Page 6 of These Summer Storms

“I was just thinking about trains.”

His gaze flickered to the tracks behind her. “Wish you’d stayed on it?”

“How’d you guess?”

“I might feel the same way.”

For a heartbeat, she wondered why, but she knew better than to ask, knowing that her questions would summon his own. Instead, she spilled a new conversation into the silence hanging between them. “Trains make me think of Duke Ellington. He was a—”

“I know who Duke Ellington was.”

“Are you a musician?”

“Are you?”

“No. But my father—” She cut herself off. She didn’t want her father there.

The handsome stranger didn’t notice. “Why do trains make you think of Duke Ellington?”

“He toured the whole country, with a full orchestra, in a private rail car.”

“Hmm,” he said, the sound low and thoughtful. Alice liked it. “Sousaphones don’t really fit in the overhead on the Amtrak regional.”

“I don’t think there was a sousaphone.”

“If you say so,” he said, and she couldn’t help her little surprised laugh. There was something easy about this man, smooth and competent. The kind of guy who made you want to mess him up a little, make him have some fun.

Except, there wasn’t time for fun.

She looked at her phone. Benny was ten minutes away. She pushed away the messy thoughts and was left with jazz. “Most people don’t know that Duke Ellington’s orchestra went stratospheric here. In Rhode Island.”

“Do you think that private rail car stopped here? In Wickford?” He exaggerated it like the conductor on the train. Long and flat, missing ther.

“It did, in fact. A few times.”

“And all we got were lukewarm hot dogs and day-old coffee.”

“The fall of civilization,” she said, softly, thinking of the many ways she’d traveled to this place in her life. Expensive cars. Helicopters, sailboats. She resisted the memories, turning, instead, to the excellent distraction before her. Solid and tall and with those forearms that—

The tattoo was a compass. Geometric and beautiful, arrows extending in long, fine lines to his wrist and elbow. She spoke to it. “You’re not local.”

He didn’t have to reply. She was right. Anyone would see it. He was pure stranger comes to town—nothing about him even close tohomegrown by seaweed and salt and clam shacks on the beach. He was too serious. Too smooth.

He lifted a hand. Hesitated. “You have…paint in your hair.”

She brushed the hair and his hand away, self-conscious and unsettled by how easily he had identified the paint, as though he knew where she’d been that morning, before she’d gone to her classroom, before her mother had called and everything had changed, back when it had been a perfectly normal day, distant now. The past.

Before.

He cleared his throat. “I should introduce myself,” he said, extending that hand that hadn’t touched her, like they were normal people doing a normal thing. “I’m—”

“Don’t.”

He didn’t. “Why not?”

“Because then—” Then she would have to introduce herself. And then he’d know. And then it would get weird. And this wasn’t weird. Well, it was weird, but it wasn’t weird in the way that every other interaction in her lifetime had ended up weird.

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