Page 18 of How to Say I Do
“Well then.” Wyatt’s fingers touched his brim. “I will see you in the morning, Noël.”
CHAPTER5
Wyatt
Noël captivated me.
A year before my parents were killed, my dad and I started planning a father-son trip to Europe. It was going to be a summer-long meander through Bordeaux, the Rhone Valley, and the Rioja. From Spain, we’d cross the warm waters of the Mediterranean by sailboat to Italy, and there, we’d lose ourselves in sun-drenched wineries across Tuscany, Umbria, and the Emilia-Romagna. We were researching warm-weather vineyard operations, Dad said, but more importantly, we were going to spend the summer together as father and son growing out of childhood and into adulthood.
We were supposed to fly out the summer after I graduated.
Dad’s dream for the Gran Cielo Viñedo had started taking real shape after I turned sixteen. He and I had painstakingly turned ten acres into a test block of vines. We scraped the earth, fed the soil, and patiently built up lines of trellises in careful rows before we planted our first baby green grafts of one-hundred-percent petite sirah. We tended those ten acres by hand, measuring vine growth in millimeters as we plucked away weeds and smoothed the dirt around those tender shoots. We were on our way, Dad said.
Working the vines was our time. Our beautiful father-son time, lasting from the sun-bright highs of after-school afternoons to the amethyst-soaked twilights when the horizon smudged into an orange line and our shadows faded over the fields. My dad had been everything to me since I was born—superhero, nightmare slayer, playground playmate, homework helper, sideline cheerer, and, up until I was about seven years old, the best couch cuddler and warm chest to fall asleep on.
While we worked, Dad became something else, too: father became confidant and then best friend.
Dad listened to me ramble about English class and football practice and whatever the current gossip at school was. We had fifty-six kids in our high school, most of them bussed in from around the county.
He checked in regularly about my coming out. Was I okay? Were kids at school treating me right? Had anyone dared shoot me a glare or whisper an insult under their breath? Say the word, and he’d be at school tomorrow to sort them out left from right.
I was lucky, and I knew it. I hadn’t stepped far out of the closet by sixteen, but to the people I had come out to, all I’d received was support. The worst reaction I’d endured was a vague kind of boredom. My romantic interests were not at all fascinating to the guys in my age group. In fact, they were probably relieved. Me being gay meant I was one less competitor for Rosalie Johnson’s affections. Rosalie Johnson was teenage royalty in our county, and every boy wanted to woo her. Except, of course, for me.
Dad was bothered that I hadn’t found anyone yet. Not that he wanted to marry me off as a teenage husband, but he’d said more than once that he wanted me to have a crush, lose myself a little in teenage love. But at sixteen, I had never been on a date. Not one. Compared to Liam, who was almost impossible to keep in the house on Friday and Saturday nights, my social life was as exciting as watching paint dry. True, my dating pool had been significantly smaller, but it wasn’t nonexistent. Three little towns over, there’d been a boy on the cheerleading team. Two towns south, a cowboy crooner type was making a name for himself singing at the weekly bandstand concerts on his Main Street square. There were others—a handful of baseball and football players and assorted jocks who kept everything on the down low.
None of the small-town boys interested me.
Once the plans for Dad and my European vacation began, I was a goner. I’d been ensnared by the parade of stunning and self-assured men in the pages ofWine SpectatorandThe Wine Enthusiast, all dressed in sleek, slim-fitting suits while holding glasses of wine in a way that got my heart slamming. Their palms curled just so, delicate fingers long and lean, all five fingertips gently pressing—
Page after page of alluring, come-hither stares drenched in sophisticated and haughty poise. Miles of confidence, charisma, and searing sexiness. It was too much; I was overwhelmed. The glossy magazines and wine-tour travel guides sealed my fate, and there was no way I could explain this to my father.
I was surrounded by farmers and ranchers, wind-swept prairies, and fields of manure-turned dirt. I’d outgrown my body three times in six months, packing on muscles that never seemed to stop. Football practice and horseback riding and mending fences and building trellises and digging post holes and sowing fields kept adding to my strength, and my bottomless stomach knew no earthly limits. I was the tallest man in the family, taller than Dad by two inches, and I felt like an elephant forever unsure of its own size and bulk. Elegance made my stomach tie itself in knots. Lithe and compact masculinity stopped my heart.
I had to have been the only sixteen-year-old in the world who kept aWine Spectatorhidden in his bedside table, three full-page photos carefully marked for ease of access.
Dad must have known. He'd made me, raised me, and watched me grow before his eyes. He’d watched my neurons spark, and watched my life and my personality rise up out of roots he’d carefully tended. He used to tell me, when we’d sit on the back porch and talk about our great European adventure to come, that there’d be space in our trip for me to have some alone time. I’d turn magenta, running suddenly hotter than the worst sunburn I’d ever had, and he’d smile and change the subject.
I never made it to Europe.
I never dated, either. The most I could say I’d ever done with another man was fool around with a couple closeted cowboys in the back of my truck. And, every six months or so, I’d drive a hundred miles east or north, someplace where I could find a town with more than a thousand people. There, I could be just another guy perched on a barstool. Occasionally, I’d find someone who I wanted to spend a little more time with, and we’d get a motel room and trade blow jobs and hand jobs. Sometimes we kept in sporadic touch, but that never lasted.
My love life peaked at sixteen when I nurtured secret fantasies of gallantly graceful men filled withsavoir faire, men who dazzled me and elegantly ravished me in my dreams. At seventeen, all that was over. When you’ve got mouths to feed and a ranch to run, there’s no place for fantasy. Besides, I had so many other people’s dreams to tend to. There was no space left for mine. And, anyway, myWine Spectatormagazines burned up in the fire.
Those teenage dreams got boarded up behind locked doors, ones I’d nailed shut.
Meeting Noël was blowing them wide open.
On the surface, Noël was everything I’d secretly fantasized about—classy, chic, cosmopolitan, and avant-garde. Physically, he was lissome and compact, and when he’d given me that big-city stare-down over the brim of his sunglasses at that bar, my heart had skipped three beats while my hands broke into a cold sweat.
But I was truly lost the momentafterthat one, when Noël’s proud stare had cracked and his heartbreak had bled to the surface. I slid him that burger, and even though he was in the middle of the worst day of his life, he kept his chin high and held himself together through raw force of will. Then his voice had wavered ever so slightly, and his small smile shattered me like a shotgun blast.
I’ve always loved complexity. My father was the same, and that’s one reason we were both drawn to viticulture, I suppose. Embracing complexity is the heart and soul of being a vintner. How many secrets could you tease out of your grapes while they were ripening on the vine? How many subtleties could you draw out during fermentation, when the skins and the sugars and the juices revealed all those hidden layers you’d tried to nurture through the growing season? Winemaking was art and science melded together, the borders of both hazy and indistinct. Nitrogen, calcium, and lime levels in the soil impacted grapes in known directions, to a point. Rain was good, but not too much. Wind aired out the canopy, but could petrify the fruit. Sun ripened or burned in differences measured by arcs of degrees. Days and minutes on the vine could change the course of a grape and a wine irrevocably.
Days and minutes could change a man’s life, too.
If I hadn’t been hungry between my flights. If I hadn’t gone to that airport bar. If I hadn’t been my father’s son, unable to sit by while another man’s heart bled out in front of the whole world. If Noël had told me to fuck off and mind my own business instead of grasping for a smile as his heartbroken eyes tugged me in, pleading for a rescue from his tormented loneliness.
Noël was a complicated man. I’d known that from the start, before I’d even said “Howdy.” No one downing shots in a tuxedo and hiding a tear-stained face was simple. He was intense. Haughty, even arrogant, in the way he moved through the world. Self-assured, yes. Proud, yes. Gallant, too, even in his agony. He had so much fortitude to keep going.
