Page 51 of The Paris Roommates: Dean
Dean jumped and looked around in the gloomy space.“Where?”
“I’m kidding!” She shoved him playfully as the lights flickered.
“Not funny,” he mumbled.
“But you should keep an eye out for the rats. We are in an old restaurant.”
“They’re probably in the walls,” Kyle called as the ladder gave an ear-splitting groan. “God, I didn’t know wood could make sounds like this.”
Madison snickered. “I did, but only if it’s good wood.”
Dean high-fived her for the sex joke. “Nice!”
Kyle jumped down three rungs and landed hard on the floor. Dean righted him when he knocked into his side. “Thanks! We’re going to hope it’s easier going up than down. Now, where are the other ladies?”
Madison pointed down an archway with stone sides leading to an open room with serious old-school Paris beams overhead. “Brooke suggested she, Nanine, and Celine start the viewing since we all couldn’t stand at the end of the ladder and wait.”
Dean reached out and touched the damp stone walls as they passed into the main room. Fortunately, he didn’t have to duck his head. “Is that moss or mold? And does that mean this wall faces north? I was never a Boy Scout.”
“It’s not a tree, Dean.” Madison grabbed his arm and pulled him down the first aisle as Kyle’s footsteps followed behind him.
On either side of them, wine bottles, dusty from age, lay on wooden shelves that spanned from floor to ceiling. Jacqueline must love this place. He’d thought Pierre must’ve been harder for her to give up, but now that he knew her passion for wine, he wasn’t so sure. “Any idea how this place is organized?”
“I imagine Celine will tell us,” Kyle said as Dean ducked to avoid a lone hanging flickering lightbulb. “Okay, I hear Celine. Let’s all smile and listen attentively.”
They reached the opening at the back of the aisle, which gave them a good vantage point of the space—more aisles stocked with wine were arranged to their right, while an open space waited in front of them, about the size of a reading room. In fact, the whole setup reminded him of a mall bookshop. There was an old scuffed wooden table, newly polished, likely from the same old tree as the ladder, which he suspected had been made sometime around the French Revolution. Two chairs had been pulled up to it. Nanine and Brooke were seated, and Celine stood, looming over an open ledger.
“This is the original inventory,” Celine was saying in rapid French. “Chef Beaumont did not use a computer, of course, so transferring it to an electronic document took some time.”
Hadn’t he just talked about the brilliance of hiring a minion? Dean wanted to kiss whoever had gone through those yellow and dog-eared pages and entered them into a computer. He sometimes forgot people didn’t use basic technology. Nanine detested computers, of course, and Madison wasn’t hot about them either. Maybe it was a restaurant thing. But he could already see the online wine inventory system he wanted to create for the restaurant. Every server at Nanine’s would have access to it. They’d constantly update the quantities, allowing them to see what was selling the most as well as what needed to be restocked.
“It’s like the stone age down here,” he whispered to Madison, who poked him again.
Brooke looked over, her narrowed eyes conveying it was biz time, and he’d better not yuck it up. He made a face, which had Kyle gripping his shoulder. He was standing behind him—how could he know he’d made a face? Then Nanine cast a discreet glance his way, and he stilled completely. This cave would go a long way toward healing her heart and putting them back in possession of a Michelin-starred cave. He made himself chill.
Celine rattled off vineyard after vineyard, along with the wines in stock from each, as she flipped through the pages. Listening, he had to wonder how many of the varietals Jacqueline had selected. He only recognized about one in every six of the names. French wine was a vast universe, he knew, but shouldn’t he recognize more of them?
He asked himself the same question he’d had after looking for wines for his picnic with Jacqueline: how was a normal person—like him—expected to know what was good? More, how was a normal person supposed to know if said wine was worth the price? Only a wine tasting could take away the guesswork, and from what he’d seen, the more expensive and rare the bottles, the less they were available for tastings, leaving a person to trust things like reviews and awards, which didn’t always pan out. Hadn’t there been famed wines he’d ordered, sometimes at great cost, and disliked?
He’d spent days researching white wines for his picnic with Jacqueline, hoping the wine would work but not completely confident it would. It shouldn’t be this complicated.
The hairs on the back of his neck got twitchy, and he could feel his “It” idea—so close he could almost touch it. His mind leapt from one idea to another. Something online and accessible. Something that would deliver. Something—
“Move,” Kyle hissed as the women followed Celine down the far aisle.
“I’m thinking,” he hissed back. “My skin is all tingly—”
“Dean, I am going to club you with that giant brandy bottle if you don’t stop talking about tingling skin. Focus, man.”
Could he help his excitement? But he reined it in as they toured the endless collection of brandy and cognac, which Brooke told Celine was interesting—what did that mean? They cruised past the aisle of digestifs, upon which Celine produced from the bottom shelf a rare Chartreuse that had Nanine coating her fingers with dust to hold the ancient bottle. He’d never been a fan of the famous green liqueur himself, thinking it tasted like Jägermeister, something he probably shouldn’t admit out loud now that he lived in France. People took their digestifs seriously, and again, he had that skin-tingling sensation…
Not able to help himself, he shoved his jacket and shirt to his forearm to show Kyle the goose bumps. His friend glared, but seriously, how was he supposed to stay interested in this tour? This was the worst way to present a product he’d ever seen. Death-defying ladder. Slippery moss-covered stone floors. Not to mention the funky smell. And had that scratching sound coming from the corner been rats? The bottom line was that this place stunk, literally and figuratively. Personally, he would have cleaned everything up. Did wine geeks think these conditions meant their cave was the shit? He had no clue why any of this was important beyond Celine telling them it was so.
Jacqueline would probably skewer him with a corkscrew if he told her that. He thought of how she’d talked about the history of the oldest vineyards. With her, he’d been able to get a sense of the story behind the bottles—the significance. That’s what was missing down here. All he saw was dusty bottles. Stories had power. They made the wine more interesting, especially if he wasn’t tasting the goods, which they weren’t.
He got goose bumps again and thought about stories with a better hook. Why, he imagined people who’d survived the Black Death had probably made incredible wine. Like, seriously, if you’d been one of the last humans in Europe to survive your skin turning black along with all the other horrible symptoms, wouldn’t you have cranked out the best vintage ever? Now,thatwas the way to sell it. Not this dry, bore-them-until-they-fall-asleep-standing-up way.
Suddenly he could see a webpage for the wine in question, along with a widescreen photo of the vineyard, and felt excitement race through him. The story would be rendered in a catchy font, along with some information about the current owners, perhaps. But probably not the gravestones of people from the Black Death because that would be depressing.
