Page 4 of Something Has To Give

She broke off with another shriek when he upended her right there, tucking her under one arm and pinning her across his hipwhere her bottom became his open target. He didn’t have a good hold on her and she fought back like the she-devil she probably was. But by the time it was over, he’d landed only a half-dozen good slaps and maybe just as many others that missed the intended mark. He stopped anyway, yanked her upright, spun her roughly to face the wall again and shoved her right up to the old pin-striping that his grandmother hand-hung way back when she’d been matriarch of this house.

“Don’t move from this spot,” he warned.

“My pants are falling down,” she snarled back.

“Unless you’re dying to know what my belt will feel like whipping across your naked ass, I suggest you let them!”

“You can’t do this!” she shouted. “You’ve got no right touching me—not with your belt or your hand! No right! None at all, and that goes double for looking at me without my clothes on!”

Quint grabbed his belt buckle.

Elsie flattened herself against the wall, hands and nose both pressed flat, her forehead firmly against the papering. Her whole small body was as tight as a drum. Her pants were a puddle of denim around her ankles and her bright red bottom was on blatant display. She sniffled twice, and then, with the rigid set of her shoulders dissolving into jerky shakes, she began to cry all over again. This time it was softer, more breathy.

Letting go of his belt without drawing it, Quint moved in close behind her, letting his bitter angry words fall just behind her ear. “Those aren’t your clothes. Those are Maydeen’s clothes. And you’re…not…her.”

Angry as he was right now, for just a tiny moment, he honestly could not tell whether that was a good or a bad thing.

Shoving back off the wall, he was just starting to walk away when he thought he heard her mutter, every bit as bitterly, “Thank God for small favors.”

Tempted as he was to whip off his belt and heat up a good ol’ fashioned Round Three, Quint threw himself down on the couch instead. Exactly what he was supposed to do now, or even more importantly, what he was supposed to do with Elsie, he didn’t know. Folding his arms across his chest, he tried to satisfy himself with glaring holes in her back until long after the sun went down and the house went dark.

* * * * *

He was a pervert. A misogynistic, woman-beating pervert.

With a very hard hand.

She wanted to rub so badly, but he was just sitting there, burly arms folded across his equally burly chest, staring at her…ogling, really. Yeah, that’s exactly what he was doing. He was ogling her naked butt.

And here she was, taking it. Just taking it. Why wasn’t she doing something to get herself out of this mess?

Because he had a belt, that’s why! Apparently, he wasn’t afraid to use it, either.

He couldn’t make her stand here all night, could he? Elsie shifted from one foot to the other. And what the hell was going on with this wallpaper? She’d been here eight months. How could she not have noticed how truly hideous this design was. She should have ripped it out months ago.

Glaring, Elsie fumed in silence, while trying her best not to look like she was fuming. This was ridiculous. She was twenty-six. Twenty-six-year-olds did not get spanked, nor did they stand like recalcitrant children with their noses in unending time-outs. She sighed and, after a moment, when he said nothing, sighed again a little louder. “I’m getting out now.”

“Not until I tell you.” He sounded bored.

If anything, that made her fume even harder. “You can’t keep me here all night.”

“It’s my house. I can do anything I want.”

“I didn’t know anyone was living here,” she spat, folding her arms now too.

“So, that makes it all right for you to move in?” He snorted. “How did you even find my house? What, were you walking up and down random driveways, checking to see whose lights came on?”

Hugging her middle defensively, Elsie glared at the wall and said nothing.

A full minute ticked by in silence, helped along by the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.

“Why haven’t you called the cops yet?” the soldier on the couch asked.

She locked her lips in a hard tight line.

After a moment, he snorted again. “It’s because the cellphone in my pocket is the only phone in the house, isn’t it? The electricity, water and gas all get paid automatically out of my bank account, but Maydeen only ever used her cell, so you had no way to turn the phones on. Isn’t that right?”

She cast him a single dark look over her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Captain Rydecker. When I want to get rid of you, I won’t call the cops. Yours won’t be the first large body I’ve buried in the desert.” She faced the wall again and thought about her car at the bottom of that chasm. If she hadn’t shoved it into the gully between those two rocky outcrops, maybe she could have found a way to get gas to it, hid it out here in one of the outbuildings, and now she’d have a way to…to what? Run away again? Drive off into the chilly sunset and find another house somewhere? Start over for the second time with nothing?

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