by Nancy Warren
Chance Encounter
Take a Chance, Prequel
Nancy Warren
Ambleside Publishing
Chance Encounter
Copyright © 2014 by Nancy Warren
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Chapter One
June, 1976
On the Greyhound bus heading from California to Oregon
Daphne Naigle was making a list. As the Greyhound bus rolled north and California sunshine gave way to darkening skies and then drizzle, she passed the time writing in her neat, round handwriting, all the things she could now call herself.
Fallen Woman. That topped the list. Such an old fashioned term.
Slut.
Single mom. She tapped the end of her pen against the page. Crossed that out neatly. On a fresh line she wrote.
Single teenaged mom.
A shiver of fear trembled through her the way the wind was blowing through the trees on the side of the highway.
She’d be nineteen when her baby was born. Her hand slipped to where her waist used to be. At five months pregnant, she wasn’t showing that much but she hadn’t been able to zip up a pair of jeans in four weeks. She wore sweats, mostly. And bulky shirts.
She crossed out the last item on her list. Rewrote it one more time.
STUPID, pregnant teenaged slut.
She started to write Adulteress but she crossed that out too. She’d take the rap for a lot of this mess, but her American History prof had told her he was separated before she let him take her to bed.
She hadn’t known that separated, in his terms, meant that his wife and kids were visiting her family back in Virginia for a month.
She let her head drop back on the padded seat. The bus changed gears and jolted slightly. He looked like Sidney Poitier, she thought. And as she’d sat there in class, mesmerized by his deep, rich, professorial voice and heard him lecture with passion on freedom and justice, she’d believed in him with every fiber of her being.
She worked harder in his class than any other, and when he’d asked her to help him research a book he was writing, she’d been thrilled.
Naïve fool.
There was a young guy sitting in the seat across the aisle from hers. The bus wasn’t very full so the only people sharing seats were the ones traveling together. Everybody else got two seats to themselves.
She’d noticed him checking her out as soon as he got on the bus a few towns back. He wasn’t much older than she was. In his early twenties, probably. In a different time, she’d have flirted with him to pass the time. He looked cute, with curly hair that fell to his shoulders, hunky body in a well-worn denim jacket and jeans.
But she didn’t flirt. Not anymore.
The miles dragged on. Her eyes grew heavy. She felt the rattle of the bus as her head slipped so it was against the window. Ow. She pulled a sweater out of her bag, bundled it against her cheek and let sleep take her.
“Are you all right?” A low, soft male voice startled her.
Daphne blinked, not sure where she was. Her heart was thudding and black shadows of a nightmare clung. She blinked again and thudded back to reality. The bus. The young guy from across the aisle, now sitting beside her, looking worried.
“I’m fine.” She realized her cheeks were wet and wiped at them with her hands.
“Here,” he said. He handed her a red bandana. “It’s clean.”
“Thanks.” She wiped her face.
“Go ahead, blow your nose. I have another one.”
She did. Feeling embarrassed. “Was I making noise?”
“You were crying in your sleep. It wasn’t loud, just really sad.”
“Sorry.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She glanced down at her lap and saw that her notebook was sitting open. No way he could have missed reading what was written there. Not only had she underlined STUPID pregnant teenaged slut but she’d gone over the word stupid a few times with her pen. Shit.
“What are you, a minister?” She felt bitchy and cranky and who needed a complete stranger poking into her problems?
“No. I’m a guy on a bus with some hours to kill. I’m a good listener. A stranger. Sometimes it helps to talk.”
She glanced at him and she thought he had the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. Blue, so blue, and yet there was a hardness to his face that made her wonder.
She took her fingertip and pointed to the words, STUPID pregnant teenaged slut, in her notebook. “That’s my story. Right there.”
He reached over and put his hand over hers, only for a moment but she felt the warmth, the leathery palm that suggested he worked with his hands. “That’s not a story,” he said. “That’s some shit you’d find scrawled on a bathroom wall.”
Before her bemused gaze, he reached over and ripped the page out of her notebook with a satisfyingly destructive sound. He tore the page in half. Then he turned the two pieces to the side and ripped again. He crumped the jagged squares of paper into a ball and stuffed them into the seat pocket in front of him where someone had left an empty Snickers Bar wrapper.
He picked up her pen before it could fall to the floor, reached once more over the now fresh page in her notebook and wrote in big block letters.
THE BEGINNING. He handed her back her pen. “That’s your story.”
She felt the fluttering movement in her belly that reminded her of how true those words were. “Okay. The beginning.”
He held out a hand. “Jack.”
“Daphne.”
“Good to know you, Daphne.”
He settled beside her and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to go back to his own seat or not.
He was right. He was a stranger she’d never see again, what did it matter if he knew the awful truth about her?
He had a pocketbook in his hand, as though he’d been reading when her sobs reached him. Mortifying thought.
She glanced at the title. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice.
He saw the direction of her gaze and said, “You read this?”
“No. Never heard of it.”
“It’s pretty good. I’m almost done. You can have it when I’m finished.”
“A man sucking a woman’s life blood out of her and leaving her undead is too much like my life right now,” she said. Then winced. “That was a little heavy on the self pity, right?”
“Maybe a little.” He turned his head and once more she was struck with the blueness of his eyes. Something about him made her want to trust him. “I bet your story’s as interesting as this one.”
“Don’t you want to tell me yours?” She couldn’t remember ever meeting a guy who didn’t seem more interested in his own story than in anything she had to say.
&
nbsp; “Nah. I’m rewriting my story, anyway.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Can you do that?”
“Sure? Why not?”
Chapter Two