“Go to hell. I’ll climb out the window.”
A window? Was she botz? Was she trying to drive me to the edge of a cliff? Because jumping out the window and rolling down the scrub-brushed hill half naked was not all right. My blood got hot with the thought. My skin tingled and curled on itself. If she knew that I was sure she’d be picked up by some stronzo as soon as she was out of my reach, she would have come out of that fucking bathroom right then.
“This is your last chance to come fucking out!”
No answer, just the sound of her weeping on the other side.
Fine. At least I knew she was in there.
I checked the objects in the room. Nothing. Carpet. Blinds. Electrical outlets. Enough. That was enough.
I tore down the blinds with my bare hands. She must have thought I was having a temper tantrum, and maybe I was. She’d separated herself from me by not telling me what I’d done, then again with that door that I could have torn off the hinges.
The crossbar that held the blinds separated from the wall, tearing plaster. I yanked off a vertical blind, cracking it. I used the edge of a piece to start unscrewing the plate from an outlet.
“Are you in there, Contessa?”
I needed to keep her in the bathroom. If she crawled out the window, I would rip the mountains off the earth and fling them at heaven.
“Are you there?” I shouted.
She sniffed.
“I don’t like too much talking,” I said. “Too much can get misunderstood. So if you say straight what I did, I can apologize and we can finish fucking. But you sit there behind that door, then we’re fighting, not fucking. That, I do not like.” I finally got the plate off.
She mumbled something.
“I can’t hear through the door.”
I got the plate off the outlet. It left a nice hole in the wall that would work for leverage.
I pulled up the blinds by the crossbar, extending them to their full length. I jammed one end in the hole in the wall the plate had covered, bending the outlet until I had room, then put the other end against the doorknob.
“It’s too much. It’s just too much. I can’t… we can’t… this is wrong.”
I bent the crossbar so it wouldn’t slide closed. Adjusted. “What’s wrong?”
I felt a little less angry knowing she was inside and staying there.
“You’re married. I can’t get past that.”
I didn’t even address that concern. It was ridiculous. I went outside. The vegetation at the side of the house was overgrown, and I walked through the brush like a bulldozer, breaking any branch in my way, angry as the floodlights at the back of the house. The rear wall was five feet from a near-sheer drop into the oblivion of the canyon, and at the back wall, the bottom of the bathroom window was six inches over my head.
I tucked my thumbs under the window. It was locked.
“Open this window,” I shouted.
“Are you nuts?”
I could see the top of the bathroom door. Saw the geometry of it change then snap back into place. She was trying to open it.
So eager to get away from me. Oh, this would not continue. Not for another second. I was going to make her understand that she was not to hide from me. Not to run. Not because of Valentina or anything. She was mine, and what was mine stayed in my sight until I decided it was safe to leave it.
I knew how to break a window. I’d broken a few dozen. I didn’t want to scare her or cut her, but that window was getting broken or opened, and I was getting in there to explain to her what all this meant.