CHAPTER FIVE. A Hot Little Number

"I'm Penelope."

Tyler was speechless. Penelope, Joe's ex?!

"You're Joe's ex?" he demanded, then belatedly remembered he was supposed to be Joe Mulcahy, and said, "Uh. I mean. My ex?" which wasn't really much better after all. 

Maybe Tyler wasn't doing so well at the subterfuge thing, let alone the rugged hero thing, or the incognito thing.

Penelope smiled, a red-lipstick circle around white teeth.

Strangely, she was still beautiful.

"Let's not play idiot ball here, Tyler," she said, or rather sneered, in his general direction.

So. Not a friend, then.

She took a seat at his table without an invitation.

"Did I say you could sit there?" Tyler demanded, because if he was going to inhabit the body of a rugged hero he may as well try to live up to the title.

"Hm. Charming," said Penelope, lighting a cigarette in a long holder like she was Cruella deVille or something. "Let me cut to the chase, as my presence is apparently no more welcome with you than it would have been if you were still Joe in that body."

"It might help if you weren't such a bitch on introduction," snarled Tyler, thinking he was really getting the hang of this hero thing.

Her hand snaked out and grabbed him around the collar, slamming him into the table so fast he barely registered it, only the throbbing pain in his face afterwards to mark that it had happened at all. She withdrew her gloved hand and went back to that dainty-lady act, which he now knew was a complete farce. He'd been on the wrestling team in high school, and nobody had strength like that. Nobody.

"So," he coughed, to cover his embarrassment. "What can I do for you, Penelope?"

"Call me a bitch again and find out."

Tyler seethed, and watched her smoke in silence for a moment. Her hair was in perfect waves, the kind that are machine-made, not natural. She was so put together it was pretty easy to see why he hadn't recognized that she was apparently the fucking Terminator.

He got the impression that the delay here was related to her waiting for an apology, which he absolutely did not want to give, but if he had any chance of finding out exactly why the hell she knew his real name then he was going to have to be humble.

"I'm sorry," said Tyler. "That was shit of me."

"Indeed. Now. Was that so hard?" she asked sweetly.

"How do you know my real name?"

"This isn't my first time, sweetheart," she said. "Some of us can control this power. Some of us cannot."

"How many of us are there?" asked Tyler. "I just woke up like this."

"Said like any blonde little influencer," she said.

Ah. So she was from his own time period. Nobody would know about the vast efforts put in by the kind of people who lived their entire lives like they were on the Truman Show, on purpose, unless they were living sometime near his own era, or thereabouts.

Still, all of this put Tyler on edge. He didn't like to feel like someone else got the jump on him. Hero or not, he liked to know what was going on, and exactly who he was dealing with, especially since he had apparently entered a reality where people could bodyswap and time travel. 

Who knew what else might be possible?

"And you know me how?"

Her smile turned inexplicably cruel.

"I can recognize one of us from a mile away," she said. "It's something in the eyes. Call it lack of belonging or confusion. And this isn't A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - "

She saw his lack of recognition, and shook her head.

"What are they teaching kids in school these days?" she muttered.

"I saw that film!" protested Tyler.

"Film. Sure," she said. "Well. The thing is. I'm not from your time period. Your time period seems quaint and vintage to me. I'm from the future."

Tyler just blinked at her.

"Well, so am I," he said, since it was technically true.

She rolled her eyes.

"I mean, I'm from your future," she said. "Tyler. I'm your wife."

A silence fell between them that perturbed Tyler probably far more than Penelope, since this was apparently not thunderous news to her in the way it was to him.

If, that was, she was actually telling the truth, and given her cool serene attitude, he wasn't too sure about that.

Overall, this was absolutely too much for Tyler to bear, especially since he hated her on sight and calling a woman names was no auspicious beginning to any relationship.

"Get the hell out of here!" he shouted. "Go!"

He stood, pointing a shaky finger at the door, and hoped and prayed that the people of Aguascalientes would just think old Prof Joe was angry at one of his string of hot exes. Not that he was doing a great job of the whole rugged hero thing, given that his chest was heaving with emotion and his fury was unmatched at the moment, although he couldn't really suss out the reason why.

"Very well," she said. "When you get your wits together, you'll know where to find me."

She stood, and sashayed out the door, leaving Tyler to yelp after her:

"Where?"

You know. Just in case, Tyler thought desperately to himself.

"The Palm Hotel," she purred. "You'll know it. Ask around. See you, Ty."

And she was gone, leaving Tyler to collapse into his chair and bury his face in his hands, only belatedly realizing that absolutely nobody in his entire life had ever called him Ty because he always hated it, ever since Trixie started chanting shoelace shoelace shoelace!! at him when the nickname was originally attempted.

"What the fuck was that," he asked himself, and wondered at his reaction to this Penelope woman. She was absolutely beautiful, that much was true, and definitely of the hourglass-figure variety made famous by exactly the kind of old movies he enjoyed watching, someone built very much like Marlene Dietrich or Lauren Bacall. However, he could not imagine liking someone with that kind of personality, certainly not well enough to marry them! 

However, he hadn't exactly given her much of a chance, and he had reacted so angrily that he hadn't even received the answers to his own questions, namely, how could he get back to his own body, and back home? But his reaction of completely irrational anger was a strange one. Tyler was many things, but mostly a laid-back kind of guy, because someone with as little ambition as he possessed wasn't usually so volatile.

And yet, here he was, shouting at some woman who was still a stranger to him, despite her obvious interest in having a conversation. He wondered just how long it would take him to decide to go to the Palm Hotel. In fact, he realized that he had no idea where Joe had been staying, and wondered with a groan whether it would be the exact same place. Aguascalientes was probably not the kind of town that could support more than one hotel, and so he felt very foolish indeed as he considered his next move, and wondered at his extreme reaction to Penelope's presence.

Then again, she had put his face into the table! So he felt kind of justified. But it was definitely the kind of mixed feeling he didn't want to examine too carefully.

He hated to admit it, but people only really got that angry at family, friends...or lovers.

He was stewing away there in the bar when someone suggested he go check out the hot springs from which Aguascalientes got its name. This was the kind of friendly advice from the barkeep that really meant please get out of my bar before I have to throw you out. He decided that he had probably tested the patience of these nice people to the limit, and that instead of bothering them further, he could go take a look around the town and maybe take a dip in the water while waiting for Paco to return with the Professor, who seemed to have no other name.

Aguascalientes was not a very large town, so it was not far from the cantina. Tyler used his time wisely, and immersed himself in the busy city streets on his way to take the waters, as he had always seen it referred to in old novels. Trixie had been right; there was real value in travel, and experiencing new things. In the time he had been here, which wasn't even a full day yet, he had learned a great deal about other people and about himself. Perhaps there was really something to what they said, about how travel is the great enemy of prejudice.

So Tyler left the cantina, and walked down to the riverside, where the water steamed hot and glorious, there in the middle of the jungle.