Page 8 of Something Has To Give

Rydecker had the tiny second-story bathroom window open and he was glaring down at her through the screen. “You have to the count of three to let me out of here. One…”

“Two,” she sang out with him as she mounted the porch steps. “Three.” And then in her best Sesame Street Count impersonation, she added, “Three I don’t give a craps! Ha ah ah ah!” Then she went into the house.

She heard him bang his fist against the windowsill and laughed all the way to the kitchen. She didn’t really feel like laughing, but it was important when sharing a house to establish one’s dominance and show who was boss early on, and it sure wasn’t going to be him.

After giving the eggs a gentle rinse in the sink, she packaged them in cardboard cartons and put them in the fridge. The rest of the morning she spent making cheese—heating the goat’s milk on the stove and adding vinegar to allow it to separate. She had just enough to make two batches. One she left plain and the other she spruced up with garlic and herbs before pressing into molds and taking them down into the basement to age hanging from the rafters.

No sooner had she emerged from the basement than did she hear a knock at the door. It was Ben Johnson, who ran the little breakfast café in a tiny hole in the wall called simply Benny’s. He bought all the eggs she had, plus two 8-ounce tubs of cream cheese and one round of aged cheese from the basement for himself.

“Goat cheese is an acquired taste,” he said. “Much too fine for most of the folk who patronize my place.”

“You and Darby are about my only cheese customers,” Elsie acknowledged. “But between you, my poor goats can barely keep up.”

Ben winked at her. “Well then, tell Darby you’re sold out. Cheese, crackers and pepper jelly on top; that there is my idea of heaven.”

Throughout the visit, there wasn’t one sound from Rydecker upstairs, but as Ben was heading back to his car with two recycled Walmart bags full of eggs and cheese, he turned and offered a wave up toward her roof.

“Welcome home, Quint!” he called and then tossed Elsie a wink and a grin. “Didn’t know you two were an item.”

God forbid.

Faking a smile, Elsie waved goodbye like her insides weren’t curdling with dread, but just as soon as his car had vanished down the winding driveway and that curtain of his retreating dust had dispersed in the wind, reluctantly her gaze tracked up to the rafters of the porch ceiling. She was going to have to do something about Rydecker, especially now that Ben had seen him. What if Ben talked and suddenly Rydecker started getting visitors? The sheriff might not arrest her for squatting, but she was pretty sure she could and would be arrested for holding someone imprisoned in a bathroom.

How did things get so screwed up so fast? Elsie rubbed her face and, stifling a groan, went back into the house. Leaning against the kitchen sink, she thought through her options.

“Crap,” she said, because no matter how she thought of, it all included at some point that one significant step: let Rydecker go free. She made a face, but there was no point in putting it off any further.

She made a peace offering: two pieces of toast, a little strawberry jam and some of the cream cheese she’d made the day before. Knowing it might take several feedings before hewould sweeten up enough not to prove difficult once he was out, she placed his breakfast into the lids of two store-bought potato salad containers so they could be slid easily under the bathroom door.

As if she needed a reminder as toinwhich direction his “difficulty” might lean, her bottom began to tingle. Elsie hiked up her pants, because rubbing was infantile and she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction, whether he was here to see it or not.

The big jerk.

Scowling, Elsie took her peace offering upstairs. As she approached the bathroom door, she fished the compact she’d snatched from him earlier out of her jeans pocket. She could hear him moving around inside. He could probably hear her too, since he came to the door.

Say something nice, she told herself. Something to help sweeten him into being harmless once he comes back out. “If I slip the mirror under the door, am I going to catch you doing something nasty?”

In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best thing she could have said.

“No worries, honey,” he drawled through the door. “I finished that hours ago.”

“That’s disgusting!” She shoved the mirror of the compact into the space under the door so he could see her glaring at him. “Real men would never admit doing something so base and gross.”

“No?” He squatted, smirking down at her through the mirror. With his forearms braced across his knees and his big hands hanging limply down between them, for some reason that only added emphasis to the already conspicuous bulge clad in white cotton between his legs. “How often do you go around asking?”

Elsie gaped, her face flushing hot in an instant. “Do you want to get out of there or not? Because I am just fine with leaving you in there until you rot!”

“No, you’re not,” he said with maddening confidence. “You wouldn’t have those in your hands if you didn’t care at least a little bit about the consequences of your actions. And there will be consequences, Elsie. I’ve had nothing to do all morning long but think about what I’m going to do when I finally get out of here.”

“When I let you out, you mean.”

“I meanwhen I get out.” His faint, smirking smile thinned. “Because I will get out, and when I do, I’m going to put you back over my knee. Before I’m through with you, you’re going to wish you’d been born without a bottom. And that’s onlyifyou untie the rope right now and let me out. Because if you don’t…well—” that faint smile of his thinned even more. “—guess what I found in the linen closet.”

He reached up into the sink and pulled a wooden-backed brush into view. The handle seemed a little short for a bath brush, but also a little too long for a hairbrush. Exactly what it was didn’t really matter, she supposed. When he tapped it against his palm and fixed that deadly serious look on her through the reflection of the compact again, the skin across her bottom positively crawled.

Snatching the compact out from under the door so she couldn’t see the way he was looking at her helped, but not a lot. She shoved the two lids under the door. “I hope you choke,” she hissed, backing anxiously away from the door. She wasn’t rubbing her bottom, she told herself fiercely. She was just wiping the sensation of being anywhere near him off her hands.

“What,” he called through the door. “No water?”

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