“Excellent,” Ollie says. “Come with me. I’ll get everything set up.”
The kitchen has a completely different vibe without Judith and Delaney in the mix as we stand around the island and dig into the food that Ollie prepared. We settle into an easy rhythm of conversation about our past travels and bucket list trips.
When Ollie offers to serve us the rest of the wine and lemonade, Leah suggests we just finish the ones that we already have open, and then promptly pours what remains of the lemonade into her own glass, so that I have no choice but to have the Sauvignon Blanc. As expected, Val and Ollie don’t take any notice or care about what anyone else is drinking, and Leah’s secret is kept safe.
When our conversation turns to focus on Ollie and his sommelier training, I apologize on behalf of the group for how our tasting ended up.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “What happened tonight is nothing in comparison to some of the things I’ve seen in my career.”
“Like what?” Val asks as she pops a perfectly medium-rare piece of meat from the steak-and-frites board into her mouth.
“Like the time that I accidentally overserved the groom at a joint bachelor, bachelorette party that resulted in the wedding being called off.”
Our collective jaws drop, and then we beg Ollie to tell us the rest of the story, which he happily obliges.
“When I first started, I was too worried about remembering all the details about each wine to really pay attention to the guests, so I didn’t realize that the guys from the bachelor party had pregamed before they got to the tasting. By the time I noticed, they were pretty sloshed, especially the groom, and our policy is to stop serving guests if they appear intoxicated.”
We nod as he continues, and I take advantage of both Val and Leah’s attention being laser-focused on Ollie’s story to swipe the last goat cheese crostini, even though I’ve eaten more than my share of them.
“Well, as you can imagine, the groom didn’t like that,” he continues. “He got in my face and demanded I keep serving him and his friends. He backed me into a corner, and I ended up just handing over the wine I had just opened, and he drank it straight from the bottle.”
I gasp, both at the way the story is unfolding and the image of him backing down from a fight. As he stands here today, Ollie is almost as tall as Cameron and equally muscular, if not more. The thought of him being too afraid to stand up for himself is as hard to imagine as the idea of someone being brave enough to challenge him.
“This was at the beginning of my career, so I was young and pretty scrawny back then,” he says, when he notices that I am not the only one surprised that he was overpowered by an unruly groom. “When the groom and his friends finished the wine, he threw it against the cellar wall and shattered it, then went for the spittoon in the middle of the table—”
“What’s a spittoon?” Val interrupts, eyes wide.
“It’s the bucket for all the guests to pour their unfinished wine into after each tasting round. When he drank from it, we had done at least five rounds, so I can’t even imagine how awful it tasted.”
Leah shakes her head back and forth, disgusted. “Forget the taste, imagine thegerms! All of the backwash from multiple people swirling around together in there . . .”
Cameron walks in just as we are doubled over in laughter at Leah’s dry heave that punctuated her last sentence. “What did I miss?” he asks, smiling politely at the others before his eyes land on me.
“I was just telling them the story about that awful joint bachelor, bachelorette party, because they were trying to apologize for how tonight was going.”
Cameron leans on the doorway into the kitchen. “Ah, yes. That one was a doozie.”
“That’s how Cam and I met, actually,” Ollie says, but rushes to clarify, “He wasn’t at the tasting. No, I met him at the Muay Thai gym that I joined shortly after.”
Cameron smiles fondly at the memory. “Ollie came in demanding to fight someone right away, even though newbies always start on the bag.”
“Yeah. And you were the only other guy over six feet in there that day, so Kru Pan pointed me in your direction, and you dropped me in about three seconds flat with a knee to the gut.”
Cameron shrugs as if he had no choice.
“I trained in Muay Thai too,” Val joins in. “But now I am a Wushu student. I started it to help my Ahsoka cosplay look more realistic but ended up falling in love with the art of it.”
The way Ollie looks at Val after she finishes her statement makes me thinkhejust fell in love withher.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand half of the words that she just said,” Leah says in the silence that follows.
Ollie chuckles in awe, eyes sparkling as he keeps them trained on Val. “I think she just said that she is a Star Wars fan and knows how to scrap, which might just make her the woman of my dreams.”
Val meets his lovestruck gaze and promptly rolls her eyes at him, which just makes his smile even wider.
Leah scoffs. “On that note, I think I’m going to head upstairs to my room. I need to read my notes about the book so that I can be ready for all the activities tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah, about that . . .” Cameron says, pulling our attention back to him. “Delaney just let me know that she will be leaving first thing tomorrow, too, so we need to talk about what the rest of the retreat will look like.”
