Chapter 12
1221 Words
Chapter Twelve
These last several days have been strangely…wonderful for a jaded man like me.
I am feeling invigorated with the presence of Fleur. Apart from being a beautiful woman and a delicious lover, she’s fresh, sweet, and funny.
I know deep in whatever’s left of my soul—she’ll be mine.
“I believe this is what we should do with our lives,” her friend remarks, taking me out of my revelry. “Travel the world.”
“You would enjoy that,” Jean chuckles before reaching for his own glass. “My wife, the world traveler. I would be dumped in a week’s time for a younger man.”
Collette laughs as she lays her hand on her husband’s arm, a look of love plainly written on her face. “I could never trade you in, my beloved Jean. You only grow finer with age, like a wine resting on a shelf.”
Fleur giggles but I can see she is worried about something. She has been pensive since after the beach and I have no idea what it is.
“A fine wine, eh?” Jean replies, winking at me. “Well then, that must be the reason you are unable to get enough of me.”
“That is true,” Collette agrees, her eyes alight.
I smile lazily and stretch my arm on the back of the sofa, plotting how to get her back into my bed. I want to see the mark the bikini left on the light tan her skin has acquired in the last few days.
“As I feel will be the case with Salvatore when he sees our dear Fleur once again,” says Jean.
Collette blows away her cigarette smoke. “His long lost rose.”
“Oui. One that uprooted itself from the garden he created to come find him.” Fleur smiles at this and her whole face lights up. It’s a smile of a woman in love.
I barely avoid choking on my wine.
The words roll over my suddenly numb brain: Salvatore; rose, garden.
I look at Fleur as if I am seeing her for the first time.
A beautiful, young French woman with eyes that see inside you. Living in England. In a forsaken manor in the middle of nowhere.
Oh, f**k.
My Fleur is Salvatore’s baroness.
As soon as coffee is served, Fleur—no, not Fleur but Chloé—excuses herself with the claim to have a headache. Or she might be having a big guilt trip.
I watch as she goes to her room and soon after, I say my goodnights and also go to my bedroom.
The clock ticks the minutes away into hours as the waves crash on the beach below and I pace the veranda, listening attentively to the muffled sounds coming from her bedroom.
I know what she is doing and that kind of angers me. She’s packing, excited to leave the house, leave me, because I also know Salvatore has returned.
I talked to him on the phone a few hours before I realized Fleur is Chloé. He told me he inquired about Chloé while he was in England and found that she is traveling to France with a couple of friends to visit a sick friend. He is hopeful that she might drop by afterward.
I haven’t heard Salvatore this excited in a long time. And I’ve seen him pretty f*****g excited, or at least back in the early days when being rich as Croesus was new for us.
If you saw what we have today, you wouldn’t know that we started off poor, then worked up to not quite as poor, which is how Salvatore met Chloe to begin with.
When our father’s—or more accurately, Salvatore’s father’s—experiments with wine paid off, he was very pleased, but had no interest in commercializing his success. He was content to be the maker of the best wine in town with only a modest increase in our financial status. Salvatore and I had big ideas—basically, all that we accomplished after our father died, we tried to get him to do while he was alive, but he wanted no part of it.
It turned into a stupid fight and we all said things we regret.
Salvatore’s father, as well as my father before him, was just too old-fashioned and stuck in his ways. Salvatore and I ended up refusing to work for the winery that our father wanted to keep small. I think now that the idea of expanding it into a large enterprise scared him, but he would’ve never admitted to that.
Angelo was too young to be involved in the arguments and didn’t care one way or another, so he stayed on, but Salvatore and I took our modest savings and decided to backpack across Europe.
It didn’t take long for us to run out of money, but by that time I was regularly f*****g a French girl and ended up staying with her for a while.
Salvatore was invited to stay there as well—and why not?—we were already sharing her, but he declined, wanting to travel more and see more of the continent.
So he worked odd jobs and continued on his own, ultimately ending up working as a gardener in England. And then his baroness happened and he had a compelling reason to stay on that job and stop traveling so much.
But then the bank disaster happened exactly when my father was in England to convince Salvatore to go back. His father’s death was a huge blow to all of us, and I know I still have regrets about how things turned out. But on the positive side, having inherited the small wine business, we put all of our ideas for expansion, branding, international distribution and so forth into practice.
And now? We are more successful now than we ever imagined we would be. I wish our father could see what we’ve done.
We’re three of the richest, most powerful men in the wine industry of Sicily, basically controlling this little island, with the gold mine our father discovered—or rather, Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita, something that assured our wine was among the best in the world.
That has afforded us certain luxuries.
And we, Salvatore and I, I mean, we’ve done it all.
But after a while, even luxuries and extravagances get a little stale.
Truth is, we’ve been f*****g bored.
And the boredom didn’t lessen even though we had every Sicilian piece of ass. And some foreigners, too.
From sharing, we graduated into foursomes, even into orgies. Salvatore and I were the only males in them. Although we probably wouldn’t have opposed another gorgeous man joining the fray, it never happened. At least, I wouldn’t.
Finally, it all got stale, and we stopped with the excessive and, let’s face it, unsatisfactory f*****g.
He was looking for something more and even if I was not so interested in such a quest, deep down inside I’ve been bored too. I think this is why his thoughts always return to Chloé. He was at his happiest when he was with her in England. And now I too am happier than I’ve been in a long time. We’ve had plenty of beautiful women just for fun, but Chloe has beauty plus something more. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I can tell you, it has something to do with the key to happiness.
I stop pacing and walk to the connecting door between our rooms, opening it without knocking.
And there she is: his Chloé, my Fleur.
Isn’t it the best of luck that I have found her, too?
- Writer
