FICTION – FOWC & RDP

Chapter 5:

Jam, Jealousy, and Slightly Too Much Honesty

Fiona hadn’t said anything since Hamilton vanished back into the tavern.

Not a joke. Not a sigh. Not even a dry remark about 18th-century masculinity or the aggressive scent of wig powder.
Just quiet.

She sat on the bench with her spine too straight, her fingers tracing the curve of a splintered edge. Her eyes weren’t blank, precisely—they were calculating, restless, staring somewhere three centuries ahead.

Elliot stood nearby, fiddling with the time device for the fifth time. The screen still blinked its error message like a stubborn ghost. He wasn’t trying to fix it. Not really. He just needed something to do with his hands, so he didn’t clench them again.

The silence between them had texture now—dry, itchy, like wool on bare skin.

Say something, he thought. Make a joke. Ask if she wants to go back in there and debate Hamilton to death.
But every thought got stuck in the same loop:
She lit up when he looked at her. She didn’t with me.

So instead, he snapped the back cover onto the chrono-device a little too hard and said, “I’m gonna try to trade for socks or bread or something.”

“I’ll come,” Fiona said too fast, already standing.

They walked shoulder to shoulder but out of sync, her footsteps crisp and narrow, his looser, uneven. The colonial town buzzed around them—smoke drifting from chimneys, cartwheels clunking over stone, and a blacksmith hammering metal with the rhythm of someone trying to outrun his own thoughts.

Fiona inhaled the sharp tang of hot iron, woodsmoke, and sweat. Her borrowed clothes scratched at her skin with every step. She didn’t belong here. She felt it in her bones, her teeth, the small of her back.
And still, what stung more was Elliot’s silence.

He hadn’t even cracked a joke when they passed the pig in a bonnet earlier. That wasn’t just weird. That was apocalyptic.

He’s mad, she thought. Not joking is his version of yelling.

She cleared her throat. “About earlier…”

“You don’t have to explain,” he said, eyes on the ground.

“But I want to.”

“No, you don’t. You want to make it okay.”

That stopped her like a slap. “Is that a bad thing?”

“It is if it skips the part where you admit it wasn’t.”

Her throat tightened. The air felt heavier suddenly, or maybe it was just the weight of all the things she hadn’t said.

“You think I liked him.”

Elliot finally looked at her. “You didn’t exactly hate it.”

“No,” she said, her voice quiet but steady. “But I didn’t exactly like being invisible either. By you.”

His mouth opened slightly. “I wasn’t ignoring you.”

“You were fading,” she said. “You do this thing where you tuck behind your humor and act like if you’re quiet enough, nobody will notice you’re scared. But I did notice. I noticed everything. I asked you out, Elliot. I took the risk. And since then, I’ve been wondering if you’re even really on this date with me… or just tagging along.”

The words hit harder than she expected. Saying them out loud made them real, sharp as cut glass.

Elliot exhaled, like something cracked in him, too. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and kicked a loose stone across the road.

“I didn’t think I had a chance,” he admitted. “Not with someone like you.”

She blinked. “Someone like me?”

“Confident. Brilliant. You plan your outfits. I sometimes forget if I’m wearing shoes. I figured… maybe if I kept things casual, you wouldn’t see how far out of my depth I am.”

Her voice dropped. “So your strategy was what, to underwhelm me into settling?”

“No,” he said, frustrated. “To keep you from seeing how hard I was falling.”

The silence between them shifted again—warmer now, but heavier.

“I don’t want to be a background character in your life,” he said. “I don’t want to be a lab footnote or a failed experiment. I want to be part of—”
He hesitated. “—us. If that’s even a thing.”

Fiona’s heart squeezed. Her throat ached. Somewhere under the ache, something softened.

“I don’t need safe,” she said. “I need real. Even if that means fights and flaws and awkwardness and you occasionally brooding in silence until you pop like a shaken soda.”

He smiled faintly. “You saying I’m the brooding type?”

“I’m saying if I have to date a man who wears the same Ramones shirt three times a week, I want to know he can show up when it counts.”

They stood in the middle of the muddy road, neither caring anymore about the people staring or the drizzle starting to fall.

A jar of jam tipped off a vendor’s shelf beside them and shattered in slow motion—glass and berries bursting across the stones. A goat immediately trotted over to investigate.

Fiona watched it without blinking. “If that goat licks my boot, I’m going to time travel myself into a wall.”

Elliot reached out and gently tugged her away. “Let’s walk.”

They moved forward, together this time. Still quiet, but less fragile. Not quite us, not yet. But no longer, maybe.