Grinning and feeling rather pleased with herself, her quiet moment of victory was nullified by a distant wondering of what the rest of the passengers were thinking about her. Were they thinking that she was ill-mannered? Well, judging by her experiences so far in rural southern China, she wasn’t particularly convinced that manners mattered all that much.
A stray thought, rogue and evil, flitted through her mind, and Terry grew cross with herself. Were they contemplating her size? When she had landed in Hong Kong, her first ever visit to China (though people had been quick to point out that though Hong Kong was technically part of China, they were entirely different culturally, and she had blamed her guidebook), she had become extremely aware of how slight everybody was, especially the women. Terry was a big girl, even by standards back home, and standing at nearly five feet and eight inches, she was also a couple of notches past the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI chart. She reconciled that particular factoid with the knowledge that the BMI chart put body builders in the unhealthy range, too. Still, drunken lads had called her names while they sped by in their cars many times before, and her memories of school were not as fond as she would have liked.
Terry reprimanded herself internally for letting such a harmless little worry prick her like that. She was a confident woman, and ninety-nine percent of the time she didn’t suffer from self-esteem issues. But even then, sometimes her mental toughness wavered. Nobody was tough all the time. Everybody had a little downtime.
Forget it, she thought to herself. For years now she had been perfectly at ease, and very comfortable with herself. She felt sexy, and knew that men found her sexy, too. She summoned up that self-confidence she knew she had, even though it had been weakened the last few days.
Arriving in Hong Kong, and seeing that she wasn’t actually much shorter at all than the average guy, and almost certainly bigger and heavier than the average girl, had done a number on her self-esteem, and all that confidence she had molded simply didn’t fit into the slot presented anymore. She found it hard, at first, to plug that hole, to stop worrying so much because of the sudden change in relativity. It was a ridiculous comparison to make, too. Ethnic genetic differences alone meant that it couldn’t possibly be apples to apples, it couldn’t be useful in any meaningful way.
Those dark clouds of insecurity had faded quickly, though. If there was one thing Terry was proud of, it was her resilience. She was strong mentally, and she had to be, growing up with crazy parents, crazier brothers, getting a crazy job with an even crazier boss. Yeah, it hadn’t been all peaches and cream back home in London.
But even being as strong as she was, even having the mental fortitude to beat her inner demons most of the time, it didn’t always immunize her against that waifish, random thought, the one that somehow made it past all her psychological defenses, snuck past the mental barricades, and flitted its way right into the center of her consciousness where it then proceeded to chirp and screech and call attention to itself. Those were the kind of doubts and worries that were the hardest to eliminate.
Terry sighed. This was a hurdle that she was going to have to clear – and the sooner the better – if she was going to spend any considerable time in Asia. She laughed for a moment, considering the thought. Asia. That giant continent full of dozens of countries, and yet, until she had arrived in Hong Kong, it had all sort of seemed the same to her.
Her encounter with a man quick to tell her that Hong Kong was not the same as China had been the first time Terry had really come to grips with the idea that within Asia – heck, even within China – the cultures were diverse, different, individual in their own ways, and, most importantly, proud. The last thing she wanted to do was leave a trail of people offended by her ignorance as she traveled from place to place. She didn’t want to be that kind of tourist. It mattered to her, not because she was easily harmed by the barbed words of others, but because she held herself to a high standard. Tourists were often ignorant of the complex culture back home, and they always came across worse off for it.
Terry awoke from her brief moment of reverie, looking up the front of the train. It was rattling on its rails, only five carriages long, each one sounding as barebones as hers. The engine car was huffing out great, leathery plumes of smoke, and there was enough of a crosswind to pull them to the side, so that they did not spoil the view on her side.
The weather had changed overnight, from grumbling clouds and annoying intermittent showers to clear skies, humid heat, and harsh sunshine. Far off in the distance, back toward the city of Nanning, she could see the city’s gray smog hanging in the air, and it looked like a murky plastic bag floating on the surface of the sea when seen from beneath.
Terry grinned when she remembered that she had thought that the train ride would be like ones she had seen photos of in India, with mountains of people holding on for dear life on the sides and tops of the cars as the train sped loudly along its way. But that again had been just another assumption, something she was quite glad to be wrong about, especially since the train wasn’t stable at all. People would be falling off left and right. It would just be a total disaster.
In front of her, four windows up, she saw a hand poke through the gap. She desperately hoped that the person wasn’t going to open the window. But the person did. The hand shot down as the window slid into its recess (but not without making a creaking complaint), and Terry’s nostrils were flooded with the smell of manure again.
“Fuck,” she said quietly to herself. Oh well, it was better than having her head inside the train. A small farm shot by, and Terry got a brief glimpse of a young girl picking vegetables out of the ground. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Having spent the last two days in cities, she hadn’t really been confronted by the staggering poverty in China yet, though it was unlikely she would ever get an accurate sense of its scale. Hong Kong had been rich, prosperous, civilized, and easy. Guangzhou, a little less so, but the city planning had done a good job of hiding the impoverished, relegating them to the outskirts. Nanning was a little direr, a little less glossy, but was still nothing like the bleak image of a child picking vegetables when she should really be in school.
It made her reflect on her own fairly well-off upbringing. Growing up in the same small townhouse just outside London, she’d never before even seen a proper vegetable farm, let alone a child worker. With no relatives in the country, Terry and her family were oddly provincial, in their own little suburban way. She hadn’t even really left the city, except for school field trips to the potteries and things like that. Her family had been pretty good earners, too. It was a two car household, and her and her brothers had all gone to quite good schools.
When people talked about culture shock, they often mentioned food, religion, and in some cases, hygiene. But this was something that Terry had been unprepared for. The reality that she had it so much better off than so much of the world, and that, for most of her life – heck, even all of it – she had taken it for granted, was a little crushing. And it didn’t help that the smell of animal shit seemed to envelop the entire train carriage!
“Ugh,” she griped, pulling her head back inside the window. She climbed down as gracefully as she could – she was climbing down backward – off the bench, picked up her backpack, mildly grunting with exertion as she did so, and began to push her way through the throng of people toward the door at the end of the carriage. She figured there would be somewhere to stand outside where the two carriages were joined, and she could at least be out of the crap-current.
“Excuse me,” she said, remembering then that probably nobody understood her. “Mei guan xi, mei guan xi.” She pushed her arms in between bodies and pried them apart so that she could get through. It was sort of amusing at first, until she realized that she was going to have to get through about thirty people, standing so close they could all probably smell each other’s breath. Terry couldn’t help but laugh. And she thought the tube was bad!
“Sorry.”
/> “Excuse me.”
“Mei guan xi.”
Eventually she made it to the door, exhaling with relief. She twisted the handle, pulled the door, and heard a dull metal thud. Shit.
“No, you’ve got to be joking,” Terry said, twisting the handle again and rattling the door in its frame. “Why would they lock it?” She could feel the frustration welling inside her, and in a momentary outburst of irritation, shook the door again. This time it slid open, and she looked to her side to see that somebody standing nearby had pulled a latch which had unlocked the door.
“Thank you,” she said, blood rushing to her face. “Xie xie.” She hoped she had said it right in Mandarin, and quickly slid the door shut behind her. All of the people looking at her were blocked out of sight, and she felt immeasurably better.
“Thank God,” she muttered. She reluctantly conceded that her ultimate getaway, her great escape, wasn’t going as fantastically as she had planned. But it was only the beginning.
In front of her, across a small bridge with no handrails, was the door to the next compartment. Though it had no window in it, she was fairly certain that the carriage was just as crowded as hers had been, and probably contained just as many animals, too. Instead, she moved toward the side, along the small ledge that protruded, as though the carriage was sticking its tongue out, and where there was a railing. Moving toward the edge, she poked her head out from in between the two carriages, felt the sudden rush of wind against her face, the roar of it drowning out even the sounds of her own breathing.
Fantastic, she thought. She couldn’t smell the manure here anymore. Happy with that simple pleasure, she leaned against the railing, watching the countryside whisk by, a blur of dark green, brown, and the gray-blue of the sky. The sight was framed by the edge of the carriages that she was in between, making it seem brighter than it really was.
Again, another one of those thoughts snuck past her mental barricades. This time, though, it was a doubt: What are you doing?
What are you doing?
* * *
The sound of the door to the adjoining carriage sliding open made Terry jump. She assumed it was a guard, walking up and down the train, possibly even checking tickets. Though how he would squeeze through all the people, she didn’t know.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw someone obviously very tall, well over six feet. He had his back toward her as he closed the door to the carriage behind him. The v-shape of his back was pronounced, and his well-fitting dark-blue jeans and white t-shirt informed her that, beneath them, was the olive-colored body of a swimmer.
This was definitely not a guard.
“Hey,” she said, for a moment forgetting that she was in a foreign country, and that it was extremely unlikely this person would know English.
The man barely turned, but Terry instantly knew that he was a looker, despite managing to only see the side profile of his face. It was also immediately evident that he was a traveler, too, and that he might very well speak English.
Her eyes and his locked for the briefest of moments, and it felt like she had passed a finger through a candle’s flame.
He nodded at her without speaking, turning to face her now, his tawny eyes hard and icy, as though they had never expressed any sort of emotion before. He clenched his jaw, sharp as an axe, and then seemed to will himself to speak. “Hi.” It was a quiet voice, deep and disinterested.
Terry tried to find his eyes again. She wanted to feel that jolt of electricity again, that charge of static. It was a rush, and she wasn’t sure if it was a fluke or not. But even though he looked at her, she felt that he was not looking into her eyes. When gaze traveled up and down her body, slowly and with precision, the temptation to be indignant about it was overwhelming. But she realized that she’d done the same to him.
She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t think of what to say, and so she smiled instead. His tussled dark brown hair looked as though it had been punished by the wind, blown back like he’d had his head out of the carriage window. She saw a hairline oddly straight, like his give-or-take thirty years of age wasn’t doing what it had supposed to by now.
When he didn’t smile back, and instead walked across the small bridge between the two cars, an unexplainable readiness in his stride, his strong and stringy arm outstretched to open the door to the carriage she had been in, Terry spoke, unwilling yet to let the striking man go. If anything, he was something of interest on a train ride where she found little else interesting.
“You don’t want to go in there,” she told him, pointing at the door.
“Why not?” he asked, turning his head to the side to look at her. His words were accented, but like nothing she’d ever heard before. The emphasis he put on the ‘h’ sound was a little strange, and there was a hint of something approaching an Australian accent, or a Kiwi one. Terry certainly couldn’t tell the difference.
Their eyes met again, and while Terry felt the same quickening of her heart, he didn’t seem to feel anything at all. He looked solemn and serious, and even weary, though not in a stand-out way. Almost like the tiredness was buried in his bones. He immediately gave off the impression of a man weighed down by something, and Terry’s imagination took off on its own, so much so that she had to blink and bite it back, reign it in.
“Um,” she said, unable to stop herself from grinning. It struck her that this was actually pretty damn lucky. Here she was on what she would politely describe as a train lacking in any kind of comfort, speeding through rural southern China, and just in the neighboring carriage to hers there was not just another person who she could communicate with, but one who was also a total fucking stunner.
She swallowed, and jerked her head at the carriage she had been in. “There’s animals in there.”
“What?” he asked, his eyes growing impossibly harder for a moment, like windows to a terrible temper that might flare.
“Uh, animals? You know, like livestock. Sheep, and I think a buffalo? Maybe there were goats. Or was it pigs? Maybe there was a dog, too. I’m not sure.” She became aware that the words were just spilling out of her mouth, and so she clamped her teeth together.
“In there?” he asked, pointing with his thumb toward the carriage door.
“Uh huh. Yes.”
“In there, too.” He jerked his thumb the other way, and his lips curled into the tiniest of smiles.
“Oh yeah?” Terry said, wishing she would stop smiling like an idiot, but she was completely unable to. She knew she must look like a buffoon. She felt like she was a schoolgirl again, and she had just locked eyes with the hottest guy in school. She couldn’t shift her gaze even if she wanted to. “I think this train was originally meant for animals only.”
“Except for the benches,” he replied, leaning his shoulder against the door and looking at her. He seemed to be studying her, and so Terry took that as a license to study him back. She’d already taken in his face, handsomeness that teetered on the edge of prettiness but was saved from that boy-band look by hard angles, and now that she had an opportunity to pay more attention, a collection of scars. So instead she studied his body, broad rounded shoulders, tapering to a narrow waist, almost as though he belonged in a magazine. His collar bones jutted out, and beneath his dark and brooding eyes, they reminded her of a pirate’s skull and cross-bones.
His long body, not stretched, seemed locked in a state of flex, as though ever ready to pounce or sprint. He didn’t look uncomfortable, but he looked as though he held his body to a high standard of efficiency, right down to his movements. She noticed that, while she wiggled her foot, clenched her toes, and bit on loose strands of skin from her cuticles, he had no wasted movements, and as a result, made her feel uneasy.
“I’m Terry,” she said, extending a hand. She pushed it quickly out at him, thumb pointing toward the sky.
“Liam,” he answered, without taking it.
“You’re pretty terrible at introductions, Liam.” She looked at him, her head tit
led to the side. As though it were the hardest thing on earth, he extended his own arm and took her hand, shaking it. “There we go,” Terry said, her hand swallowed up in his. “Was that so hard? Wow, you, uh, have really big hands.”
“Your hands are just small.” He let go of hers and she looked at it, fingers extended.
“No, I think it’s yours that are big. Mine look pretty normal.”
“Yeah,” he said, giving her a slow nod. “Okay.”
“So what are you doing out here?”
“Where?”
“Um,” Terry said, wondering if she should ask what he was doing in China, on the train, or outside the train in between two carriages. She shrugged, and pointed down at the ledge they were both standing on.
“Smells like shit in my carriage.” He did his best impression of a smile again. The corner of his lips moved about a millimeter, and yet there was a charm to it. She wondered what he would be like if he really did let loose, break out a full smile or laugh. It would be disarming.
“Yeah, in mine as well,” Terry said, nodding. “So, why are you on this train?”
“It’s going to Pingxiang.”
She blinked, unsure if it was a question or not. “Yeah?”
“So am I.”
“I see.” Terry couldn’t help but laugh. What the hell was wrong with this guy? It was like he had never had a conversation in his life. “Are you going to Pingxiang for any particular reason?”
“Walking over the border into Vietnam.”
“Really? So am I!” Things were going pretty well already, she thought. “Well, we could walk across together.”
Fated Mates: The Alpha Shifter Boxed Set (12 Book Bundle) (Insatiable Reads) Page 124
