Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Two: In Which Jessie Is Unwell

I hoarded them instead, the last remaining proofs that I was not mad. That I was not the addled heroine of some Georgian romance. That this wasn't The Tempest, or Northanger Abbey, or The Monk, or The Welshman's Daughters. The last proofs that I was who I thought I was, that I still had my identity, if nothing else.

Both lay under the pillow in the Captain's cabin. I had rescued them from my soaked jeans, and followed the impulse to squirrel them away, protect the last of all I owned. I had no illusion that they were safe from the Captain's curiosity there, but let him contrive what he wanted from them. I didn't care.

Beside me, the sailors tried to catch my eye, to start conversations, but I could not unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth, could not loosen it enough to speak. And at the same time, I also could not bare the thought of drinking anything to make the task easier.

Water and I were quite at odds for the moment, despite how parched I was.

Just a small tiff. A fair-weather break up. Understandably.

The men were shouted back to their duties, or drifted off when I proved to be an unsociable companion. They all smelt like unwashed hair and unwashed clothes and too long at sea with only other men and hot hands.

I had been preparing for a run of one night stands, but I didn't want it like that. I didn't want it now. Didn't think I'd ever want it ever again.

Weren't survivors supposed to feel a desperate drive to affirm life?

Right now all I wanted was to breathe without each inhale being a small agony.

A low grey fog crept out from the unseen land over the curve of the horizon, and lay over the water like a shroud. The sun set slowly, fading into the shadow mass of land that was Europe to my right – starboard or port? Which is that? – and I kept to my place at the nose of the ship, a morose figurehead, undoubtedly as grey in the face as the weathered maiden who stood sentinel below me, my eyes forward like I could pierce through the fog and find the twenty-first century on the far side of the mist.

Eventually we passed through the field of bodies and wreckage, and the crew stopped muttering prayers at every cadaver that bumped away under the prow. I sat on a large round coil of rope tucked up against the rail.

For some time, perhaps for hours, Captain Goodenough hovered in my general periphery, concerned perhaps of suicidal intentions (no, no, I'd had enough drowning for one day, thank you muchly) and then eventually left me to my vigil.

Yes. Vigil.

That was a good word for it. I pulled the blanket close, unperturbed by the new dampness on its outside, pulling up my legs and crossing them. I made a tent of warmth and denial.

I could not seem to blink.

I could, however, think. A lot.

Mostly about how I seemed to have fallen straight into either a supermarket romance novel, or a crazy science fiction thriller; I wasn't much of a fan of either, but my mind just kept circling back and back to the idea that this had to be fiction, because it was too much liked the movies to be real. It was sort of like watching the footage from some public atrocity and thinking, The things they can do with CGI these days, before realizing that the horror on the screen had really happened - shootings, vans plowing into sidewalks, bombs, airplane crashes. The brain short circuits and tries to yank what you've seen, what you're experiencing, right back into the realm of fiction.

Because people don't really time travel.

And they aren't rescued by Regency naval post-captains. The plot in Georgian romance books always includes the dashing rescue of a heroine who has managed to fall ass over teakettle by a kind and handsome stranger man. My handsome, dashing stranger was Francis Goodenough; not exactly the chiseled, barrel-chested Fabio that chick-lit had promised the tumbled maidens of the world. Goodenough was dimple cheeked, eyes dark and hair a careful rakish messiness that I would call "JBF" on any collar-popping Aber-zombie: 'just been fucked'.