At some point, a very bored airline employee was going to say her name into a little speaker three times and then give her seat away.
Bree probably thought Amelia had hooked up with Gaz and wouldn’t check on her until she returned from her fabulous honeymoon.
At some point, someone would realize she was gone and likely decide she’d gone home early. The world would continue on without her, bright and loud and plugged in, while Amelia stood in the mud in the year twelve hundred and sixty-five trying to remember how to breathe.
“What year did you think it was?” Thomas frowned at her.
She looked at him.
There was a cup sitting on the cart, one of the men’s cups, filled with the weak breakfast beer everyone here drank as if water were a dare issued by Satan. Small beer, Edith had called it. Safe enough for children, apparently, though Amelia had some questions in regards to medieval childcare.
Amelia picked it up and drained half of it in one long pull.
Thomas’s expression changed at once. “Mistress.”
“It’s fine.” The words came out too bright. “It’s small beer. Practically water you all said. Responsible, even. I’m being very responsible.”
“You have not eaten.”
“I had a canapé yesterday.”
His frown deepened. “I do not know this word.”
“No, of course you don’t, because canapés are seven hundred years away, along with dental floss and deodorant and the little pens hotels leave on the nightstand.”
The yard had gone soft at the edges. That was ridiculous. She had consumed half a cup of medieval breakfast water. She wasn’t drunk. She was…chemically inconvenienced.
“I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday.”
Thomas went still.
“I have a deposit down on a venue in October,” she continued, because apparently her mouth had filed for independence. “Not for me. For work. Obviously not for me. I don’t even have a plus one, which Bree mentioned three times before marrying a man she met eight days ago, because that makes perfect sense but me falling through time into the thirteenth century does not.”
“Mistress Amelia,” Thomas said, very quietly.
“And I have a return flight. Seat fourteen-C. Aisle, because I am not an animal. And there will be a gate agent with very flat hair and dead eyes saying, ‘Passenger Amelia Quinn, please report to the desk,’ and I won’t report to the desk because I’m here, where everyone drinks beer before breakfast and the tower has a roof and you are…”
She pointed at him, then stopped, because pointing felt unwise when the person in question was large, armed with various daggers and swords, and who knew what else, and staring at her as if she had begun speaking in tongues.
“I am what?” he asked.
“Smoking hot,” Amelia said.
There was silence.
Then a goose honked somewhere behind her, which didn’t help.
Thomas blinked once. “Smoking hot?”
Amelia’s soul left her body, circled the yard, saw the lack of viable transportation, and came reluctantly back.
“I said…not,” she said. “You arenot…helping.”
“That is not what you said.”
“It was heavily implied.”
His mouth did the almost-moving thing again. This time it was much worse, because she could tell he was trying not to smile.