LA FURIA

Chapter 3

Both were silent for a while. Then she spoke up.

"I can't understand why I couldn't even wash my own clothes in your yacht..."

"Of course you can't!" he hollered right in her face.

"That's not a washing machine, you idiot!" That's a trash compactor! You moron!" Edward's face grew red all over. Actually, her punch didn't hurt much. His pride hurts more.

She suddenly calmed down. Then, with a look of embarrassment, she asked.

"Right...okay...what's a trash compactor?"

He calmed down too. Not looking at her, he replied.

"It's a machine. We use it in preparing waste material for recycling. It reduces a sack of garbage into a one-foot cube..."

"On, no...", Rachel gasped, crestfallen. She imagined her clothes being torn to shreds.

"Excuse me", she walked past him heading for the cabin, but he held her arm.

"Come with me. Don't think about your clothes anymore. You won't need them."

Rachel fell silent as she let him pull her towards the cabin. He let her sit on the lower deck bed and left. When he came back, he was holding a bag of toiletries and clothes.

"Use these. After you shower, of course. You look like something the cat dragged in."

Great. He gives her clothes then insults her. Rachel mumbled her thanks sticking her eyes to her toes. Then, she stepped into the shower.

Edward sat on the bed for a while, staring at the bathroom door. Behind the noise of running water, he could hear her humming a tune. He cursed himself for being such a bully, scaring that fragile creature as small as a duckling. She's not afraid of him at all. He could tell. How dare her shout at  Edward David Sevilla. Where did she get the gall to punch him?

She hasn't known him yet. He was known by many as a foul-tempered dragon with an even worse superiority complex. But people get used to him. Women crawl at his doorstep. Edward, however, knew that they don't want a man. What they wanted was a bedroom poster. Or an inexhaustible supply of money. He never touched a single one of them. He knows what trouble looks like or feels like.

"Enough of this low-IQ melodrama", he said to himself.

Little Rachel duckling would be coming out to dress up soon. Rachel felt her circulation returning to normal as the highly-pressurized showerhead sent water gushing on her skin. She never could understand men. Aside from frequent misunderstandings with her father, experiences with her three elder brothers taught her a lot more. But this Edward guy was more than a puzzle. 

"Of course not", she giggled as she scrubbed the dirt from her knees. 

"He's not a puzzle, he's a work of art", she added. Funny how she had compared him to a sculpture of his namesake. 

"Too bad he's so...He's got no patience at all", she thought.

Rachel planned to dig deeper into his character. Maybe he's got the worst problems God has to offer. But hey, she liked that freaky attitude of his. May she's just psychotic. Or a little freaky herself.

She found a green-blue and black plaid cotton dress in a baby doll design laid on her bed. It had a matching bandanna to tie her hair with cute sandals with blue straps.

Then she noticed a pair of white underwear. She didn't know whether to feel embarrassed. Why did he happen to have a lot of women's underwear around here?

His dreamboat image fell to her foot. Well, it's also his prerogative to bring women in his yacht. Prerogative is Rachel's favorite word because it sounds so complicated for her to pronounce.