It was love at first sight.
And James hardly knew what dinged him.
But when it did, he couldn't tear his eyes away from her.
From the first moment of their meeting, they looked silently into each other's gaze, the distant and impossible suddenly becoming near...possible...and inevitable.
James's ears reddened feverishly hot.
His pulse excited as it would be, had a shot of opium jealously taken possession of his senses.
His mouth going dry in transfixed wonder, made from half agony, half adulation. Another poor bastard burned at the stake of Eros's punishing arrows. Losing the good fight against those repressed desires he'd once called himself master of. Of that inborn craving that is the undoing of even the best of men.
Helen, the beautiful, toiling relentlessly after his unstill beating heart.
Neigh...beautiful was too limiting a word for the masterwork of a goddess.
And a proper Juno, the lady was.
His eyes dragging over every indulging curve, from the perky lift of her divine trunk to the pearly bonnet that left James breathless with nothing but his wildest imaginings about what a force she'd turn out to be, once he'd gotten fast inside of her.
Never again would he be smitten by nonesuch a girl.
Because from the moment he made her acquaintance and learned her name, he was surely done for.
"Honda."
James's breath was smoky in the chilling April air as he read the lady's nameplate.
And he could almost hear the angels above singing from their moody skies, as if fate had long ago written in the blest hour of their meeting.
A splendid speed machine, she was. The pearl lines of her design mouthwateringly tailored to his fetish for high-performing mechanics.
The Honda Civic, 2015.
Capital of all motorized engineering.
Had James heard of her by word alone, such a seamlessly engineered coquette might've sounded to him more a fever dream than actuality.
But no man in his phantom of mind could ever invent such a riveting tale.
"What cruel fate we nigh on endured, to have lived and died near a century apart, without knowing how perfectly we were meant for each other," James whispered reverently to the motorcar, falling fast for the indescribable pleasure of a plushy cushioned seat against his back. And when he realized that the delightsome warmth keeping his bum toasty was a heating mechanism built into the motorcar bench, James's toes curled against his socks.
Honda appeared to sigh contently with him. Her rumbling purr dragging him to the brink of exhilaration, anticipating the climax of knowing exactly what made her engine so impossibly quiet.
What caliber of performance did this grand lady have waiting for him under that hood?
Eager as he was to find out, James knew well enough the game of intrigue, and had the stamina for it to boot.
He had no problem with waiting, knowing the lady would come to him soon enough.
And so, he bought his time, turning his gaze up and about to ponder her remarkably sound interior.
For a collection of kit and kaboodle, she appeared-dare he ever say it again-"unsinkable".
She, the pentacle of comfort and security shutting out all the rain and cold outside. Her steely breath exhaling a steady stream of warmth that played between his numbly cold fingers, as James held his hands up to the personal air vents in front of him.
Feeling kept, but in all the best ways of confinement, within the intimate cozy nook of her windows and sturdy roof that sheltered all passengers equally. Nothing like the open carriages chauffeured back in his day, reserved for only the wealthiest patrons of old money.
In this world of 2022, any man could look upon his kingdom from the throne of his Honda.
James's eyes chased every pretty light and button blinking across her switchboard, tempting him with the foreplay of secrets.
There was even a little looking glass on the windowshield, which James toyed with curiously. Clicking its miniature torchlight on and off, and turning it from side to side to get a clear view of every angle over his shoulder.
"Marvelous," the charmed junior officer whispered her praise.
The looking glass was even decorated with a dainty little pine tree swinging in zen-like cadence, with the wordsreading Apple Cinnamon etchedacross it.
James couldn't have described it better himself.
So much like Christmas in a Yorkshire countryside, the car smelt.
Spiced Victoria cakes. Mince pies. Yule Log sponge cake. Cinnamon Burboun Apple Ice Cream...
The Englishman's mouth watered.
God almighty...how did they get motorcars of the future to smell so bloody delicious?
Sound as a dinner bell, this fantasy was.
Save for one small problem.
James still hadn't any permission to touch anything.
And that was quite a bothersome catch indeed.
After all, what starry-eyed lad hadn't dreamed of becoming the chauffeur for some stuffed bird, if only to get a shot at his 1910 Peugeot Grand Prix?
Like any other 20-something who couldn't keep his hands off a shiny new motor toy, James was practically drooling to get behind the wheel of this Honda.
How much would it take, really, to bribe Miss Amberflaw's driver into letting him have a go?
Granted, James hadn't any experience with Hondas, and had only played about the wheelhouse of an ocean liner ever and anon.
But ships and motorcars weren't so different, weren't they?
He knew the basic mechanics of making things go fast.
So long as in 2022, right still meant right, and left meant left, and go meant go, and stop was indeed stop, James could manage the in-between details of motorcaring a motorcar in no time.
But whomever that lucky bastard was chauffeuring Miss Amberflaw around-well, he was certainly a lucky fellow indeed...
...who would gradly understand wholeheartedly, man-to-man, James's primal need to turn the crankshift of the Honda just once.
And Moody could hardly wait, when the driver's door finally swung open.
"Between us, old man, would it be any too much trouble, if I..."
But James quickly swallowed his words when Miss Amberflaw plopped right into the driver's seat instead.
The singing birds and angelic choirs from heaven stopped, as it all came crashing down on him like a gramophone needle jamming the rut of a broken record.
"Seatbelt," Emily announced brightly to him, pulling a long strap over her apron and clicking it into a buckle at her side.
"What–what on earth are you doing, miss?" a bemused James questioned her.
"To-ing and fro-ing," Emily answered, adjusting her rearview mirror back to its proper place from where James had moved it.
"I'm not tellin' ye I'm any such expert here," James disclaimed. "Though I do believe that seat belongs to our driver."
"And here I am," Emily presented herself. "Yours for the asking,"
James's wheat-brown eyebrow perked skeptically.
"You?" He nearly couldn't keep his unsmiling face from cracking. How bloody cute she was. "Surely, you can't mean he's left you in command of chauffeuring us about?"
"Quite the scandal, is it not?" she answered rather uppishly. Which was spoken rather well in that tune, as far as James was concerned.
She never could stop lampooning him, could she?
Yet, though Emily most assuredly took his objection as yet another symptom of his antiquated bigotry, James's skepticism of her driving credentials was not born out of any slight on her delicate sex, but out of a mad jealousy for having beat him to the draw, being the first among them allowed to drive the little Honda before he could get his hands on it.
His jaw hung flimsily.
"Surely, you can't mean for the entirety of our journey?"
"Uh huh," Emily muttered, distracted and hardly listening, as she checked her side mirror for a clear opening in traffic.
James shook his head, in a tizzy over his luck.
'I hadn't even the slightest chance against her,' he thought to himself.
But as Emily shifted the gear from park into drive and the car lurched forward, halted jarringly again by Emily mashing on the brake, the officer felt suddenly uneasy.
" Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked her.
"On occasion, yes."
"That answer is hardly reassuring."
"Then you'd better belt up," she winked at him. "I don't exactly have a license."
"And by that, you mean what, exactly?"
The daredevil gamely smirked back at him. "On the count of three."
She revved the engine a couple of times, which was no reprieve for James's nerves.
"Wait-What's a license, miss, and why does it sound so blooming important?" he inquired of her again.
"One."
"Pack it in. We will not be going on."
"Two."
Emily let the car slowly roll out its parking spot.
"Miss, you must know, I'm a terribly jittery fellow, and you can't possibly do this without the proper qualifica–You're not listening. Dear God, I mean it, miss, don't you dare say-"
"Three!"
And the officer scarcely had enough time to work out what a "seatbelt" was, before the car galloped on down the roadway.
James snatched Captain Wentworth's cat carrier, shielding it safely against his chest as he ducked for cover.
There was no "how-to manual" about this sort of thing.
No guidance for how a 20th century man should live to tell the tale, should he find himself at the mercy of a 21st century lass hotfooting a 2015 Honda Civic at her leisure.
All James knew was to give a wide berth to all machinery commanded by a woman.
And he was far too late to change his mind about putting his fate in the hands of Miss Emily Amberflaw.
Demented, she was!
But so naive was he about the future, James could not tell what he was in for.
All he could do now was hold onto the door latch for dear life. His heart racing as he watched the world become a whizzing blur of color. Alien to the still and quiet existence he once knew before.
"Miss...this is absolutely mad...this is..." Moody whispered breathily.
But gradually, he found himself speechless as the engine softened to a hum, and the Honda gradually found its steady pace.
And once he realized it was all going considerably well, James dared himself to peek back through his window.
And when he did, he couldn't take his eyes off of it.
His shoulders slowly relaxing again, as his utter terror melted into rallying excitement.
How beautiful it all looked now.
The golden glistening fairy lights of street lamps floating by, people of all sizes and all colors doing all sorts of peculiar things, gargantuan cityscapes that to James appeared to come straight from an H.G. Wells novel.
Was it not the most eye-opening and inspiring adventure he'd ever chanced upon?
Just like flying, it was.
He'd never felt so alive, except when looking out into the ocean from the deck of an officer's bridge.
Staring at the bottom of your glass, Hoping one day you'll make a dream last. But dreams come slow, and they go so fast.
The catchy tune on Miss Amberflaw's car gramophone played along with the rhythm of their journey.
And in that moment of reverie, James suddenly felt a strange pang of bittersweetness that swept like an ocean tide over him.
Realizing that finding such a place, and the tragic circumstances on Titanic that had brought him here, was not without its give-and-take.
Now that he was here enjoying all the wonders of this world, dead to the old world he'd left behind, did that mean that to be "reborn"-so to speak–he had taken this life in the future from someone else?
Because he was alive in 2022, would it never be possible now for his grandchildren's children to one day enjoy a world so beautifully progressive as this one?
"You must be thinking, god, this is insane," Emily smiled over at him from behind the wheel, mercifully ripping James away from his dreary thoughts.
"I wouldn't 'ave believed it, had you only told me it was so," James agreed. "How fast are we goin', do ye reckon?"
"Almost 50 miles per hour," Emily told him. "See?"
James leaned in closer to her shoulder to get a better look at the speedometer on the dashboard.
Then straightening his posture again, he went on doing the math.
His blue eyes turned up to his window as he mentally worked out the sum in his head against each of his fingers.
"Forty-three knots, that is," he reported his answer back to Emily.
"Sorry, I'm not exactly sure what a 'knot' is."
"A nautical mile, I mean to say," James explained. "It's a simple conversion. Perhaps, I can show you how to do it some time. But I suppose what it means is, you could readily cross the Atlantic in double the time it'd take for the RMS Olympic, and just under half for the Oceanic. Three days, at most. We could go around the whole world in just under 20 days, if you wanted to try for it."
"Is this always the way you think about things?" Emily asked him. "In knots?"
"Nautical knots, Fisherman's knots, bowline knots, anchor knots, granny knots," Moody's list went on. "We junior officers do them all."
Emily smiled, shaking her head, as she turned her attention back to the road.
"You're one in a million, James."
Moody didn't know precisely what she meant by that either, but something about the way she smiled when saying it made him reluctant to check her math on it.
He smiled too, turning back to his window.
What did the math matter anyway?
"It's extraordinary," he whispered to himself, as he went on admiring the world floating by to the ambiance of Miss Amberflaw's invisible gramophone.
'Only know you've been high when you're feeling low,
Only hate the road when you're missing home,
Only know you love her when you let her go.'