OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (36 page)

Halfway through my speech, he finally stopped circling me—which was just as well, since I was dizzy enough from hardly breathing. No, he just stood still, staring at me, and when I finally finished, he closed his eyes and looked tired.

I considered hitting him while he wasn't looking. Instead, I stood there and trembled. Despite everything, I'd trusted him. I'd thought he understood, at least a little. I really had.

He dragged a hand down his face, sucked on his cheeks a moment, then stared pointedly across the street and tightly drawled, "Set you up at Mrs. Charles Rath
's boardinghouse. Same place Chalkey Beeson took his bride afore bringin' her out to his ranch, when first she come from th'East."

Finally he hit me with his gaze, and I was glad he
'd spent some of it on the wall across the way, because it was still burning strong.

He waited.

Oh.

I guess there were different kinds of boardinghouses.

He still waited, radiating annoyance. Obviously my stupidity about things that he found simplistic was rapidly losing its charm, assuming it had ever had any. Especially once I started attacking him for it.

Well.

Huh.

Didn
't I feel silly?

I felt even worse when someone cleared his throat behind me. "Miss? You in need of some assistance here?"

A hesitant glance over my shoulder revealed three unfamiliar, raggedy young cowboys, looking downright mean—and eyeing the Boss. Garrison, for his part, neither moved nor said anything. Probably a wise tactical decision on his part.

"No," I said quickly. "I overreacted to something he said, but it was all a misunderstanding. I
'm perfectly fine now, thank you so much." And I went to Garrison's side, took his arm, patted it.
See what friends we are? No reason to kill him on my account.

They nodded, suspicious. But the lure of the party across the street was apparently too much for them.
They were teenagers, after all. The leader said, "As long as you're all right then, miss," and touched his hat. Then they backed partway away, turned, and loped off toward the fun.

Some terror, those Dodge City cowboys.

Oh God.

I took a deep shaky breath, then another, and tried to tell myself it didn
't matter, but only pretended to believe myself. Finally I said, in a small voice, "I'm sorry."

For an uncomfortable moment, I thought he was going to let me stand there forever. But with a long,
long
sigh—Jacob the Martyr—he turned and guided me down Front Street, away from the noise and sidewalks, back toward the eastern side of town.

I could tell he was trying not to limp and didn
't dare look at him. "Did I hurt you?"

"Not hardly," he said,
his voice tight.

It doesn
't
matter,
Elizabeth. This isn't your world. You only have to survive here long enough to get
back
to your world. Diet Coke. Antibiotics.  Air-conditioning.

A particularly explosive ruckus across the tracks startled me, and I felt glad for Garrison walking between me and the street.

No random gunfire... at least not in your neighborhood.

Wow, he was quiet...and I couldn
't blame him. I'd just accused him,
him
, of pimping me out! "I am
so
sorry," I tried again.

"So you said."

I was probably pushing this, but... "You didn't accept it."

We
'd passed the Long Branch, the Alamo, the Alahambra, and the hardware store with the big wooden gun hanging outside. He turned me north onto a wide dirt path—er, road—away from Front Street. I saw that Beatty and Kelley's restaurant, across the way, was still open, just as advertised. Ahead lay residences, randomly spaced across the nighttime prairie that stretched forever beyond them.

"The yokel accepts," said Garrison
, finally.

Ouch
. "I didn't mean that," I told him, and knew it sounded weak. "Or... or whatever else I called you, either. I was just trying to come up with names that weren't swear words."

He sighed, tired. He
'd had a full day, too, even without jail or learning he was from another reality.

We didn
't speak again until we'd reached Mrs. Rath's boardinghouse, at which point I felt even guiltier. Though large, it was a about as plain as a house can get—a square, white, two-story clapboard, surrounded by an unpainted picket fence on a bigger, scruffy dirt lot. But light shone, welcoming, from its rectangular windows. It felt homey. Lived in.
Safe.

A horse stood patiently at a wooden
post that stuck out of the ground near the fence, waiting, wearing Garrison's saddle.

The Boss led me to the
screen door and knocked, then released my arm and stood in a thick silence that I didn't dare breach until a blonde woman, easily as pretty as her bustled, blue silk dress, appeared at the door. To my surprise, she looked to be my age.The Boss swept off his hat.

"Mr. Garrison!
" she greeted, her large eyes brightening at the sight of me in particular. "Thank you for returning so promptly. And this must be...."

"Elizabeth Rhinehart," I introduced myself—
finally
!—and noticed too late that he'd opened his mouth to do it. To cover, I offered my hand, which she took and squeezed lightly.

"Car
oline Rath," she returned—aha! So her first name wasn't
Mrs. Charles
. "Please, do come in, both of you! Thank you, Mr. Phelps," she called to another boarder who headed upstairs, then turned back to us. "Have you had supper, Miss Rhinehart?"

After the excitement of the day, could I even
eat
supper? I decided if I weren't hungry now, I'd probably be hungry later, and I shook my head.

"The regular boarders take the formal meal at six o
'clock sharp," she explained, as we followed her to a small living room, "Breakfast at seven, and dinner at noon. But I would be happy to fix you some soup before I retire. Why don't the pair of you sit in the parlor until it's ready?"

Garrison nodded nervously, and I let him lead me
further into the "parlor," a lovely, if cramped, little sitting room. The ceiling seemed low to me, its stripe of the second-story's floorboards unusual. An enormous pelt of thick fur covered the floor—a buffalo hide, I realized—and the walls had plain plaster, but they were prettied up by numerous portraits and paintings, several even propped at a tilt between the doorjambs and the ceiling. Shiny chocolate brocade covered the skirted sofa, and a dark wood box piano, also skirted, huddled beside it with lamps and knick-knacks crowded across its top. A glass lamp hung from the ceiling, warm with its glow. What a study in contrasts!

But a
t least I for once
understood
why my surroundings felt so strange to me. Among other things, there was no television and no coffee table.

I hesitated to even sit—shouldn
't there be velvet cords roping the furniture off from the public?—but belatedly realized that the Boss wasn't just waiting to make sure I settled in. He meant to sit too, and wouldn't until I did.

And he had a hurt foot. Oh God. I sank, chagrined, onto
the sofa and smoothed my old-fashioned skirt over its petticoat cushioning. He sat beside me—with several respectable inches between us, of course—and laid his hat on the end table.

We could hear Mrs. Rath bustling in the kitchen nearby...
almost as if she were making extra noise to
remind
us how nearby she was. Something about that, and about the privacy of the sitting room itself—weren't there other boarders?—and about Garrison's stiff silence beside me, finally clicked.

Good heavens, the woman was
chaperoning us!

"What did you tell her?" I demanded quietly, twisting in my seat to face him. When I did, my knee bumped his. He shifted so that we had respectable distance again, and it seemed so absurd.  We
'd had sex this afternoon—hot, exciting, physical
sex
—but heaven forbid our knees touch tonight.

With Mrs. Rath heating soup in the other room, and a big goodbye looming ahead, I would probably do better not to think about the sex.

"Told her we're engaged," Garrison admitted finally, sullen.

Oh my. "I thought you never lied."

His gaze caught mine and didn't waver.
Oh
my. He didn't think he was lying!

I didn
't know what to say.

He did. But he had to look away to say it. "Mornin
', I'll come by for you, take you to Reverend Wright. He's a fair man; just built a new church. By midday I'll have the herd movin' again, make camp early, come back in the evenin' for..." he lowered his already quiet voice for the next two words,  "...
for appearances
. Head out afterward, the next day. You'll be fine here until spring. By then I'll have a house built, leastwise a cabin. Dependin' on..." again murmured, "...
on yer situation
, I'll send fer you, or the both of you. You can take a train to Cheyenne, and a coach north from there."

It had to be the most words he
'd ever spoken to me, maybe to anyone, and I even sensed a kind of stubborn pride in the Boss when he finished them without stumbling. That's what made me measure my words so carefully, instead of going with my first, dazed reactions, which were along the lines of:

Thank you so much for planning my entire life
without my input, you jerk
.

You would marry me and then go on to Wyoming
without me
? Even if I'm
pregnant
?

And the ever popular: What part of
no
didn't you understand?

Oh sure, I
'd always assumed that if a man proposed, he might actually look at me, or touch me, or ask my opinion in the matter. Silly me. But something about his delivery—how he'd planted his palms on his knees, as if to keep them out of trouble, or how his bearded chin had lifted slightly, or even the unnatural number of words—kept me from taking immediate insult. That, and the fact that it really
didn't
matter.

Because I didn
't belong here. I couldn't stay.

So instead of attacking his plan, no matter how stupid it was, or God forbid laughing at him, I gently said, "I
'm sorry, Mr. Garrison, but much though you honor me, I cannot marry you." There! Let's see Laura Ingalls do any better.

Then the Boss taught me a lesson in condescension by zinging me with one of his executive
looks
and drawling, "Ain't got no choice."

And maybe it would have worked on Lillabit.

But he was not only a hundred-plus years too early, but a solid week too late to try that on Elizabeth.

Chapter 17 – Another Chapter

Damn, but I was glad to know who I was again. It didn't exactly feel
good
; nothing about this conversation felt
good.
But it gave me far better reasoning ability.

Garrison
's quaint, old-fashioned manners seemed increasingly less endearing, in contrast, and only the presence of Mrs. Rath in the kitchen kept me from risking my life with a few unfortunate words. But we
were
chaperoned—lucky for him—and I
would
handle this better than I'd handled the boarding-house announcement.

Or even Everett
's sexual harassment.

There had to be a balance between being a victim and doing actual, physical harm. So I said, "I
do
have a choice, and my choice is to remain single."

"Gave up that choice this afternoon."

"No, I—" I glanced toward the kitchen, glad to hear that Mrs. Rath was still generating a polite amount of noise in her soup making. But I lowered my voice to whisper it anyway. "No, I gave up something
else
this afternoon, but it was hardly my ability to decide my own future."

His face colored, either from embarrassment or anger. From the intensity of his eyes, I
'd say anger.

"I do not shirk my duties," he informed me stiffly.

I almost asked him what dumping me in Dodge City for the better part of a year sounded like to him, but he obviously thought giving me his name and an allowance
was
being responsible. For the 19
th
-century, it probably was.

But I had a life waiting for me at home. I had friends, family... pets. I had a comfortable, familiar
place
waiting for me, a world in which I wasn't helpless and I had a say. Sex or no sex, that world wasn't here.