Roxy is compartmentalized like a submarine. Everything sealed in its own chamber. Vapor-locked. And everything she does seems to me both erotic and remote. Her ordinary demeanor is of Aphrodite regarding pigeons.

And when she talks to her mother back in Orgosolo, I can hear the whole conversation because the mother talks loud in that machine gun Sarda accent that sounds like ping pong balls splattering a tin roof. The mother invariably mentions some woman's cosce selvagge—wild thighs—disapproval thick as saba. It's usually a woman she saw on TV wearing a mini skirt and stilettos, or just some local woman at the IperPan wearing tight pants and kissing a baby with those lips. Roxy encourages her, clearly enjoying her mother's crusade.

And this is the thing, both Roxy and her mother are rich the way Sardinians are rich-silently, stubbornly, with land, and jewels hidden in the walls—but the mother buys cheap shampoo at the China Store and pours it into a Pantene bottle for guests.

Roxy is the same. Pathologically frugal. Elegant. Perfectly modest. Except when she isn't.

If I were to ask her "did you really want me to do that where you asked me to do it, or was that for my sake?" she would likely slap me. And she would see my pleasure, and then call me deficiente. If we did talk about it, I'd tell her the whole production makes me sad—like watching a Chekhov play and someone shoves a vaudeville routine in at the end. Everyone's disappointed.

But she just ignores me, so we don't communicate. And this is why it ended.

The car is packed. Her apartment is shuttered. A quiet weekend in the Abruzzo mountains awaits.

She's been ready for about 5 seconds, standing by the door in the pitch-black living room, keys in hand, while I do one last check to make sure I have everything. I'm aware of her waiting, in the way one is aware of a lit fuse. But she's been rushing me since we got out of bed, and I've only had a thimble of coffee.

"Aspetta," I say. Wait. "Un caffè."

No acknowledgement from the darkness. Things have been tense for awhile.

Last Tuesday she found two of my pocket notebooks stuck together in her refrigerator. I keep them everywhere—jackets, car, satchel, kitchen drawers. A banana had turned gelatenous in my satchel and coated them. I put them in her fridge to stabilize; stop the gnats circling. I meant to do a full recovery operation but I forgot about it.

So they sat abandoned in her clinically organized refrigerator.

The notebooks are filled with simple observations. The pair of donkeys I see on my runs outside town, who circle when they spot me. The barista at Trovellesi who braids her hair differently every day, bites her fingernails, can't stay off her phone. My landlord Yuki trimming roses in the alley, her underwear tangled in the waistband of her stretch pants.

Roxy found these notes and didn't say anything. Just removed them and disappeared them. I was too afraid to ask where they went.

I run the machine once. Twice. Three times. Each pod making a tiny portion, hissing, gurgling, while I hold an Ikea tea mug underneath. Making my trough, as she calls it, one espresso at a time.

"Hey Alexa, play Happiness is a Warm Gun by The Beatles," I say.

By the time her Alexa has dutifully recited the command, I'm in the dark against her, my right finger pointed like a gun into her little belly, singing, "She's not a girl who misses much, dodo-do-do-dodooo,oh yeah..." I'm gyrating up and down like daddy long legs in the breeze.

Not even an eye roll. Her expression is the one my son exacted when I'd ask him to redo his homework. An obstinant trance state that, when he was very young, could devolve into slobbering.

I run back to hit the machine again. More coffee. Still singing.

"Alexa, stop," Roxy says.

We're back into the void. Disembodied souls listening to coffee gurgle into a trough, which I then realize is in a cup she will not allow me take to the car.

I'm opening cabinets looking for a travel mug, still singing, acapella now: "When I hold you in my arms... and I feel my finger on your trigger...."

Nothing from the darkness, but her phone is illuminated and her face is caught in its glow. She hates the Beatles. Loves Jethro Tull. When I think of this I feel a pain in my chest for her which has nothing to do with music.

Then I see it. A recepticle with a handle that looks like a skinny, crystal beer stein.

Fuck it.

I pour the coffee into the thing. All of it. American-sized. Hot. Steam rising through the louvred shadows.

I walk to the door. Smiling. Full of anticipation.

She's facing me. Hand on the door handle behind her. Not moving.

I walk right up to her and purposely nudge against her reaching for my jacket. Feel her body against me. Smell mint shampoo under my nose.

"Ayoooo?" I say. Let's go in Sardu.

Nothing.

"Roxy?"

She's looking at me. Waiting. Her big brown eyes are expressive and deep. Like peering over the edge into the Supramonte. You want to just let go. Give her what she wants.

I ask what's wrong.

"Sit," she says. "Drink your coffee."

"I'll drink it in the car. Come on, we're already—"

"Siediti. Bevi. Il tuo. Caffè."

I stand there maybe ten seconds waiting for the punchline, but I quickly realize she's not messing around. There is no getting both her and the coffee out the door. A similar thing has happened before. It was a conflict over my wanting to sleep with a fan by the bed in summer. She said she knew someone who woke up with her mouth literally migrated to her cheek after fan exposure. At the very least, she said, she'd have a sore throat. "Colpo d'aria" is the affliction. Literally "hit of air"—a folk illness Italians treat like medical fact. I lost that battle. Between this and the shutters having to be closed to block all light, we sleep together like vampires in a sealed crypt. I allow it because in spite of all this, when the light goes out she giggles at everything I say and tells me terrible jokes; so we laugh. And she sleeps naked, snuggled beside me, with her nose by my ear. The crypt. Her breathing. She seeps into me as I drift off.

And so this morning I'm being reminded that Italians don't play games with food rules. They don't eat on the move. They don't drink and walk. And apparently they don't drink coffee in a moving vehicle. It's degenerate. It's American.

I go to the sink and pour it out. All of it. Four espressos. Disappeared.

I set the glass thing down. Carefully. Turn around.

"Let's fucking go."

She's already out the door.

She drives. She always drives. I drive too slowly for her and I don't have a car, so I have no say in any case.

Five minutes past Santa Maria degli Angeli, I decide I want out. I can't take it anymore.

"Stop the car."

She doesn't stop.

"Rossana. Stop the car."

Nothing. Driving twenty miles over the speed limit, hugging every curve, drifting off the rear fenders of competing travelers, not using her turn signal, ever. In America you'd guess she's running from the law. Here it's normal driving.

I reach for the door handle. Pull. Nothing. Child locks.

"Open the door."

She drives. Silent. Umbrian countryside rolling past. Vineyards. Olive groves. Medieval hilltop towns. I'm locked in like a child being driven to school.

"Roxy. Open. The. Door."

Nothing.

She starts an audiobook in French on the car stereo. Her face calm. Focused.

We drive through Umbria. Into Le Marche. Climbing into the mountains. She never stops. Never unlocks the doors. Never acknowledges I asked to get out.

One hour in her rickety Peugeot that rides like a prairie schooner—she's been getting quotes to replace the suspension for three months—listening to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in French. The narrator is describing the scent of a strange woman's sex on Tomas's hair. Tereza smelling him while he sleeps. I've had enough. I have to get out of the car. I know how this story ends.

"Remember in the very beginning when I asked about the most adventurous place you had sex? I said mine was the little graveyard in the park in Missouri where the brother of outlaw Jessie James is buried and you said, 'Taxi'."

I let that rest there for a bit, watching her expression. Waiting to see if an Italian Jeopardy board materializes in her head with the category: Things Italians Can't Do in a Car'.

"Was it just a blowjob, or did you fuck?" I ask. In my mind it was both. That was how I preferred it. Her telling me nothing was worth more than a whole porn franchise dedicated to the subject. All I knew of her love life, before me, was that she had traveled a lot when she was younger and been with many men. Her last boyfriend was a married British guy who was, in her words, "the Hugh Grant of British academia." His subject was philosophy, so I was skeptical. Still, I imagined her and Hugh Grant in the back of one of those little black cabs in London. Probably the same thing she imagined while she was doing it, but who would know?

Here I could I have asked her if she wanted chicken in her pasta al limone and it would have caused her the same pain. Italians do not adulterate pasta dishes, especially with a second course element. I always ask her anyway because her rage excites me.

She doesn't flinch. The words seem to have evaporated before impact. We ride in silence another ten kilometers. At the first sight of an exit she puts on her blinker. It's refreshing that she's finally decided to communicate.

We exit and come to a stop gently in front of the Autogrill, families filing in and out all around us. She unlocks the doors still staring forward through the windshield. The sound of the mechanism releasing inside the door is like the sound of prison doors sliding open. I look at her to say goodbye, but she's clearly not in the mood.

"They both die in the end. Truck crash."

She screeches off. I should have done this the moment she tried to get me to pop my collar in Piazza Comune.

I have no idea where I am. Marche or Abruzzo. Might as well be the moon. But I'm done. I decide to go full Kurtz in the Congo, but in reverse-a savage into the heart of civilization. I spot the first head I'll shrink and make an example of. I pick a ceramic mug up from the gift section and pay for it. It's got Mickey Mouse and a bear on it, which I like. I have to exit the place and re-enter to the cafe side. I spot the victim. He's a young man, about 30 I guess, dressed like a Las Vegas bell hop and has the air of a man in charge.

"Cinque o dieci caffè normali. Non voglio un americano," I say in clear, unambiguous Italian. And I slide the mug across the counter.

He doesn't move. Which is what you'd expect when a man's world order is collapsing in on itself.

"Five coffees?" he says, in English. Incredulous.

"Bravo, sì. Ce l'hai fatta," I say. You got it.

"Impossible," he says. Doing this thing that often happens. Italians switch to English and I ignore them and keep speaking terrible Italian.

"Impossibile?" I ask. "Perché?"

"Sir, he is too big. He is for beers. Also, he will not fit under."

"Chi beve la birra in quella tazza?" I ask. Who drinks beer out of that?

"Tourists."

"Va bene. Facile. Fai tutti i caffè insieme e versali dentro." I point to his ten spout machine. I make a pouring motion. Just make the coffees all at once and dump them in.

He takes the mug. Looking at me like he thinks I don't understand. I walk to the window and look out at the interstate in the distance. Where is Roxy? I miss her already, but I think I missed her from the start. I feel nothing new. I call my best friend Elliott and send him my GPS position. He calls Yuki because she has a car. Rescue party on the way. Yuki drives the opposite of Roxy. She drives with her nose over the top the wheel, squinting, always like she's driving in an ice storm.

I return to the bar to find a steaming mug. I pay for it. Suspiciously low price. I take a drink. The motherfucker made me an Americano. Which is not American coffee. It's espresso with hot water—a dilution, a compromise. Real American coffee is something else entirely. A vast country in a cup. The burnt Folgers in a metal pot at a Nevada diner. Bottomless cups. Homemade pie. Or dark roast from one of those airpots in an Oakland cafe—four dollars, but you can sit there for an hour and nobody tries to rush you out. For an American, coffee is meant to be lingered over. A companion to the morning as it unfolds, slow and forgiving.

Unfortunately for him, I have an hour to wait. I return to the counter and order a caffe normale. Pay for it. Pour it into the mug. I do this four more times, each time measuring his increasing recalcitrance, the deepening lines around his mouth. It didn't have to go this way.

By the fifth, he won't look at me.

I walk outside and bum a Diana from an old woman stretching her legs. She's kind and seems pleased to offer it. I haven't smoked in over a year—just a handful in the last ten.

I take a drag and all the tension leaves my body at once. I look back through the glass. The barista is gesticulating wildly to a coworker.

The horror.

"Little Black Submarine" is an excerpt from Reliquary, a forthcoming story collection by Leo Bruno.