Nearly Wild

by Linda Seed

  Rose liked the way her appearance weeded people out. The interested, the polite, and the benignly curious could stay to play another round. The rude, the judgmental, and those who thought she was an ideal target for jokes, psychoanalysis, or, God forbid, fashion advice were eliminated immediately without the benefit of parting gifts.

  Having exchanged pleasantries with Christopher, Rose extended her hand toward Melinda.

  It was interesting that Rose had never met her. True, Melinda didn’t live in Cambria. But Will had dated her long enough that Rose should have encountered her at least once. What did it mean that Will had never brought her around? Nothing good, surely.

  The woman gave her a dead-fish handshake as though she were afraid Rose’s fashion choices might be viral, exchanged through skin-to-skin contact.

  They all sat down, and Chris made some noises about ordering a bottle of wine.

  “We should have Rose choose,” Will said. “She’s a wine expert.”

  “Really.” Chris looked at her with interest. “A hobbyist, or do you work at one of the wineries?”

  “I manage De-Vine, here in town,” she told him.

  “Ah. So you’re not a vintner or an oenologist,” Melinda said smugly.

  “No. I’m self-taught,” Rose said.

  “I’m sure you’ve picked up quite a lot bartending for the tourists.”

  What was this? Was Melinda getting into a pissing contest with Rose? That meant one of three things: One, Melinda was still interested in Will, and she was jealous that he’d come with a date. Two, Melinda thought Chris might find Rose attractive, and was worried that Rose might steal her billionaire boyfriend. Or three, Melinda simply thought Rose was inferior due to her appearance. In any case, Rose had always enjoyed a good hair-pulling catfight.

  “Rose isn’t a bartender,” Will told Melinda. “She manages one of the most successful shops in town. And aside from that, she recommends wines for many of Cambria’s best restaurants. Jackson Graham, the head chef here, relies on her judgment.”

  Rose looked at Will. She appreciated the way he was defending her, but she was a little surprised by it. She hadn’t realized Will had given any thought to what she did for a living.

  “I’ve heard a little about Jackson Graham,” Chris put in. “They say he’s a stickler for quality—a real perfectionist. If he trusts Rose’s expertise, then that’s good enough for me.”

  “Not that he doesn’t push back a little on occasion,” Rose said, picking up the wine list and opening the tall folder. “He’s pretty good with wine. But he doesn’t have The Nose.”

  “The nose?” Chris said.

  “It’s almost like a sixth sense,” Rose said. “I can tell just about everything about a wine from the aroma. Jackson can’t do that. But it’s not his fault. Most people can’t.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Chris said. He seemed to mean it. “How did you learn that?”

  Melinda rolled her eyes.

  “Oh,” Rose began, “I grew up in Connecticut with high-society parents. They thought I should be educated about the finer things—they thought I should be cultured. They taught me a few of the basics when I was a teenager, but The Nose—that’s just something you have to be born with.”

  “Your mother must be so proud of you,” Melinda said, giving Rose a pointed look up and down her body, her glance encompassing Rose’s clothes, her hair—everything a high-society mother would loathe with every molecule of her being.

  “No.” Rose laughed. “Mothers tend to be more appreciative of daughters who look like they just stepped out of a Barbie Dreamhouse.” She flashed Melinda a cutting smile.

  “Okay,” Will said, clapping his hands once to break up the conversation. “Rose, I’d like to … ah … talk to you about the … ah … Could we talk privately for a moment?”

  “Of course, sweetheart.” Rose batted her eyelashes at him, ran her hand slowly from his shoulder down his arm, and gave him a seductive smile before shooting one last look toward Melinda, who seemed like she might swallow her tongue. Yep, it was the first option. She was still hung up on Will.

  Will led her into the foyer and turned to face her. She expected him to scold her for being rude to Melinda, and hell, she probably deserved it. She didn’t expect what he actually said.

  “Rose, I’m sorry,” he told her, looking miserable. “Melinda had a chip on her shoulder from the minute we walked in the door. You shouldn’t have to put up with this. If you want me to make an excuse, I’ll do it, and we can get out of here.”

  It was sweet that he wanted to protect her, but she didn’t need protection.

  “I can handle her,” Rose said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you can. But you shouldn’t have to. I don’t know why she’s being this way, with the crack about being a bartender, and the thing about your mother …” He shook his head, looking grim.

  “I think I have some idea,” she said.

  “You do?”

  She fluffed up the bubble of her skirt, making it more bubble-like than ever.

  “I’m thinking you’re the one who broke up with her. Am I right?”

  “Well, I … no. It was mutual.”

  “Are you sure?” Rose asked. “Was it maybe a little less mutual on her side than yours?”

  Will looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted with the collar of his dress shirt, as though it was too stiff or scratchy. “I—”

  “Look, I’m not trying to make you out to be the bad guy,” Rose said. “I’m sure you had your reasons. Good ones, from what I can see. I’m just saying, she’s still interested in you.”

  His eyes widened. “No. That’s … No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Rose—”

  “Trust me on this. It’s one of the benefits of being a fake date. I have distance. I can see things you can’t.”

  He nodded. “Okay. So let’s say she still has feelings for me. That’s awkward and weird, but … let’s go with that. She’s dating my friend, who’s also my boss. What am I supposed to do?”

  Rose shrugged. “That part, I don’t know.”

  “Terrific.”

  Rose took a surreptitious peek into the dining room, where Melinda was sitting with Chris, looking pinched and angry. Rose raised her eyebrows thoughtfully.

  “Will, how important is it to you that I get along with your ex?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do I have to kiss up to these two? For the sake of your job?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve known Chris for years. He’s not going to fire me if my date doesn’t like his girlfriend.”

  She nodded. “Excellent.” She linked one arm through his. “I’m ready to go back. Lead the way.”

  Back at the table, Will wondered if Rose could be right. Was Melinda acting hostile because she was still interested in him? It seemed unlikely.

  The way he remembered it, she’d been perpetually dissatisfied with him for one reason or another—everything from his clothing choices to the way he loaded a dishwasher. Mostly, though, she was dissatisfied because he’d wanted to use his Stanford education to study birds rather than to found some high-tech company that would ultimately go public, raining money down on his head in an all-consuming flash flood of wealth. In other words, she hadn’t wanted him—she’d wanted someone like Chris. And that’s what she’d ultimately gotten, so why was she upset now? Was she still hung up on Will? Was that possible?

  Had he really hurt her?

  Speaking of people hurting each other, Will felt an impending sense of doom as he saw the way the women were looking at each other: Melinda with barely veiled contempt, and Rose with barely veiled glee.

  If there was going to be a Thunderdome-style cage fighting match, Will would put his money on Rose.

  That turned out to be the right call.

  Rose had barely ordered the wine—a 2012 Enfield Chardonnay—when Melinda went to work on her.

  “So, Will. How did you meet Rose
?” Melinda’s mouth curved into a delicate smile of feigned interest.

  “Ah … my friends are in relationships with Rose’s friends, so we were running into each other here and there,” Will said.

  “Are Rose’s friends as … unique as Rose?” Melinda raised her eyebrows in innocence.

  “Well, I like to think we’re all unique,” Will said, rallying.

  “It’s so nice that you can make the effort to see below the … well, the surface,” Melinda said, gesturing vaguely toward Rose. “Unless the surface is the point. I mean, I can see that for an ordinary guy like you, dating Rose would be quite a walk on the wild side.”

  In just three sentences, Melinda had managed to insult Rose’s appearance, call Will ordinary, and insinuate that his association with Rose was some kind of kinky fetish. Will was both horrified and impressed.

  “Melinda …” Chris tried.

  “Not that I’m judging,” Melinda went on. “I mean, for every kind of person, there’s someone who finds that sort of thing attractive.”

  “I imagine just about anyone would find Rose attractive,” Chris put in.

  That gentle rebuke—Chris indicating that not only did he side with Rose in this particular wrestling match, but that he found Rose attractive—caused the color to rise in Melinda’s face.

  “Oh,” Rose said, “there’s certainly a ‘walk on the wild side’ aspect to our relationship, wouldn’t you say, Will? We do like to take things to the limit.” She leaned toward Melinda and whispered, “Sexually, I mean.”

  Melinda opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. Will was reminded of a trout on a hook.

  “Rose,” Will began. “I—”

  “You don’t need to be embarrassed, Will,” she told him. “We’re among friends here.” Then she leaned over and kissed him so deeply, so sensuously, so thoroughly, that the world around him disappeared into swirling colors of orange and red, and a whooshing sound filled his ears.

  “Well,” a voice said, interrupting them.

  Will broke from the kiss, feeling like his body had been turned inside out and then right again, and looked up to see Jackson standing beside the table in his chef’s coat. “I came to see if I could offer you a special appetizer. But I see you’ve already had one.”

  “Well, that was … interesting,” Will said as he and Rose left the restaurant.

  “God,” Rose said. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I wanted to rip that bitch’s face off and stuff it down the front of her dress.”

  “Kissing me was better, all things considered.”

  “What the hell did you see in her?” she demanded as they arrived at his car.

  “This is what I’m wondering.”

  “And Chris,” she went on. They got into the car and she buckled herself in. “He seems decent enough. What’s he doing wasting time with a puffed-up, lacquered, fake-ass skank like her?”

  Will sat in the driver’s seat, stunned by the evening’s developments. “She wasn’t like that. Before, I mean. When I was dating her.” He stopped to consider whether that was true. She’d been judgmental even then. And superior. And a little bit catty. But not to this extent, surely, or he would have noticed. Wouldn’t he?

  “I’m sorry,” he said as they pulled out of Neptune’s parking lot and headed down Main Street on their way toward Rose’s house.

  “For what?”

  “For putting you through this. I’m sure you could have done something much better with your evening. Like, I don’t know. Doing your laundry, or … or cleaning your grout.”

  She gave him a half grin. “I do like a good session of grout cleaning.”

  That had sounded dirty to Will’s ears, and he wondered if she’d intended it that way. And that made him think about the kiss. Never in his life had he been kissed that way. Never had he even considered that such a kiss was possible. It might have been the added thrill of doing it in public, and especially in front of Melinda—the whole exhibitionist aspect of it. But probably not, he thought. A kiss like that probably would have blown his world apart no matter where it happened.

  “Well, I’m sorry I took you away from your … grout.”

  “I’m not.” Rose wiggled a little as she settled herself more comfortably into her seat. “When you’re facing a bitchy ex, you should always have someone there who’s on your side. Plus, I got to eat some of Jackson’s food, which is always a plus.”

  He drove down Main Street and got on Highway 1 north toward Moonstone Beach. He turned right and followed Cambria Pines Road up into the pine-covered hills toward Rose’s place.

  He’d been quiet for a while, and finally, he sighed. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” he said.

  Surprised, Rose looked at Will as he drove into the woodsy expanse east of Highway 1. He looked sad and vulnerable, his sandy-haired good looks making her think of the boy he’d once been.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  He shrugged, looking at the road. “Why did I have to pretend to have a date? Why couldn’t I have just … I don’t know. Shown up to dinner alone? Or said no?”

  She felt a prick of offense; had it been so bad escorting her? But really, she knew that wasn’t what he’d meant at all.

  “It’s normal to want your ex to think you’ve moved on,” she told him.

  “Nah. It’s not about Melinda.”

  Then she understood. “It’s about Chris.” She turned a little in her seat to look at him. “Right?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

  She didn’t press. It was clear that he wanted to talk, and he’d do it in his own time.

  Finally, he said, “We were roommates at Stanford during our undergrad years. Did you know that?”

  “I did, yeah,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, look how that’s turned out. He’s ridiculously rich, and I’m buried under student loans, driving a car that should have been put out of its misery fifty thousand miles ago. He runs his own business, and I work for him. I’m his employee. And now …”

  “And now, he’s even got your girlfriend.”

  “Well … yeah. It’s not that I want Melinda back …”

  “Horrors.” Rose shuddered. “I can’t imagine why you would.”

  “But it’s the symbolism of the whole thing. He’s got it all, and I’ve got to talk somebody into pretending to be my date.”

  A muscle in his jaw flexed, and she found herself wanting to tuck him to her breast and stroke his hair.

  “As I recall, you didn’t talk me into anything,” she said. “In fact, this fake date thing wasn’t even your idea.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “And if you want Chris’s lifestyle, go get it. Do what he did. You’re ridiculously smart, I’ll bet you could do it.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, which was long enough to curl slightly over his ears and at his collar. “It’s not even that. I don’t want his lifestyle. I just want … I don’t know. I want to achieve something.”

  “Okay. So, what is it you want to achieve? What’s the big goal?”

  He shook his head. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. Right now, the goal is to finish my dissertation and get my PhD. But after that …”

  “You’re going to teach? Become a professor?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you’re not thrilled about the idea,” she guessed.

  His grim silence gave her his answer.

  When they arrived at Rose’s house, he got out of the car and walked her to her door.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked. Usually at the end of a date, inviting a man into your home meant that you were interested in sex, or at least some making out and groping. But this was a fake date—and she was done with men—so it didn’t mean that. What it meant was that he looked sad, and she thought he might need someone to talk to.

  “I’d better not,” he said.

  She dug her keys out of her purse, unlocked the door, and turned toward him.
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br />   “All right. And Will? It was fun being your fake date. Even with the whole Melinda raging bitch thing.”

  He was looking at her in a funny way. He started to say something, and then stopped. Then he started to walk back to his car, and stopped, and came back. “There’s something I … Do you mind if I do just one thing?”

  “Do what?”

  He reached out suddenly, held her face in his hands, and kissed her. Before she could think, before she could breathe, she was pressed up against her front door with his fingers entwined in her hair, and his mouth was the whole world and everything in it: the earth, the moon, the stars, her own beating heart.

  He kissed her just about as thoroughly and completely as a girl could be kissed, then he let go and backed away. Without him holding her up, she wasn’t sure she could still stand upright.

  “I … uh … I’m finished with men,” she managed to croak out from amid her haze of arousal.

  “Oh, I know. I get that.”

  “Then … ”

  “I wanted to see if I could replicate the results from … you know. During dinner.”

  “Always the scientist,” she said.

  “I was just … gathering data.”

  “Uh huh. Well, I …” She pointed to her front door.

  “Right. Good night,” he said, and walked down the driveway to his car.

  When he got into his car and drove away, she was still standing there, watching him go.

  Chapter Seven

  “So, I kissed him, and then he kissed me, but I don’t think either kiss counted, because it wasn’t a real date,” Rose attempted to explain to her friends at Jitters the next morning. They were sitting around one of the small café tables with lattes and muffins in front of them—all except for Gen, who had a plastic container full of fresh fruit. Gen had always been a healthy eater, but she was particularly careful about it now, with the wedding approaching.

  “Wait,” Lacy said, putting one hand up traffic-cop style. “If there was kissing, how was it not a real date?”

  “I told you,” Rose said with exaggerated patience. “I kissed him because his ex-girlfriend is bitchtastic, and I wanted to see if I could make her head burst into flames. Which it almost did.”