Nora makes a connection
It was a busy Saturday on the patio at the Celandine Hotel. Classes at the college were back in session for the fall and the vineyards had just finished the last harvest, bringing workers down from the hills to enjoy their first weekend off since late summer. Fern River was humming, and the hotel felt like the very center. Nora sat at the front desk listening to voices filter in from the patio, the novel she had brought along for the day lay unopened beside the house book. Margot leaned in through the door.
“Darling, would you help run drinks for a minute?”
Nora got up and walked across the lobby to follow Margot down a short hall to the bar, Margot’s heels clicking on the polished tile floor. The bartender handed Nora a round tray with two glasses of bright yellow agua fresca and pointed her in the right direction.
Out on the patio, the autumn sun lit everything to a cheery glow. Patrons were still dressed in summer clothes and sat clustered around tables arranged on the flagstones. Em & Janie had come down from campus for the afternoon to listen to music and people-watch on the hotel patio, and were sitting at a small table beneath a trailing solandra. After a morning in the pottery studio preparing for their fall critique, they had showered, changed into sundresses and walked down along the Promenade.
Nora spotted the pair and stopped short. She hadn’t seen them since accidentally overhearing their morning activities at the Glade over the summer. The memory of Em’s melodic moans as Janie went down on her in their tent intruded into Nora’s mind. They hadn’t seen her there in the branches of the big willow, surely, but still Nora felt awkward. She pushed the memory aside and walked up to the table.
“Here are your drinks, girls,” she announced, trying to sound casual.
“Thanks!” Janie smiled up at Nora from behind a pair of round rose-colored sunglasses. “Oh hey, we know you. You’re Luc’s friend right?”
Nora set the drinks down on the table. “Oh, yeah, totally. You go to school with him huh?”
“Luc’s great. He’s taking the photos for our fall gallery show. You know Em?”
“Hey, I’m Nora.” She put out her hand and Em took it, smiling. Em was conspicuously braless under her sundress, and Nora tried to keep from glancing too obviously at her high round breasts shining through the thin yellow cotton.
“You’re a dancer aren’t you?” Em asked. “You should come perform at the Fria café sometime, Janie could get you a gig this winter.”
Nora felt a rush of excitement. The girls had no way of knowing that the piece she was working on was performed entirely in the nude, but imagining that they would still extend the invitation regardless excited her. “That would be really cool, thanks. I’ll think about it.”
Nora said goodbye and threaded back across the patio to the bar, where Margot had run the remaining drinks for the time being. “Your friends are cute,” Margot said, looking over to the table where Janie was laughing while whispering something in Em’s ear.
“Ha, yep. Need anything else?”
“No, honey, thanks for helping me out.”
Nora returned to the front desk, turning over in her mind the scene of the two girls in their sundresses on the patio, the memory of them splashing naked out into the river last summer, and the notion of dancing for them. The images twisted into an exciting thread in her mind’s eye.