Somewhat Clear

James was starting to feel lonely. 

He had the whole London displayed in front of him, with a cup of tea cooling on the table, seconds ticking away until the moment his Time Ticked expired. He would have been visible then, like a man from a dream becoming suddenly real and alive. It didn't take long now. Just a couple of hours.

He never hoped for Christine to understand him. They've nevere been made for each other. She was young, she was bright, she was optimistic and ready for a life that he couldn't give her. He couldn't help but think to her mother; she must have been happy when her daughter came back from her Time Trip without him, the strange old man who looked much younger than he actually seemed to be. 

James wasn't old, of course. He was thirty-one; older than Christine, but she was only twenty-five. Six years weren't much, surely. Not that it was of any importance now. He would never see her again.

He waited those two hours thinking of her. Remembering her face, her smile, her eyes, the way the light was caught in her hair, the way she looked perfect when she came out of the dressing room wearing another outfit from another time, looking so natural that she seemed to be born in that age, the gut-wrenchin realization that he loved her and she just liked him, and that they were bound to break up sooner or later. He remembered that day when, while he was kissing softly the back of her neck murmuring about some historical nonsense, she told him that she had never been happier in her life. He already knew that she was lying. She couldn't be happy with him. They were too different: how could he be so blind, and not realize earlier? He was really like an old man, caught and lost in his historical rambling, relishing in the past, while she looked at the future, ready to live her own history. 

James liked the idea to live in a time where he already knew what it was going to happen. Bad things, mostly. But he didn't wallow in people's misery. The future scared him. 

Neverthless what scared him more was to see her happy without him. That was why he had decided to stay.

James disliked very much sudden decisions; he was used to think everything in advance, and that was what he had done. He prepared for an eventual sudden decision; he didn't think he would actually do something like that, though. 

No sudden decisions was his golden rule. But rules existed to be broken. And there he was.

2012. London 2012. 

It wasn't against the law to drop into a temporal dimension in order to live there. You just had to have with you a disguised Time Jumper. And he had one, that looked like a pocket watch. He had changed all his money in 2012's pounds -finding himself suddenly loaded, and quite surprisingly so. 

He had prepared himself, and then he had decided suddenly that it had been a good idea, maybe the best one he had in his whole life. He had taken Christine with him on that trip because he was feeling the crisis between them, and he had hoped for something to happen that could made her fall in love with him, as much as he was in love with her. 

Obviously, nothing had happened. They just argued even more. And more. And then she realized. They couldn't be happy together. They didn't want the same things. She moved on, he stayed behind. 

He suppressed a pained sigh. Not that anyone would have paid attention to him: he theoretically still was Unnoticeable to contemporary people thanks to his Ticket -not really invisible, but he was granted that bit of privacy that allowed tourists like him to say weird New-World-like things without being pointed and screamed at. He reached into his pocket, and felt it, warm against his palm, warning him that his time to go back to the pick-up point was almost over. 

A couple of minutes to a brand new life. One.

Ten seconds.

He closed his eyes.

« Excuse me? » 

James almost jumped out of his skin. He knew that when the Ticket cooled off people would have been able to notice him and bother him, but that had been extraordinarily quick; also he didn't think that waiters -even 2012's London's ones- would have such an accent. 

The man in front of him however didn't look anything like a waiter. In fact, he looked like himself.