7. Bas
BAS
I’d cut her off when she said my name, sensing that whatever came after it would be something I’d rather not hear tonight. Especially since there was a decent chance it would ruin the best day I’d had in months.
The main house was dark at the top of the drive, exactly how I’d left it. I let myself in, hung the keys on my father’s hook, and stood in the hall, listening to the furnace tick.
The sprawling Victorian had been in our family for generations, and my father had spent most of my childhood restoring it. I walked to the kitchen over boards he’d sanded and refinished the summer my mother decided she wanted the floors lighter, and I set the coffeepot up for the morning.
Our heights were still penciled on the doorframe, beside me in my mother’s handwriting. My father had gone on measuring us long after we were all grown because it made her laugh, and after she was gone, he’d kept doing it anyway.
My phone buzzed with a call from my next-youngest sibling, Everest, while I was rinsing the carafe.
“You’re up late,” I said.
“I’m at the hospital.” Machines beeped steadily somewhere near him. “Did you eat dinner?”
“I ate at the Estuary.”
“By yourself?”
“Good night, Everest.”
“That’s not a no. Before you hang up, Arlow wants an answer about her rootstock trial, and Bry needs you on camera for a class project. She says you’re the last holdout. And whatever Hux asks you, the answer is no.”
“What’s he asking?”
“You’ll find out.” When he paused, I knew what was coming. “Bas, are you sleeping?”
“Enough.”
“You’d say so if you needed one of us home, right?”
“Good night, Ev.”
After ending the call that had become an almost-nightly ritual, I walked down the hall, past the pictures my mother had hung there.
Nobody had taken one down since she died.
In the oldest, my parents stood on the porch on their wedding day, and in the harvest shots, everybody was stained purple to the elbows.
For years, I could walk past that wall without stopping.
Since December, every time I passed it, it bothered me.
Before I went up to bed, I turned the porch light on and left it burning. Maybe I’d leave it on all the time. That way, no matter who showed up, day or night, the house would look as welcoming as it had during all the years when I was growing up.
My parents’ room was to the right of the top of the stairs. All five of us had learned how to avoid the boards that creaked, not that it had stopped our mom and dad from knowing exactly how much past curfew we’d tried to sneak in.
My bedroom was at the far end of the hall.
It had been mine since I transitioned out of a crib and into a regular bed.
It hadn’t changed much since high school.
My feet had hung off the end of that bed since I quit growing, and I’d never done anything about it.
A Davis pennant was still tacked over the desk, and beside it was the barrel schedule I’d copied out of the cellar in a boy’s block letters.
My mom used to threaten to turn it into a guest room the minute I moved out. She’d never touched it.
From the window, I had a clear view of Gemma’s cottage.
Lights were on in the office, but the bedroom was still dark.
It probably meant she intended to work, regardless of the late hour.
Was that because she’d agreed to dinner with me and now had to get caught up?
I’d need to think about that the when I told myself I was inviting her to do something when, in reality, I’d given her no choice.
I turned off the lamp and left the curtain open.
Ev had offered to write me a prescription for something to help me sleep. Tonight, I wished I’d let him. Then again, the problem wasn’t sleep. The problem was across the drive, with her office light on.
I was in the cellar by six the following morning.
The two barrels in the corner came off a half acre that was part of a larger vineyard my great-grandfather had planted and my father had always threatened to tear out.
Mixed vines, a couple of them nobody at Davis could identify, on a slope too steep for the tractor. Last October, on a weekend when he was in the city, I’d picked a small amount myself at night and crushed it with nobody’s help.
It was the only thing I’d ever made that he never tasted. It needed another year in the barrel. I figured he had more than that.
When Gemma knocked at nine on the dot, I already had the door partially open and the coffee made.
“Morning.” She walked past me with a folder under her arm and gave my kitchen the same corner-to-corner once-over I’d watched her give the dining room at the Estuary.
There wasn’t much for her to find. I’d cleared the table, set out a chair, and dug up a pen that actually worked.
Past that, all the room had in it was a bowl of oranges and a lot of bare counters.
Nobody had cooked in there since my father died, and even he had mostly used it to burn toast. Gemma settled at the table, and the kitchen stopped looking clean. It looked empty.
“How do you take your coffee?” I asked.
She’d asked me when I was at her place the other night, but I hadn’t paid attention to how she drank hers.
“Cream if you have it. Black if you don’t, please.”
I fixed her cup and sat down across from her.
“Let’s review the sponsorship contract first.” She slid the top stack to me. “You said ‘all of it’ at dinner, so I priced all of it. Tent, catering, florist, music, staff, insurance.”
I skimmed every line and focused on the total. It came in under what I’d spent on new oak barrels last fall. “Where do I sign?”
“You didn’t read a word of it.”
“I reviewed the numbers, and they’re fine.”
“Initial at the tabs, sign the last page, and try to look a little less pleased about spending this kind of money. You’re making me nervous.”
“It’s a fundraiser that supports sick kids, Gemma. Being pleased about it is the point.”
When her cheeks flushed, I decided not to call her out on it and signed.
“This is the employment agreement. Paid by the event, the cottage rent offset against the work, and a budget for extra hands when we get busy. It’s your own proposal from last night, cleaned up and put in writing.”
She slid the second stack over and walked me through it page by page. I did my best to follow along, but somewhere in the second paragraph, I lost my place, watching her mouth instead of the words coming out of it. She caught me, but rather than say a word, she tapped the page.
It was her version of cleaned up, too. When I called Alex about the budget, I’d asked what planners charged for events this size, and Gemma’s price was significantly under the average Alex gave me.
“You cut your fee.”
“It’s a fair price.”
“I talked to Alex, remember? This is under what she told me.”
“Initial the page, Bas.”
Rather than continue arguing a point she’d never concede, I went on to the next line item. “The extra help. Who do they answer to?”
“Me. I hire them, I schedule them, and if it comes to it, I fire them. You pay for them on the event invoice.”
I initialed page after page. Then I got to the last section and stopped.
For the term of this agreement, one year from signing, the relationship between the parties shall be limited to the work described above. Neither party shall pursue or accept a romantic or physical relationship with the other.
I read it twice, then set the pen down.
“This last section needs to come out.”
She kept her eyes on her notes. “It protects both of us, Bas.”
“From what?”
Her chin came up. I waited, and for a minute, the only sound in the kitchen was the refrigerator.
“If it’s never going to come up, why does it matter?” she asked.
“It doesn’t need to be in there.”
She read the section over one more time. Then she picked up her pen, drew a line through it, and initialed the margin.
“You’re right. It doesn’t belong in a business contract.” She slid the page across to me. “So hear it instead. I don’t get involved with clients. Ever. That’s not negotiable, and now, it’s not in writing either, because it doesn’t need to be.”
I added my initials beside hers, then my name on the last page. She wrote hers under it, tapped the papers into an even stack, and put them in the folder. “I’ll make copies for both our files.”
“I don’t need a hard copy.”
“You do, Bas—”
“No, I do not. Scan it and email it to me. I don’t use any more paper than I need to.”
Her cheeks flushed again. “Noted.”
I worked the events-center key off my ring and held it out. Her fingers were warm when she took it from my hand.
“Come on.” I grabbed my jacket. “I’ll walk you over.”
The lock on the event center’s door was stiff, so I showed her the trick to it. “Pull toward you, then turn the key.”
“Got it,” she said when I had her do it.
It was dark and cold inside. After I turned on the lights and heat, she walked the length of the main hall.
“The offices are this way.” I led her down a hallway, flicking switches as we went. She stuck her head in, then waited for me to lead her to the kitchen and prep areas.
“This is nice, Bas. It’s bigger than I imagined,” she said after I’d showed her the restrooms, storage and equipment areas, loading docks, and the dedicated wine cellar.
“I’ll leave you to it, unless you have any questions.”
She glanced around. “I’m sure I’ll have several later. For now, I need to get my bearings.”
“Call if you need me,” I added on my way out the door. How much of a shit was I that I hoped there was something she couldn’t figure out, requiring her to reach out to me.
The day passed without a single call from Gemma. At least three separate times, I’d stopped myself from going to check on her.
When the crew knocked off for the day and everyone, including Zeke, headed out the gate, I couldn’t hold out any longer. She’d been in that building since morning, and I’d have bet my truck she hadn’t stopped to eat.
There wasn’t much in my kitchen to work with, but I managed to find bread, salami, cheese, and apples, then packed it all in a basket that had been my mother’s. I pulled a bottle of our Pinot off the rack in the dining room and took glasses down from the cabinet.
By the time I crossed the drive, the only light still on in the building was coming from the far corner.
Gemma stood near the wall with a marker in her hand. She’d taped a large sheet of butcher paper to it and was so deep in thought about the notes she was writing that she didn’t hear me come in.
She’d taken her hair down too, or it had come loose, and her sleeves were shoved up the way mine were.
I stood in the doorway, wanting to cross the room, wrap an arm around her waist, and kiss her nape.
I made myself set the basket and the wine on the end of the desk instead. That got her attention.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“Dinner. You’ve been in here since this morning. Tell me I’m wrong about you skipping lunch.”
“I had—” She stopped.
“That’s what I thought.” I unpacked what I’d brought and motioned to her chair. “Sit down, Gemma.”
“You’re giving me orders in my own office now?”
“I gave you the office this morning. The building’s still mine. Sit down anyway.” I pulled the chair on the opposite side closer to the desk, then opened the wine and poured two glasses.
She took a sip. “This is good.”
“Of course it is. I made it.”
That earned me an eye roll.
“Your father read every page of my proposal before he signed. I watched him do it. Most people skim to the number.”
“Which is what I did with both of yours this morning.”
“I noticed,” she muttered.
“He never skimmed anything. That part skipped a generation.”
“I’d prepared for him to negotiate when he got to the page where my fees were outlined, but he initialed it without blinking.”
“My dad liked you the day he met you,” I told her.
“I liked him too.”
I spotted a legal pad on her desk with “Bachelors for Auction” written across the top. Nothing was below it.
She followed my gaze, and I braced for her pitch to add my name.
“Gemma, I—”
She held up her hand. “‘I never agreed to be in it and don’t intend to.’ That’s a direct quote.”
“I didn’t figure you’d give up that easily.”
“It sounded like you meant it.” She hesitated, then squared her shoulders. “But I have a different question for you.”
“What?”
“The other night when you said you didn’t lie about the important things, then said something about needing me, what did you mean?”