Page 28 of The Christmas Express

Cali

Knock knock knock. I wait outside Luke and Joe’s compartment come nightfall, my hands full of tinsel, my heart high up in my throat.

I know Joe’s wandered off somewhere (I just know, okay, I wasn’t spying – much) and Luke’s in there alone, probably lost in whatever novel it is he keeps reading.

‘Come in,’ he calls.

‘Can you slide the door for me?’ I call back.

There’s a pause, a long pause, before I hear his feet pad onto the floor and cross the small gap to the door.

He opens it. He looks messy and like he’s not been sleeping well, and he has a little stubble and his knitted jumper has a whole in it that his thumb is poking through.

He’s like a sexy, grown-up Artful Dodger.

‘Hey, Cali,’ he says, moving to the door frame, his book dangling from his hand. The way he’s shifted his body actually puts him closer to me. We’re in each other’s space, that magnetic pull again, and I find my lips parting as I look at his.

‘Um,’ I breathe. I feel him watching me, and he shifts his weight again, my heart fluttering as it moves him even closer. I move my eyes up to his, to find him gazing down at me, emotions over every part of his face.

‘Um,’ I repeat, and swallow. ‘It’s Christmas Eve night.’ I hold up the tinsel in my hands, and it reflects tiny red streaks onto his face under the overhead spotlights of the carriage.

‘What are you doing with that?’ His lips drift into a small, curious grin, and his hand reaches towards the tinsel I nicked from the bar car, brushing against mine when he touches it.

‘You know what I’m doing with this. What we’re doing.’

‘No.’ Luke shakes his head but I stand firm, edging closer to his cabin so he can’t shut me out, edging closer to him.

‘Please. It’s tradition,’ I insist. ‘It’s Christmas.’

It’s a silly tradition, really, and I’m not going to tell Luke it’s one I’ve carried on, on my own, for the past few years.

But every Christmas Eve night, in the townhouse, he and I used to get together, stick on a Christmas movie, open some mulled wine, and make coordinating tinsel accessories for the whole gang.

They were gaudy, tacky, and usually fell apart by mid-morning on Christmas Day, but it was just something fun, just between us.

He relents and stands aside, and I walk into his room, glancing up as I pass him, a spark zipping between us when we catch eyes that makes my breath catch again.

It’s still there.

Inside his compartment, I take a seat on his bed, already folded out, setting the tinsel between us, along with a collection of hairclips, bobby pins and sticky tape.

Imagine if he just swept it all off onto the floor and kissed me and laid me down and we had a lovely Christmas Eve night that went into Christmas Day and merry Christmas to me.

I shake my head a fraction, barely noticeable. I don’t want that, anyway. I can’t just forget that we aren’t each other’s person any more.

Luke sits opposite me, one leg folded underneath him, the same as me, and picks up the strand of tinsel, playing with it between his fingers.

My mouth is dry, and this guy I used to talk to for hours is like an outsider to me right now, and I can’t think of what to say, even as small talk.

Then he speaks first, in that quiet voice that used to feel like it was just for me to hear.

‘This is a really weird Christmas.’

‘Weird because we’re on a train?’

‘Weird for so many reasons.’ He glances from his tinsel to me, but looks away again quickly.

‘Yeah,’ I agree, and it comes out like a sigh. In that word, I think my body and mind finally acknowledged this fact.

‘I’m...’ Luke starts to say something, but trails off.

I can’t take the silence, my breath is short and high in my throat, and I busy my hands snipping the tinsel into sections using nail scissors, and trying to thread some of it through the claws of a hair clip, just so I don’t get tempted to pick at the spot on my face.

A nervous laugh escapes, and I have to fill the quiet with something.

I don’t think I can handle the heavy conversation that maybe we need to have.

‘Where are you living these days?’ My voice comes out not so much light as high and a little shaky.

‘I’m still in London.’

My tinsel drops to the bed, and I look at him, my mouth hanging open. ‘You still live in London?’

‘Yep.’

Luke’s eyes are trained on his tinsel now, which he’s trimming slowly with the nail scissors, causing tiny bits of red confetti to pepper his bedsheet like shiny little blood spatter.

I stare at the top of his eyelashes, soft, dark, splayed out in a way I’ve always been envious of, to be honest. He still lives in London?

A million thoughts are shimmering for my attention, and I want to ask him all the questions I have.

Instead, what comes out is a statement. ‘I thought you moved away.’

He nods, without looking up. ‘I’m the other side of the city, but that’s as far as I went.’

A sadness, a longing for lost time to magically come back, seeps down me like thick tar. He’s always been in my city, he never left, but he never told me, and I never asked. He’s always been there, but lost in the crowd.

I swallow down the tar, and attempt my lightest voice. ‘Well, I guess in a city of nine million people, it’s easy to miss someone.’ I’ve missed you .

Now he puts down the tinsel and looks at me, properly, his head tilted to the side, and he scans my face, my lips, like he’s reminding himself, remembering. ‘Actually, I was just thinking the opposite. Despite all those people, I saw you once.’

His words hit like a boulder on the railway line. ‘What? Why didn’t you say hi?’

‘I lost all my words. And then you were gone.’

‘Where was this?’

‘A crossing on the Strand. It was autumn, and the ground had all these red leaves from some tree you were standing under, and you were looking down at them, waiting for the lights to change. It was sunny, and only a little cold, and it was that absolutely giant bright pink scarf of yours that first caught my eye. It was a couple of years ago.’

‘I still wear that scarf all the time,’ I croak out, adding precisely nothing to the conversation. He was right there, and I missed him. And it sounds like I was looking pretty cute that day, which isn’t important, but, you know, nice.

I long to be brave enough to have the talk, to ask him why, all those years ago, he chose to leave rather than fight for us, at the very least for our friendship. But if he asked me in return, would I have an answer?

Outside the train window, in the dark, the shapes of the mountains are beginning to rise from the flats of the Plains we’ve been trundling past for the last twenty-four hours. Barely visible against the night sky, if it wasn’t for the moon highlighting their white peaks.

‘Are you going to take a look around Jasper in the morning?’ Luke asks, forcing the conversation to more neutral ground. Probably a good thing. I don’t want to mess this up before the snowflakes have even had a chance to settle again.

I push a smile back across my lips. ‘Absolutely, are you?’

‘Definitely, I’m looking forward to it, to be honest. The Rockies.’

‘It’s going to be a pretty cool way to start Christmas Day,’ I say, and we each reach for some more of the decorations and set about creating our silly little accessories.

The deeper stuff is still chugging underneath me, much like my own personal inner-train, but it makes my feet sweat to think about getting too intense right now, tonight, on a night that once upon a time felt like it was our special night.

‘How’s your family?’ I ask him, always having liked his parents, and his trio of sisters.

‘Good. Mel’s just had a baby.’

‘Another one?’

He smiles at that, like he’s surprised I remembered. ‘Yep, that makes two nephews now.’

‘Congrats.’

‘And your parents? What are they doing over Christmas?’

I tell him about them being away in New Zealand with my brother, about how I went there myself in the summertime.

He talks about a holiday he took to Australia for a month the year before.

I avoid any topic that might bring things around to this made-up bloody boyfriend of mine, and Luke seems to be skirting around that issue too, or maybe I’m just deluding myself that he even cares.

In too short a time we’re finished with our tinsel accessories. We made six, out of habit I guess, and I lay them out in front of us on his bed in a row. ‘Should we... shall we all take a look around Jasper together? What do you think?’

‘I don’t know...’

‘We need to be on good, well, civil at least, terms for Bryn’s wedding. It’s her big day. And we arrive early Boxing Day.’

‘And we need to give out these beautiful creations,’ Luke adds, straightening the row, drawing my eyes to his fingers.

‘Exactly. We should ask if Ember wants to come, too. It might be our last chance to talk her out of everything.’

Luke nods. ‘And we could give her one of the accessories.’

That lights me up like a little Christmas candle, that he wants to include her like that.

Honestly, even though she and I have managed to have a few laughs, she still seems kind of pissed off at us, as a group, which I can only assume is because we lost touch with her.

And gave her an ultimatum. But perhaps if we just keep her close, show her some love, she’ll start to listen and take in our concerns, and then slip away and leave Bryn to live her happy ever after.

‘What if Bryn is giving Ember signs, though?’ I say to Luke.

He leans in towards me. ‘I wondered the same thing. Ember seems convinced this is the wedding the two of them planned, even if it was only theoretical. Maybe Bryn is trying to catch her attention.’

‘That doesn’t seem very Bryn though. She was always kind of straightforward and direct.’

‘Cold feet?’ Luke asks.

‘A little,’ I say, and lift his bed cover to tuck my feet inside, and am just getting cosy when I realise what he meant. ‘You were talking about Bryn. Getting cold feet.’ A giggle pops out.

Luke laughs in return, his face softening, his eyes crinkling.

I want to capture this moment, protect this little flame, because this is real, this ease between us, this laughter.

I blink, just in case I suddenly have the ability to stop time, but no such luck, and as our chuckling diminishes, I hold onto my smile as long as I can.

Removing my feet from his bed, I stand up, collecting the tinsel accessories in my hands carefully, but bumping his book off the bedside table and onto the floor as I go.

‘Oops, sorry,’ I say, crouching down, just as he does the same.

A stone on the tracks, or maybe a little helping hand from the stars, bumps me off balance and I tip closer to Luke.

He catches me, his hand gripping my upper arm and almost immediately loosening once I’m steady.

But he doesn’t move it. Even under my thermal sweatshirt I feel his palm open up, his fingers spreading, trailing slowly, like he’s trying to cover as much area as he can without crossing any of these boundaries that haven’t been broken down between us. Yet.

Luke’s hand slides a centimetre further around the back of my arm. Is he pulling me into him? I’m frozen on the spot; I don’t know what to do.

But I know what I want to do.

His fingertips touch my back and I lick the dryness from my lips. But then he stops, and his hand ebbs back, like he’s remembered himself, and he leaves my skin to tingle without him. He picks up his book and slides his bookmark back into place.

I clear the butterflies that have lodged in my throat and check the cover. ‘A Christmas murder mystery.’

He shrugs one shoulder, and smiles down at the book. ‘As usual.’

‘As usual,’ I agree, remembering his festive reading habits. ‘A gift from your girlfriend?’

Merry Christmas, Cali, here’s a little torture for you.

‘Uh... yeah,’ he replies, and the mood in the room changes, the distance between us widening again.

‘Don’t get any ideas, though,’ I joke. From our place still crouched on the floor, his gaze flicks to mine. Oh my God, get some ideas please, just not murdery ones . ‘Murdery ideas, I mean.’

No. No, this is just proximity and Christmastime and the fact my fake boyfriend can’t hold a decent conversation to save his life. I did not come on this trip to pine after Luke. Yes, I did. No, I didn’t! We did not work then; we will not work now. Get up, Cali.

I obey myself and push up off the floor. Luke does the same and then loads my hands up with the accessories again, and I’m not thinking about whether or not it’s on purpose that his fingers are touching mine because I’m not interested anyway.

I give him a friendship nod. ‘Goodnight, Luke. Merry Christmas Eve.’

‘Nigh-night, Cali.’ He holds open the door and I head the few steps back to my own compartment and don’t give a passing thought to the way he used to say that before we fell asleep beside each other.