Something Has To Give

8. Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Q uint 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 sure no 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.

Elsie was quiet for so long he thought she’d gone back upstairs. “Please come up to bed,” she said thickly. He could definitely hear the tears in her voice and beneath that small request, as loudly as if she’d spoken it instead, he heard her begging him, Please stop being mad at me.

He wished he could. He clenched his hands tighter. As evenly as he could, through gritted teeth, Quint told her, “Elsie, the next time I get into bed with you, neither one of us will be getting any sleep. Not for a long, long time.”

She didn’t move. He couldn’t even hear her breathing, not until she whispered, “Okay.”

Quint opened his eyes.

Without waiting for him, Elsie disappeared back upstairs, leaving him to lie in stunned silence for almost two full minutes before he suddenly realized the mountains were gone. One minute, unscalable; the next minute, poof.

“Well, hell,” he said, marveling. Kicking out of his blankets, he headed up after her. There was already a tight burn of tension pulling low in his belly. It extended quickly down into his groin, bringing a flare of giddiness and anticipation to life. Right up until he reached the top of the stairs. His bedroom door was wide open and there, sitting on the edge of the mattress, was Elsie. She held his grandmother’s wooden-backed hairbrush in her hands while nervously smoothing her nightshirt midway down her thighs.

“You found it,” he said, somewhat surprised. After his escape from the bathroom window and subsequent mad-dash run through the yard, he wasn’t sure exactly where he’d dropped it.

“It was in the basement under the bottom step.” For the first time, she looked at him long enough to grant him the biggest fake smile he’d ever seen. “I saw it when I was hanging the cheese.”

Quint slid his hands into his pants pockets, wondering why she was holding it now. Her hair already looked brushed, although from the condition of the bristles, it didn’t look as if she’d used his grandmother’s brush to do it. In fact, as far as he knew, that hairbrush had never once been used to brush hair. Any time his mother had picked it up, the end result had usually been his burning need not to sit down for a while. Oh yes, he had known the bite of that brush, as his father had surely known it before him and perhaps even his grandmother before that. Maydeen had known it only once in all the years they had been married, and that had been for throwing a fit at the mall over how much she could and could not spend in any one shopping trip. While it might have saved his wallet, obviously it hadn’t done their marriage a lot of good.

He wondered if Elsie knew how close she had come to having it used on her the other day.

“Will you come sit down beside me?” she softly asked, once more with eyes turned to her lap.

Quint came into the room. They were the only two people in the house, but he closed the door anyway. Somehow, that deepened the degree of intimacy between them, but sitting down beside her brought that to a whole new level.

He sat down on the bed beside her, ducking his head a little, trying to see her face.

“Will you do something for me?” She glanced at him then, a quick sideways peek that never went farther than his knee.

“What?”

When she stood up, he had the instant premonition that she was about to put herself bottom-up across his lap and in that strangely surreal moment, he was hit by both the electrifying eroticism such an offering would bring and by the absurdity. Elsie had fought him so violently the two times he had spanked her before, there was no way she’d ever just lay herself across his knee and meekly submit to having her bottom slapped.

And she didn’t this time, either. But what she did do was almost as surreal. She sat in his lap and it felt like the most natural thing in the world, when she tucked her head down on his shoulder, to wrap his arm around her. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t do that either. She began to talk instead and it was so soft that, were he not already straining to hear her, he would have missed one word in five.

“We were only married a few weeks when the recession finally hit our town and I lost my job. A couple days later I came home to find he’d annulled our marriage, taken all our money and all our things and just…gone. All I had was the money in my wallet, the beat-up old car I’d been driving and the clothes I’d been wearing. That’s it. That’s all. I didn’t know what to do…so I left. I put all the money I had in the gas tank and I drove until it was gone. I sat there about half a day before I pushed it off the road into a chasm between two big rocks.”

His eyebrows arched, but otherwise he didn’t move. “Why?”

She didn’t move much either, just a lift of one shoulder. “I don’t know. It looked real peaceful down at the bottom of that hole. I couldn’t see the car anymore. It was all covered over with dust and rocks. For a moment, I remember wanting to be down there with it.”

He actually drew back a little at that. He didn’t take his arm from around her, but he did try to get a better look at her face. “Why?” he asked again, trying not to sound as appalled as he felt.

“Because if no one found us, we’d never have to go back.” Her eyes fell closed for just a moment before she opened them again, shaking her head as she looked at him, silently beseeching understanding. “I can’t tell you how much I did not want to have to go back. Haven’t you ever felt that way, like things could never get any worse?”

Yeah, he had. He hadn’t pushed a car into a rocky chasm or moved into someone else’s house, but he had enlisted for another year in a violent war zone where he dodged bombs, bullets and insurgents on a weekly, if not daily basis. Of the two of them, quite frankly, she had dealt with it better than he had.

“So I just started walking. It took me two days, but when I found your driveway I just…walked down it. I sat on your porch all day long waiting for someone to come home, but when no one did and it got dark, I don’t know why but I tried the door. It wasn’t even locked.”

The way she was speaking, so flat and emotionless, it was a little unnerving. Quint stroked her back, not sure if he ought to stop her, reassure her, or just let her talk it all out.

“All night long, I sat on your couch and waited, expecting any minute for car lights to come down the driveway, but they never did. Eventually, I dozed off and when I woke up in the morning, I found out the lights and water still worked. There was dust everywhere and a few cans of food in the pantry, so I cleaned up a little and ate some peas. I kept all the cans, neatly lined up on the table so I could make a full accounting when someone came back. I knew the house was empty but I think it took three days before it really sank in that all that dust meant no one was going to come home. So I stayed. And eight months later, you did.”

She stared at her knees for a time, turning the hairbrush over and over in her hands.

“You’re right,” she finally admitted, once more her voice falling to very soft tones. “This isn’t my house and I don’t belong here. You don’t have to evict me. Let me stay until the snow melts, and then I’ll go.”

Now it was his turn to stare. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Go where?”

She had no idea. He could see that in her eyes.

“I’ll be okay,” she said. She looked at the hairbrush, turning it over in her hands again. After a moment, she held it out to him. “Do you want to spank me now?”

“No!” The word blurted out of him before he could stop either it or the wave of startled laughter that followed. Had he the chance to think about it, he would have tried harder to catch himself. She could so easily have misinterpreted that laugh as being directed at her rather than the situation.

“Why are you laughing?” She glared at him. “You have no trouble spanking me when you think I need it, but if I think I need it, then it’s funny? What kind of misogynistic bullshit is that?”

“For someone who has hated every spanking I’ve yet given her,” Quint promptly countered, “I’m surprised you’re asking for one now.”

“I stole your house. Am I not allowed to feel bad about that?”

“You didn’t steal it. You just lived here for a while.”

“You’ve been threatening to evict me all week and now you suddenly don’t care?”

“Of course I care. But maybe I’m getting used to you. Maybe the idea of living here alone isn’t as appealing as I thought it would be.” He offered her a wan smile. “Maybe I’m wondering if this house isn’t big enough to share.”

Something that looked a lot like hope sparked to life in the very backs of her eyes. It dimmed in the time it took her to blink. “What kind of strings come attached to that?”

He almost laughed again. Almost. “Elsie, I want you to sleep with me because you want to sleep with me. If you can’t say that to me right now, I’m going back downstairs tonight and tomorrow we’ll make up a bed for you in one of the other rooms.”

She rubbed her fingers. “I’m not whoring myself out for a house,” she finally said. “I’d like to think I have just enough self-respect not to do that.”

He added his own somber nod to that, fighting back his smile and a shake of his head. “I’d like to think so too.”

She tried to hand him the hairbrush again. “Please spank me.”

It was everything he could do not to withdraw. He didn’t want to spank her. Well, okay. Maybe if it was something sexy and playful, he could probably be pulled into enjoying the hell out of that kind of spanking. But not disciplinary. Not for punishment. That wasn’t the mood he was in.

She continued to hold the hairbrush out until he gave in and took it. He set it on the bed beside his thigh.

“Why?” he asked, no longer smiling.

Another one-shouldered shrug was all she gave him. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t spank for why not. That’s an indefinite reason and grown women should never be spanked for indefinite reasons. Every spanking I’ve given you has been for a very definite reason and I’m not going to break that record now.”

She blinked twice more, stubbornly looking down at her knees while her eyes grew watery. “How about because I feel bad, because I want to start over, and because you can’t start over unless you make amends first?”

“So this is for atonement?”

“Does that make it all right?”

Oddly enough…yeah, it did.

He’d spanked her twice—three times if one counted those few swats he’d given her out in the snow—and in none of those instances had she ever gone bottom-up with anything approaching meekness or compliance. But when he took her arm, Elsie rolled right over and braced her hands upon his left thigh. He saw her breasts rise in apprehensive little hitches as she lowered herself into position, wiggling her hips and legs as she tried to find a measure of comfort like this.

“Will you h-hold my hand?” she begged, reaching her right hand back into the empty air behind her hip.

Spanking her was not what he wanted to be doing right now, but that…that was almost too cute to resist. Quint took her hand in his, tucking it up against her side as he wrapped his arm around her waist. If left up to him, he’d have told her she had nothing to atone for. Yeah, he hadn’t expected her to be here when he’d come home and yeah, she’d definitely been something of a pain in his ass since then. But listening to the misfortune that had brought her here made a difference. And he wasn’t lying when he’d said he didn’t particularly want to live here alone. He’d never been the sort to hold grudges either. Truth be told, she really was growing on him. Maybe they could share the house, build some kind of working relationship—just him and her, a smattering of chickens, those cussed, rotten goats…honey bees…whatever else she had growing out there in the unknown wilds of his property…

But all working relationships were built on a system of give and take. And for this one to find some stability, something told Quint that Elsie needed this atonement.

She stiffened, her free hand clutching at his thigh when he raised the hem of her nightshirt and folded it over onto the small of her back. Her breath caught, doing that hitching thing all over again when he hooked his fingers into the backs of her panties and skinned them all the way down to her knees. Just like she had been when he had her face-down on the kitchen floor, he had her bottom completely bare. Unlike that time in the kitchen, this time he couldn’t help noticing how sexy, round and wobbly in all the right places she was. He would have loved to caress her, to cup her bottom and squeeze, but that kind of slippery slope could only lead to his forgetting about the spanking entirely and just rolling her under him on the bed.

Elsie squirmed, lifting up a little in an effort to look under her. “D-do you have an erection?”

He spanked her, his hand catching first one pale nether cheek and then the other, bringing an instant blush rising to the surface of her naked skin and promptly redirecting her concerns to matters far less embarrassing for him.

He took a firm but gentle approach to it, checking the downward strokes of his arm, spanking slow but steady and giving plenty of time for the sting of each slap to fully sink in. But right from the very start, Elsie seemed to have trouble enduring it. Quint couldn’t begin to count all the times he’d taken a firm hand, or belt to Maydeen’s errant backside. In retrospect, spanking her probably hadn’t been a good idea. But Elsie was different. She gasped, cringed, and clenched her bottom in anticipation of each fresh smack, making the globes of her soft, round ass jump under his palm. If she had any idea just how much each wiggle exposed all her beautiful, feminine, and hitherto hidden charms, for his viewing pleasure, she might have worked harder at holding still. But she didn’t know and he certainly wasn’t going to tell her, and so with every new crack of his hand, she would toss her head and writhe, twisting her bottom first one way and then the other, lifting up as if trying to meet his hand, only to cringe back down again—two blushing buttons jamming helplessly together to avoid a hurt they could not escape.

He thought he was being gentle, all things considered, but she must have had a very low pain threshold because he couldn’t have given her more than twenty or so firm swats when she began to sniffle, and then to cry. But it was also right about then that Quint noticed something else: a shimmer of moisture gathering along the crease of her sex, glistening under the overhead lights and growing more pronounced with every spank and subsequent wriggle. She was becoming aroused. Quint didn’t for a second think she was faking her discomfort or tears, but the sight of all that shimmering wetness sent a bolt of answering lust charging straight through to the burning core of him. What he had now went beyond any mere erection. This was something only long years without a woman, and three even longer nights sleeping beside one that was sexy as hell and twice as aggravating, could do to a red-blooded man fresh home from the military.

Her wetness beckoned to him—a hot, winking welcome she tried to lock behind her tensing thighs. He had to touch it, soak his fingers in it, and the next thing either one of them knew, he had tightened his arm around her waist, hauling her not just further over his knee, but wrapping her around his hip while he wrenched his right leg out from under her. He clamped her left leg, the one closest to him, in a scissor hold impossible to escape and shoved the other right off the end of his knee, leaving it free to kick and scramble as she would and opening her right up to the hungry appreciation of his eyes.

“Wh-what—” She stopped with a breathy squeak when he touched her, dipping into that well of liquid heat and filling the air with the heady scent and sound of her arousal. Elsie went stiff as a board. She twisted, trying to see back at him, her eyes huge with the most darling mix of mortification and confusion. “What—” she said again, but never made it any further. Her whole body rippled, shuddering when he slicked down through her folds to find her swelling clit.

“Elsie,” he said huskily. “You have been a bad, bad girl.”

She came, pinned across his knee with her blushing bottom on full display and his fingers stroking lazy circles through the slick heat of her sex. That she had no idea where that orgasm had even come from was plain by the abject confusion she wore, even as her small body contorted in tight, little spasms, trying to ride both his fingers and his knee, but that was all right. In this case, he was prepared to be one hell of a thorough teacher.

He began to spank again, faster this time, firm but not hard. She might have asked for hard, but she didn’t need it and he doubted she could take it. And even with only his hand, he still set her bottom on fire. Breathy gasps and squeaks gave way to yelps and cries, and yet he knew it wasn’t all just pain. Her bottom was moving in lusty ways, sometimes struggling to get away, yes, but just as often thrusting back to meet his palm and grinding down on his knee in desperation of another climax.

He never used the hairbrush. He’d save that for another time, when the offense really did warrant something more than just his hand and when there was no pleasure to confuse and diffuse the bite of that particular disciplinary sting. Instead, Quint took her right to the very edge of coming and just as she arched, her whole body tensing on a whole new wave of spasming jerks, he yanked her up off his knee and rolled her down onto her back on the mattress. He thrust his fingers into her, loving the milking sensations of her body trying to pull him deeper, mashing with his palm and rubbing fiercely to make her ride that wave for as long as she possibly could. Until her cries diminished to mews and her clutching, arching motions began to wilt.

He moved between her legs, every nerve in his body pulsing with need. In that moment, he could think of nothing more beautiful than the sight of her, so sated that she glowed from it, could barely move from it.

“Can we please start over now?” she whispered.

Quint shook his head. “To hell with starting over.” He stabbed his fingers through her hair, bringing her mouth right up into his ravenous kiss. He wasn’t gentle when he finally got out of his pants and into her, but then, she absorbed his initial thrust with little more than an arching moan and arms and legs that wrapped around him, holding him as tight as two people could possibly come. They were practically strangers, but as cliché as it sounded, she absolutely rocked his world.

For the first time since he’d been discharged, Captain Quint Rydecker came home.