Nearly Wild

by Linda Seed

  “I … it wasn’t …” Will tried to explain, but what was there to explain? He was just inches from bending her over the salad bar. And now that Jackson had suggested it, he wouldn’t stop thinking about that possibility for quite some time.

  “Rose is terrific, man,” Ryan said finally. “You could do a whole hell of a lot worse.”

  “Yeah.” Will nodded. “Yeah. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “That’s your problem, college boy,” Jackson said. “You think too much.”

  It occurred to Will that Jackson might be right. Thinking was great when you were compiling a research report or planning a big career move.

  But sometimes you just had to bend somebody over a salad bar.

  The next day at De-Vine, Rose called the local wineries to place orders for the shop, did some accounting work on the computer in the back room, served a customer who’d come in to buy champagne for a silver anniversary party, and then consulted with a local restaurant about their wine list.

  With all of that done, she opened her laptop on the bar and pulled up information on the wine and viticulture program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

  The college was only about forty minutes from Cambria, so the commute would be doable. What would be less doable would be juggling her job at De-Vine with her studies. Or paying the roughly eleven thousand dollars a year she’d need for tuition and books.

  Her salary at De-Vine wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t notably generous, either. Rose couldn’t blame Patricia. Rose did the books, so she knew what Patricia could and could not afford to pay her. Her paycheck was enough to cover the rent on her cottage as well as her basic expenses, but it would never be enough for her to pay for college.

  Rose’s mother had enough money to fund her education, and she’d be happy to lend it to Rose, or even give it to her. But Rose knew what the conditions would be. The money had strings attached, and those strings led straight to a hair salon and a dermatology appointment for laser tattoo removal.

  And that would be just the beginning.

  There were student loans, of course, but then she’d be saddled with more than forty thousand dollars in debt when she graduated, and that didn’t seem like a very appealing prospect.

  She could do community college for the first two years—get the general education requirements out of the way relatively cheaply—and then transfer to Cal Poly for the last two years. That would bring her student debt down to a mere twenty thousand.

  But that was assuming she could keep up with the course work while still managing De-Vine, and that thought worried her. She could study during slow times at the shop, but she’d need time off to attend classes. Patricia was great, and she’d do what she could to accommodate Rose. But Patricia could only do so much. Rose couldn’t manage the store from San Luis Obispo. She had to be here.

  She was still pondering it when the little bell over the front door jingled, and she looked up to see Will walking in.

  Her heart did a little flip when she saw him. And what the hell was that? She was not interested in Will Bachman. She wasn’t interested in anyone. And she was going to stay not interested in anyone, no matter how brilliant a kisser that someone might be.

  “Hey,” he greeted her, waving his fingers at her in a way that was endearingly shy and tentative. He looked all mussed and wind-blown from being outside, probably on the beach. He was wearing old jeans, a grey T-shirt with Stanford across the front in red lettering, and Teva sport sandals.

  Rose did not want to rip off his shirt and run her hands all over him. Not at all.

  She straightened from where she’d been slumped over the computer.

  “Hi, Will. Did you need something?”

  “Yeah. Uh … Chris and Melinda want some of that Enfield chardonnay we had at dinner. Do you have any?”

  “Sure.” She cocked her head at him. “I thought you were the caretaker. You have to do his shopping for him, too?”

  He cleared his throat. “I had some stuff to do in town, so … I volunteered.”

  The first thought that popped into Rose’s mind was that he’d volunteered so he could see her. But that would be stupid since they weren’t dating, not even fake dating anymore.

  She went to get the wine. “How many bottles?” she called over her shoulder as she went into the back room.

  “Six. Two to drink, four for the cellar, he says.”

  “Six it is.”

  When she came back with the wine, he gestured toward the laptop. “So, what had you so absorbed when I came in?”

  “Oh … nothing. Nothing important, anyway. Just … yearning and broken dreams.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound like nothing.”

  She flipped the laptop around on the bar to face him. He peered at the screen.

  “Wine and viticulture,” he read. He looked up from the screen. “You want to go to college.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. I didn’t go right out of high school because … well, because. And now, with the costs and my job here, I wish I’d gone when I had the chance.”

  “Why didn’t you?” He pulled up a stool at the bar and settled in.

  “Ah, jeez. It’s a long story.”

  “Every minute I spend listening to you is a minute I don’t have to spend at Cooper House with Melinda,” he said.

  “Good point. Is she leaving soon?”

  “Tomorrow. Thank goodness. But don’t change the subject. Why didn’t you go to college?”

  He looked so cute with his messy blond hair and his sunburned cheeks, his glasses and his earnest blue eyes, that she found herself pouring out the whole story.

  “I grew up in Connecticut,” she began. “Darien. All white, all rich. I went to private school and my parents bought me a Mercedes for my sixteenth birthday. My mother expected me to get straight As, go to cotillion, and date a future lawyer.”

  “Huh. That wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

  She raised her pierced left eyebrow at him wryly. “You don’t say. Anyway, I was supposed to go to Yale. My mother had it all planned out. My extracurricular activities, student government, debate team—it was all designed to look good on my application. I volunteered at a soup kitchen twice a week because my mother said the admissions office would like that. Of course, there are no soup kitchens in Darien because there are no poor people in Darien. We had to drive to Hartford.”

  Warming to her story, she propped her elbows on the bar and leaned forward, getting into it. “I had a college admission coach. I had an SAT tutor. I had a Yale student mentor.”

  “Okay,” Will prompted. “So what happened?”

  Rose stood up straight and let out a sigh. “I got accepted.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned her hip against the countertop that ran behind the bar. “I ran away.”

  “You … ”

  “Right after high school graduation, I got in the Mercedes and ran out of there like I was escaping from a hostage situation. Which, now that I think of it, is exactly what it felt like.”

  “What happened then?”

  She gave him a kind of side-eye. “Do you really want to hear this?”

  “Are you kidding? This is a great story.”

  The bell on the front door jingled again, and a middle-aged couple came in the door and started browsing among the IT’S WINE O’CLOCK signs and the jars of tapenade.

  Rose greeted them and asked if they were interested in wine tasting. They were. She got them situated at the bar with a sheet listing the wines available for tasting. When they’d selected their first wine, she poured one-ounce portions into their glasses and returned to where Will was seated a few feet down the bar.

  “So, anyway. My parents cut off the money. Of course. I sold the Mercedes for ten thousand dollars and took a bus out here to the coast. I got the tattoo at around the halfway point, at a place in Lincoln, Neb
raska.” She lowered the left shoulder of her top slightly to show him the red rosebud with the thorny stem.

  “That was brave,” the woman put in as she sipped her ounce of pinot grigio. She was a trim fiftysomething with tidy hair who looked like she might work in a bank. “How old were you?” She looked apologetically at Will. “Sorry. I came in in the middle.”

  “I was eighteen,” Rose said.

  “Jeez,” the man said, shaking his head. If the woman looked like she worked in a bank, the guy looked more like an insurance salesman. “It must have been hard to give up that Mercedes.”

  “Not really. It wasn’t me. I liked the bus better.” She turned back to Will. “Anyway. Now here I am, ten years later, and I want to go to college, but I can’t afford it. I should have gone to Yale when I had the chance.”

  “No.” Will shook his head. “No. You’d have flamed out at Yale.”

  “Hey,” she said sharply. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’d have flamed out because it wasn’t what you wanted. Because someone else was trying to shove you into a little box, and you were too big for the box.” He spoke with conviction, and she felt a thrill of excitement at the thought that he might understand—he might really get it—in a way other people rarely had. “This time, it’s for you,” he said. “This time, it’s about becoming the person you want to be, not the person someone else wishes you were. That’s why this time, it’s going to work.”

  His speech had gotten her so fired up she almost forgot she was broke. But then she remembered, and her shoulders fell.

  “Yeah, but I can’t afford it.”

  “There’s always a way,” the guy down the bar said. “Loans, financial aid.”

  “But loans mean debt,” Rose pointed out.

  “Yeah, but a college degree means more earning potential,” the woman added helpfully.

  “What do you think?” Rose asked Will. “You’re a Stanford guy. That can’t be cheap.”

  “It’s not,” he agreed. “And I didn’t get much help from my parents. They did what they could, but they just didn’t have the money to give.”

  “So, how’d you manage?” the bank lady asked.

  “Scholarships, loans, work study.” He turned to Rose. “If I did it, you can. Anybody brave enough to leave home at eighteen with nothing but a suitcase and a Mercedes can figure out how to pay for college.”

  “Yeah.” Rose wanted to believe it, and she felt a little seed of hope begin to sprout within her. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Can we try the Opolo sauvignon blanc next?” the guy wanted to know.

  Chapter Nine

  Will drove back to the house with the six bottles of wine in his car. He couldn’t stop thinking about Rose.

  Unfortunately for him, the story she’d told about leaving home at eighteen had left him more enamored than ever. The reason it was unfortunate was that he thought she might really mean what she said about being through with men.

  Someone that strong, that determined, that brave, probably didn’t need anybody. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be good for her. That didn’t mean he had nothing to offer.

  He wondered if she realized that his errand to get the wine had been an excuse to see her. Yes, it was really for Chris, and yes, he did do those kinds of things sometimes as part of his job. But he’d bent the truth a little when he’d told Rose about it. He hadn’t just volunteered to get the wine. He’d been the one to suggest buying a few bottles in the first place. And he’d done that to have an excuse to go into the shop and talk to her.

  Pathetic.

  He thought she might be out of his league, but then he wondered why he should believe such a thing. He was a Stanford-educated PhD candidate. By any measure, he was good relationship material.

  On further consideration, he concluded it was the pure force of her personality that made him feel lacking by comparison. If he was a light breeze, Rose was a hurricane.

  It probably wouldn’t hurt him to pick up his own wind speed a little.

  He was still thinking about her, about his chances with her, and about how he might best approach a woman who had sworn off anyone bearing a Y chromosome, when he pulled up in front of Cooper House to deliver the wine. Rose had given him a cardboard box to carry the bottles, and he hefted the box from the trunk of his car and carried it up the front walk and onto the porch.

  He was so preoccupied as he waited for someone to answer the doorbell that it never occurred to him that the person answering the door would be Melinda. But there she was, in bare feet and some kind of long, flowy dress that had probably cost more than the current value of his car. Which, he had to admit, wasn’t saying much.

  She had a certain look when she opened the door, a certain grandiose attitude, that told Will she was practicing to be lady of the manor. When she saw that it was him, her face dropped.

  “Oh. Will.”

  He cleared his throat and shifted from one foot to the other. “Chris asked me to get him some wine from town.” He lifted the box slightly in demonstration. “Here it is.”

  “Of course. Would you bring it in for me?” She stood back to allow him to enter.

  Will looked around as he came into the house. “Is Chris here?”

  “He and his tennis coach are out on the court.”

  Will’s brow furrowed. “He has a tennis coach in Cambria?”

  “No. His coach from the Bay Area came down for the lesson.”

  “Ah.” It was at precisely that moment that Will realized he and Chris were no longer friends, and were now simply employer and employee. What kind of person made his tennis coach drive four hours to give a lesson, especially when Chris would be returning home the next day? Will had known that he and Chris had grown apart over the years, but at this moment the gaping chasm between them seemed unbridgeable.

  “Would you mind bringing the bottles down to the cellar?” Melinda asked. She was moving ahead of him into the house, floating about in a peculiarly airy way, as though her association with Chris and his vast wealth meant she were somehow no longer tethered to the earth.

  “Sure.” Will nudged the front door closed with his foot and followed Melinda.

  Of course he knew where everything was in the house—knew it better than Melinda did—but for some reason she felt the need to escort him into the kitchen and through the big oak door that led down into the wine cellar.

  When they were down there in the dim light amid the racks of bottles and the smell of oak barrels kept purely for show, Will put the box on a table in the center of the room.

  “Okay. There you go,” Will said. “I’ll just …” He gestured toward the stairs and headed in that direction.

  “Will.”

  He stopped and turned toward her, waiting.

  “This thing between you and that woman can’t be serious,” she said. She’d uttered the word woman as though it were an offense to her mouth.

  “It can be whatever Rose and I want it to be,” Will said, keeping his tone casual. This wasn’t the place to get into a fight with Melinda. “What’s your problem with her?”

  She looked at him incredulously, her arms folded in defiance over her chest. “My problem?” She shook her head as though she couldn’t believe he could be this obtuse. “You broke up with me, and then … you end up with her? Her ? ”

  “This isn’t about Rose,” he said. “Whatever’s got you upset, it’s not about her.”

  “No.” She walked over to the cardboard box, took a bottle out, looked at it, then set it on the table. “You’re right. It’s not about her.”

  “Then what?”

  She shook her head. “Will. How can you be so dense?”

  “Melinda—”

  In a second, in a breath, she crossed the room, put her arms around him, and kissed him. This wasn’t the old, familiar Melinda kiss, uninspired and dutiful. This was a kiss full of determination, anger, and maybe a little desperation.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed h
er back until she was at arm’s length from him.

  “Melinda, what—”

  “You can’t want her more than you want me,” she said, her face flushed. “You just can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’re with Chris,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “He doesn’t have to know.”

  “There’s not going to be anything to know. Except what we’re already keeping from him—that we used to be together. We used to be together. But we’re not anymore. And that’s all there is to tell.”

  He let go of her, then climbed up the stairs and out of the wine cellar, leaving her down there, alone, to think her unknowable thoughts.

  Tomorrow, she’d leave. It wouldn’t be a minute too soon.

  He wanted to talk it out with someone, but it seemed unlikely that any of his friends would be available. Jackson would be at the restaurant, Ryan would be out herding cows or doing whatever it was he did on the ranch. Daniel would be in his studio blowing glass into amorphous shapes.

  And even if he could get hold of them, any of them, he realized they weren’t the ones he wanted to talk to. They weren’t the ones whose advice he wanted.

  He pulled out his cell phone and called De-Vine.

  “Can you have lunch with me?” Will asked when Rose answered the phone.

  “Oh.”

  He heard her hesitation and rushed to reassure her. “I know you’re done with men. You told me. But this isn’t a date. It’s just … you know. Lunch as friends. I kind of have stuff going on, and I need someone to talk to, and … You know what? Never mind. It was a bad idea.”

  “No. Wait. Patricia’s here between noon and two. I can slip out for an hour during that window.”

  He felt his heart lift. “Twelve-thirty?”

  They met down the street at Robin’s, where they sat on the patio and ordered fish tacos for him, and a pastrami sandwich for her. The early afternoon was mild, with overcast skies and a slight breeze that kissed her skin.

  “So, what’s this stuff you’ve got going on?” she asked, when they were settled in with their food. She picked a stray piece of pastrami from her plate and put it in her mouth.