Out of Time 01 - Out of Time

and cleared his throat, moving to his side of the bed. Hastily, he sat up and tried to look as if nothing had happened. “Sorry.” “It’s okay,” she said with a blush.
    Simon cleared his throat again, putting his hands in his lap. She had to hide her smile. He was absolutely adorable when he was befuddled, but she decided to take pity on him. “I’m going to use the bathroom, unless you want to go first?”
“No,” Simon said. “You go ahead. I’ll...You go ahead.”
    Stifling a giggle, she escaped into the bathroom. When she caught sight of herself in the mirror, her laughter stopped.
    An appalling case of bed head and raccoon eyes stared back. She combed her fingers through her hair, but it stayed poking up like a bouffant gone terribly wrong.
    My kingdom for a hairbrush.
    She tested her breath. Strong enough to kill a wildebeest. How humiliating. She’d actually sat there grinning like an idiot at him. Looking like this.
    She searched the tiny bath. No toothpaste, no hairbrush, no nothing. What a way to make a debut in the twenties, looking like a day passer from an asylum. She did the best she could with the absolute nothing she had. A quick bird bath and finger brushing later, she felt marginally human and slipped on the dress they’d bought yesterday.
    First stop, a pharmacy, she thought. Her stomach rumbled in protest. Breakfast first, pharmacy second. She took one last look in the mirror and sighed.
    You can do this, she told herself. A city was a city. It’s not like they were in the middle ages. How different could it be?
    * * *
    “I’m tellin’ ya that ump was blind. Fletch oughta get him some cheaters. The Babe was robbed. That was a two bagger!” a man growled loudly and thumped his hand on the counter.
    “Don’t see what you’re gripin’ about. Yanks won, didn’t they?” his companion said.
    “It’s the principle of the thing. Ain’t right.”
    Simon glared at them, but their argument continued. It seemed everyone in the diner felt the compulsion to converse loudly enough to wake the dead. He turned back to Elizabeth, who’d been listening to the conversation with glee.
    “Can you imagine getting to see Babe Ruth play?” she said. “If we have time, we are so going to a game.”
    “This isn’t a vacation, Miss West,” he said, picking up his menu.
    “It isn’t a prison sentence either. Think of the opportunity we have. We get to see what it was really like. Not some revisionist history from a book, but the real deal. And I’ve always wanted to go to Yankee Stadium,” she added with a grin.
    “Miss West—”
    “I’m kidding. Mostly. And it’s Elizabeth, remember?” she said, wiggling her ring finger.
    He hadn’t forgotten, but after the incident in bed he felt more compelled than ever to keep his distance. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d dreamt of her and that the dream had coalesced, in a frighteningly smooth way, into reality. But if he was going to wake up every morning with a raging morning erection, this was going to be impossible.
    “First thing we should do is visit the local library,” he said. “We need to know the exact time of the next eclipse.”
    “Wouldn’t want to be caught with our pants down.”
    Simon cleared his throat. “No,” he said and quickly went back to his menu. The prices were absurdly inexpensive. Steak and eggs for a quarter. Coffee and a donut for a dime. Blue plate special only fifteen cents. Remarkable really, or would have been if he had more than twenty dollars to his name.
    He heard someone snapping gum and looked up to see their waitress impatiently tapping her stubby pencil on a pad. “What’ll it be?”
    “You don’t have Wheatina.”
    Snap. Pop. Snap. “Nope.”
    He stared down at the menu looking for something that didn’t sound positively dreadful.
    “We’ll have two specials,” Elizabeth said. “And two coffees, unless you want tea?”
    Simon was about to say something about being able to order for himself, but the idea of some tea in his future blocked out everything else. “Do you have Chinese Gun Powder?”
    “This look like an armory to you, buddy?”
    Elizabeth handed her menu to the waitress. “Two coffees will be fine.”
    Simon pursed his lips and gave up, handing his menu to the waitress. He watched her walk away and looked around the diner. Steam billowed from behind the cook’s counter. A corpulent man with a sour face and a grease-stained T-shirt tossed ridiculously large slabs of