Hungry Heart - E. D. James

The trains rolled smoothly that day, the rhythm of the stations and the patrons falling into place from the start. Alan had always thought that the system was like a living organism in that way. There were times when it seemed that nothing would go right. Trains broke down, people threw themselves on the tracks, passengers were fighting and angry and he wondered if the thing could even keep running. If maybe the chaos would overcome the energy of the system and they would just have to give up on it. Walk away and let the tracks and tunnels grow in with weeds and become shelters for the homeless. Then there were times when everything was tight. The trains were strong and the stations sparkled and the team and it’s passengers all seemed in harmony, like Snow White with the birds and the animals and dwarves before the wicked witch ruined it all with that tasty apple. It was on those days that the song came to him most strongly, surging through the tunnels and filling him with a feeling that the life force ran through every molecule in a way that he could tap into and ride like a surfer on an endless cresting blue wave of clear warm water.

Standing in the open window at the Embarcadero station watching the passengers file in for the ride east, he suddenly admitted to himself that she made him feel that way too. When he had come home the night before and she was still there in his bed, and in the morning when she’d come dancing into the kitchen in those goofy clothes he’d bought her, he felt a clarity and easiness that had eluded him since he was a child. He tried to separate that feeling from her. To find it in himself as basic force that he could harness to bring his life meaning and energy. He knew deep down that there was no future for them. That even if he could pull off this scheme to free her from Vinokurov they could never be together. She might love him in a way. She might even have let him feel that love in her body. But he was a fifty-two year old BART train operator and she was a beautiful creature at the beginning of her life. For the first time he knew that he had to find in himself the courage to love and be loved. He knew that he hungered at his very core to be with a woman who knew all of him and would accept him unconditionally. He knew that the drinking and the depression were weak ways to hide from exposing himself in a way that might allow him to find the love his heart desired. And suddenly he knew that risking his life to free this woman would free him too. Then he closed the window and the song filled him and he slammed his palm on the big red button that sent the train humming through the tube and out under the bay and he had a clear vision of his destiny for the first time in his life.