Confessions of a Dating Fool Read online

CHAPTER 6

  The Girls from Omaha

  Their names were Dee and Kelly.

  Bistro Jeanty in Yountville, the heart of Napa Valley, is a tiny little bistro, true in every way to the traditional country bistros in France. This very well accomplished feat of verisimilitude was achieved by the very good chef and owner Philippe Jeanty, a man I know and like. When I lived in Napa Valley, he was my neighbor, in a way: We both lived just outside Yountville, a few miles south of this vintage hamlet, a mile or so from each other, our homes separated by Highway 29. There were still some balmy evenings in September, a month that was losing its grip on summer and starting to yield to the fall. The leaves were losing their lustrous green and, in a few weeks, would turn and fall to the ground in a patchwork of color.

  On some of those nights, right before the dinner rush, Philippe and I would sit side by side for a half hour or so on his antique park bench, which was propped against the facade of his restaurant, right off the front door. Flanked by large pots of lavender and local flora, he and I would have an amiable discourse over every topic of local life in the Valley. Interestingly, we were close enough to the street corner to effectively judge whether or not cars made full stops at its stop sign. It became a particularly interesting game of “Would he or not?” when applied to the local cop parked cleverly out of sight and positioned to pounce on violators. The call wasn’t as easy to make as one would think. Some rolling-stop cars made it through and some didn’t, but the blatant ones were easy to pick and moments later became contributors to the Town of Yountville coffers. It was a shame we couldn’t warn the drivers, but warning them would’ve spoiled our fun and deprived the town fathers of their budget expectations.

  I often dropped in on Philippe’s place on Friday or Saturday nights as part of my single-guy-in-Napa circuit, so to speak. It was a cozy little place on the main drag, where it didn’t take many people to make it a crowd and, thus, make it a lively place. The mix of locals and tourists added to the buzz of the ambience, making for friendly conversations, which often began with a smile and the question, “Where you from?” Paul, the skinhead bartender, though that wasn’t his political point of view, was busy overseeing the eight-seat bar, like an octopus, serving drinks and meals to the bar-sitters in an endless orchestration. This made for a good show for a drink or two, with sporadic chitchat with him, with or without any petite conversations with the customers.

  Just over the bar crowd’s shoulders, toward the front entrance, was a community table, which was exactly what it sounds like: a large table with open seating for up to twelve walk-ins. It was often the best table in the house when it came to interesting conversations on unexpected topics, but it was usually a context for couples and not strays. Me, I preferred the bar, which was easier for chatting up women if they, too, were making the circuit or simply stopping in for a French experience in Napa Valley.

  Chatting up single women who were visiting Napa was necessary for my survival—I kid you not. I was in my forties, and there was an acute shortage of single women in my age range in the valley, making me dependent on outsiders to make it interesting, however shallow that might sound. I didn’t want to go younger than the thirties. I didn’t feel like dating the restaurant servers, who were mostly in their twenties. Besides being in a very different generational space from mine, they had lousy hours for me: Their nights generally started when mine ended.

  Keep in mind that the Napa Valley scene for the over thirty singles crowd is very small. In that way, it was probably like every other farming community in America: The career-minded leave as soon as they can for the big city. Around here, that was San Francisco, one of the most alluring cities of all, which was only seventy miles away. Or, the women leave to find husbands. This set probably goes to some city other than San Francisco. You can’t blame them. For guys in my situation—professionals in their prime—it was tough being single in Napa valley. I lived under the impression that all five of the valley’s eligible women got together over lunch every Monday to compare their weekend dates—and oh, could they get into details! If a guy was careless or desperate enough to make the mistake of going out with more than one woman in one month or two, he could quickly become “that cad” or the player poster boy for the clique. For single men, Napa Valley could be a treacherous place, but it didn’t have to be.

  Flirting with touristing women was refreshing and seemed relatively risk free for one’s social standing and, more importantly, gave me a chance at peaceful coexistence with the clique. Rarely did anything beyond flirtatious conversations come of bar talk at Bistro Jeanty, in my experience, but every once in a while, the conversation continued outside the bar and late into the night. “Thank god!” I say to that because single people cannot live on bar conversation alone. There’s got to be more than that.

  One night, while seated at the bar, I was chatting with Paul when he looked past me and suavely said, “May I help you, ladies?” His question had a nice ring to it, a little more upbeat than usual, which made me think something special was up. He had cut me off in mid-sentence, but I gladly went on hold to let Paul do his thing. The women were standing behind me, so they were of a yet to be determined number. They were women that Paul didn’t know, so I assumed they were tourists because Paul knew every local that had ever walked into the place.

  My radar picked up a silky soft voice putting in an order from over my shoulder for a couple of glasses of cabernet. Paul passed a wine list to a nice looking feminine hand that suddenly broke into my line of vision. The choice of wines was expansive, so the offer of a list to the mystery woman was a nice thing in and of itself, but I interpreted Paul’s move as a deviously clever means of seduction to draw this person into my personal sphere. You see, I have quite an imagination, and given the life of a single man in Napa Valley, I was always Walter-Mitty hopeful. That’s when I slowly turned to see the interlopers and immediately couldn’t resist saying, “Hi” to the person attached to the pleasantly intrusive arm. She said, “Hi” back and then answered, “Omaha” to my first question. Then, right after that, I offered my hand and said, “I’m Tom,” and then I heard, “Dee and Kelly” in answer to my second question. It was a predictable start, one that I liked.

  I made a couple of suggestions for wines that Dee and Kelly might like and then encouraged them to switch from a cabernet in favor of a glass of my favorite red zin, which was Cline ancient vines from Sonoma. I always felt like a traitor when I ordered that label; after all, it wasn’t a Napa wine, but it was so good that I was willing to risk a Napkin’s wrath, had any resident been within earshot. I gave Paul the order, and because I was a bit buzzed from my second glass and on the cusp of falling in love with either one of them, I told Paul to put it on my tab. Dee and Kelly protested for a trillionth of a second, but I insisted on paying, so they quickly allowed me the pleasure.

  Paul wasted no time, being Mr. Efficient Octopus, and placed two fresh glasses of Cline on the bar in front of me, giving my glass a boost as an encore. I passed the cups of luscious red nectar to the women, who were looking pretty luscious as well, and we three clinked glasses, toasting with my words “to new friends.” It was a toast I came up with to signal my interest in talking with them some more. I hated buying drinks for women and then having them walk away, which was always a rotten deal, one that makes me feel used even though the drinks were offered without any strings attached. I offered my seat, and Dee took it, thus grounding the triumvirate.

  Dee and Kelly were fun and interesting from the first sip. They smiled a lot and their eyes sparkled, probably triggered by a glass or two of wine they might have had before they walked into the bistro. I said some funny things, and we three reveled in the laughter, which is something everyone loves. No woman ever rejected a man because he was too funny! They told me they had had lots of fun all week, doing all kinds of things together, but hadn’t really run into any men to party with during their whirlwind tour of the Bay Area. I was thinking to myself, “Until
now.”

  I was by myself, but I was determined to be fun for the two of them and decided to be fun in a flirty way with both of them. I was feeling light-headed and witty talking to them, so I didn’t think about trying to cut one out or skew my flirtations. They certainly seemed to be enjoying getting equal time, as harmless as it was, and I certainly was feeling like Mr. Wonderful with the total attention of the two best looking women in the restaurant. The wine never tasted better.

  Philippe stuck his head into our trio, and with my introduction of him as owner and chef, my stock instantly went up. It was a good move by Philippe. It assured the ladies of my good standing, and he probably enjoyed our petite société for the minute he spent with us.

  I truly liked both women equally for all kinds of reasons. One owned a trendy dress shop in Omaha; that was Dee. She was together, smart, demure, and alluring. Kelly owned a gift shop. She was witty, out-going, a little tarty, and stylish. The two stores, I was told, were next to each other on Howard Street in a revitalized part of old Omaha. I remember the street name because Kelly joked that it was her ex-husband’s name. I can’t remember the name of Dee’s ex-husband, but she said she had one too. Dee and Kelly were best friends and decided to do the girls’ getaway weekend to Napa on the heels of four days in San Francisco. It was a weeklong party for them, and this was their last night. When we started chatting at the bar in Bistro Jeanty, it was about eight-thirty on a Saturday night, not too early but not too late. Earlier, they had “a really good” dinner at Mustard’s and drove the mile south into Yountville to see what was cooking in the heart of this quiet little town.

  Yountville could be terrifically fun for restaurant bar-hopping, so the girls from Omaha made a good call. It was a hamlet of thirty square blocks, under a forest of redwood trees that towered over a potpourri of cracker box homes, many of which hadn’t ever been renovated, but were destined to be fixed up, as home prices were escalating faster than anywhere in America.

  Yountville was once the home of a dozen houses of ill-repute, which had run a brisk business servicing the patients at the very large Veteran’s Hospital on the edge of town since World War I and right into the seventies. To my knowledge, the pleasure huts were no longer in Yountville. They’d been pushed out by the gentrification that had come with the booming popularity of winemaking and wine consumption. The new business of Yountville was the restaurant business. This included Thomas Keller’s world famous French Laundry and others, such as Keller’s city bistro, Bouchon; Jeanty’s country bistro, Bistro Jeanty; the valley’s old Italian standby, Piatti’s; and on the town’s perimeter, Mustard’s, which was the first truly great restaurant in Napa Valley. Lots of other little places filled in the spaces.

  I’m guessing Dee and Kelly were in their late thirties. They looked like their early thirties, but they might have been forty or forty-one because they were very protective about revealing their age. In my humble opinion, women start getting protective about their age when they hit forty. Regardless, they both looked terrific and were clearly taking care of themselves: These were two women who worked out. The tell for that is always in the upper arms. When I can see some noteworthy dimension in the upper arms, I’m pretty confident the whole package is tight, something that happens only from lifting weights. This is just one man’s point of view, one who has, as a single adult for over twenty years, checked out a lot of upper arms. And legs. And everything in between.

  Napa Valley is a mixed crowd in women’s fashion, ranging from jeans to smart looking slacks to designer dresses. Tourists often opted for something more than jeans, because that’s fun and perfectly appropriate in many of the great restaurants. Dee and Kelly wore dark slacks, the choice of worldly travelers. Dee’s top was a starched button-down white cotton shirt, like men wear, with a beige cashmere sweater knotted around her neck. Kelly wore a red silk blouse under a waist-length black silk jacket, which had small black beads embroidered in some kind of geometric pattern. Both women looked stylish, and neither was underdressed nor overdressed. They were attired just right for my tastes.

  I confess: The only reason I noticed what they were wearing was my ingrained male curiosity for what it would take to undress each one. I know that sounds funny, but that’s something some guys think about. I know I do. When I think of dates in the past, the ones who wore turtle necks or collars buttoned to the top or layers of clothes were sending a different message than women whose clothing made their bodies a little more accessible. Go ahead, say I’m horrible, but I’m just being a guy, and I prefer fashion like the latter. Dee and Kelly looked good, and they both fell into the latter category, not that I was dwelling on that. The conversation moved along quickly, and my prurient thoughts disappeared or, rather, were placed on the back burner.

  The hour passed quickly, punctuated with more laughter and a variety of topics, some that had all three of us talking at once, fighting for air time. We talked about their lives in Omaha and their feelings about culture in Nebraska. “What culture?” they playfully asked. And we talked about my life in Napa and the pros and cons of living in wine country. We talked about their marriages and the fact that I had never married, which as a fact by itself was a red flag for most women, causing many to conclude that I was dysfunctional, strange, or even gay. I knew enough to diffuse those misperceptions by revealing that I had actually proposed marriage and lived with a woman for seven years, an experience that included raising her daughter from age four to eleven. I usually followed that up by saying it was “a virtual marriage,” which generally put the matter to bed. When I would add that it was an easy breakup because we had decided “what was hers was hers and what was mine was hers,” that would always get a good laugh. Women instantly saw the divorce-driven humor in that and didn’t ask me if that was really true. Of course, it wasn’t; it’s just an expression I used to indicate my willingness to be out of that relationship. Divorce is never pleasant; it kills a lot of dreams. Although I hadn’t been technically married, so I couldn’t be technically divorced, my dreams in that relationship died a painful death just the same.

  The three of us had knocked back another glass of the Cline zin as the clock struck ten, which was late for Napa. It was evident that the action in the bistro was winding down: We were the last ones at the bar, though some people lingered over dinner in the restaurant in back, and even Paul had stepped away for a break, abandoning us to our total merriment. His absence gave me an excellent opportunity for a discreet invitation to Dee and Kelly to leave Bistro Jeanty with me and come to my house “in the vineyards” for a nightcap and some great tunes.

  “You actually live in the vineyards?” Kelly asked me, repeating my choice of words and emphasizing the word “in.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I do,” feeling the instant suspense of whether or not my invitation would be accepted. It was offered with good intentions, of course. So that there was no misunderstanding, I tacked on something like “of course you can trust me,” but that part was lost in Kelly’s determination to be silly with her response.

  “You mean you live between the vines?” she continued, “I mean, between the rows of vines? On the dirt?” She asked these questions with a mirthful smile, sticking me for the image I had created. It was the kind of inquiry that rose from the bottom of her empty glass.

  “No, Kelly,” I replied, “I didn’t mean literally that I live in the vineyards. I don’t live in the vineyards, per se. I live in a beautiful house on the edge of the vineyards, which aren’t mine, but they’re, like, in my backyard.”

  It was good that Kelly was teasing me. Her reply was better than a no and indicated that she was stalling over an answer to my invitation. Given that I offered it to both of them, I sensed they would’ve preferred to discuss the invitation in my absence, so I excused myself to go to the men’s room. I expected that I’d have my answer when I came back. I peed hopefully.

  Their pow-wow lasted right up until the moment I rejoined them. Perhaps I hadn’t given th
em enough time to decide. I always figured safety was a big concern of women when meeting a stranger, especially in assessing an invitation to go someplace, especially to a guy’s place. Wasting no time, I spoke first:

  “I promise you’re safe with me. I’ll be a perfect gentleman.” I tried to assure them, knowing that might not exactly be an alluring promise, but it was the kind of assurance I thought they were looking for. Then I added, “There are two of you and just me,” but as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were the wrong words. They comprised a meaningless promise of security because one man could probably overpower two women, especially a big one like me, who is six foot three and 225 pounds, about the size of a NFL linebacker. On the heels of my poor choice of words, which I thought had probably killed my invitation, I quickly added “or we could go to some other bar and have a glass of wine there instead,” which was an alternative I was perfectly comfortable with, one that would put us in neutral territory. I just wanted our party to continue, and I didn’t really care what the location was. Sort of.

  We were all having so much fun. I stopped talking and waited for their decision. It would be stupid to say, “I gotta go pee again” so that they could talk some more. So I looked over their heads at the collection of bar bottles, while they looked at each other and exchanged secret eye signals for several long seconds before a whisper from Dee went into Kelly’s far ear. I discreetly turned away and scanned the empty community table, while envisioning my beautiful home close to the edge of some of Mondavi’s vineyards. I thought of my place as an Italian micro-villa. It was trimmed with a lap pool and a rustic guest house, tucked under some magnificent redwood trees. My front door was deep in a courtyard of white hydrangeas, and a backyard patio was surrounded by raised beds of lavender and giant clay pots of miniature orange trees. The inside had a sophisticated decor of casual elegance, which caused some women to ask, “Are you sure you’re not gay?” I always took this as a compliment, but only in that context, because I was the decorator. And it had a hot tub off the back patio. I liked my house, and I liked it even more when people were enjoying it with me. After scanning the room, my gaze returned to my two new friends and effectively conveyed suspense in waiting for their decision.

  “Okay,” Dee said, looking at me as if they were giving me a gift.

  “We’ll go to your place,” added Kelly, “but we won’t stay long.”

  I calmly and happily said, “Hooray! Let’s go.”

  I covered our tab with a handful of cash and walked out, agreeing that Dee and Kelly should follow me to my place in their rented car. It was an easy drive, only about two miles, and as I drove, I was thankful that I had left plenty of lights on at my house. My place looked fabulous at night when the lights were on.

  While they twirled in the middle of the living room, taking it all in, I pulled a couple of bottles of Cline zin out of my wine cabinet in the kitchen island. Why not—it’s what we were drinking, and it was getting better as we aged.

  The girls were quite impressed with the décor under one very large, high ceiling that encompassed the kitchen, the living room, and a dining area. The room had a spiral staircase at one end that led up to the master bedroom. The back wall was a row of big windows and doors overlooking a patio with a lavender perimeter, a lap pool, and the vineyards that I’d said I lived in. The pool lights went on and up-lit the underside of the massive, but gracefully sweeping, branches of the giant redwoods that had sprouted in my yard over two hundred years ago. The light shimmered in their branches, creating a light show that made the setting seem surreal. Sitting in the hot tub, just off the patio, with the ambient light from the pool, was incredibly relaxing. It was so much a part of the Napa Valley experience and so wonderful that it was hard to resist. I sat in it almost every night.

  After a speedy house tour, we returned to the kitchen island with wine glasses that were already half empty and picked at some brie and water crackers that I had grabbed out of the double door Sub-Zero. I loaded the CD player’s six-disk tray for options, grabbed my remote, made my first selection, and turned up the volume. For openers, I played the theme songs from the 007 movies. Bond would have been proud of me. It’s expansive and exciting music, featuring themes that all three of us recognized. We had a lot of fun challenging each other to be the first to name the movie the music was from. We were off to a rousing start with “Goldfinger” and laughing hilariously over the name Pussy Galore, which each of us said about five times and agreed it was the greatest name for any heroine of all time. I took turns with Dee and Kelly on the open floor, swirling and whirling to the best of Bond, hanging on to my dance partner every second and putting my dancing talents on show. They were both good, and I danced with one of them at all times through my favorite picks of Bond’s greatest hits. For a moment, I was Bond…James Bond.

  Another bottle of Cline took us to a higher level in music appreciation, notably in volume too, as we danced like crazy people to every tune, including to the medleys of Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Alicia Bridges, and then the heavier stuff of a club mix and some techno music and even a physically demanding run through Cotton Eye Joe by the Rednex. Somewhere in all that, we were taking turns dancing on top of the kitchen island, and at one point all three of us climbed up there, surely pretending it was 1976 and we were at Studio 54, dancing on top of the giant speakers. I was anyway. Why I wasn’t worried about someone breaking a neck or, worse, my cement countertop, it’s hard to say, but I’m thinking alcohol had a lot to do with it!

  After Cotton Eye Joe, we needed a break. I pointed the girls toward the guest room and its bathroom, while I ran up the spiral staircase for some relief in the master bathroom. After the necessary expenditure of a few minutes and a little freshening up with some toothpaste, I returned to the dance floor and waited for the two Cornhuskers to reappear. That’s right—Cornhuskers; that’s what people from Nebraska call themselves. It didn’t remotely fit these two lovely women. I waited several more minutes for their return, wondering, as I had so many times in the past, why women took so long. Granted, there were two of them, and two of them in a bathroom could take a while. Even so, time seems to stand still for women in bathrooms.

  After waiting for what seemed an inordinately long time, I ambled down the hallway to the guest quarters and, to my surprise, discovered they weren’t back there. I spun on my heels and went to the front door in search of their car. “Could they have left?” I wondered. One glimpse out the open door revealed that their car was exactly where they had parked it. I thought maybe they stepped out onto the patio, so I went to take a look. I opened the patio door, and on the couch just outside the door was a pile of clothes. Their clothes! With that discovery, I heard laughter coming from the hot tub. They were in it, and despite being just outside the patio lighting, I could make out two heads bobbing above the surface with huge, naughty smiles on their faces.

  Dee called out, “C’mon in, Tom!” And Kelly added, “Don’t be shy!”

  “Alright!” I called out. “I’ll grab some towels and our wine and I’ll be right back.”

  “We’ve got our glasses,” one of them called out to me.

  I returned two minutes later, naked, with an armful of towels and one wrapped around my waist, along with my glass and a liter of bottled water. En route, I opted for the water over the wine. No one at that point needed more wine, and water was a good thing for prolonging life in a hot tub. I dropped the towels on the tub’s bench, along with the towel around my waist, and climbed in. They totally ignored me when I said, “Don’t look!” This was a breach in hot tub etiquette, just as I expected!

  I lost track of time as the tub conversation got interesting and intimate. Hot tubs make people reveal secrets and all kinds of things they wouldn’t tell anyone in any other situation. We were enjoying ourselves so much that time was timeless, and the water bottle was waterless. I went to the kitchen for another one, towel in hand, but wrapped for the return trip.

  I don’t kno
w what Dee and Kelly talked about while I was fetching more water, but they talked about something because as soon as I climbed back into the tub, Dee moved closer to me and pressed up against my side, skin on skin. The tub was in the shadows, the jets were on, and it was impossible to see below the surface. At that moment, all six hands and feet were underwater, along with one other appendage. The mutual distance the three of us had allocated ourselves had suddenly become asymmetrical. Dee was pressed up against me. Kelly was across from me. Dee took me in her hand, in a biblical sense. She got a handful. I was not expecting this, though part of me might have been hoping, nor was there a failure in imagining the possibilities at any time during the evening. While we were laughing about one of the five million things we had been laughing about all evening, Dee shifted, half rose and was suddenly wiggling in my lap, and I was suddenly inside her. The three of us just kept chatting away, laughing, and carrying on like no one was having sex in the hot tub, living a lie and living la vida loca. I think I bit her on the back of her shoulder, a little—maybe a little too hard because she yelped in the middle of a laugh.

  I have to tell you this was all very unexpected. It hadn’t been on my horizon when I walked into Bistro Jeanty. Surely Kelly had to know that Dee and I were engaged, but I didn’t know for sure if she knew, although we joked about what the new arrangement of bodies could mean. Like I said, the three of us continued our streak of laughter. Of course Kelly had to know. They surely planned it during my water run. How could Dee be plunking in my lap otherwise, laughing ecstatically over my stupid jokes, and Kelly laughing along with her? For a moment, I was speechless, but it was a heavenly moment, lost on no one.

  Modesty, or something like it, prevailed—a little anyway. No one said anything about what had just happened, but we all broke into a medley of snippets of songs with appropriate lyrics, including “Climb every mountain…,” followed by Carole King’s lyrics, “I feel the earth move under my feet….” Shortly after a few more tub stories, we had pretty much hit the wall. As I said, the conversation was intimate and now hugely silly. But besides being naked in a tub, the typical male fantasy of a threesome didn’t happen, maybe because it’s not my fantasy, although another fantasy had happened. One-on-one can be complicated enough—why make things more complicated? Whatever happened or didn’t happen among us worked just fine for us.

  We walked back into the house, wrapped up in towels. Dee and Kelly clutched their clothes in both hands, totally immodest about displaying their very sexy underwear. Maybe it was a good thing I hadn’t noticed all that lace earlier. It was all very sexy. It made me suddenly feel a little stronger, if you know what I mean. I was thinking maybe I was insatiable.

  I broke away from this line of thought, suddenly overwhelmed with some common sense and, frankly, ready to call it a night. I interrupted some silly conversation that put the girls into giggles, “I think you two should spend the night here,” quickly adding, “in my guest room.” I continued, “Napa cops are everywhere, and neither of you wants to end your vacation with a DUI. What do you say? I say stay.” I hoped they’d say yes because it was the right thing to do. But a response was not immediately forthcoming, only more of those eye signals between them.

  “Really,” I repeated, “you should sleep here. Your flight’s not till the afternoon, so there’s plenty of time to check out of your hotel and get to the airport.” I waited. They knew it was the sensible thing to do. “You can each sleep in one of my t-shirts if you want. Okay?”

  They stood still and looked at each other. “Think about it,” I said. And as I spiraled up the staircase, I added, “I’ll get shirts for you.”

  Two minutes later, Dee and Kelly each had one of my t-shirts in hand and a bottle of water, along with the clump of their clothes. They said goodnight and moved down the hallway toward the guest room. I told them there were guest toothbrushes in their bathroom, then I went upstairs, threw my damp towel in the tub, peed, brushed my teeth again, took two aspirin, and fell into bed, thankful the girls from Omaha made the right decision. “What a fun night,” I said aloud to myself and fell asleep under eyelids that weighed over a ton.

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep. It could have been ten minutes or ten hours, when I felt the mattress shift, a shuffle of my comforter, and the nudge of a warm body slip into my bed. From a slit in one eyelid, I concluded it must have been a couple of hours of sleep anyway, as the morning light was beginning to creep in behind my drawn curtains. I wasn’t startled, as the possibilities were known and limited. I figured Dee was cuddling up with me for a few more hours of morning sleep and maybe round two. As groggy as I was, I was ready for round two and checked in with her, “Dee, hi baby,” I mumbled in my sleepy state, while fully embracing her with my arms and legs. “You looking for round two?”

  “No,” she whispered, “I’m looking for round one.”

  I didn’t get it at first. Round one wasn’t the thought that was lodged in my brain. I didn’t say anything, as I worked my way through its meaning. Before I could figure it out, it was figured out for me.

  “I’m not Dee. It’s me, Kelly,” said the warm body.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered back, clearly and fully accepting the truth, after every appendage reached out for her. What could I do, deny the dream? I had to ask, “Does Dee know you’re up here?”

  “Of course,” Kelly replied. “It was her idea. She felt it was unfair that she had all the fun. She insisted.”

  “She insisted? She made you come up here? Made you?” I asked playfully, though sleepily.

  “Not exactly,” Kelly replied.

  “Not exactly?” I repeated, “What’s that mean, not exactly?”

  “You want me to go?” She asked softly.

  “No. This is nice.”

  “I think it’s only fair.” Kelly whispered, “and I think you’re ready for me,” before moving her lips to mine.

  My hand ran down to the small of her back as I drew myself into her. “You’re nice,” I added. I could feel her body melt into mine as she let out a little moan. “Yeah, it’s only fair,” I said, as if that made perfect sense. And it did, in a way. “Fine by me,” was my final response, but actions spoke louder than words, so nothing else needed to be said. I stayed awake a little longer, as long as necessary.

  A couple hours later, with the sun well on the rise and coffee consumed, I walked the two girls from Omaha out to their car and thanked them for a terrifically fun time. We had already exchanged business cards and expressed a mutual hope that we’d see each other again, while not knowing when that could possibly happen. I ended our party with the last words among us, responding to their comment about meeting again someday: “Who knows?” I said, “Life’s full of surprises.” I paused before adding, “And you two were a total surprise! Drive carefully and have a good trip back to Omaha.” On those words, the three of us smiled and waved. They drove off, while I continued to wave goodbye as they left the driveway, saying softly to myself, “Wow!” I turned and walked through the courtyard and then through my front door, ready to launch a new day in treacherous Napa Valley, a place where a single guy has to be careful.

  ∞