashing out now while the valuation was so good, but Jeff had said no. Streamline needed them both, needed their vision and energy and commitment. There were going to be years, still, when going away on vacations would be touch and go, and if Amy couldn’t handle that—

“You never said anything before—”

“That’s not true. I said it a million times. A million and one. I got sick of hearing my own voice. Nothing ever changed.”

“I—” He took a deep breath. Tried to uncoil the fear. There was a way to fix this. He could work less. Differently. Be more attentive to her. Of course he could.

“You should go home. Before either of us gets hurt any more than we already have been. You work there. I work here. Neither of us is interested in negotiating, apparently.”

“I am. I will. Tell me what I can do.”

“Okay, let me put it differently. I’m not interested in negotiating.” She turned abruptly and looked out the window.

But earlier, she had looked at him with hunger. She had laughed with him the old way. Maybe before this morning he could have given up and gone back to Seattle. But today had sharpened his longing for her. It had reset his determination.

Chapter Three

“Come home with me,” he said.

It was Wednesday evening now. She was being slowly worn down like a stone in the middle of a river. “No,” she said.

“Please.”

There was something intoxicating about a powerful, well-dressed man pleading. It should be a controlled substance. And this wasn’t just any powerful, well-dressed man. This was a man who had always had the ability to reduce her to naked neediness—and that was before that bit of wavy hair had started hanging over his eyes.

Also, she hadn’t remembered his mouth clearly. How did it manage to look so soft and so masculine at the same time?

“No.”

“What do you have against second chances?”

“The fact that nothing changes.”

“That might have been true with your father. It isn’t true with me. I will change. Whatever you need. I won’t talk on the phone during dinner. No phone calls when we’re in bed.”

The phone calls in bed. She’d blocked those out. He’d never actually answered a call while they were making love, but one time, she was pretty sure he’d driven them speedily to the logical conclusion in order to check his voice mail. She’d been mad as hell, had walked around for days thinking of it, but she’d never brought it up because it would be too easy to deny. If he’d told her he hadn’t done anything deliberate to hasten the happy ending, what evidence would she have to the contrary?

“Long vacations in exotic locations. No broken dates. I’ll be on time.”

What other concessions could she demand from him, and would it make a difference if she did? There would be no guarantee he would keep his promises. No guarantee that he
could
keep his promises. Once she’d given in and come home, she wouldn’t have any leverage.

“No.”

He banged the back of his skull on the soft seat behind him. “Amy.”

Why was that sexy? What was wrong with her? It was too many hours spent too close to him. Months of living with him and having constant access to sex had conditioned her to associate the sight, smell and sound of him with mind-blowing orgasms. And then she’d deprived herself of all sexual contact for six months, and this was the inevitable outcome. He banged his head on the seat, and she wanted to climb on and straddle him.