Starting Over

This is a continuation of a story about two middle aged people, the narrator, Dave, and his Berkeley next-door neighbor, Britt. Each is working at starting their lives over after the death of their respective spouses, Ellen, and Doug. In the prior chapter they traveled up to the Napa valley to visit four old friends of Britt's: Louie, Marcus, Gina, and Bianca. They were living together at a rural home near Napa and were the last surviving members of a long defunct commune where Britt met her late husband, Doug. This chapter will work better if you have read the prior chapters.

Grab a coffee and then we'll go," Bianca said as I helped Marcus carry a couple of cases of beer into the house. When I reached the kitchen I found Gina and Britt dressed in aprons, and not much else, making what looked like a considerable mess on the big butcher block table that filled the center of the space. There seemed to be flour everywhere. The aprons covered the girls' chests, sort of, and what wasn't covered by the apron seemed to be covered with flour.

"Are you ladies making pasta or having a food fight?" Marcus asked as we carried the beer into the pantry behind where they were working.

"Just do your chores Marcus," Gina responded.

I noticed that the aprons made no effort to cover the two women's backsides—backsides I had been intimately involved with during the prior 24 hours. It was distracting. I almost tripped as I walked into the pantry. When I came back out of the pantry Britt had turned around and was leaning against the worktable. It had been several hours since we had made love in the early morning hours before arising for breakfast. As I looked at her, covered only by an undersized apron that stopped well short of mid-thigh and barely covered the breasts I had been fondling with such pleasure a few hours before, I could feel my cock beginning to grow beneath my jeans. Her long blonde hair was piled atop her head in a haphazard fashion with a few whisps from here and there hanging down. She pushed a couple of strands from in front of her face, smearing flour across of her forehead. "I hear you and Bianca are going up to The Hill."

"I guess so," I responded. "Is that where the old commune was?" As near as I could tell the commune's principal guiding policy had been one of free love, a policy still followed by the four Napa survivors that Britt and I were visiting for the weekend.

"Yes. I haven't been there in years, but as you can see, I have my chores to do." She held out her arms to the side pushing her breasts against the apron. "I'm sure Bianca will show you everything," she said with a wink. Britt had told me earlier in the day that Bianca wanted to have sex with me, since I had spent most of the prior evening with Gina and then Britt.

"Oh, I see," I said, acknowledging her double meaning.

"I'm sure you will see... see everything that is. Have a good time and don't do anything I wouldn't do," Britt responded. Based on what Britt had told me about her life in the commune and her marriage to Doug, there wasn't much of anything involving sex she hadn't done. She turned away from me and leaned forward on the worktable thrusting her naked ass out at me. As I walked by her I paused, grabbing her round plump hips with both hands, and pulling her back against my jeans. Britt responded by grinding her ass against my rapidly hardening dick. As she continued to grind against me I slid one hand in the open side of her apron and fondled her tits. Gina was watching both of us closely and I was seriously hoping I could skip the tour of The Hill and stay here to help the girls make pasta... and perhaps screw both again, as I had the night before.

"Oh no you two," Gina said. "Believe me Dave I would love to keep you around here and listen to you talk dirty to us while you molest us like you did last night, but Bianca will give us holly hell if we don't share with her. Besides, we have pasta to make."

Britt pulled away and turned to face me saying, "She's right Dave. You need to go with Bianca and we need to make pasta." She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me hard and then said, "Now go. Gina and I will be here when you get back." As I turned to leave I saw that Gina had pulled her apron down and was holding her beautiful round tits out toward me.

"You two are terrible teases," I said as I turned to go, dusting flour off my upper body.

Bianca was waiting for me beside one of the old pickup trucks. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Unlike the garments she had worn the night before, the jeans fit her snugly and the T-shirt did little to disguise her braless breasts. She had, like everyone else, been naked at breakfast, but my attention had been focused on Britt and Gina. At dinner the night before she had been wearing the loose-fitting dress she wore to her job as a high school counselor. It disguised her body almost completely. I was stunned by what I saw now. I realized that for a woman approaching fifty Bianca was impressive. She was tall, almost six feet, with much of her height coming from legs that just seemed to go on forever. Her ass, certainly a bit broader than it had likely been in her twenties was round and still well defined by a narrow waist above it. Her breasts were big, covering her chest in full, obviously soft, with large nipples that showed through the T-shirt like a pair of jellybeans calling out to my lips. Over the T-shirt she wore a cotton work shirt that was open and pushed to the side each of her tits. As she turned to step up into the truck I starred at her round, full ass, tightly covered by the jeans she was wearing. My lascivious mind was telling me how much I would love to stand behind her and hang on to that ass while I screwed her. "Oh yes." I said to myself. "There is a lot more to Bianca than I noticed yesterday."

She turned, standing on the running board of the pick-up, and looked over her shoulder at me, her left hand resting on the door to the truck and her hip and one breast thrust out. "Come on Dave. You've got things to see." I had learned by watching the group over the last 24 hours Bianca was in the habit of giving orders and the others were in the habit of obeying them, and I was feeling just fine about having to follow her orders now. I wanted to see more of what she was wantonly showing me now. Gina and Britt would still be around when I got back from my tour of The Hill.

"I certainly hope so," I said as I climbed into the truck from the other side.

Bianca looked across at me as she started the truck. "You seem to have been helping with the pasta production. There was still flour on my lap. She reached across and brushed it off, stroking my still hard dick as she did so. "I think you and the girls were being naughty." She shook her head and put the old truck in reverse, grinding its aging gears.

Our drive up the Napa Valley was slow, as you would expect on a Saturday afternoon. Bianca grumbled about the tourists clogging the road. When we got to St. Helena she turned off to the right. "I want to stop here and get some things for lunch and say hello to my aunt." We parked before an old white barn. The gravel lot was lined with orange trees. The front part of the barn contained an obscure little store selling Italian foods—pasta, olive oil, salami, a few cheeses, some locally baked artesian breads. There was a plump old woman manning what passed for a cash register. It was a cigar box. The place was strictly cash and carry. She and Bianca exchanged a crushing hug and then begin to chatter in Italian. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but it was obvious I was part of the conversation's subject matter, as I heard my name and Britt's repeatedly.

We left with a big salami, some sourdough bread, and a lump of cheese. After Bianca managed to thread her way through St. Helena's Saturday tourist traffic we begin climbing up the Mayacamas ridge that separates Napa from Sonoma. The road was a dusty graveled road with a real need for a grading to smooth out the washboard. The land around us was a mixture of pine and chaparral, most of which had burned in recent years. There were scattered vineyards which had somehow escaped the fires. "They call this the Spring Mountain wine district, Bianca said. It's not as famous as some of the districts down on the valley floor, but I prefer the wines that are made from these grapes. They are stronger and have more bite. The growers down below make wine that is too soft. It's lost its soul."

When we reached the top of the ridge, we turned off on a road that followed the Mayacamas ridge south. It was narrower than the county road we had been following and could have used some serious maintenance. The old truck rattled and clattered as we bounced along through potholes and over rocks that stuck out of the roadbed. After a couple of miles we pulled up to a locked gate. Bianca tossed me a key and said, "Okay, shotgun. Open the gate and then lock it after I drive though." The lady did like to give orders. Once through the gate we followed a narrow track that wound through a stand of burned-out pine and wrapped back around the ridge towards the north again. After a drop down a steep face we were on the edge of an open piece of meadow land that ran gently down the hill towards the Napa side of the ridge.

There were a couple of ruined foundations that barely showed above the browned grass. A chimney stood at the end of one of the foundations. The bricks showed signs of having been seared in a fire that presumably took the building around it, but it did not appear to have been a recent fire. Against the steep hill that we had driven down there was a stone wall with a door that I would learn later led into a cave that had been dug into the hill to store wines. The storage cave and the vineyard below the field dated from many years before the days of the commune. There was also a shinny new metal shed at the lower end of the meadow along with a new irrigation pump and a power line that came from somewhere down below to power it. The barely visible vineyard cascaded down the mountain in a series of terraces toward St. Helena, totaling I would later learn a bit more than 30 acres of usable vineyard. An old picnic table and benches set in the shade before the stone wall fronting the wine cave. Bianca put the truck in four-wheel drive and drove up and across the meadow until we could park on a patch of gravel in the shade next to the old stone wall and the table.

"Time for lunch," she said as she jumped down from the truck. She set the food we had purchased in St. Helena on the table along with a buck knife she withdrew from her pocket. "This is The Hill she said sweeping her arm across the view. Get a corkscrew and some glasses from the truck and I'll tell you some history." I found a couple of dusty plastic glasses behind the seat in the truck. The truck's glove box, like any good Napa Valley pickup, contained at least half a dozen cork screws. Always good to be prepared to taste the wine, I thought, but I didn't see a bottle of wine among the things in the truck.

As I approached the table with the corkscrew I said, "I didn't see a bottle of wine in the truck," Bianca was peeling off the cotton shirt she had worn over her T-shirt. I couldn't resist staring at her big tits, as I put the glasses and a corkscrew on the table.

"No, no," she said. "You're company, so we're drinking the good stuff. There's a lot of wine behind that steel door and it's not the crap Marcus brews up from the grapes we grow down in Napa." She used her the tail of her T-shirt to dust off the plastic wine glasses. When she pulled the cloth up to polish the cups, well really dust them off, I could see the bottoms of her big round breasts. "Yup, those'll do," she said holding them up like a sommelier about to serve a fine wine. Exactly what I was thinking about the breasts that I could see peeking out from beneath the T-shirt. I also thought their garage wine made in Napa was pretty good, but apparently the old wine cellar carved into the rock wall held something better.

"Come on let me show you where we keep the good stuff." As she stood her big tits bounced beneath the T-shirt. Digging into her jeans pocket she found an old skeleton key to open the big padlock on the iron door. The door opened with a grinding creak of hinges unaccustomed to regular use. It was completely dark beyond the door. Bianca stepped in and fumbled about on the wall to the left of the door until she found a switch that powered up a string of lights that ran down the ceiling beyond the door, dimly lighting the cave. The old cellar was forty or fifty feet deep and filled with wine racks that held hundreds of bottles of wine. There were also a few barrels stored near the back. The labels on the bottles disclosed nothing but the vintage year of the grapes used to make the wine within the bottles—none of the fancy labels and legally required disclosures found on wines offered for sale in your local wine store. Just a white label with a black four-digit number that I presumed was the vintage date. The dust on the bottles and labels was thick.

"This is our library," Bianca said. "These wines are all pure cabernet, made from grapes grown in the vineyard below here. Originally there were wines here that dated back to when those grapes were planted in the late 1940's but when the commune was here we drank all of those. Dumb. We didn't know what we had. Now they date back to a few years after the fire that destroyed the commune a year or two after we moved away. That was when Doug bought this land at a tax sale and had the old vineyard rehabilitated so he could make wines here. Louis and Marcus did all the work, but the money that paid for it was Doug's and he owned the land> Now it belongs to Britt, but I'm not sure she knows that. Bianca chuckled. "She inherited so much stuff from that asshole husband of hers that I wonder if she knows what she owns—and how rich she really is. Let me get a good bottle and I'll explain the details to you." she walked down an aisle until she came to a group of bottles of a single vintage. She pulled one from the shelf, wiping the dust from the label, and said, "Yes. This is a 2005. Marcus likes this one and he was the vintner on everything you see in here. Let's get out of here. Too many spiders. This place gives me the creeps."

When we sat down at the table she used her T-shirt to dust off the wine bottle, showing me even more of her tits this time. She held up the long piece of salami she had bought and said, "These are so phallic. Don't you agree?" She stared at the salami for a moment and then shook her head, saying, "Nope that's too big for me." Laughing at her crude joke, she took a knife to her newfound phallus. While she cut up salami, cheese, and bread, I opened the wine and smelled the end of the cork. It was a strong, powerful wine, at least if the cork was to be believed. "Well pour some and let's see what we've got," she said. This is almost twenty years old. No need to let it air. I poured and Bianca quickly swirled the wine in her cup and drank a bit, holding it in her mouth to let the flavors develop before swallowing. "Oh yes. Marcus does such great work. Taste some Dave."

The wine was stunning. A strong deeply flavored pure cabernet that would have set professional wine tasters to babbling forever about a world of exotic flavors and scents they always claimed to find in a great wine. I've never been able to find all those exotic tastes in a good wine, but I have consumed enough great wine so I know it when I taste it. This one had a strong aroma, or nose as the wine snobs like to say, one that I can only describe as the lovely odor that impacts you when you walk into a winery where a good cabernet is fermenting. In the mouth it opened with the strong rich fruit so typical of a great California cab, and so irritating to a Frenchman stuck with their weak opening wines. At the finish there were the beautiful cabernet tannins that, even though softened by years of lying in the bottle stored in the hillside behind me, still provided that dry finish you seek in a great cab. "That's magnificent," I said.

As we sat in the shade enjoying the wine and the salami and cheese Bianca had purchased from her aunt, she gave me a more detailed history of the commune which they called The Hill. It had started simply enough with Louie, Bianca, Gina, and Marcus (the "Four Amigos") choosing to live together shortly after high school in the old house whose foundations and chimney remained today. It was a farm and vineyard owned by Marcus' uncle. He had built the home and planted the vineyard shortly after World War II. By the time the four finished high school, the farm and vineyard were abandoned. The steep hillside made the vineyard too expensive to profitably farm. No one objected to their using the property. For several years it was just a place where they and various friends who wandered in and out, including Britt and her twin sister Freya, spent their nights. Most were working in the grapes or at other jobs in the Valley. Britt was in Med school in Stanford and later in her psychiatric residency training, so her presence was episodic at best. Eventually they took to calling it the "The Hill", but it was still very loosely organized.

"Then Doug arrived," Bianca said. "And everything changed. After getting his MBA from Stanford he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. He brought us organization. Sure the sex was still free and open, but everything else was suddenly structured and had a purpose. We began improving the vineyard, a few rows at a time. The wines got better, although we still didn't have the patience to let them age. We didn't just grow marijuana. We cultivated it and paid attention to the genetics to get specific characteristics that our dealers and their customers wanted. Hell, Doug even got us to count the eggs each chicken laid. We ate the ones that didn't produce. It was more structure than some people wanted and they left. We replaced them with people who had skills we wanted and needed. The place actually worked."

"Then Doug left and it all fell apart. We didn't see that coming. It wasn't like Doug was telling us exactly what to do each day. He was kind of a subversive leader. He never gave orders. He just pointed out problems and made suggestions. Without him ever telling anyone to do anything specific we were all convinced to do what he suggested and it worked, until he went off to conquer his next challenge. He took Britt back to the City and set out to become a billionaire. With Doug gone the discipline disappeared and things stopped working. People drifted away until it was down to just the Four Amigos again and we were back to working in the vineyards in the Valley and using The Hill as little more than our crash pad. That was when the four of us called it quits. Louie and Marcus went off to college at UC Davis to study grapes and wine and I went UNLV to study dance and sociology. Gina went to a junior college and picked up some basic accounting skills. That was sort of a waste. She hates bookkeeping and makes her living in retail. Those tits and that cute little round ass of hers can really sell things."

"It sounds like it was a great ride while it lasted," I said.

Bianca smiled and shook her head. "Oh it was. It really was." She paused for a moment. "Would you mind if I took off this T-shirt. It just doesn't feel normal sitting up here with all these clothes on."

I laughed. "Good God no. I've been staring at your tits since we got here."

"I noticed,"

"I'm sorry," I responded. My mother taught me it was rude to stare at a woman's breasts."

"Don't apologize. I was enjoying it. It's making me horny." She pulled her T-shirt over her head and then reached back and released the clip that held her hair in a ponytail. As she shook her head to free her hair, her big breasts wobbled and danced in the most delightful way.