The Truth is in the Wine

by Curtis Bunn

  Paul knew this, and he turned his wife’s face toward his with a gentle tug. She was breathless. Between the wine and the signals her brain sent through her body—and the love she tried to suppress for Paul—she was defenseless. He kissed her on her lips, which were moist with anticipation.

  His lips were thick and soft, and they met hers as two wineglasses would meet to climax an intimate toast. Ginger closed her eyes and Paul closed his, and they delighted in a deep, passionate kiss that made Ginger woozy when their lips finally parted.

  The small portion of her brain that was not covered in passion tried to resist. She stood up to catch her breath, but Paul stood up, too, to restrict her breathing by kissing her again as he wrapped his arms firmly around her.

  Paul’s heart beat as if he had been sprinting. It was the combination of unmitigated passion with his wife and the intensity of the kiss that heightened his desires. And so, he leaned away from Ginger and, while looking into her eyes, slowly unbuttoned the front of her shirt.

  As each button came loose, Ginger breathed in, until Paul got to the end and slowly pulled off the blouse and discarded it like a piece of tissue into a wastebasket. Ginger stood there, staring at her man, feeling like she did when they first met, when they had sex as if their survival depended upon it.

  That was such a joyous time in their lives, and to feel like that made Ginger finally release any inhibitions and meet Paul’s desires with her own passion.

  So as Paul fumbled slightly with unhitching her bra, Ginger politely took his hands and placed them over her firm breasts and she reached behind her back and released the strap in an instant. Paul knew his wife, and that maneuver meant the resistance was over. They could not dance to their rhythm.

  Since winning the lottery and regaining some self-esteem, Paul dropped significant weight, making him look more like the man she married than the man she loathed. He had only had sex with his wife once in the previous two months, and she had not seen his new body in the flesh.

  Paul, eager to show it off, pulled his shirt over his head and stood in front of his panting wife as if to say, “This is all yours. What you gonna do with it?”

  Ginger read her husband’s look and she slowly, seductively unbuckled and unzipped her pants, never taking her eyes off Paul’s, who was unbuckling and unzipping his pants, too. When their underwear dropped to the floor, it was like the starter’s gun to a race went off.

  They attacked each other, kissing and groping in a furious fashion that somehow was in rhythm, a seductive dance that extended from one side of a queen-sized bed to the other.

  Finally, the foreplay turned into lovemaking that they had not experienced in years. About two months before the trip they had a sexual encounter that was more about them having a need than having sex. This was passion. This was intense.

  Ginger allowed Paul to lead the family, but she, at times, liked to be in charge of certain situations. Intimacy with him was one of them. She liked to be on top so she could control the passion: How deep Paul entered her, how rapid the thrusts, the angle of penetration.

  All Paul had to do was hold on. Ginger was at her dick-riding best, squirming her saturated vagina on his hardness in swift counterclockwise rotations, which allowed for pleasure along multiple areas of her inner walls.

  Paul tried to thrust upward, but Ginger’s pace was fast and did not allow much for his participation. She rocked her hips and enjoyed his joystick with abashed pleasure. The wine made her feel uninhibited, and her actions spoke the truth about how she felt.

  She kissed Paul deeply as she changed her sexual attack. Now she bounced up and down on his manhood. Paul stroked upward to her cadence, creating a smacking sound as they challenged each other on how deep he could get and how much she could take.

  Well, she took everything he had to offer and he offered a lot. He held her by her waist and pulled her down to meet his thrusts, making it almost a violent collision of passion. Ginger moaned with each thumping, but there were moans of pleasure and pain coming together as only can happen in intense sex.

  Paul grunted with each thrust, an indication of how intent he was on getting deeper and making sure his wife felt his intent. After two minutes of straight pounding each other, Paul began to sweat, and immediately he went back to their early sexual sessions that really solidified their bond.

  Those experiences were few and far between over the years, but in that moment of feeling sweat develop on his forehead and slide down his face, he made a commitment to return their sex lives back to something sensual and passionate, romantic and lasting.

  Losing his job diminished his sex drive, and he was embarrassed at the weak effort he gave Ginger in the first weeks after being laid off. Sex became less important because his manhood was threatened with being out of work. His erections were mild, or certainly unlike the pole-hard stiffness he banged Ginger with their first hours in Napa Valley.

  Ginger noticed the difference—in how he handled her and the strength of his hardness. She might have been in control of the movements while being on top, but Paul was in control of the pleasure.

  Ultimately, he won out on that battle; his forcefulness was unrelenting. He was too proud to let Ginger wear him out, and so he kept feeding her until she exploded in herky-jerky body gyrations and weird sounds that had only one interpretation: ecstasy.

  Her movements were so wild that all Paul could do was hold on until she gathered herself, which took another minute or so. It was then when he flipped her onto her back and began his pleasure quest by holding up her legs and spreading them as he threw his head back and pumped deeper and deeper into her.

  She took his strokes with sounds of pleasure, and Paul felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. He and Ginger had not enjoyed that kind of relentless passion in some time, so long that he could not even recall.

  And when he looked down and saw the pleasure on his wife’s face—a look he had not put there in months—he became so excited that he stroked her harder and harder, generating a sensation that ran through his body and exploded out of the head of his penis and into Ginger’s waiting canal.

  It was his turn to yell something incoherent but translated into the ultimate pleasure. He collapsed his much larger body onto Ginger’s and she took him without issue, hugging him firmly as he breathed heavily over her shoulder.

  “My God,” Paul managed to get out after a few minutes. “I forgot how incredible we can be together.”

  “It has been a long time,” she said.

  Paul realized he was suffocating her, so he rolled over, and they both let out a sigh.

  “This is how it should be all the time,” Paul said. He held her hand and turned toward her. “I messed things up, but I want us to get back to where we were. And I also realize it will take time. But I hope this is the start of us getting back to where we were when we were happy.”

  Ginger’s cautious side wanted to offer something negative, or at least something that would not indicate she was all in. And that made her mad. Why can’t I embrace what was good without second-guessing? she wondered.

  It was her nature to find the cracks and pounce on them. This time, though, her body told her to cut it out, to let go. She loved her husband and he had just put it on her in a display of passion and love that she missed—and needed.

  That was the key. Ginger had girlfriends who insisted they did not need a man and could get by without sex in their lives. She did not understand that. She needed the physical aspect of lovemaking in her life and she needed the emotional connection that came with it. She wanted to believe she could have one without the other, but she could not convince herself of that.

  She felt most emotionally connected to Paul when they consistently had sex. It was not the elixir to all things broken. But it was the foundation of holding things together.

  So when Paul’s sex drive diminished with his loss of self-esteem, their connection to each other slowly dwindled, too. Laying on her back after a vigorous
round of passion with Paul made Ginger feel alive.

  “I want the same thing, Paul,” she said. “I do. But I’m scared. I’m scared because I don’t know what brought you around and if you’ll go back to that place where you were depressed and cold and sometimes just mean to me.

  “It has been a very rough last year or so with you. I felt like my family was falling apart. Thank God we were able to somehow shield our troubles from Helena.

  “You don’t know this, but I have gone through a lot because of this. It has been a very difficult time. And I couldn’t even talk to you about it because we were so fractured. Still, I believed it was a phase. I never expected to hear you say you wanted a divorce. That was very hurtful and it put me in a really bad place. I don’t know. I am here, in Napa, because I want to save our marriage. And as great as it has been so far, I can’t get out of my head how things have been.”

  “I understand,” Paul said. “I do. But I was going through something that I did not know how to handle. They say you lash out at the people you are closest to when you’re under duress. Well, I was under duress. I worked all my life. I provided for my family from Day One.

  “To be let go after so many years and so much commitment to the job, it crushed me. And I won’t even try to lie: My ego was crushed, too. We probably should have sought counseling then. Maybe it would have helped if I opened up. But I can’t even say now, looking back on it, that I would have said the things necessary to heal.

  “I felt sorry for myself and nothing was going to get me out of that mode until I found a job. I need to provide for my family.”

  “But Paul, it’s not like we were going to lose our house. We saved well enough to survive for a while. And you should have known that providing for your family means more than money. You weren’t the only one going through something. I needed you to be there for me, and you weren’t. You were in your own world.

  “Our daughter needed you to attend her events and really be more a part of her last year of high school. You were at her graduation and you were great. But leading up to that, you were not pleasant to be around.”

  Paul lifted his wife’s hand toward his face, leaned over and kissed it.

  “You haven’t kissed my hand in more than a year,” Ginger said. “It might sound crazy to you, but you kissed my hand at the end of our first date. I was expecting a kiss—we had such a nice time—at least on the cheek. But at my door you told me you were glad we met, reached down and pulled up my hand and gently kissed it.

  “And that was so damn erotic and sexy and gentlemanly. I was turned on. From there, every so often you would kiss my hand when I was upset or when you wanted sex or when you were just being nice. I have missed that.”

  Paul wanted to tell his wife at that moment about the lottery money, that their lives had changed forever, that they could do whatever they wanted without regard for finances. But he didn’t. He listened to the doubts she expressed and decided to hold on to his secret a little while longer, when Ginger seemed all in and doubt-free.

  Instead, he said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m starting over. I’m rebuilding. I’m committed to making the effort to regain your trust and full commitment to the marriage. I understand your feelings, but I’m going to do what I need to do, what I’m supposed to do, to make things right.”

  “Well, that sounds good to me, Paul,” Ginger said. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  Paul pulled her closer to him and she rested her head on his chest. “We have about an hour, maybe ninety minutes before dinner. Let’s get a quick nap and have a great Thanksgiving dinner,” he said.

  “I wonder how our mothers are getting along,” Ginger said.

  “I wonder, too,” Paul said.

  CHAPTER 9

  MOMMA MIA

  The mothers spent their time before Thanksgiving dinner enhancing their buzz with glass after glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

  “I needed this time away more than those kids of ours needed it,” Madeline said. “They have their neat little lives, daughter off to college. And here we are. I’m a widow and you’re divorced.”

  “But we can’t let that keep us down,” Brenda said. “I had my moments of depression, even though I was the one who wanted a divorce. But I got over it.”

  “How?” Madeline wanted to know. “How did you do it because it’s been almost ten months since my husband died. And I feel strange even thinking about another man.”

  “You gotta believe you don’t need another man to get on with your life,” Brenda said. “I said you gotta believe that shit—but you don’t have to deny yourself, either.”

  The women laughed and Madeline said, “I know that’s right.”

  “Girl, I got on the Internet and joined a dating service and I have met two really nice men,” Brenda said. “Please don’t tell Paul this. He thinks he’s my protector. He bought me the computer and told me to not even think about those dating sites because—how did he put it?—they attract ‘the man who is not interested in nothing but having sex. They figure that you are desperate to be on a dating site, then you will be easy to get in bed. I’m not trying to hear about you being stalked—or worse—by someone you met online,’ he said.

  “I let him live his life, you know? He’s got to let me live mine. You can believe his father is living his.”

  “Well, truth be told,” Madeline said, “I did meet someone. He was visiting my church. Retired military. He lives in San Diego. Retired there. Said he would be in Sacramento visiting his cousin or some relative while we are here. So I might have to sneak away for a day to see him. I like him. Charming. Smart. We’ve had dinner and breakfast together.”

  “On the same date?” Brenda asked.

  Madeline looked embarrassed. “What can I say?” she answered.

  “Listen at you,” Brenda said. “You should tell him to bring a friend and we can double date. Shoot, I ain’t above no blind date.”

  “You know what? That’s a good idea,” Madeline said. “Where’s my phone? I don’t know how to text that well; Ginger showed me how. But that’s the way the young folks do it. They send a text. I’m not trying to be that young, but I don’t want to seem that old, either.”

  The combination of the wine impacting her coordination and the touch screen to her iPhone made it an adventure for her to complete the text. “Shoot, I guess we can have another glass of wine while you figure that whole thing out,” Brenda said.

  After nearly five minutes, she was done. “Damn, I’m exhausted,” Madeline said. “Next time, I’m just calling. Trying to act young is too exhausting for me. And I only typed three sentences.”

  “I ain’t that hip myself, but I know you have to abbreviate,” Brenda said. “I’m glad you at least tried. You’re so prim and proper.”

  “I might be prim and proper,” Madeline said. “But I can get down and dirty when I need to. But ladies rarely go there.”

  “You trying to say something about me?” Brenda asked, smiling.

  “Of course, not,” Madeline said.

  Before Brenda could reply, she looked up to see Paul and Ginger approaching. She looked at her watch. It was Thanksgiving dinnertime.

  “I can’t believe you are down here before us,” Ginger said.

  “Honey, they have been here since we got here,” Paul said.

  The mothers looked at Paul in a strange way.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” he asked. “I saw you all when I came down here to get some wineglasses. That was almost two hours ago.”

  “Mother, you have been drinking wine all that time?” Ginger asked.

  “Not all that time,” Madeline answered. “But most of it.”

  And she and Brenda burst out laughing, loudly. Ginger and Paul looked at each other. They were in for an interesting evening.

  “I thought you wanted to shower and change clothes, Mother,” Ginger said.

  “I decided to sit here with Brenda and enjoy life instead,” her mom said. “I’l
l do that later. And I know one thing: I’m hungry. Wine does three things for me: makes me hungry, makes me feel good, and makes me want to wee-wee.”

  “That’s too much information, Maddy,” Brenda said. “Yes, that’s my new nickname for you. Maddy. Madeline has too many syllables.”

  “Oh, boy,” Paul said. “They are both tipsy as hell.”

  “Vino, it’s OK,” Brenda said as she pulled herself from her seat. “We’re fine. You know what, son? This was a great idea. I am so glad to be here. And you’re right: Maddy isn’t the bitch I thought she was.”

  “OK, OK,” Paul said to his mother. “Maybe you should have some water.”

  “We’re going to the bathroom; come on, Maddy,” Brenda said. “Get us a table for dinner, Paul. We’ll be right back.”

  The moms composed themselves and walked arm-in-arm to the restroom.

  Ginger turned to Paul. “You called my mother a bitch?”

  “What? No,” Paul said. “Come on, now. I love your mother, even if she has issues with me. And why would I say something like that? My mom didn’t even say that. She said she didn’t believe she could get along with your mother. And I told her your mom wasn’t as bad as she thought.”

  “That’s not the same as saying you love her, Paul,” Ginger said.

  “It ain’t calling her a bitch, either,” he said. “Hold up. Are you trying to start a fight? After what we just did and what we just shared? I told you neither of us called your mom a bitch. My mom obviously is feeling the wine. So whatever comes out of her mouth is suspect.”

  “Or the truth,” Ginger said. “You know what they say: A drunk person speaks a sober man’s thoughts.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m focusing on the good thing and that’s that they are getting along,” Paul said. “I hoped for this but didn’t expect it.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Ginger said. “I guess we should ride this wave as long as we can.”

  “That’s right because even the biggest wave reaches shore and dies at some point,” Paul said.

  “Let’s get some wine and drink to them being BFFs for now,” Ginger said.