Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [25]
If she was running away, and not running—arms wide—toward the world, she was running away from responsibility and pressure and obligation. And she wondered why the whole world didn’t have the sense to do the same thing. Surely, she was the sane one.
IT WAS AT LEAST FIVE DEGREES COLDER THE NEXT MORNING. BEX had a day off, and Josh had never even made it home, so Amanda went to work alone, stopping outside the tube station to pick up one of the free papers that had nothing interesting to say, so that, five stops in, the paper languished on the empty seat next to her, and she was almost back to sleep, her head leaning back against the bulk of the thick scarf around her neck. She was thinking about warm water lapping at her toes, splayed in white sand.
“Excuse me—is this yours?”
Her head sprang up with an awkward snap. It was Tintin. What were the odds? He was holding out the free sheet.
She shook her head, and he sat down. Winter coats made the seats too small, and his whole length made contact with hers. She shifted slightly and sat up straighter.
She wasn’t sure he recognized her, or that if he did, he intended to acknowledge the fact, until he turned to her and smiled the sheepish smile of yesterday again.
She looked at their fellow passengers, establishing that there were no obvious candidates for his equally obvious admiration in the carriage, and replicated his small shrug by way of reply, rolling her eyes.
“Sorry about that.” His voice was deeper than she was expecting. Tintin had quite a high-pitched voice. But Tintin was Belgian, wasn’t he, and this guy was clearly British. Although not very—British people didn’t normally try to establish a conversation with you on an underground train at 8:15 in the morning.
That was another thing she loved about traveling. Donning Birken-stocks and a rucksack—a proper one—was like wearing a sign on your forehead that said “Talk to me—I’m up for making friends with like-minded individuals!” Like a secret handshake, granting admission to a society where you pretty much liked everyone else who belonged.
“Hey,” she smiled. “You’re a guy, aren’t you?”
The commuters around them started to listen, although they didn’t look up from their newspapers and romance novels and county court summonses. A couple who’d been hanging on to the central pole and facing the other way, staring into space, angled themselves so that they could see who was talking. You may as well be on an orange box at Hyde Park Corner.
He smiled a broad, surprisingly sexy smile. The sheepishness had vanished. “And you’re a feminist, I gather?”
“Just a woman who’s learned that men are utterly predictable. More realist than feminist.”
“So young, yet so jaded.”
She laughed. This was a novelty. Normally conversations like this were limited to old episodes of Dawson’s Creek, which she only knew about because Josh had a giant crush on Dawson and watched the show on Sunday afternoons while he recovered from the night before. In sunglasses. Personally, she’d far rather have Pacey, but…that wasn’t the point.
This was their stop. Her stop. The Starbucks stop, at least. They stood up at the same time. He gestured with one arm for her to leave the carriage first, and then he walked beside her. She was amused.
“I’m Ed.”
“I’m late.”
“You want to walk faster? We could walk faster.”
Instead she stopped. The commuters behind her