There and Now

by Linda Lael Miller

  Elisabeth kissed her cheek. “I don’t think I can explain, sweetheart,” she said truthfully enough, “because I don’t understand, either. I’m just glad we’re all together again.”

  “Vera’s mother says there’s going to be a wedding, and she’s bringing over her own dress for you to wear. She says the least Pine River can do for you is see that things are done properly.”

  Soon Vera’s mother did, indeed, arrive with a dress, and Elisabeth was so grateful that she forgot how the woman’s child had practically called her a witch that very morning. She bathed in the privacy of the spare room, and brushed her hair until it shone, pinned it into a modified Gibson-girl and put on the lace-trimmed ivory silk dress her neighbor had so generously offered. The fabric made a rustling sound as Elisabeth moved, and smelled pleasantly of lavender. Trista gathered wildflowers and made a garland for Elisabeth’s hair, and when the two of them reached the site Jonathan had chosen, next to the covered bridge, the doctor was waiting there with a handful of daisies and tiger lilies.

  The townsfolk crowded the hillside and creek bank, and several schoolboys even sat on the roof of the bridge. Elisabeth marveled that she’d come so close to losing her life and then had gained everything she’d ever wanted, all in the space of a single day.

  To be married by the very judge who would probably have handed down her death sentence was a supreme irony.

  The ceremony passed in a sort of sparkling daze for Elisabeth; it seemed as though she and Jonathan were surrounded by an impenetrable white light, and the ordinary sounds of a summer afternoon blended into a low-key whir.

  Only when Jonathan kissed her did Elisabeth realize she was married. When the kiss ended, she was flushed with the poignant richness of life. Instead of tossing her bouquet, she handed it to Trista and hugged the child.

  “Now we’re a family,” Trista said, her gray eyes glowing as she looked up at her stepmother.

  “We are, indeed,” Elisabeth agreed, her throat choked with happy tears.

  After the ceremony, there was corn bread and coffee at the hotel. There hadn’t been enough advance warning for a cake, but Elisabeth didn’t care. What stories she’d be able to tell her and Jonathan’s grandchildren!

  Trista would spend the night with Vera, it was agreed, and the Fortner family would leave on their trip the following morning. Once all the corn bread had been consumed and Jonathan and Elisabeth had been wished the best by everyone, from the judge who had married them to the man who swept out the saloon, the newlyweds retired to the room Jonathan had rented.

  Beyond the window and the door, ordinary life went on. Buggies and wagons rattled by, and the piano player hammered out bawdy tunes in the saloon across the road. But Jonathan and Elisabeth were alone in a world no one else could enter.

  She trembled with love and wanting as he slowly, gently undressed her, and it was an awkward process, since his right arm was still in a sling. “I’m going to have your baby, Jon,” she said in a breathless whisper as he unbuttoned her muslin camisole and pushed it back off her shoulders, baring her breasts. “I’m sure of that now.”

  He bent his head, almost reverently, to kiss each of her firm, opulent breasts. “The first of many, I hope,” he relied.

  Elisabeth drew in a quick breath as she felt his mouth close over her nipple. “I missed you so much, Jon,” she managed after a moment, tilting her head back and closing her eyes in blissful surrender as he enjoyed her. “I was terrified I would never see you again.”

  He suckled for a long, leisurely time before drawing back long enough to answer, “I was scared, too, wondering if you escaped the fire.” He turned to her other breast, and Elisabeth moaned and entwined her fingers in his rich, dark hair, holding him close as he drank from her. If she never had another day to laugh and breathe and love, she thought, this one would be sweet enough to cherish through the rest of eternity.

  Presently, he laid her down on the edge of the bed, running his hands along her inner thighs, easing her quivering legs apart for an intimate plundering. She felt her hair come undone from its pins and spread it over the covers with her fingers in a gesture of relinquishment.

  Her soul was open to Jonathan now; there was no part of it he was not free to explore.

  He knelt, his hands gripping the tender undersides of her knees, and nuzzled the moist delta where her womanhood nestled. “I love pleasing you, Elisabeth,” he said. “I love making you give yourself up to me, totally, without reservation of any kind.”

  Elisabeth’s breath was quick and shallow, and she could barely speak. “I need you,” she whimpered.

  Jonathan burrowed through and took her fiercely, and Elisabeth cried out, her body making a graceful arch on the mattress, her hands clutching and pounding at the blankets.

  He consumed her until she was writhing wildly on the bed, until she was uttering low cries, until her skin was wet with perspiration and her muscles were aching with the effort of thrusting her toward him. He drove her straight out of herself and made her soar, and brought her back to earth with patient caresses and muttered reassurances.

  She found him beside her on the lumpy hotel bed, after she’d returned to herself and could think and see clearly. Very gently, she touched his bandaged arm.

  “Does it hurt much?”

  He bent to scatter light kisses over her collarbone. “It hurts like hell, Mrs. Fortner. Just exactly how do you propose to comfort your husband in his time of need?”

  She stretched like some contented cat, and he poised himself over her, one of his legs parting hers. “I intend to love him so thoroughly that he won’t remember his name,” she responded saucily, spreading her fingers in the coarse hair that covered his chest.

  Jonathan groaned, touching his hardness to her softness, receiving warmth. Elisabeth guided him gently inside her, arching her back to take him deep within, and his magnificent gray eyes glazed with pleasure.

  Slowly, slowly, she moved beneath him, tempting, teasing, taking and giving. With one hand thrust far into the mattress, the other resting against his middle in its sling and bandage, he met her thrusts, retreated, parried.

  The release was sudden and ferocious, and it took Elisabeth completely by surprise because she’d thought she was finished, that all the responses from then on would be Jonathan’s. But her body buckled in a seizure of satisfaction, and he lowered his mouth to hers, as much to muffle her cries as to kiss her.

  When the last whimper of delight had been wrung from her, and only then, Jonathan gave up his formidable control and surrendered. He was like a magnificent savage as he lunged into her, drew back, and lunged again.

  Finally, with a loud groan, he spilled himself inside her and then collapsed to lie trembling beside her on the mattress, his chest rising and falling with the effort to breathe. Elisabeth draped one leg across both of his and let her cheek rest against his chest.

  For a long time, they were silent, and Elisabeth even slept for a while.

  When she awakened, there were long shadows in the room and Jonathan’s hand was running lightly up and down her back.

  “I think you’ll miss your world,” he said sadly as she stirred against him and yawned. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay, Elisabeth. Maybe you should take the necklace and go back and pretend that none of this ever happened.”

  She scrambled into a sitting position and stared down at him. “I’m not going anywhere, Jonathan Fortner. You’re stuck with me and with our baby.”

  “But the medicine—the magic box…”

  Elisabeth smiled and smoothed his hair, less anxious now. “In some ways the twentieth century is better,” she conceded. “They’ve wiped out a lot of the diseases that are killing people now. And life is much easier, in terms of ordinary work, because there are so many labor-saving devices. But there are bad things, too, Jon—things I won’t miss at all.”

  His forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “Like what?”

  Elisabeth sighed. “Like nuclear bombs. Jonathan, m
y generation is capable of wiping out this entire planet with the push of a single button.”

  His frown deepened. “Would they actually be stupid enough to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed and settled deeper into the pillows. “Do you suppose all the rest of us would die, too, if they did? I mean, the past and the present are obviously connected in ways we don’t understand.”

  Elisabeth was saddened. “Let’s hope and pray that never happens.”

  Jonathan stroked her hair and held her close against his chest. “What else can you tell me about the twentieth century?”

  “You’re bound to experience some of it yourself, since it’s only about eight years away,” she answered, entwining an index finger in a curl of hair on his chest. She bit her lip, remembering history that hadn’t happened yet. “But I’ll see if I can’t give you some previews of coming attractions. Around the turn of the century, America will declare war on Spain. And then, about 1914 or so, the Germans will decide to take over the world. France, England, Russia and eventually the United States will take them on and beat them.”

  Jonathan stared pensively into her face, waiting for more.

  “Then, around 1929, the stock market will crash. If we’re still around then, we’ll have to make sure we invest the egg money carefully. After that—”

  He laughed and held her close. “My little Gypsy fortune teller. After that, what?”

  “Another war, unfortunately,” Elisabeth confessed with a sigh. “Germany again, and Japan. As awful as it was for everybody, I think most of the scientific and medical advances made in the twentieth century happened because—well, necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing creates necessity like war.”

  Jonathan shuddered. “Tell me the good things.”

  Elisabeth talked about airplanes and microwave ovens and Disneyland. She described movies, electric Christmas-tree lights, corn dogs and Major League Baseball games. Jonathan laughed when she swore that a former actor had served two terms as President of the United States, and he absolutely refused to believe that men were having themselves changed into women and vice versa.

  When Elisabeth was finished with her tales of the future, she and Jonathan made slow, sweet love.

  Later, they ate a wedding supper brought to them by Big Lil’s daughter. They consumed the food hungrily, greedily, never remembering after that exactly what they’d been served. Then they made love again.

  Early the next morning they rose, and Elisabeth put on the dress she’d been married in, since she had nothing else to wear. Jonathan kissed her, said she was beautiful and promised to buy her as many gowns as she wanted once they reached Seattle.

  Elisabeth was nervous and distracted. Finally she brought up the subject they’d both been avoiding. “Jon, the necklace—where is it?”

  He paused in the act of rebandaging his arm and studied her for a long moment. “I left it at the house,” he said. “Why?”

  “There’s something I have to do,” she replied, her gaze skirting his, her hand already on the doorknob. “Please—tell me where to find the necklace.”

  The expression in his eyes was a bleak one, but he didn’t ask the obvious question. “All right, Elisabeth,” he said. “All right.”

  They drove out to Jonathan’s house—their house—in his buggy. “The necklace is in my study,” he said. “Under the ledger in the middle desk drawer.”

  As she hopped down from the rig, Elisabeth surveyed the ladder propped against the partially burned house. Apparently, the repair work had already begun.

  She hummed as she went inside, found the necklace exactly where Jonathan had said it would be, and brought it out into the sunshine with her. Her husband stood beside the buggy, watching her pensively.

  “I’m about to show you how much I love you, Jonathan Fortner,” she said, and then she began climbing up the ladder.

  “Lizzie!” Jonathan protested, bolting away from the buggy.

  Elisabeth climbed until she reached the doorway that had once led from Trista’s room into the main hallway. Holding her breath, she shut her eyes tightly, closed her fingers around the necklace and flung it over the threshold.

  She was pleased when she opened her eyes and saw that the pendant had vanished. Holding her skirts aside with one hand, made her way quickly down the ladder.

  Elisabeth Fortner had found the century where she belonged, and she meant to stay there.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-1633-8

  THERE AND NOW

  Copyright © 1992 by Linda Lael Miller

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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