Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Nine: In Which Jessie Meets Her Match

I wasn't the type of person who often went off in an angry, foot-stomping, Rumplestiltskin huff. At least, I hadn't in my old life, my then life. But I thought this particular revelation warranted it, and so suited action to thought immediately. I huffed off.

Pretending to be straight for the rest of my life, okay. Fine. Staying with the Captain forever just because I needed a man to do everything for me because I wasn't allowed to do it myself, alright - not awesome, but I could make that work. Realizing that I'd suckered myself into believing that -- that I could... that I had let myself only believe that I was actually in 1806 if I could construct a fantasy life there that granted me all the autonomy I was used to in my twenty-first century one. I had accepted 1806. But I'd had that life ripped away

So now what.

Now fucking what?

It not being my house, I wasn't entirely sure where I had huffed off to, but it was somewhere dark and quiet and mostly warm due to a few glowing lumps of coal in a neglected fireplace grate. So I sat down and tried very hard not to lose my mind twice in one day. Foolish. Childish. Ridiculous. Building a fantasy with someone I didn't even know because they were the only person I knew.

Just... perfect. Everything was just wonderfully fucking perfect. Trust the twenty first century ... hussy... to ruin everything. I wasn't sure who I should be angrier at; Mr. Lewis, for exposing the truth; myself for just blithely falling into Captain Goodenough's arms like some sort of dumb novel heroine; or the Captain himself for knowingly committing what probably amounted in this era to adultery.

Fuck adultery, he had been courting me for a month.

Hadn't he?

That was flirting, wasn't it? The gloves and the dancing and the hand strokes and the kisses on the cheek? I hadn't misread the whole thing? Or was there a cultural divide that I just didn't see – what I thought was flirting, what was flirting in the twenty first century, was just being pleasant and gentlemanly here? Now?

Huh! Gentlemanly! What we did in the alley was certainly not gentlemanly in the least. And he had said "I want" and "I've wanted". He had felt it too, the spiderweb thin connection, that passion we had begun to weave into a beautiful, ringing pattern between us. And Mr. Lewis, in one fat swipe of a careless hand and pulled it all apart, ruined everything that we had, turned it into nothing so much as tattered cobwebs.

How had I let myself get turned around like this? How had I let him do this to me? How were we going to fix this?

No, we had nothing. There was no we.

Captain Goodenough was bloody going to be married! And I had rolled over and showed him my belly, like one of those stupid movie bisexuals who just needed a good deep dicking to be 'cured' and give up women, call it just 'phase'. Because I had needed him. Because I had needed somebody, anybody to want me. Because of some stupid Stockholm Syndrome or Nightingale Effect or some other disorder having to do with trauma victims, and extreme circumstances, and desire to be valued.

I felt like I was about to be sick.

It felt like I was swallowing mouthful after mouthful of seawater when all I kept gulping at was the thick, dark air.

I'd had full on straight upsex with a man. I'd swallowed - I've never... My stomach roiled. "Oh god, oh god." I scrubbed my teeth with my sleeve, trying to get rid of the taste of, of... I turned aside and spat on the hearth.

The lonely little lump of coals gave off a sort of feeble red light, sparking now and again in a splutter of oxygen, attempting to jump up and not finding enough fuel to feed so much as a tiny lick of flame.