“Those smell amazing. Is that tarragon?” I asked.
“Yep. And flat leaf parsley and sage to go with the garlic. I’m gonna fry it together.” She put the herbs down and came over to hug Cherry and me. I wasn’t surprised Becca wasn’t there yet because she was always late, but Sarah and Tatum were usually punctual if not early.
“Finn, where is everyone?” I asked. A part of me was worried everyone would ignore Sarah’s instructions like Cherry had and I worried they were lurking around the house someplace.
Cherry, who’d gone to the cupboard for glasses when I was actively evading her questions, started pouring wine for the four of us and handing it out. Finn led Annie over to look at the garlic.
“Tater Tot and Sarah were here but I sent them on an errand so I could talk to you without Sarah yelling at me for ignoring her text.” Tater Tot was our nickname for our youngest sister, Tatum, who worked in tech in Palo Alto.
“You’re unbelievable. What fool’s errand did you send them on?” I asked, rolling my eyes. I took a sip of my wine. I had a feeling I’d need a lot more of it to get through the evening.
She waved a hand at me. “Relax. I just had them go out for some wine. I told them there wasn’t any here in the house.”
“And they believed you?” Annie asked, incredulous. “We have a wine cellar downstairs. Have you seen how much wine is in there? Blake’s friend hooked us up with something like a dozen cases and shipped them down from Napa. We need to start drinking that stuff yesterday.”
“I haven’t seen it, but I want to now,” I said, walking away from Cherry.
I had seen it, but I’d do anything to avoid talking about Tom and the ignominious social media gotcha pics.
I started walking in the direction Annie was pointing, but Cherry hooked her finger in the belt loop of my pants and pulled me back. "Not so fast, cowgirl.”
“You’re really starting to annoy me,” I said.
She grinned the way she always had as a kid when she knew she was getting my goat—which was often. “Fine. Let’s check out the wine cellar. And in the privacy of dead grapes, you can tell me what happened with Tom.” She raised an eyebrow at Finn, victorious, and he rolled his eyes and mouthed ‘sorry’ to me.
Annie gestured to a door in the middle of the hallway that the average visitor would mistake for a coat closet. I pulled the handle and a light went on automatically in the cool space below.
“Wow…” Cherry said.
“I know. It’s a little bit glamorous in a hidden-panic-room sort of way and a little freakish, like there might be bodies down here.”
“You have an active imagination. I was just thinking it was cool that the light went on by itself.” Cherry followed me down a narrow set of stairs.
When we got to the bottom, I stood in the middle of what was really the basement of the house with a water heater in one corner and a furnace in another. A bunch of ductwork and WiFi routers and cables snaked overhead. But along one wall was a built-in refrigerated storage area with no less than two hundred bottles on display. The wall was divided into quarters, each one temperature controlled separately so they could house different kinds of wine. Reds didn’t need to be chilled quite as cold, whites liked things a little more frosty.
“So this is really more of a wine wall than some custom-built wine cellar,” Cherry said when we stood in the center surveying the ten by ten foot space. “It kind of makes me feel better about our brother not being a bougie hipster with a wine cave.”
“Do bougie hipsters have wine caves?” I asked. I had no idea, given that no one had ever accused me of being a bougie hipster and I never imagined myself having a wine cave.
She shrugged. At the exact same time we both seemed to notice a folding chair sitting in the middle of the floor. We looked at it, looked at each other and immediately burst into hysterics. Then she ran up the stairs and yelled for Finn so loudly, he probably thought the water heater had rolled off its hinges and crushed me.
I heard his footsteps overhead come running. He leaned in the doorway and looked down.
“Yeah? What happened?”
“Finn, do you sit in this chair and gaze at your wine collection? Please tell me you really do that so I can tease you about it until the end of days.”
I couldn’t see Finn but he sounded annoyed. “Seriously, that’s why you’re screaming like a banshee? Because of a chair?”
“Just answer the question. Do you gaze at your wine?” she asked.
“No, I do not. I do, however, store stuff in my basement. Including chairs.”
“I only see one chair, Finn. I think you’re a wine gazer,” Cherry said. I didn’t dare interrupt. I was still hoping to distract her until my other sisters came back—the ones who knew the rules about asking me about Tom.
He stomped off, yelling behind him. “The rest of the chairs are up here, you lunatic. They’re sitting around the kitchen table for dinner.”
Cherry went to the chair and sat down in it before casting a glance around the small space. “It does make for a nice cool spot to contemplate a bunch of wine and a water heater,” she said.
I’d moved on and was looking at some of the wine in the various refrigerators. “You think he’d mind if we grabbed a couple of these? I like Frog’s Leap and he has a bunch from there.”
Cherry shook her head. “I sent the sisters on a wine errand, remember? We can’t bring up perfectly chilled bottles and have them come back and see them.”
I shivered as a strand from an overhead cobweb came loose and brushed against my neck. “I don’t care if there’s wine down here. It’s still a basement and it kind of gives me the creeps. I keep waiting for a mouse to scurry by,” I said.
I was antsy to get out of there, so I figured I should make quick work of answering Cherry’s questions. “So what do you want to know?”
“Who’s the Swedish model? How stupid is he that he thought he could be out in public with her without getting photographed? Why didn’t you break up with him first? And are you okay?”
I was impressed. My sister was organized.
“She’s some skank he met in New York and according to him, it was just sex, and I’m the one he wants to be with, which is not going to happen. How stupid is he? Um, very. Clearly. I meant to break up with him and got lazy. My bad. I’ll regret that for a long time. And yes, I’m actually fine.”
It was the truth. I really felt okay. In part that was due to the recent distraction provided by Owen, but that wasn’t a Pandora’s box of new gossip I was willing to open in front of Cherry. I loved her, but she had the biggest mouth of any of my sisters and less than average sensitivity about divulging secrets.
“Wow, good for you. I should have led with asking how you’re doing. Sorry about that. And sorry for pinning you into a corner, or a wine cellar, and making you talk about this. It’s just that I care and I didn’t want to blow it off and not see how you are, you know?”
“Thanks, Cher. The truth is I’ve been over him for a while and even though seeing the pictures stung, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. He doesn’t make me happy and he never felt like forever. He’s not the guy.”
“You’ve been saying that for a while. I just hated seeing those pictures and I wanted to check on you.”
I nodded. “I wasn’t trying to shut you out. I just didn’t want this whole dinner to revolve around Tom and his idiotic behavior. Or mine, for that matter.”
It felt good to talk to Cherry, and as much as I hated to admit it, I was glad she’d forced me to spell out my feelings about Tom and the reasons it was never going to work out. The more times I said it, the better I felt about my relationship ending.
“The problem is he keeps leaving me messages, saying he wants us to be together. I keep deleting them, but he’s making me feel tied to him when I don’t want to be,” I said.
“You could change your number.”
“I shouldn’t have to. Ugh, I’m sure eventually he
’ll give up, but man, the guy is stubborn.”
“Guess you don’t get to be a billionaire by taking no for an answer.”
“Well, he’s not getting any other answer from me.” I was getting worked up just thinking about how much I wanted Tom gone from my life. Maybe I would change my number. “On a positive note, my day ended well.”
Then I caved and filled Cherry in on the past twenty-four hours with Owen because I wanted to say his name and have an excuse to think about him. And his lips. Cherry would set me straight if she thought I was crazy to hook up with someone so soon after Tom.
“I like him and he’s fun and he likes to talk about bread, so what’s the harm in having a good time with him while I get myself back on track?”
The loud stomp of footsteps on the ceiling indicated that Sarah and Tatum were back from their wild grape chase but I felt confident they wouldn’t be able to find us in the basement.
“Sounds good to me. Go for it. Have fun, blow off some steam and get your mojo back. You need to feel like your best self before you’re ready for a more serious relationship. But if he turns into another distracting guy who sidetracks you from getting what you really want out of a relationship, promise me you’ll cut him loose,” she said.
“I promise. Right now, he’s the kind of distraction that I need. There’s too much going on with my expansion plans and the battle it looks like I’m going to need to fight to get that lined up right to think about starting a relationship with anyone.”
The stomping got louder. “Where are their voices coming from?” Sarah’s voice intoned from the floor above.
I heard a muffled reply from Annie, then a shout from Tatum.
“Wine cellar? What wine cellar?” Tatum was only loud when she started drinking, so I had to assume she and Sarah had either done some tasting at the wine store on Euclid, which was walking distance from Finn’s house, or she’d been back for a while and just now realized we were missing—also thanks to the wine consumption.
Before I could come up with an excuse for what we were doing, Sarah and Tatum were descending the stairs, joined by our middle sister Becca, who I hadn’t realized had arrived.
Cherry froze and I moved in front of one of the wine refrigerators, as though I could hide the evidence of Finn’s collection from them.
“We didn’t know there was wine here, we swear!” Cherry shouted.
Tatum dismissed her with a flick of her hand. “You’re such a bad liar, Cher. How did you get through your teen years?”
“Um, I didn’t lie?” Cherry seemed confused.
Sarah laughed and shared a look with Tatum that told me that somehow my smartest and most rule-abiding sisters did things I didn’t know about in their teen years. I’d unpack that one later. “Sorry you got stuck buying wine.”
Now it was Sarah’s turn for a dismissive wave. “Oh, please. We saw right through that, so we went to the wine bar on Euclid and had a glass each, then we came back here.”
“You knew Finn had a wine cellar and you pretended to run an errand because I said so? Why?” Cherry asked.
Tatum laughed. “Is that what he’s calling his scary basement now? There are spiders in here, you know. And yes I knew. Where do you think I got the wine I just pretended to gift him?” She pointed at one of the refrigerators which had two obvious empty bottle spaces. “Grabbed it before we left.”
Becca was standing in the middle of the room looking confused. It might have been the longest I’d seen her go without talking. “What am I missing? You two went on a fake wine run?” she asked.
Tatum nodded. “I knew Cherry wanted to pounce on Isla for info about Tom, but Sarah said she didn’t want it to be a whole thing, so we took off for a few.”
“What I said was that I didn’t want to discuss it at all.” I was looking at Sarah when I said it. She had the sense to look contrite.
Becca took a seat in the one chair and pointed her finger at me. “You should’ve broken up with him two months ago.”
“That’s what I said.” Cherry high-fived Becca.
While my sisters discussed me behind my back, literally, I looked at the bottles in the fridge, hoping to find one with a screw top. Weren’t more and more wineries foregoing corks?
Finally, on a shelf near the bottom, I spied one with a metal cap and took it out. Twisting off the cap, I held the bottle up as though in a toast. “Cheers.” I unscrewed the top and took a swig. “To not discussing my love life.”
Becca took the bottle from me and threw down a gulp. “To finding a better guy who appreciates how amazing you are.”
“And who doesn’t cheat,” Cherry said, grabbing the bottle.
I nodded. “Goes without saying, but yeah, I’ll drink to it anyway.” I grabbed the bottle back from Cherry.
“I’m already half-drunk, but I’m getting in on this,” Tatum said, putting out her hand for the bottle. “To better than average sex.”
“Oh God, yes. That should’ve been the first toast,” I said, looking at Sarah, who I assumed would want her turn.
She nodded and hoisted the bottle over her head.
“To being the mistress of your own destiny, and to hell with Tom’s mistress. Cheers.” She took a double swig and passed the bottle back to me.
“If we weren’t all related, this would be pretty gross,” I said, wondering how much of the remaining wine in the bottle was really just backwash. “What the hell.” I drank some more.
Cherry put her arm around Sarah. “I agree with you, sister. Good toast. You can do anything you want to do. If you’re ready to be in a relationship, there’s an internet full of guys who will jump at the chance.”
I shook my head. “Ugh, I don’t want to date the internet.”
“Or don’t date. Build your bakery empire and have babies on your own. You can totally do that. You’d be an awesome mom,” Sarah said.
“Yikes, where did that come from?” I grabbed the wine back because all their pro-Isla energy was starting to freak me out. “Not sure I’m ready for all that.”
“Oh, come on. You talk to your bread starters like they’re human. You’re so ready.” Tatum sounded drunk. Or crazy.
“I talk to them because they’re living things and all living things need love.”
“You know who you should talk to, Blake’s sister, Sydney. She just had a baby two months ago and she’s doing it on her own,” Becca said.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll talk to her when the baby’s applying to college. I can relate to that.”
From upstairs, we heard more feet pounding around. A moment later, Finn and Annie appeared on the basement stairs.
Annie took in the sight of us passing around the bottle of wine and didn’t hesitate before extending her hand. Becca handed it to her and she took a sip.
“You all are crazy,” Finn said. “But I love you, and there’s dinner upstairs unless you’d rather eat in here.”
Annie took another swig and shook her head. “Nope, not eating in here. There’s only one chair down here. Come on, people, get your butts upstairs. You’re gonna love the fried garlic. Let’s go.” Obediently, we followed her up the stairs.
Finn brought up the rear and when I walked past him, he leaned in and whispered, “I agree with everything they said. It’s your life. Make it good.”
I hugged him. For only one brother, he did the work of ten.
Chapter 11
Owen
I got up early on Friday for my drive to Healdsburg. Actually, that’s not exactly true. Getting up early implies that I slept, which I did not.
After eating pie with Isla, kissing Isla, texting Isla, recalling every sigh from Isla, I was finding it hard to think about anything else.
I’d gone to my meetings on Thursday and buzzed around like I was in the throes of a manic episode, but my newfound energy was all because of her.
Then, instead of sleeping, I’d spent the night looking at architectural drawings, binging a reality show about guerrilla
wilderness survival techniques, and thinking about whether to cancel my meetings on Friday and lurk at the bakery all day instead.
I couldn’t get her out of my head, despite an irritating rational voice telling me to stop. I would have been smart to listen.
The problem was that I didn’t want to stop. It was like a dam had been leveled with a wrecking ball, and now the water poured through unhindered. And I was a man who’d spent a year dehydrated in a drought.
I couldn’t pretend I was a guy with a crush when now I was the guy who couldn’t have enough of her.
No one was rebuilding that dam.
And despite my previous denial, which mainly came in the form of lying to myself about why I hung out at the bakery so often—I’m picky about my bread, I like walking two miles every morning for a wheat product, I’m a creature of habit—the truth was that I’d always been coming to see her.
But now, I’d kissed her, so there was no point in denying any of it. And I didn’t want to wait until Sunday to see her again.
As soon as I got off the treadmill, I’d righted the ship and decided I was going to my meetings . . . right after stopping by the bakery to say hello. I could claim that I needed a little sourdough to carry me through until Sunday. Nothing weird about a quick errand on the way to Healdsburg—in the opposite direction.
Apparently, lack of sleep made me honest and extremely stubborn. So I went full kitchen Romeo.
Knowing how much she liked apple pie, I searched out a simple recipe that used a pre-made crust and threw together an apple breakfast pie with the ingredients I had on hand.
It didn’t go very well.
I’m not a baker, and the crust kept crumbling before I could lay the whole thing into the pie tin. It was actually a blessing to be up to my wrists in hot apples that weren’t behaving—it gave me something to focus on besides how bad I had it for her.
In order to make it up north for the meeting on time, I needed to hit the bakery earlier than my usual, and I wondered if Isla would be busy in the back. Normally, all the bread was in the ovens by the time I arrived and she was filling the cases in front.
Falling for You Page 9