“I care about you,” she said, the tone of her voice saying anything but. “How am I supposed to understand when you won’t tell me anything?”
“You care about being in control, nothing more, nothing less. If you can’t have it, you rage against it,” Lance said, finally losing the battle in caging off the anger. Ellen’s eyes widened in surprise, and Lance knew then that he’d gone too far. Not by saying anything wrong, but by putting his finger directly on the truth.
She turned and dumped the remainder of her coffee into the sink and walked past him to the entry. Lance sat for a few seconds, not looking at her, not wanting to. Finally, he felt reason wade its way into the chest-deep fury of his thoughts and try to calm him.
“Ellen, wait.” He rose and walked over to where she stood, her hand already on the doorknob, the too-high heels strapped dangerously to her feet. “I’m sorry. I just can’t go through it all with you now; it’s not the right time. There’s so much. I can’t …” His words trailed off, and he hoped she would take the cue in this play they had rehearsed so many times before. Ellen turned her head just enough for him to see both of her eyes, her eyebrows drawn down in anger, with a hint of sadness.
“You’ll never let me in. I know that now. I won’t wait around for someone who can’t face his fears.”
“I’ve faced my fears!” Lance yelled. “I’ve seen things that would break you!” Ellen grimaced and closed her eyes as she turned away from him. For some reason he very much wanted to see her face, maybe to know if she’d opened her eyes or not. She kept her back to him when she spoke again.
“You faced your past, you just can’t bear to look at the future.” Without favoring him with another glance, Ellen turned the knob as if it were an emergency exit on an airplane and stormed out of the house, into the brightness of the summer day.
The slam of the door was like a bold exclamation point at the end of an angry sentence. Lance stood with his hand pressed against the cool wall and waited for the boiling anger in his center to subside. It didn’t.
With a yell, he spun, grabbing the closest object at hand—a vase he had received as a gift from Andy when his second novel won a Bram Stoker award—and flung it as far and as hard as he could. The heavy blue vase glittered in the sunlight as it flew and shattered into a thousand sparkling pieces on the far wall. The tinkling patter of the shards hitting the floor snapped the trance of his anger. The rage that had been so sharp and crystalline seconds ago now seemed foolish and alien, as if he had been playing surrogate to someone else’s emotions.
Sighing deeply, Lance went about vacuuming up the glass on the floor, and then remembered the broken lamp from the night before. I’ll have to redecorate entirely if I don’t get a handle on this, he thought idly, and a halfhearted smile surfaced on his face. When he went to clean up the lamp, he found that Ellen had already swept it up and disposed of it, seemingly while he slept deeply that morning. The sight of the clean floor made his heart sink a little as he returned the vacuum to its place in the closet downstairs.