DISCLAIMER:
All characters appearing in this story are at least eighteen years of age.
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
drunkenness, feet, bodily fluids, adultery
*****
All that was left was the pool table, the TV, the kitchen appliances, and about a dozen bottles of wine. We'd packed up the rest—the furniture, the china, the antiques, all the hunting and fishing gear and taxidermy—and loaded it onto the truck, just the lady and I. The next morning, I was to haul her stuff to the auction house down in Fallen Oaks. The lady was going to hang around the lodge for another day or two, I guess shooting pool, watching TV, and soaking up a few last memories. She'd take the TV when she went. The pool table and appliances would sell with the lodge. I didn't know what she planned to do with all that wine.
It wasn't an easy move. The lodge was set on a hill, about a hundred yards uphill from where I could park the truck. So, we had to carry all her stuff by hand down a steep wooden staircase, load after load, and then trudge back up. My Fitbit logged 26,733 steps by the time we were through, most of them vertical.
The lady worked just as hard as I did, made nearly as many trips up and down those stairs, and even helped me lug some of the heavy stuff. She only took time off to cook us lunch. I was impressed with her work ethic. I hadn't expected that from an aristocrat. (However, I did get the impression that the lady wasn't quite as aristocratic as she once had been, and that that it wasn't purely by choice that she was selling the hunting lodge built by her great-great-grandfather, but I didn't probe for the details.)
After we'd loaded the last pair of boxes into the truck, she said if I was half as exhausted as she was, then I must be dying for a drink.
I told her I was probably every bit as exhausted as she was, but I shouldn't have a drink, because I needed to drive. Those winding mountain roads could be treacherous. Though I didn't really mean it. I definitely wanted a drink. And I definitely wanted a drink with
her
. So, it didn't take too much persuading to get me back up to the lodge.
With the furniture gone, there was only one place left to sit, except for the floor, and that was the built-in window seat in the main room, in the big bay window overlooking the valley. I assumed that that was where the lady was planning to sleep, because she'd already laid out her bedding—a couple of red silk pillows and a camouflage sleeping bag. She told me to push them aside and take a seat.
Evening was falling—it got dark so early that time of year—and the air was turning chilly. There was a little pile of firewood left. The lady lit the fireplace. Then she disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a bottle of wine in her hand and a sheepish expression on her face. When we'd packed up the kitchen, we'd failed to leave any wine glasses, or any other kind of glasses, or a corkscrew.
I said not to worry, and I showed her how to jigger the cork out of the bottle with a house key and some slaps on the bottom.
She said we could drink the wine straight out of the bottle if I didn't mind her germs. Or else she could get me my own bottle.
I said I didn't mind her germs.
She sat down next to me on the window seat, close enough to pass the bottle, but no closer.
I wasn't sure what this was. The lady had been friendly with me, but not what I'd call flirty. She'd been nice in a slightly patronizing sort of way, like a boss trying to be a cool boss, trying to build rapport with her subordinate, but being a bit stiff about it, as if she were applying managerial techniques she'd learned from a book. Anyway, she was married, well above my social class, and more than twice my age. She'd mentioned she'd celebrated her forty-first birthday only a few days earlier, which made her twenty-one years older than me (and the same age as my mom). So, probably this was nothing.
My best guess was that this was simply the lady feeling depressed in her husk of an ancestral lodge, now stripped of its four generations of remembrances, and wanting to get drunk, but not wanting to get drunk alone, and me happening to be conveniently proximal.
If that's all this was, I was happy to get drunk with her. I liked the lady. And I liked her wine. It was the best I'd ever tasted. The bottle we were chugging from was older than me, French, and probably cost hundreds of dollars.
Still, if the lady had something more than drinking on her mind, I was up for that, too. Despite our age difference, I found her attractive.
She was a blue-eyed dirty-blonde with a tall, imposing figure. I'd describe her as statuesque—actually, she reminded me of a literal statue: the Statue of Liberty, particularly in her face. Her nose was straight, her brow stern. Her mouth, though, did not much resemble Lady Liberty's. It was heart-shaped, plump-lipped, with impish tips, and very kissable. She'd kept her figure fit, but not obsessively so. She was obviously well-fed, with soft breasts and nice wide motherly hips. But time and gravity had been kind, and her snug black yoga pants were entirely suitable.
Normally, I had a policy of not fooling around with married ladies—and I met a lot of them in my profession—but I decided, in this case, I'd make an exception. From what the lady had told me about her husband, he sounded like a total schmuck. For one thing, the guy was a hedge fund manager, and I'd never met a hedge fund manager who didn't deserve a good cucking. For another thing, he sucked at his job. It was because of his bungling, I'd gathered, that the lady was forced to sell her family's lodge. And for a third thing, the prick hadn't even bothered to come help his wife pack—which was obviously an emotional ordeal for her. So, as far as I was concerned, his wife was fair game.
As we downed the bottle of wine, the lady put on a movie. It was an old black and white gangster film from the early 1930s, filmed partly in and around her great-great-grandfather's lodge, shortly after he'd built the place. The plot involved a gangster, his moll, and a bank robbery. After some car chases and shootouts, the gangster and his girl holed up in the lodge, with both the police closing in and a forest fire raging. In the end, of course, the lovers chose to go down in flames.
By the movie's fiery finale, the lady and I were well into our third bottle. Driving home was out of the question. The only place for me to sleep was on the pool table. The lady said I could use her sleeping bag. The cushions on her window seat were plenty soft, she said, and she'd be near enough the fireplace to stay toasty, so she wouldn't need a cover.