Page 17 of The Last Train Home
‘A couple of times a year: Christmas and sometimes in February, if I’m not skiing.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ I say and put my head in my hands, laughing to myself. He has no idea how posh he sounds.
‘What?’ he asks. ‘What?’ He gently lifts my head up to look into my eyes. ‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘No,’ I say, straightening my face. ‘I was. But I’m not now.’
His hand is still on my face and he’s looking at me, his eyes full of amusement instead of annoyance. It feels nice, the warmth of his skin against mine.
‘Sorry,’ I say, collecting myself. ‘It made me laugh. But I shouldn’t posh-shame you.’
‘Posh-shame?’ he splutters and takes his hand away from my face, the physical connection between us lost. He tops up his vodka glass.
We sit companionably in the club, the thrum of the music making the banquette seating vibrate beneath us. The vodka is making me brave, and my journalism training is hard to shake. ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’
‘Uh-oh. Go on.’
‘When we met …’ I start.
‘Yeah?’ he says.
‘You’d just finished a relationship.’
‘Yeaaaah,’ he draws out the word nervously, uncertainly.
‘Did you finish it that day?’
He shakes his head. ‘No, the night before.’
I draw in a breath. ‘That’s a dramatic twenty-four hours.’
He takes a sip of his drink. ‘Agreed. As weeks go, that one was … fucking awful.’
He gives me a half-smile and attempts to laugh it off, but there’s something in his eyes that tells me he’s feeling the way I am, although I wish I knew what it actuallyisthat I’m feeling.
And then he starts up. ‘It wasn’t right between us – Samantha and me. There was noone thing. It was a combination ofthings, really. And you can either choose to ignore it all, hold onreallytight, hope for the best, even though youknowit’s probably not going to work – not really. Or you can …’
He struggles for a word and, after a beat, I volunteer, ‘Let go?’
Tom looks at me, thinking it over. ‘Yeah,’ he says slowly. ‘Let go.’ Another pause. ‘It was the right thing to do, for both of us.’
I want so desperately to ask what she looked like, this woman, Samantha. Is she a lean, fit yoga bunny; a tall blonde from his office; a petite brunette he met at university? I think about how to position this question in the atmosphere, without sounding like I’m momentarily hung up on it, hung up on the type of woman Tom would date, the type of woman Tom would break up with – which obviously Iamhung up on now – when a girl about my age walks past the table, her skirt short, her shirt open at the neck, and Tom looks at her for the briefest of seconds before returning his attention to me.
I look down at my work clothes – jeans, T-shirt – and am reminded that I don’t fit in here. I pull my hair up in a high ponytail, fidgeting unnecessarily.
‘You look great by the way,’ he says softly. He leans in to tell me, so that I can hear him over the thumping noise the speakers are blasting. How could he tell I was stressing?
‘You don’t need to try likethat.’
‘I look like I don’t try?’ I ask over the thumping music.
‘You look like you don’tneedto try,’ he repeats, louder this time. ‘Like that. You’re effortless. There’s a big difference. Trust me.’
He makes me smile and I don’t know how he does it, but so far he’s been an expert at making me feel relaxed. In thestreet, in his flat, here where I feel out of my depth, Tom is easy to be with. But despite his placatory words about my appearance, I still pull a lip gloss out of my bag. He looks at me while I apply it, but doesn’t speak. He turns away while I finish, downs the rest of his shot and then turns back and grabs my hand.
‘Come on,’ he says as the DJ begins playing Rihanna’s ‘Pon de Replay’. I’ve been hearing this song everywhere for months, but I’m still not over it. Tom pulls me up from the seats, instructs his mates to watch my bag and drags me on to the dance floor, where I’m surprised to see so many people. I’m not drunk enough for this, but Tom has this good-humoured way of encouraging me to dance without forcing me. He’s just going with the flow, and I’m going with him.
Under my shoes the dance floor is reassuringly sticky. While other couples seem to be grinding up against each other, Tom’s still got hold of my hand, swirling and spinning me and then pulling me towards him. The music is fast and the beat’s making my head spin. Tom being close is making my head spin too, but it feels natural, and he’s making me laugh by singing all the words wrong. I think he’s doing it on purpose.
