CLAIRE

The train rattled west through the dark, and Claire fell asleep against my chest.

Sleep would not come for me. The wagon shuddered over every uneven stretch of track, and I lay awake, afraid to move. Her hand rested on mine. I could feel her slow, steady breath. The glow-stick she had shaken earlier had faded to a pale green, just enough to keep us from being blind inside the steel belly of the train.

I looked down at her hands. Her fingers were thin and pale, her small nails painted in mismatched colors: some yellow, some blue, others red. The polish was worn, chipped in places to show the natural pink beneath.

I studied her while she slept. Her hair met her face along a meandering border, and she was a true blonde, with no dark roots at all. A few long strands shone almost silver in the glow. Golden freckles dusted her pointed nose, and her closed eyes were fringed with long, nearly transparent lashes. She wore no makeup, and she looked beautifully natural. She was petite, no taller than five feet, and she weighed almost nothing against me. I wondered whether she had always been so slender, or whether she had been skipping meals while she looked for work in Boston.

If she knew who I was, or rather who I had been, a gluttonous bourgeois attorney who made his living denying claims to people like her, she would never have become my friend.

Holding her, I realized something else. Though I couldn’t recall the past fourteen years, I sensed that I hadn’t been close to a woman in a very long time, and that I had forgotten the warmth and completeness only a caring woman can give a man.

“Is everything okay?” Her voice was thick with sleep. Her watery blue eyes opened slowly.

“Yes. I just can’t sleep.”

She didn’t move away. After a while, she spoke again, softly.

“I’ve been wondering about something. You never told me who you were. Before.”

“A lawyer.”

“Huh.” A pause. “I would’ve guessed worse.”

“It may have been worse.”

She waited. I could have told her about the penthouse, the Ferrari, the woman on the phone who had hung up on me with Mrs. O’Brian’s name still ringing in my ears. I didn’t.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Okay.” She settled her head back against my shoulder. “Someday, then.”

No one I could remember had ever let me off the hook that easily. I noticed it, and I noticed what it did to something in my chest.

“You’re definitely new at this, aren’t you?” She patted my chest gently.

“New at what?”

“At being a hobo. Taking uninvited rides on freight trains with a woman holding on to you.” She lifted her head and looked straight at me, smiling.

I had no answer. I stayed as still as a statue as her face came closer.

“Xavier,” she said, using my name instead of X-man. “Don’t be afraid. I promise I won’t bite.” Her voice dropped. “Is this okay?”

I nodded. I could not have spoken if I’d tried.

She kissed me softly, her lips warm against mine, and for a moment I forgot the train, the cold, and the missing years. Then I kissed her back.

Then she drew back, just far enough to look at me. Something crossed her face that I could not read. It was not regret. It was closer to restraint, as if she were holding a door shut with her whole weight.

“That’s all,” she whispered. “For now. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She laid her head back on my chest. The cold, which had nearly killed me an hour earlier, stopped mattering. As far as I could remember, it was the first time in over a decade that I had been held like that, and I had no way to prove otherwise and no wish to.

The glow-stick faded to a gentle luminescence, and we lay together in its twilight. I held her through the night. At last my exhaustion won, and I forgot that I was a stowaway on a cargo train and fell into a deep sleep. The wagon rocked and wobbled, its rumble a steady counterpoint. We rode that way through all of the next day and into a second night, sharing a can of cold soup and sleeping whenever the cold allowed.

Then, abruptly, a deafening screech tore through the wagon.

The floor lurched. The rumble died.

The train had stopped, and nothing about it felt right.