All In Good Time - A Time Travel Beatles Fanfiction

Track 2 - I Saw Her Standing There

"Giz a ciggy, mate," Paul said to someone, and soon all five of them were smoking strong-smelling foreign cigarettes, and there wasn't a fresh breath of air in the car.

Lainey let out an involuntary groan and tried to make sense of what was happening to her. Since she was ten years old she'd wished she could have known her grandfather. Maybe that's why she was having this hallucination, or whatever it was. This had to be tied to the strange little gypsy woman. Certainly it was temporary. Maybe it was some sort of realistic comatose state, and she should ignore the pain in her head and make the best of it until she woke up on the street under a bus in 2012.

She straightened and turned toward Paul, squinting through the smoke. His face was inches from hers. "Good Lord. You really are as pretty as you look on YouTube."

He stopped massaging her neck. "Say again?"

Lainey clamped her mouth shut. Perhaps she hadn't fully come around. She should stop talking. She looked at Ringo next. The expression on his face made her want to laugh. He looked as sweet and dazed as he did in most of the videos she'd watched of him. "Ringo," she whispered.

And George, sitting in the opposite corner smashed against the door, nodded when their eyes met. She leaned forward, blatantly staring.

George raised an eyebrow. "'Ello," he said with an uneasy smile.

Those cheekbones. That smile. Lainey's mother had the same crooked smile.

"Oh my god!" Lainey blurted out. "Look at your teeth!"

George snapped his lips closed, frowning. "What's wrong with 'em?"

Lainey tapped one of her teeth with a fingernail. "Your canine teeth. They're fangs. Your teeth look exactly like mine. Except...I had braces..." She suddenly thought of something. "Is your mother in Liverpool? I would give anything to meet her. She'd know what to do."

George's brows were knit together in a picture of confusion. "You want to meet my mum."

"Oh God yes," Lainey murmured. "I'd give anything to meet her. I thought about contacting your sister in Illinois, so many times, but I didn't know how she would react—"

From the front seat, John turned around and examined Lainey through a haze of smoke, his eyes narrowed. "Who the fook are you, any road, and how do you know so much about us?"

"Nobody, really," Lainey muttered. She realized she was acting like a lunatic, but who wouldn't, in this situation. Her head still felt like it had been squeezed in a vice. She needed to stop talking, and when her head cleared, she'd figure out what to do. If only they had the internet in 1963, she could do a Google image search and see if she could find out the history of this ring...

"My purse!" Her gaze flew around the car, her heart jumping into high gear.

John passed her handbag from the front seat, and Lainey blew out a relieved sigh.

"Thank you." She aimed a smile at John, but he was already staring out the front window.

Paul cleared his throat. "Close your eyes, love. We'll be home soon and you can ring your mum. Everything's going to be just fine."

Lainey leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, hoping he was right.

Moments later, Paul led Lainey up the stairs and into a third-floor flat, pointing to an end table with a squat black rotary dial telephone sitting on it. "Shall we ring your mum?" he suggested.

Lainey stared at the telephone. Who could she call with that? Her teenage grandmother in Virginia? It was a possibility, she supposed. Grandma Marie would never believe her though. She was far too practical. Lainey needed to be alone for a few seconds and check her iPhone. "Could I use your bathroom?"