‘Oh, this is my home, I guess,’ Darlene replied, looking a little uncomfortable that everyone was looking at her. ‘The East Coast is busy and exciting for sure, but I guess I’m an Oregon girl.’
‘You can’t beat coming home, huh?’ said Kurt, with a raise of his glass. Darlene smiled back at him. Strangely, he then noticed, what had originally been her best feature was the only one that was now less vibrant: her smile. It used to be carefree but now it had a melancholic quality. Something had changed her since she had been away but, being hidden from the opposite sex as she had been, Kurt was at a loss to guess what it was.
‘Kurt would know all about that. Tell her about some of the places in Europe you’ve been on your travels,’ his father then put in, inadvertently encouraging him to brag and impress her. ‘Which were the most impressive?’
‘The most impressive?’ Kurt considered. ‘Cologne, Vienna, or Prague perhaps, but I think Darlene would love Florence or Paris the most. Girls prefer the romantic places, so I believe.’
‘Whereas you prefer the places with the best beer is what you’re saying?’ his father added correctly.
‘But I’m an Oregon man too, after all,’ Kurt continued. ‘And our clients prefer cocktails, so I’d better get used to finer living.’
Mentioning clients inevitably directed Clive back to business talk, but Kurt was satisfied he had impressed Darlene. There was some kind of chem
istry across the table he was sure of it, though he was underestimating just how much his curiosity was about to soar.
After the first course, he excused himself to go to the bathroom and, before heading back downstairs, found that he was enticed by being in close proximity to her bedroom. The Furse’s had a fairly large house but it was obvious from a nightgown hanging from the end of a single bed, whose this bedroom was.
The upstairs had thick carpet and, because there were no squeaky floorboards, Kurt found himself daring to step inside.
How he would love to be in that room alone with Darlene when her family were absent. The idea was so dangerous that it caused intense nerves in the pit of his stomach, only they were good nerves and the kind he desired more of.
Whether such a liaison could ever happen was fraught with complications and, knowing the chance might not come, Kurt was desperate to discover something new about her before leaving the room. Did she have a diary he could read an excerpt from maybe? If so it was hidden away and the room was fairly tidy except for the one suitcase in the middle of the room. Darlene had not been back long and so had probably been rummaging for clothes or makeup in there and had failed to zip it back up.
Seeing that there was easy access, Kurt decided to lift the lid to find out what he might see. Some fancy underwear might have sent his pulse racing even more, though all he saw at first were two neat piles of jeans and t-shirts. That was un-amazing until he saw that something was lodged between them. Moving the jeans to one side, Kurt then couldn’t believe his eyes.
Were, they handcuff?
Yes, they were and something else too. Perhaps he was the naïve one or else that was a pair of black nipple tassels.
An evening that was already rated nine out of ten on his intrigue meter was suddenly off the charts. For Kurt, there could be no holding back anyone, regardless of familial concerns. He simply had to find out what this Darlene had become since leaving. Was she really a man-shy religious nut who would make the Virgin Mary proud, or else a closet nymphomaniac with a ravenous sexual appetite?
Someone would find out first hand eventually and he wanted that man to be him.
Back at the dinner table, his eyes lit up opportunistically on seeing that their dessert was cherry-pie with stripped pastry. As Clive continued to yap away about brochures, Kurt surreptitiously manipulated the pastry in order to spell out ‘DATE?’, before turning his plate in Darlene’s direction and gently tapping the table cloth.
Darlene paused halfway through a mouthful upon seeing the question, then looked up into his eyes to see if he was being serious. In response, he gave the slightest of cheeky smirks and a shrug of the shoulders, then was thrilled to see she had to look away for fear of smiling too much in front of everyone.
It took him a few minutes to get his answer, because she was a bit more paranoid than him about how to arrange the pastry. When she had finished, however, it read a big ‘YES’.
Despite the positive reply, Darlene seemed to grow shyer of him after having accepted. There was a look on her face that suggested she did not quite know what she was doing, but that only proved all the more enticing to Kurt.
Darlene was both a fascination and a puzzle to him. On the one hand, she was up for a date and had nipple tassels in her bedroom; on the other she looked to be as timid as a mouse and had a history that suggested very little experience of men – if any. A voyage of discovery was ahead, as long as he could figure out the logistics of setting sail. Darlene might have accepted the idea, but no means of discussing where and when presented itself at the time. Plus, the more Kurt thought about it, the more complicated a date seemed. Especially as it seemed safe to presume that she did not want to give her parents a single clue that she had anything of the kind planned. Certainly, they would not be revealing to their families that they were having any kind of liaison, but it was also likely that the returning goody-two-shoes hardly went out and met men at all. Hopefully she would prove resourceful enough to come up with an excuse for getting out of the house one evening, but before that Kurt had still to figure out how to go about contacting her. Calling up the family home and asking to speak with her was just not the way to go; the Furses were far too Victorian and would be onto him like a finely-cast reel.
After heading back home with his parents, while nursing a state of unclear anticipation, Kurt decided that tomorrow would be a good day for finding a solution. He was back at work and there is nothing like a good sea air for clearing the mind and offering some clarity.
Aqua Yachts boasted some fine vessels and he had dedicated the whole day to the maintenance of his favorite; a 50-foot, one-million-dollar fly-bridge called Arial, requiring only one or two crew members depending on conditions. The company had larger and more expensive vessels, but this was the kind he could often take out for personal use also and, so long as you knew what you were doing, it suited him completely. Its three cabins meant he could invite his best friends to join him on the ocean – or not – and he had complete control over what was on the itinerary.
Although the day was only for maintenance, Kurt enjoyed spending time on Arial anyway and thought he would have time to test its performance out on the water at the end of the day, so long as the weather remained calm. He had always felt grateful for the company’s market position; in that they were neither at the high nor the low end of the market. Their clients were rich enough so that they did not have to scrape around in order to stay afloat, while they did not have to worry about maintaining the giant vessels that the super-rich billionaires craved either. That would have meant supervising a massive team of people and having little time for the solitude he enjoyed. As it was, however, the company only needed to employ half a dozen maintenance engineers, whom he was able to personally train and build up strong and trusted relationships with, as well as a dozen cleaning staff. The crews that clients required to take them out on the water were employed on a per-job basis – though he occasionally did that himself also.
All in all, the job and the demands upon him were just how he liked them. Kurt knew he was very lucky and had no complaints. Although there was a certain doubt that something was missing. It would have been self-indulgent to complain or linger over what that might be, but he would occasionally find himself looking around as if he was not one of the luckiest guys in Oregon.
Whenever he got that feeling it had become a habit to go looking for girls to obscure whatever the problem was. Being in great shape – and with a selection of luxury yachts to choose from – Kurt did not find drawing female attention very difficult. Deep down he knew that the money, the ocean and the cocktails made that a lot easier than it otherwise would be, though it was also safe to say that he was pretty confident with the ladies anyway. Sexual conquest was as much a part of the landscape as the sea and the sky. The only complication being, because everyone knew where to find him, that of avoiding several bitter ex-girlfriends who had thought to accompany him and his lifestyle a bit more permanently.
Darlene represented something different, however. That much was clear from the start.
It was not that he had not gone for girls who could be considered ‘hard to get’ before, but they had usually come with the surroundings. Darlene might have had a direct connection with him as a Furse, but she clearly came from a part of society unlike his own. Her family lived its life very differently to what he was familiar with and, if it was not for business, the two of them would probably never have met.
Why was he singling her out for the extra effort, therefore? It was not an easy question to answer, despite how attractive she was. Even without the complication of risking upset to inter-family unity, the flirtation might have seemed unfeasible. For some reason, he couldn’t get her out of his head all that day, however, and thinking on how to get near to her was clearly clouding his vision as to why she was worth the effort when there were more convenient hot bodies to go chasing.