OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 01 - A City of Two Tales (Lillabit)

Here's the part of the morning that struck me as most important:

I woke up not to air-conditioning, but to an unnaturally warm night. Unnatural to someone used to 21st century climate-control, anyhow. The faint scent of horse manure wafted through an open window.

So did the jangly tune of a saloon piano, still playing down the street.

Once upon a time, I would regain consciousness to electric guitars wailing from my old clock radio. Now, the sheet beneath my hip had a seam running down the middle of it.

For a moment, I didn't know who or where I was. This made the realization that my cheek was pillowed on a man's hot, naked chest even more unsettling. What the...?

Then, in a soothing wash, my full memory clicked back into place.

My name was Elizabeth Rhinehart... Garrison.

I was in bed with my new, trail-boss husband. It was his naked chest, hairy and real, that I lay on. His hard arm molded down my spine, his calloused hand loosely cupping my butt even in sleep. Warm or not, this made for a much better wake-up than any phone app or radio alarm.

We had taken a tiny room at the only respectable hotel in Ogallala, Nebraska, en route to Wyoming Territory.

And, oh yeah. The year was 1878, over a century before my birth.

Not two months ago, a coworker and I were exiled into the past from modern-day Chicago by our employer--hence my knowledge of Freon, amplifiers, and apps. Trust me. It's a long and complex story. It ends with me slightly pregnant and newly married to a widowed Confederate war veteran who was nearly a sesquicentennial older than me.

Or around fifteen years? Depending on how you counted.

And last night....

My face against my husband's chest warmed at the thought of our wedding night, only the second time in my life I'd ever had sex. Yes, at the age of twenty-six. Get over it. Now I had my own western hero, who might someday come to love me in return... and, in the meantime, let's just say he had a way with his branding iron.

I carefully rolled to seek out his sleeping face in what I now realized was some major moonlight. Jacob Garrison. So strong, stony even in sleep. Mussed hair softened his hard, wide forehead. That bearded, stubborn jaw of his--I'd married someone with a beard. Those shadowed eyes....

When he opened those eyes at my surveillance, they didn't look shadowed after all. In fact, after staring at me a moment--reorienting to me?--they crescented into a brief but very real smile, crow's feet and all.

I couldn't have asked for a better morning-after present than that rare smile. Of course, such an uncharacteristic outpouring of emotion embarrassed him, so he tried to distract me by propping himself up on a naked elbow, glancing toward the open window. But I'd seen. I knew.

"Near mornin'," he noted, from the absolute lack of sunlight. But he had extra reason to be an early bird. Today, we'd be heading out on horseback to catch up with his herd of over two-thousand cattle. They represented the biggest business venture of his life.

Then he risked another fleeting glance at me. The uncertain hunger in his normally flinty eyes made me ache. Uncertainty was even rarer on "the Boss" than smiles, and his eyes seemed more naked than he was.

Ask, Jacob. Just ask.

But he didn't. I guessed what he wanted, and I sensed that he couldn't, or wouldn't say so. Not yet, not this soon in an unexpected, complicated marriage. So, okay. I slid myself further on top of him, as if I were big enough or strong enough to hold him against his will.