Christmas in Wine Country (28 page)

Giving herself one last look in the mirror, she took a deep breath and headed out toward the kitchen. Her ankle felt OK, not 100% but not causing much of a limp. A few days taking it easy and she’d be fine.

Downstairs, Jake had started a fire. Small and cozy, the cottage felt positively toasty. He’d also hooked up his iPod and was currently thumping a wooden spoon against the countertop to the beat of “Eye of the Tiger”.

“Good song,” Lila said, entering the kitchen.

“Thought you might like it.”

“So, how can I help?” Lila asked, surveying the kitchen. Picking up the butter knife he’d apparently used to slice up the potatoes, she asked, “Do you cook a lot?”

“Nope,” he said with a grin. “You?”

“More than I did in the city.” She approached the stove and saw that he had the sausages and potatoes along with some sliced onions simmering in a
sauté
pan.
Pouring in a healthy slug of white wine, he displayed a confidence that suggested he actually did know something about cooking—or at least about wine. Lila gave it a stir.

“Should be edible,” he declared, looking into the pan. 

             
Taking their steaming plates and refilled wine glasses back to the crate in the living room—the largest surface he seemed to have to eat off of—Jake said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. How you would still be in that job, stuck in that life that was making you so unhappy if you hadn’t gotten fired.”

“It’s true.” Lila sat onto the couch, plate in her lap, knowing she hadn’t painted a flattering picture of herself. She also knew it was accurate.

Jake settled onto the couch closer to Lila than before. In fact, their knees touched. And he didn’t move his knee away. Lila surreptitiously looked at the spot where they were touching, wondering how so much heat could be generated from what couldn’t be more than a two-inch patch of physical contact. Through jeans and sweatpants. Looking away, she knew she was flushed. Maybe Jake wouldn’t notice. Or would chalk it up to the wine and the warm glow of the crackling fire.

“So, I’m feeling kind-of stuck,” Jake said, apparently able to continue the conversational thread even with knee-to-knee contact. “And I’m wondering, what’s your advice for me? Should I really screw things up? Maybe the next time my dad and I host a big investors’ dinner I should break out the karaoke?”

Lila nearly spit out the bite she was finishing as she burst out laughing. “Yes,” she agreed. “That is exactly what I’m saying.” They debated what would be the worst
song he could do. Lila voted for an emotional version of “I Am Woman”, but only if he could manage real tears. She had to acknowledge, though, that Jake would hit gold with his suggestion: The Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

As they both ate more of their dinners, Lila wondered how much of a real question lurked behind his joke about screwing things up. “So,” she began, still feeling shy but remarkably less so than hours and hours before when she’d first arrived on his doorstep. “Are you really that unhappy about things?”

“I’m not trying to complain.” Jake brought a hand to the back of his hair, starting to mess with his curls. “There’s lots of good things…” He looked vacantly into the fire. “My dad…when I came back, I didn’t plan…I didn’t think my life…”

The stumbling pauses said it all to Lila. She remembered how miserable she’d felt in years past without even knowing why. Testing out her newfound confidence, she ventured, “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you have a really good idea of what you want to do. I mean, you can’t seem to stop working in vineyards even when you try.”

Jake laughed. “That’s true.”

“And I think you’ve got a clear idea of how you want to do it. With the bluebird houses and the drip irrigation…the slow growth. I don’t really know how to describe it.”

“No,” Jake encouraged her. “You’re doing a good job.”

“So, I think you need to do it.”

“That simple, huh?” Jake looked at her, smiling.

“I didn’t say it was simple.” Lila tucked a curl behind her ear, thinking things through. “I’m just speaking as someone who spent years and years trying to please other people while making myself completely miserable. And I can tell you, it doesn’t work.”

“No?”

“If you’re miserable, then you’re miserable. And you make other people miserable. And what’s the point?” Lila recalled her pinched and worried stomach ache years, tortured and torturing. Her boss had been right. Hell, even Phillip had been right—it hadn’t been the right fit.

“So let me get this straight.” Jake put his finished plate on the wine crate and settled back looking directly at Lila. “You think I know what I want to do.” He counted it out on his fingers. “And I know how I want to do it. So I should just…do it.”

Lila laughed, realizing how stupidly simplistic her advice sounded. “Jake, I don’t think you’ve realized yet, but I’m very insightful.”

“No, I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of myself. When you lay it all out, what exactly am I bitching about?”

As they smiled at each other, Lila said, “Well, I’m glad I’ve cleared everything up for you.”

Jake added a log to the fire and it sprang into lively crackles. Back on the couch, this time his arm went around the back, closing even more distance between them. They fell silent for perhaps the first time that day. Lila brought her fingers to her damp hair. Jake hadn’t exactly had Bumble and Bumble curl conscious calming crème in his shower. All those years of intense ironing and blow drying and now here she was, sitting so deliciously close to Jake, and she knew her hair must be curling up into corkscrews.

As it turned out, it was a corkscrew curl through which Jake made his initial approach. After nine hours of talking, a bottle of wine and a dinner, Jake leaned closer and lifted one of her curls, twisting it around his finger. He said something about it. Lila couldn’t be sure what, though, since all thought processes stopped at his touch. Jake didn’t seem to have much more control over his verbal faculties as he murmured, “It’s, um…” He swallowed. “Pretty.”

Realizing that he might actually be leaning closer still and that she could think of very little else she wanted more at that moment, Lila naturally blurted out the first thing that came into her head. “Godfrey says I look like Mr. Meows. You know how people start to look like their pets? I guess I’m starting to look like my hand puppet.” Jake sat back a barely perceptible inch. “Our act is about to get a much wider audience now, you know,” she babbled on, propelled by nervous energy. “We’re about to expand into the space next door and open a café. It’s been months in the works, but Marion—she owns the bookstore—she finally came around and now we’ve made an offer and we’re about to close on the lease.”

“The space next door?” Jake asked, sitting fully back now. “That’s been vacant for a while, hasn’t it?” As Lila continued on about the plans, Jake collected their plates and brought them to the sink. Following him in, Lila glanced at the clock on the stove and noticed it was going on 9 o’clock. “I can’t believe I’ve crashed at your house for so long!” she exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. You probably had a million things to do and I turned up lame on your doorstep and ruined everything.”

Placing his dish in the sink, Jake looked up. “So, why didn’t you ever call me back?”

“Call you back?”

“I called you at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago. A few days after you came out to the vineyard.”

“Really?” Lila’s question came out breathless and high-pitched.

“I left a message with a guy. Said I’d be out of town for a few weeks but wanted to see you when I got back. I left my cell phone number, email address. Kind-of pathetic, really.”

“I never got the message.” Lila knew one slender, emo boy whose neck was about to get wrung.

“Really?” Jake asked. “He was very thorough. Asked me to repeat my email. And asked if I had a blog.”

“That’s Godfrey,” Lila laughed. After a pause, they both began talking, Jake with “So you didn’t get—” and Lila with, “Sorry I didn’t get—”. Looking down into the sink with
their dishes, Lila knew she should move to start washing them. Somehow, though, she seemed to lack the power to do so.

Taking a step closer, Jake said, “Well, it turns out all I had to do to get you to hang out with me was take you down on the running path.” Lila laughed; he came closer. “It’s great you have such bad balance. I was about to resort to bringing my niece by the bookstore again for story time. It’s not good when you have to use a three-year-old to see the girl you like.”

Swallowing shyly, Lila wondered if she understood him correctly. Was she having an aneurism, or had he just said something about liking her? “You wanted to see me?”

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. It’s so simple. Knock you down and here you are, helpless at my house.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if she could think of something witty to say? But Lila wasn’t even managing to breathe well. Especially when Jake brought his hand to the small of her back. Tracing his thumb gently down the side of her cheek, he slowly bent down and gave her a much-anticipated-though-still-even-better-in-reality kiss.

Chapter 10: Hearts Broken in Two. Two. Two.

Reaching her arms overhead in a big, lazy stretch, Lila slowly opened her eyes and broke into a huge smile at the ceiling. She wondered if this was the new her, the smiling Lila. At first, people would find it charming. Then she’d slowly grow so annoying that no one could bear it. But that was a worry for another day. Right now, she had some pure joy to radiate. 

Shifting in bed, Lila felt her cheek, remembering Jake’s stubble last night. She bet her skin looked somewhat pink, a casualty she’d gladly endure for kissing and then more kissing. It really had to be one of the best ways to pass time. Free. No calories. Stress-reducing. She twirled a strand of hair in her finger—remembering as she did it how delicious it felt when Jake had done the same—and wondered if anyone had ever done a study of the benefits of kissing. Clearly, it would cure the world’s ills, but making out was such a temperamental, tricky beast. That delicious, warm, forget all your worries melt into someone magic? Frankly, it took a near-impossible blend of elements. Take the Man Smell, for example. Out of context, the concept conjured up locker rooms or worse. But Jake had that yummy musky smell that was like clean laundry or a woodpile or… at a loss, Lila recalled this was why she’d been no good at the creative side of advertising. She couldn’t come up with the right
metaphor
, but whatever it was Old Spice had spent a fortune marketing it.

They’d left his cottage around midnight. He’d responded to her reluctant ‘I should probably think about getting home’ with a gentlemanly escort to his car. She didn’t really
want to go, but more than that she knew it wasn’t the best idea to sleep with him right then and there. Their goodbye had taken another hour.

Making out in a car. It seemed to be her thing now. She hadn’t been thinking it was unromantic, though. If a thought had made its way into her head it had been along the lines of ‘yum’ and, occasionally, ‘more please.’ When she’d finally left his car around
1
AM
there was no better way to describe her ascent up the stairs to her attic apartment than floating. Some clichés existed for a reason.

After more lolling in bed, lazy and content as a cat in the sunshine, Lila glided to work. She was in such a good mood that she didn’t even light into Godfrey when she asked him about Jake’s message. Casually, before the storytime crowd started arriving, she asked him, “So what’s this I hear about Jake leaving a message for me a few weeks ago?”

“Jake Endicott,” Godfrey nodded, confirming the receipt of the message. He was doing some tidying in the dark arts/magic section of the store, prone to disarray from the local teens who liked rummaging around in search of various spells.

“You never told me about it?”

“I did not,” Godfrey agreed, setting aside a book on potions no doubt for his own use.

“Did you forget?” Lila asked, having a hard time believing this was the case since he seemed to remember the call just fine.

“No, I did not.”

“So, why didn’t you give me the message?”

“I was thickening the plot.” He continued sorting the shelf, as if that explained it.

“Sorry, Godfrey, what?”

With a sigh, Godfrey turned to her with the air of a veteran professor addressing a Freshman whelp. “Where would Ahab have been if Moby Dick had simply come swimming up to shore, flapping his fins like a show dolphin?” Distracted and a bit disturbed by the sight of Godfrey flapping his pale hands along either side of his head, Lila wasn’t following. “We wouldn’t even know about Queequeg today and his songs of triumph,” Godfrey continued, animated. 

“Which one was Queequeg again?” Lila asked. She didn’t have perfect recall of
Moby Dick
from her Sophomore Am Lit survey course, but she was fairly sure she didn’t remember his songs of triumph.

“Lila.” Godfrey closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with impatience and tried again. “Ahab is on a quest. He’s engaged in a relentless pursuit—of what, it’s difficult to say, exactly. Ferocious, enigmatic. The hunt defines his essence as man.”