Page 18 of Something Has To Give

“Pita—”

“Don’t give me that crap! If you hadn’t been so determined to go off half-cocked, you’d have realized she was on the back porch!”

“But I didn’t know that! I didn’t know it was going to drop six feet of snow on us either! This is supposed to be the desert! It’s not supposed to snow in the desert!”

He stared at her, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. A ripple of tension shivered through him and his big hands fisted. His jaw squared, a tick of temper barely kept under control jumping as he grit his teeth. “Elsie, let’s go out onto the back porch. We can spit into Colorado together, we’re that close to the border. The best damn skiing on the face of the planet is here in Utah. Not only do we get snow here, this is only a flurry compared to what we could get. And I don’t give a damn if yourmotheris lost out there, if you ever leave this house again in conditions like that without me right God damn beside you, woman, you won’t sit for a year!”

He really did leave the bathroom then, and this time he didn’t come back.

Shivering (though not just from the cold anymore), Elsie sank down to sit on the edge of the tub. She hugged the quilt around her, her heart pounding hard at her ribs and her ears ringing from the fury of his scolding. Under the quilt, her bottom raced with an echo of the same prickling sensation that had been sopainful when it had dominated her hands and feet. Only now it didn’t hurt so much as it just felt…ominous.

She wanted to get angry at him—for threatening her in that Neanderthal vs. disobedient child way he seemed to think was so appropriate—and yet she couldn’t make herself form the emotion. Her eyes went watery all over again.

What was wrong with her?

Hugging the quilt around her knees, Elsie bent to rest her forehead on her arms and tried her best to cry without making any sound.

Chapter Eight

Quint made coffee, but Elsie didn’t drink any. She sat in the bathroom, huddled in his grandmother’s quilt, and didn’t come out for two hours. Now and then, he thought he heard sniffling, but he was too damn mad to want to go in and check on her. He could still feel that ugly sinking sensation that had gripped his stomach when he’d first realized she’d gone out into a full-on blizzard. It was something he’d never expected or wanted to feel for Elsie, but there it was, still camped out in his gut like the danger wasn’t yet done. Feelings like that weren’t something a man got over on the spur of a moment, and the quiver of it still lurking in there only served to make him that much madder.

Wishing he could shake it off, Quint threw himself into angry work. He started with the damn goats. Not about to spend the winter with them shitting on his porch, he picked them up one at a time—starting with the ones that weren’t sporting swollen milk teats—and carried them through the snow to the goat shed. He made sure the door was shut so they couldn’t follow him right back through the snow to the house again. He also made sureno other predators could sneak in and have themselves a quick snack while his back was turned.

He was on his third goat when Elsie came out onto the porch and, without a word or a look in his direction, performed her morning milking. Once all the goats had been carted out to his old tool shed—he still had no idea what she’d done with all his tools, dammit, and that made him madder still—Quint began looking for feed. He found that in the next shed over—along with his tools, which oddly did nothing to deflate his anger; he was on a good ol’ fashioned piss-off bender—and so fed both the chickens and the goats. He had to break the ice out of their water troughs and refilled both with warm water from the house. That was just laborious enough for him to spend the next few hours digging out the old heating elements from when his father was raising horses. He spent the next two hours rigging something that would keep both the goat and chicken houses lit and warm enough to keep the water from refreezing.

By the time he wandered back up to the house to warm up his hands and get something hot inside him, Elsie was dressed, the milking bucket was empty and washed, there was a fresh tub of cheese curds dripping in a bowl of cheesecloth in the fridge and two more wax-dipped rounds of cheese hanging from the rafters in the cellar. There was also a simple lunch of soup and sandwiches warming in a covered pan on the stove.

At first, Elsie kept her head ducked and her face turned away when Quint came in, stomping the snow off his boots and brushing thick flakes out of his hair. But when he walked past the table set for two and into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, she eventually dragged herself around to face him. There was no anger, no more tears. She didn’t seem to hold him to blame at all, which mollified him a little, but neither one of them were smiling. For his part, Quint wasn’t mad anymore. That had been replaced by a great, roiling turmoil of absolute frustration.

“Are you hungry?” she softly asked.

The air between, and all around them, felt so densely packed with a veritable mountain of things he didn’t know if he could, or should try to say.

“Yes.” When he sat down at the table, she brought him a grilled ham and cheese with a steaming mug of cream of mushroom soup to wash it down. It was hot and filling, and both of them sat across the table from one another—him eating in silence while she picked her sandwich apart with her fingers—until he was finished. The mountain between them felt impassable now. Not knowing how to bridge it, Quint drank the last drops of his soup and went back outside.

It was still snowing, but not as hard as before. Fetching a shovel from the new tool shed, he threw his back into clearing a path from the goat and chicken houses to the nearest porch. The sun was going down and his arms and back were killing him before he was finished. By then, he was so tired he could barely put the shovel away and then walk back to the house. He put himself directly into a hot shower, where he stayed until heat had once more suffused all his digits. A hot cup of coffee and a huge bowl of savory potato and corn chowder were waiting for him on the table when he emerged.

Quint took a quiet seat at the table. He could get used to this. Were he living alone, right now he would have been too tired to do anything more than a peanut butter sandwich. As it was, it took roughly three mouthfuls of that hearty stew before his hunger kicked in. He wolfed down two bowls—his, hers (which she pushed towards him, having not touched more than a bite or two herself)—plus every drop left in the pot on the stove. He’d give her this much: she certainly knew how to cook.

Neither one of them said a word to one another, and the mountain just got bigger. Elsie didn’t seem to know how to bridge it any more than he did.

After she was done with the dishes, she hovered in the doorway for a while, watching him watch television (there was almost as much snow on the screen as there was outside) before quietly heading upstairs to bed.

Quint bedded down on the couch, which had to be a good foot too small for him. This was going to be a miserable experience, but just the thought of trying to wrestle another night of sleep out of that bed upstairs, with her sleeping too damn close, and her smell in his nose, and the memory of how soft she’d felt right fresh in his mind, and all this mounting frustration building under his skin—it was just too much to bear. He punched his pillow twice, but comfort was elusive. He couldn’t sleep. With the lights all off and the house dark, he lay on his side with his legs as stretched out as that too-cramped sofa would allow, and tried not to think about how even his blood was burning so hot now that it was all he could do not to go upstairs and slip under the covers right up next to her. A couple petting strokes, maybe a soft kiss or two to her shoulder and nape…maybe she’d warm to him.

Maybe that would get them over the mountain.

Or maybe it would build a whole new one.

Brand new levels of frustration balled his fists. He slugged his pillow, but comfort remained elusive. Sighing, he forced himself to close his eyes, praying for sleep to just hurry up and take him. He was tired of hearing the unanswerable siren’s song of temptation that was Elsie, sleeping in the room just over his head…so near and yet so untouchable.

It wasn’t until the moment when she spoke that he realized Elsie had come back downstairs.

“Aren’t you coming up to bed?” She sounded very small and close to tears.

A better man would have found the words to reassure her. It’s not you, honey, it’s me; that sort of thing. Except that it was her,and they both knew it. So what good would it do either of them to lie?

“No.” The back of the couch ran parallel to the wall that connected with the stairs. Lying on his side with his feet nearest to her, he kept his eyes shut and his arms tightly folded across his chest.

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