Something Has To Give

2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

“ B ut this is my house!” Quint shouted, thumping at his chest with both hands. “Mine!” By all accounts, such power displays worked well for apes; humans, not so much. Sheriff Buster Harlowe stood stoically chewing his gum and didn’t seem much impressed. “I’m giving you permission, for God’s sake! Why can’t you drag her ass out of there? Arrest her for trespassing—or something! Do your damn job, man!”

Sliding his gaze back to the house, the sheriff continued to chew his gum. “Those look like new curtains,” he finally said.

Quint could feel his temper slip a little at that. He struggled to rein it back in. “Yeah, those are new curtains. Those are new goats out in my field. I’m pretty sure she’s got new chickens around back somewhere because there’s also a new fucking sign at the front of my driveway and posted on the porch! She’s selling eggs and cheese out of my—” he thumped his chest again. “— my house!”

“Looks like she’s made herself quite at home.”

Quint threw up both hands in disgust, growled, paced, rubbed his face and finally calmed down enough to come back to the sheriff. “Yeah,” he said again, fighting not to lose his temper all over again. “She sure has. You want to do something about that, or are you just going to stand here all fucking night !”

The sheriff barely batted an eye. “Sir, I’m going to need you to calm down.”

“Calm down? I just got back from the war to find a woman I don’t know living in my house! How fucking calm would you be?”

“I understand that, sir. But what I’m telling you is, if you keep yelling and making these big arm gestures, I might just start to feel threatened and then I’ll have to arrest you.”

Quint was stunned. “You’re going to arrest me? A stranger moves into my house and I’m the one who’s going to get arrested?!”

“Sir, you have my sympathies. But while you may own the property, she has established a residence on it. Those signs posted on the driveway and on the porch mean she’s not hiding her occupation from the public. That makes this a civil matter rather than a criminal one, so there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re going to have to take her to court and have her legally evicted if you want her out of your house.”

No longer just stunned now, Quint was floored. He stared at the sheriff, unable to believe what he was hearing. He said as much too. “I can’t believe this.”

“Again,” the sheriff said, “you have my sympathies. But I’m warning you now, Mr. Rydecker, you’d best keep your temper under firm control. If I have to come back out here to settle a domestic disturbance, law says I’ve got to take somebody with me. Judging by what I’ve seen since I got here, it’s going to be you riding in the back of my car when I go. And I’d really hate to do that, son, seeing as how this is your place and I can’t imagine anything that would make a soldier’s homecoming suck worse than this.”

Quint only stared, so floored he couldn’t pull a single coherent thought into his head. His mouth fell open and what came pouring out almost made him cringe. “My wife divorced me for our ranch hand.”

“So this is really just the icing on the suck cake.” The sheriff tsked and gave him a brusque ‘keep your chin up’ pat on the shoulder. “Sorry, son.”

“Sorry?” Quint echoed. “ Sorry?! What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?”

The lawman looked up at the house, then back at Quint, and finally shrugged with a lift of one eyebrow and an I-don’t-know tip of his head. “Like I said, it’s a civil matter, not a criminal one. I will say this though: Maybe I can’t drag her out of there for you, but I can’t drag you out of there either.”

With another bolstering pat on Quint’s shoulder, the sheriff got back in his car and drove away, leaving Quint helpless to do anything but watch as the dust from the officer’s vehicle clouded up in the air and then softly blew away on the cold winter breeze. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He couldn’t honestly expect Quint to live in this house with that…that woman, could he?

He glanced back over his shoulder. Elsie Redding was standing at the far right window, sandwiched behind the dining table which buffered the living area from the kitchen. There was a rebellious look on what might otherwise have been described as her cherubic face. As he watched, her eyes narrowed. With a jerk of the curtains, she dashed from the window and suddenly, all Quint could feel was the dull pulse of anger rising above his shock. She was going to lock him out of his own house!

“The hell you say!” Quint ran for the porch.

She won the race for the door, reaching it only a handful of steps before he did, but she lost the advantage, wasting the precious seconds it took him to bolt up the steps when she tried heaving his army bag out at him. Quint punched it out of the way, tangled with the strap and nearly went down on his chin. Fortunately, he caught himself on the door. Unfortunately, she was in the midst of slamming it shut, and his fingers became the first casualties of the war.

The pain that shot through his hands was so intense it was blinding. He shouted—it might have been a blue word or two…or more, or it might have just been a roaring bellow, he had no clear memory of what came pouring out of his mouth. What he did remember very clearly (right before sheer, unadulterated rage turned the entire world into a pulsing, throbbing shade of red, just the way his fingers were pulsing and throbbing), was the look on her face right before she tried to slam the door again, pinched fingers still caught on the wrong side of the threshold and all. It had been an angry, vengeful, victorious look and it had come, for just a few seconds, with the hint of a smirk pulling at the corners of her pretty little mouth.

It was that smirk that did them both in.

Captain Quint Rydecker hit the door with his shoulder and all the force his pain, fury and frustration could muster. Knocked backwards onto his grandmother’s rag-tied rug, Elsie landed on both her butt and her hands and quickly scrambled over onto her knees. Her feet were still fighting to get the rest of her moving when he grabbed her. “You. Little. Brat! You think that’s funny?!”

“Let go of me!” She kicked and screamed and they both fell sideways. Quint flopped onto the couch with Elsie spilling halfway across his lap, her feet kicking and flailing. If he could have gotten his hands on her neck, he might have throttled her. As it was, he had to make do with what fate saw fit to give him.

Elsie let out another scream, one based not out of fear, but anger, and it wasn’t until he locked his arm around her waist and hauled her fully across his lap that she seemed to realize the trouble she was in. That was one step beyond him actually, since Quint had no idea he was going to spank her until he had her legs locked in the vise-grip of his, with his open hand beating a wild and rapid cadence all over the seat of her jeans. He put his whole arm and practically no thought at all into making this the most memorable spanking of her entire life. Even though his aching fingers screamed out at every hit, Elsie didn’t. She yelped once, and then fell silent. One arm reached back, clawing with her sharp little nails to grab his arm and stay the next swat, but that brief reprieve lasted only until he caught her wayward wrist. That too was pinned down and then Quint went right back to paddling those jean-clad curves until the whole of her body lay as stiff as a plank of two-by-four across his knees.

What was he doing?

Quint froze, every muscle locked to keep her pinned across his lap, though she wasn’t fighting him anymore. He held one trembling hand raised high above her cringing bottom. You are so going to jail , his conscience whispered. And like a little devil sitting on his other shoulder, with equal clarity he heard, Better make it worth the prison sentence. She’s not feeling a thing through these jeans .

His hand shot down, but not to spank. Lifting her off his knee far enough to get under her stomach, he found the top button on her pants just in time to bring her kicking and shrieking back to life.

“No! No!” She tried to wriggle her free hand down between them. Clawing him was probably an accident, but it didn’t help his temper any, and in the slapping, smacking, kicking, grunting battle that ensued, he wasn’t sure which of them came out the winner in the end, except that she was still pinned across his lap with both hands now clasped wrist to wrist behind her back and he still had one hand free to spank her with. He was bleeding where her sharp little nails had nicked his forearm. He looked at that, but the injury was nowhere near as serious as the one he intended to deliver upon her backside.

“Rape!” she screamed when he grabbed the back of her—no, Maydeen’s —jeans. It took three hard yanks to get them down far enough to lay her vulnerable bottom bare.

“Don’t flatter yourself!” he snapped back and then he let her have it all over again. The flat of his hand made the most satisfying smack when it connected flesh to bare pink flesh, briefly flattening the blushing summits.

Elsie sucked another hard breath, her fingers grabbing at the empty air where he held them pinned, her feet drumming fitfully against the floor. She stiffened all over again. For only a few seconds, she made no sound at all (apart from the kicking of her feet, a disjointed harmony that clunked in conjunction with the ‘smack-crack-whack!’ of his hand), but then her pent-in breath whooshed out of her and she began to squeak, tiny cries that escaped between tightly clenched teeth, growing louder the longer he paddled her until she was alternately cringing and bucking, throwing back her head and fighting to waggle her rump as if she could somehow evade the inescapable or throw the sizzling hurt right off her skin.

That it was hurting her, Quint knew beyond all shadow of a doubt; he could feel the same sharp level of pain deep in the palm of his spanking hand. He didn’t stop though, not until she suddenly clenched inward, her whole body trying to ball up on his knee—her fingers fisting until her knuckles whitened, her feet kicking back up against his thigh. When she broke, he felt that mental and emotional fracture every bit as keenly as if it had happened physically. She snapped straight back out again and her breath coughed out of her on sobbing waves that she kept trying to suck back in and hide.

“Stop!” she wailed, and Quint did. Not because she wanted him to (he really couldn’t have cared less what she wanted, at this particular juncture), but because her backside was boiled-lobster red, burning hot to the touch and swollen. He could feel the throbbing pulse of her pain radiating out of her and deep into his right hand, which was burning and throbbing and almost as red as her butt.

This was a job well-done.

This was a whuppin’ worth going to jail over.

He dumped her off his lap and onto the floor at his feet. He’d have left her there too, except there was something about that pose that didn’t sit right with him. Watching her rise onto her hands and knees, braying out wail after sobbing wail while she reached back one-handed to touch her blistered nethers…no, it just didn’t sit right at all. Looking around the living room, Quint noticed an empty corner. It wasn’t a real corner, but rather one side of his mother’s old piano tucked up next to an otherwise empty stretch of wall.

It would do.

He grabbed a fistful of loose shirt at Elsie’s shoulder, hauling her roughly to her feet, and ignored her subsequent shriek. She grabbed at her sagging jeans and underwear and swung around, narrowly missing slugging him on the chin (no maidenly slap, that one; he barely got his head jerked back in time) and let loose the kind of animalistic growl that said plainly her spirit wasn’t as broken, nor her temper as subdued, as she might otherwise have let on.

“Squatter’s rights,” he mocked, and marched her into the corner to shove her nose-first up against the wall. “I’ll give you ‘squatter’s rights’.”

Struggling to get her pants up far enough to cover all the parts of her he was still too pissed off to want to look at, she shoved right back out again almost immediately. “You have no ri—”

She broke off with another shriek when he upended her right there, tucking her under one arm and pinning her across his hip where 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?

Why did Rydecker have to come back now, just when things were starting to get easier? Why couldn’t he have stayed away, or better yet, died in the war?

No sooner did that thought darken her soul than did she regret giving birth to it. What had he done wrong, really, apart from coming home to find her living here? Yes, he’d gotten angry and yes, he’d spanked her, humiliated her, was humiliating her still—but what would she have done if their shoes had been reversed?

Elsie hugged herself tighter, digging her fingernails into her soft palms, punishing herself until it hurt. It didn’t matter what she would have done. Their situations weren’t reversed. This was her place now. She’d found it. She’d built it up, fixed it up, started a business and was just now making enough money and food to perhaps avoid starving as winter drew ever closer. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t have any way to get to town. She was totally dependent upon the things her customers brought her for barter or purchase, but this was the place she had settled herself and she wasn’t leaving. Not now, not ever.

“How do you know my name?” the soldier on the couch asked, sounding more curious than upset now.

She wasn’t an idiot. “I can read. Captain Q. Rydecker. It’s stenciled all over your luggage.”

The big, army-green duffel was lying where it had fallen in the doorway just before she’d slammed his fingers in it.

Great. Now she was starting to feel guilty about that too.

Rydecker snorted again, and she tensed when she heard him get off the couch. He walked out the front door without a word, and for one indescribable minute, Elsie was caught in electrified indecision. She had the most intense urge to run for the door, and slam and lock it before he got back, but that urge slammed almost instantly up against the invisible wall that was her reluctance to find out how much worse Rydecker’s punishments could get. In the next few seconds, however, her chance to act dissipated when he came stalking back into the house carrying bags of groceries—oh no, he was moving in!—into the kitchen. On his way back through the living room, he paused to shut and lock the door, glared at her once, then retrieved his duffel and headed for the stairs.

“Where are you going?” she asked, suspicion yielding to the beginning rise of panic. He couldn’t go upstairs. Her bedroom was upstairs!

“To bed,” he said shortly. His footsteps heavy on the stairs, he cast her another dark look before the first floor ceiling blocked him from view. “I’ve had a long and aggravating day.”

“Wait! You—you can’t go up there!” With her underwear and pants tangled around her feet, she chased after him. She almost fell on the stairs, but got them yanked up over her hips and was zipping and buttoning herself back into her shield of clothing when she reached the second floor. “Wait! Wait right there!”

He headed straight for her bedroom, nudging open the door with his duffel before tossing it onto the floor in one corner.

“Hey!” she shouted.

He caught the edge of the door and would have swung it shut on her, except that she quickened her pace to catch it and barreled into the bedroom after him.

“Hey!” she shouted, even louder.

He sat down on the end of the bed, putting his back to her while he took off his boots and dropped each with a heavy thunk on the floor. “Do you mind? I’d like to go to bed now.”

“You can’t do that here! This is my room now!”

“The hell it is.” He stood up to take off his belt. She couldn’t quite stop herself from jumping when he whipped it from his belt loops. She hated the involuntary backwards step her trembling legs made her take before anger—he’d done that just to get this reaction out of her—helped to bolster her courage. He glared at her, obviously tempted, before dropping the belt on top of his boots. “This is my room and has been since my parents died. This is my bed, too. I bought it two weeks before I married my ex-wife.”

“Go somewhere else,” she said through gritted teeth, her chest heaving with the frustration and the sheer helplessness of this situation.

Still glaring, he pulled his t-shirt off over his dark head, revealing muscle after muscle, after ripped core-muscle. God, he was built like a brick wall. Her face flushed, burning hotter the more she tried not to look—or at the very least—to not look like she was looking at him. Dark hair, dark eyes, a tribal tattoo that wrapped the bicep of one arm in stark black half curves and sharp points. She had never met a man so…so chiseled that he could just as well have been cut from stone. But that’s what Rydecker looked like, standing in front of her in nothing but a worn pair of jeans and with nothing but a bed between them. She hadn’t meant to stare, but his hard mouth twisted into a knowing smirk, and Elsie knew she’d been caught doing just that: staring.

“Good night,” he said and dropped his shirt on top of his shoes.

“You can’t sleep here.” Her voice might be trembling, but Elsie wasn’t about to back down. She squared off against him. “You might have bought this bed, but it’s been mine for the last eight months! I’ve been the one washing the sheets. I beat the dust out of the pillow and mended the holes in the blankets.”

“Oh yeah?” His brown eyes turned steely; his muscles flexed, making that tribal tattoo dance. “I was born in this house.”

“Then you never should have left!”

“You never should have arrived,” he replied and began to unbutton his pants.

Her face flushed even hotter. Don’t look, she told herself, but her eyes developed a wayward life of their own. She looked. “Stop that,” she said, sounding strangely breathless.

His smirk broadened. “Stop what?”

He unzipped his jeans.

“Stop that!” She pointed, but quickly snatched her hand back when she realized how badly it was shaking.

He shucked his jeans all the way down his muscular legs and stepped out of them. Standing nonchalantly before her in nothing but a well-fitting pair of tightie-whities, he folded and dropped his pants on top of his boots without ever taking his dark eyes off her. “Good night, Elsie.”

Except that he didn’t mean “good night” at all. Rather, he meant “go to hell”. She could hear the words hanging like icicles in the air between them.

“Not in this bed,” she said hoarsely, so impotently helpless to stop him that she didn’t know what to do. Obviously, she couldn’t call the police. She couldn’t physically stop him; it was laughable even to try. There were no guns anywhere in the house that she knew of, and although there were weapon-able knives in the kitchen, exactly what was she supposed to do once she’d retrieved one? Attack him? Yeah—she looked him up and down—yeah, right. He was a trained soldier. He was bigger, tougher—one hand crept back behind her to touch her still burning, throbbing backside—and definitely meaner. She had absolutely no illusions about how such a confrontation would end.

“Anywhere else,” she said, waving her hands over the bed, blustering in the hopes he might listen because bluster was literally all she could do. “Anywhere else in this house, but not in my bed!”

Taking hold of the quilt, he whipped back the bedding. “Get the door on your way out.” He got in and jerked the blankets back up over him. Casting her one final look, he punched his pillow twice and lay down on his side, with arms folded hard across his chest and his back to her. “Get the light too.”

And just like that, her bedroom was no longer hers. Elsie stumbled backwards out into the hall. Shaking, she grabbed at the door handle, missed, grabbed again and finally managed to slam it shut between them. Then she stood there, shaking with anger and helpless fear. After eight months of false security, now she was going to lose everything all over again.

Except that “everything” in this case hadn’t really been hers in the first place, had it?

Yes, because she’d made it hers! She’d taken this dilapidated, abandoned house and she’d patched it up, fixed it up, and turned it back into a home. She wasn’t going to leave! Where would she go if she did?

There was no place. She had nothing.

Elsie covered her mouth with her hand, and momentarily bowed by the sudden weight that hit her in the back along with that realization. She had nothing. She was once more exactly where she’d been last spring. She could taste the desperation in the back of her mouth, that sickly taint that made her feel as if she were going to throw up.

Get a hold of yourself, Elsie .

Dragging herself up the wall, Elsie straightened her spine. Rydecker might be a soldier, but she was used to fighting too. She’d been fighting every single day for every fragile toehold of gain she’d taken, and she wasn’t about to back down now. If he’d had the power to really throw her out, the cop would have arrested her. He hadn’t; so Rydecker didn’t. The only way he could win this battle was by getting her to admit defeat.

Well, Elsie was all done being defeated.

She scrubbed the tears she hadn’t realized were winding their way down her cheeks and then she marched back into the bedroom. Sometime during her crisis in the hall, Rydecker had got up and shut the light off himself. He was back in bed now, still with his back to her, still with his arms folded across his chest. He was pretending to be asleep, but she knew better.

She wasn’t about to strip down to her usual nightshirt, but she did kick off her shoes and then she got into bed too. Robbing him of at least half of his blankets, she scissored them between her legs to ensure he couldn’t wrench them back and freeze her out during the night.

“Damn it!” he swore, lifting his head off the bed’s only pillow while he tried ineffectively to tug back enough to cover himself.

She grabbed the pillow next and yanked it out from under him, then lay down facing the door with it clutched tight in both hands.

Swearing again, she could feel Rydecker’s indecision a bare moment before he elbowed the mattress in frustration and lay back down with his head now cushioned on his own forearm.

It was a Mexican sleep-off, and it was one she intended to win. Back to back, they made that bed into a silent battlefield and neither one of them slept easily or well.