Page 13 of The Last Train Home
I look at his hands; the cuts have almost healed. ‘Did you get all those from the train?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, the glass you were leaning against smashed. I crawled all over it when I pulled you up.’
‘Thanks. I was leaning against glass? I don’t remember that.’
He’s finished his sandwich and I take his hand in mine to look at it, running my fingers gently over the marks on his palm where his cuts are healing. The air between us thickens. ‘Did you have glass inside your hands?’ I ask quietly.
‘A bit,’ he says after a beat, leaving his palm in mine. We’re both looking down at our hands together. Is it my imagination or has the café become silent? I couldn’t tell you how many people are in here, but I can’t hear them, as if it’s just Tom and me, and no one else.
I raise my eyes to look at his. ‘How did you get it out?’
I think we’re both feeling a bit awkward and so I let go of his hand and he lifts it out of my lap. And then the noise of the café seems to start up again, people ordering lattes and salads; and someone nudges me and apologises as they walk towards a spare bar stool near ours.
It takes him a moment to answer. ‘Tweezers, pure determination and a couple of beers.’
‘A good combination,’ I say because I can’t think of anything else.
I look at my uneaten sandwich. I’ve ordered the wrong thing. It’s too messy to eat like this. I wonder if I’ll look like a moron if I ask for a knife and fork.
He’s asked me something and I’ve obviously missed it and need him to repeat himself. ‘I asked if you’re seeing anyone?’ he says. ‘You said you didn’t have a boyfriend before, but I wondered if you were …’ He trails off.
‘Dating?’ I suggest. ‘Playing the field?’
‘That’s such an old-fashioned way of putting it,’ he laughs. ‘But yeah, if you like, are you playing the field, Abbie? It’s notquitewhat I meant, but let’s run with it.’
It’s such a sudden change in conversation. I wonder if my holding his hand prompted it, tilted us into a marginally different level of friendship. ‘No,’ I say truthfully. ‘Are you?’
‘No,’ he says simply, and somewhere deep within me my stomach trips happily over itself, which is mental because I hardly know him. ‘I’d just broken up with someone the night of the … whatever that was – derailment, crash.’
‘I remember you saying that now,’ I reply and try to resist the urge to prompt him into revealing more about this, despite the fact that I find I want to know every single detail.
But instead of opening up, he’s staring at my sandwich. Is he dodging looking at me on purpose or does he actually want my panini?
‘Samantha and I were friends and we fell into having sex, and then fell into dating and then, before I knew it, we werein a relationship, I guess. Which is what made it incredibly awkward when it dawned on me that we weren’t right for each other.’
‘Why awkward?’ I ask.
‘I had to make a decision: stay as I was and it would probably stay like that for ever.’
‘Or … ?’ I’m pushing now.
He inhales, exhales a sigh. ‘Or lose a friend, because we could never really go back to what we were before. Even I’m not stupid enough to think you can be friends with someone, then have a relationship with them, and then you dump them and it’s all fine.’ He shrugs.
I think about this for a second or two and I wonder if he’s right. I go to speak, but he slices in quickly, pointing at my panini. ‘Are you going to eat that?’
I push the plate towards him. ‘No, you can have it.’
‘We should do this again,’ he says with a grin.
‘God help me.’
Chapter 10
Tom
A week later a fly’s trying to get inside my office window, bashing into the thick pane of glass repeatedly. It must be doing itself an injury, the determined little fella. ‘You don’t want to come in here. And besides, it doesn’t open, mate,’ I say out loud and then catch myself.
Across the desk my colleague and friend Sean looks at me and then at the window and then back down again.
