OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (35 page)

Not a particularly coherent answer. When he tried to take another swig of medicine, I intercepted it. "What
is
that, anyway?"

He tugged.

Disgusting though it was to let my fingers touch his, I held tighter.

He made a snarling sound, tugged harder, and pulled it loose, sloshing some onto his hand. Then he licked it off his hand. Then he grinned sleepily at me, and savored the word on his tongue.
"Opi-yummm."

"What?"

"Street legal, too." After one more swig, he corked it and handed it to me. I read the label, which looked like something you'd find at an antique store, but not faded. There were no ingredients or nutritional information. But it was called laudanum and, among other things, it promised "safe and miraculous relief from pain."

"This is addictive, you idiot!"

"Well
duh
!" He closed his eyes and took a deep, deep breath, then sighed it out, seeming to shrink as he did. I don't think the pain was bothering him as badly. "So I'll check into rehab when I get home. Big fucking deal."

Exhausted, completely overwhelmed, I put the bottle down on the floor beside him—then registered what he
'd just said and sat up so fast I almost fell off the chair. "When you get
home
?"

But Everett, the son of a bitch, was asleep.

"
Everett!
Wake
up
!" I grabbed the front of his shirt—eiuww—and shook him. We could go
home
? I
ached
to go home! I needed a hug from my Nana. I needed to check on my cats. I wanted to tell Rita about everything that had happened, and I mean
everything
, and to sleep in a real
bed,
preferably my own!

I wanted some freaking
air conditioning
, almost more than life itself.

No good. I let go of him and wiped my hands on my overlong,
Little House on the Prairie
skirt. This couldn't be happening to me.

Someone knocked, firmly and quietly, at the back door. I glanced at it and hesitated, torn between two worlds. Then I made up my mind and kicked the bed and hissed, "Everett, you scum-sucking pig!"

Nothing. I clenched my fists and growled to myself in frustration.
Nothing!

But I just couldn
't bring myself to hurt his injured leg again, not now that my initial fury had faded, not now that I had
hope
. Oh, he still deserved pain...but he was already in it. I couldn't hurt him just to hurt him. He would be conscious tomorrow...wouldn't he?

I eyed him, wary, in the heavy shadows. With my luck I would come back in the morning and he
'd have pulled an Amy Winehouse.

The knock came again, a little louder, not to be ignored. I noticed beyond the pulled curtains that while I
'd been interrogating Everett, the sun had set. Even back home—in Chicago, in my condo—I'd disliked answering the door after dark. Now I wasn't at home, and everything was wrong, and I couldn't turn on the lights, and this door didn't even have a peephole. I thought I knew who it was, but still... en route, I picked up an oil lamp from the table beside Everett's bed, just in case. It hung from a metal handle, so I could probably sling it against someone's head if I had to.

But when I opened the door to a familiar, solid silhouette against the darkening sky, I felt relieved that I didn
't have to hit anyone. Relieved, and majorly weirded out. Here I stood, a 21
st
-century professional woman, wearing something out of
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
and opening the door for my cowboy lover in Dodge City, Kansas.

Cue the
Twilight Zone
theme.

Refusing to be any less real just because of my newfound perspective, Garrison looked at the lamp, then slid his gaze to the shadows behind me. "Works better lit," he drawled.

I could have hugged him for making a joke. I needed a joke. I needed a
lot
of jokes. After all, I'd been torn from everything I owned, everything I'd ever worked for. The best burglar in the world couldn't have done that, but the upper management at A Closer Look had. No one I loved, from my pets to my grandmother, was even alive now. Did it matter that instead of not being alive
anymore
, they just weren't alive
yet
? Gone was still gone.

This had not been a particularly good day—and I still didn
't know if I could get home. But maybe I could. Maybe.

I grabbed Garrison
's hand and pulled him into the room. "Can you wake him up? Please?"

After only a moment
's hesitation, he stepped awkwardly in—cowboys do walk so awkwardly—and crouched beside Everett's bed. Even while I shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, his movements stayed slow, deliberate. He checked Everett's eyes, smelled his breath. Then he took a closer look at the bottle, considered it, and snorted his disgust. "Nope."

I made a guttural noise of frustration. When Garrison stood—slowly, why hadn
't I noticed how
slowly
he moved until now?—he looked from me to Everett and back, curious.

"I think he knows how I can get home," I explained, catching back my impatience, belatedly putting down the lamp—and then wringing my useless, empty hands. "Unless he was delirious, which is a good possibility, even if he
weren't
sucking opiates, the idiot."

I scowled at the silent, unconscious idiot... then I looked back at my historical companion. "I know about home, now. I want to go home.
"

Garrison waited for a moment, and when I didn
't say more he offered, "Railroad goes to Chicago. Pastor might could find you an escort."

The solution was said so sincerely, and was so completely inadequate to my situation, that I felt something break inside me. Now I
did
hug him. I stepped up against him, put my arms around him and rested my cheek on his scratchy lapel, telling myself it was just for the moment. It probably wasn't the wisest thing to do. He wasn't part of the world I had to get back to. And the solid feel and outdoorsy smell of him, a wonderful contrast to Everett's sickroom, reminded me of this afternoon.

Thoughts of what we
'd done this afternoon sent shy tingles sparkling through me, and had me thinking of this man as more than a protector.

Garrison raised a belated hand lightly to my back, returning my gesture soberly. Had that been the same Boss as this one? No wonder I couldn
't figure out people of this day and age.

Not that he
'd figured me out any better.

"The railroad doesn
't go where I need," I half-explained with a sigh, unwilling to prove my insanity by telling him where that might be. "But thank you very much for the suggestion." And I felt him nod.

I also smelled something new, something warm and rich that drew my mind back from the distraction of my futuristic reality to the momentarily safe simplicity of his. When I looked up, to better identify the scent, I caught him looking down at me. "You
've been drinking," I guessed, surprised.

Well wasn
't this a day of sin for
him
?

He stiffened, expression hardening, and his hand dropped away. "One drink."

I laughed at his defensiveness and stood back from him. Oh man, if he could have seen me that time Rita came over and made daiquiris!

Probably just as well he couldn
't. 

"It
's okay, Boss. I don't blame you. Just...let's get out of here, okay? Please?" And with his hand again on my back, as if to guide me, we left Everett sleeping off his laudanum and emerged into the fresh air of Second Avenue, Dodge City, in the summer twilight.

It was sooo strange to look around me this time, because finally I could put everything into its true context. Remembering Elizabeth
's world,
my
world of traffic jams and airports and streaming video, definitely explained the surrealism I'd found in dirt roads, mule teams, and infinitely dark night skies. The false-fronted buildings and saloons and cowboys, and the sounds of partying—laughter, piano music—floating across Front Street from the wrong side of the tracks were
history!
Living, breathing history.

So was the quiet of this side street on the decent side of town now that the stores had closed. So was the solid, silent trail boss at my side. This afternoon I
'd hit a piece of history.

That was probably
not
a good thing. Despite the quiet, I still couldn't quite relax. This complication didn't help.

Already today he
'd misjudged me as a slut—first a professional prostitute, then an amateur tramp so desperate to hook myself a husband that I'd gambled my innocence on his sense of duty and won. In this day and age, how could I possibly convince him that losing my virginity, much less possible pregnancy,
wasn't
grounds for marriage?

Considering the horror stories I
'd heard from pregnant friends dumped by long-term lovers or pressured to have abortions—some of the very stories that, along with fear of STDs, had kept me away from casual sex while I waited for love—the Boss's old-fashioned principles seemed kind of sweet, really. If simplistic. But they wouldn't get me home.

Then, just as I was trying to formulate excuses that my sweet, 19th-century prude would accept, Garrison pulled a 180 and announced, "Set you up at a boardinghouse."

And nostalgia stumbled to a halt. I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly, but my shoulders stiffened at the betrayal even as I asked, "At a
what
?"

He frowned, probably not too fond of that particular tone, but he repeated himself for me. "Placed you at a boardin
' house."

The hell with traffic jams and retirement communities—as I drew a shaky breath, I couldn
't even speak over a much more recent memory. Belle and Dixie had talked about boardinghouses. And Alice.
Fresh ones like that work the dance halls, maybe one of the boardinghouses....

Had I misjudged his sense of duty that badly? Or had my refusal of his offer, after my sexual ruin, insulted him this much! Anger and hurt and shock jammed up in my throat, and I couldn
't make a sound. Garrison looked increasingly impatient and superior, like maybe he was thinking,
turn
me
down, will you?

And in the face of that one, final betrayal, I couldn
't even manage a squeak, much less an argument—so in frustration, I simply stomped on his foot.

Hard.

I wouldn't have thought Mr. Slow-and-Steady could move that fast, but in one quick leap he'd achieved an arm's length from me, circling and reaching out defensively to make sure he stayed that way if I came at him again. He was limping. And glaring. "What in
tarnation
—"

He
was glaring? "You son-of-a —" Now that my throat unclogged I barely caught myself in time, and made up for the edited swear word by smacking at his defensive hand. "How dare you? How
dare
you!"

He continued his slow, hobbled circle
on the dirt street, still at arm's length—and had the gall to look confused. "How dare...?"

But, considering the day I
'd had, I was past hearing warning bells. "Yes, how dare
you!
" When I stepped forward to hit at him again, he dodged, which just frustrated me further. I didn't like having to turn in a circle to keep up with him. That was probably the point. "I'm
not
that kind of a woman, you... you
yokel
! Maybe I didn't know if I was or not at first, and maybe I even thought I was for a while there, but that's because—"
Because I'm from the future where we aren't such stuffed shirts? Good one, Lillabit.
"—because idiots like that Army Major and Everett-the-scum-pig and high-and-mighty
you
made me think there was something wrong with me. But I know who I am now and you were all
wrong
!

"
I thought you understood that, that you of all people understood that, but fat chance finding a man who understands anything around
here
. And you know what? I don't
care
anymore! Believe what you want to believe, but I'll tell
you
something, Mr. Jacob-Hypocrite-of-the-West Garrison, I am
not
going to any boardinghouse, and I am
not
going to any dance hall, and I am
never
going anywhere near those cribs ever again, because I'm better than that and I've got
other
places to go, and if you don't like it you can just...just
lump
it!"