The Roman Gambit Pt. 01

She said, "No, the nicest car that I have ridden in before was Ahmed's Jaguar."

Ahmed was a rich Arab kid who was one of her fuckbuddies from the club. She cut him off totally cold turkey after she felt like he had disrespected her by not wearing a condom.

Like I said, in some respects Mel's moral code is stricter than John Calvin's himself. It is geared around good healthy sexual practice and mutual respect. If you violate it, she can make the Puritans look open-minded and accepting.

She was radiating delight. I said, "And you have never been on a boat before either, right?"

She said, "Well... I was on a rowboat on the Serpentine once with Rodger".

I knew that Rodger had taken her out to in it to fuck her so that didn't count. I said, "You'll be impressed when you see the one, we are going to be on. I spent an entire summer sailing the Mediterranean on it".

She said very sincerely, "I am impressed by everything you do dear".

The boat blew her away, as it does everybody who only has a hazy idea of me and my people. Mel almost broke off our friendship over the apartment I own on the Thames bank in London, which she considered so far above

her that she couldn't imagine why I would hang out with her.

She just stood there staring up at the mast, which is impressive. I said, "Close your mouth dear and let's get your things stowed".

She looked a little shaken and said, "Is this all yours?"

I said, "No, my daddy bought it. He loves to sail."

She said, "My Da likes to play cricket in Hyde Park on Saturdays. It isn't the same thing."

I said with some heat, "MEL, I was born rich. I will always be rich. I don't care!! You are my best friend so get over it!!"

She smiled her incredibly warm smile, looked me in the eye and said with her inimitable sincerity, "I love you." That made my day and validated everything I had ever felt about our friendship.

We ate on the boat that night. I like to cook, and I have focused my considerable intellectual powers on becoming the best chef I can be. I did a simple crab stew, which is unchanged in terms of preparation and ingredients from the 18th Century Chesapeake Bay recipe that I was using.

It was both savory and also filling. In conjunction with it I served a couscous and lamb dish that I had flavored with saffron and I added a bottle of ice cold Retsina for the three of us.

Mother will not drink Retsina. I had a chilled Grand Crus Chablis for her. Mother says that Retsina tastes like turpentine, but I think the real problem is that she can't get around the fact that it is the wine of the Greek working classes.

Still, my daddy loves Retsina and Mel absolutely LOVED it.

My dad and mother had only met Mel once and they hadn't had much of a chance to talk. So, we sat on the covered portion of the afterdeck in the gathering twilight and watched the parade of ships on the horizon.

We drank the JW Blue that is my dad's and my own personal trademark drink. Mel of course had something totally incongruous, a daiquiri. Drinking odd concoctions in inappropriate places is her trademark.

When we had gotten her situated in her room, I had another one of those moments with her. She is still getting the feel for wealth and luxury and she almost wouldn't put her things in the cabin. She said, "This is too much, I'll just sleep out there on the couch".

I said, "You'll do no such thing young lady. This is your room and you will use it!"

She smiled graciously and said, "Well if you insist but this is nicer than my new house".

She had been sharing a room with her 22-year-old sister until she earned a six-figure commission on our last assignment.

That let her get her own place in Chelsea. It was a wildly bizarre house for a 25-year-old single girl. It looked like something out of Great Expectations. But on Mel it was perfect.

We hugged goodnight and I told her to sleep well because there were going to be some interesting adventures tomorrow. She was already stripping off her dress in preparation for sleep. I was going to get a good eight hours myself. I hoped that my parents in the room next to her didn't keep her awake.

CHAPTER TWO

The following day was also beautiful. I was thinking two gorgeous April days in a row must be an English record. We cleared the Marina on a course slightly east of south under full sail. I steered while daddy and Mother set the sails.

Mel sat next to me on the navigator's bench looking bright green. I said kindly, "You'll get used to it dear". She responded by heaving into one of the buckets at my feet. I had to admit that the Channel is a lot choppier than most of the places I had sailed.

Daddy took over the helm as soon as the sails were set. I took my poor little friend below to prepare breakfast. I made her some dry toast and milk tea. I was fixing a quiche Lorraine for the rest of us. Mel kept it down. But she was still looking the worst for wear.

She has faithfully followed me through all of the adventures that we've been in. I was thinking that one of these days I should spend some time in the East End just to see what her world looked like. I had a feeling that I would not be able to function nearly as well in her world as she did in mine.

We were making 14 knots under an offshore breeze which was going to get us the 100 miles to Honfleur earlier than expected. Mel had settled down a bit once I got some toast and a little bit of porridge into her.

She even came out on deck for a second, spotted the heaving horizon, turned green, and bolted back down into the cabin.

It is a trick of sailing that, when the boat is laid over on a tack, like we were at the time, the horizon isn't horizontal. So, the visual that you get coming out of the cabin makes it look like the world has just tilted 30 degrees. If you know enough to anticipate it there is no disorientation, but poor Mel must have felt like she was having a stroke.

I told her to lie down in her berth and we would get her there. But I put a bucket next to the bed just in case. She looked like a pitiful drowned puppy, beautifully exotic and wildly sexy, but a drowned puppy, nonetheless.

I was up on deck through the whole trip. Daddy handed the helm to me while he made final docking arrangements via the internet in the cabin and mother went back to scrubbing the decks. My mother has to work hard to feel good about herself. I guess I inherited that trait.

It was breezy mid-channel and the ship traffic was intense so I couldn't just put the boat on the auto-sailor and go below without ending up under the keel of a 1,000-foot container ship. I was wearing a fisherman's sweater because it was getting cold and a pair of skintight jeans because I wanted to show off the goods. Daddy has stopped gibbering about my dressing in a "sexual" manner now that I am totally independent.

We got close enough to the coast that I could navigate by sight. Honfleur is off of the Seine Estuary so it was easy to just steer for that gap in the coastline. The route to Cherbourg is much shorter than to Honfleur but that is a big port and my parents wanted quaint not industrial.

Honfleur has centuries of seafaring history built into it and you can see why it was established where it is as you approach it from the sea.

The Seine empties into the Channel there and Honfleur was the best of both worlds. Goods going to-and-from Paris can be transported by water not land. They can have an easy trip down the Seine to the port of Honfleur and from that port they can go to any place in the world.

Most of the early French settlement of the new world left from that port and, along with Le Havre, it was the center for French colonialism in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

The mouth of the Seine is so wide that the estuary itself looks like two different shores. Le Havre, which was visible to the north and right on the Channel, gets a lot of big ship traffic.

Honfleur is tucked into the mouth of the Estuary itself and you could also see why the traffic out of that place dried up as ships got bigger, since the Seine is tidal and the navigation into the river is tricky.

We pulled into Honfleur at two in the afternoon, which was seven hours after we left Poole. However, with the time difference between the UK and France it was actually three o'clock in Honfleur.

My parents have a permanent berth in the Vieux Bassin, which is a little harbor right in the center of the Town. My dad navigated us through the locks, which are set up upstream to smooth out the tidal shifts of the Seine.

We were under diesel power from the time we entered the estuary and I had to visit my two children down below, just to make sure that they were behaving themselves. The two brutish Detroit D4s were down there humming like a well-tuned chamber music group. Their mother was pleased.

I have a love of mechanics that is so profound that I would have probably worked in a garage if I wasn't rich. I know that isn't very girly but that is who I am.

We motored into our slip in the small archetypally square continental harbor. At forty-one feet, the C&C is a big boat for that mooring and it looked like an aircraft carrier next to the 30 footers.

The harbor itself was considerably beyond charming. The general impression, with the half-timbered buildings and high-rise houses, is that, "This place couldn't be real?" But once in a while the modern world does have places that picturesque, and Honfleur is one of them.

The houses around it are those classically narrow 16th Century buildings that are 20 feet wide and seven stories tall. You see them most prominently in Amsterdam, but they are in every harbor city on the northern coast of Europe.

They are painted in a riot of colors and the overall effect is that you just slipped back in time. Monet, Turner and Boudin all lived in Honfleur and painted pictures of the place; and there are still painters always sitting at easels around the harbor.

Mel had recovered her spirit and good humor as soon as the boat stopped pitching and she was standing on the quarter deck as Mother and I secured the docking lines.

She was wearing something that only Mel could get away with, absolutely skintight white Capri pants and a bright, lime green hooded sweatshirt. I was kind of envious of her dark complexion since it allows her to look stunning in colors that most women would shun like the plague.

The sweatshirt was an inspiration since rather than hiding her boobs the mounds under the front of it looked even bigger and more mysterious. I was in my fisherman's sweater and equally skintight jeans with my Dad's black 101st airborne hat worn backwards.

My mother was in an outfit I see her in frequently, a pair of tweed slacks that nicely emphasized her still perfectly muscled and round hips and a white cashmere turtleneck sweater that had the same effect as Mel's sweatshirt.

Mother radiated class and what she was wearing was as sedate as a Sunday school picnic. But the way the cashmere molded to her incredible breasts was almost pornographic; especially with my dad's special gold necklace with the spectacular diamond dangling in the deep valley between them. I was thinking to myself, "Those two little women are never, off-stage, are they?"

Baudelaire and a bunch of the other French romantics particularly loved Honfleur for its peaceful scenic beauty. Not being a French romantic I love Honfleur for the Calvados which is especially good here. People think of France they think of wine. But when you visit Normandy the drink du jour is made out of apples, not grapes.

And a chilled jug of Calvados on a beautiful late afternoon is heaven. English cider, in my opinion, is swill. But Calvados, which is essentially brandy, has a smoothness and depth that rivals the finest wines in all of France.

We three ladies found an open table at a café right on the harbor and watched the denizens of that little place intermingle with each other. There were painters who looked like they had come out of central casting for French painters. There were a few, but not too many, tourists. There were the people of the town going about their business and then there were the cafes and bistros, which are superb.

Of course, the men were French and the sight of my mother and Mel sitting out in the open was threatening a slow burning riot among the male half of the population.

There was one open seat at our table that my mother was saving for my dad. Seven different French guys stopped by to ask if they could sit in it before my dad, who had been finalizing the docking, appeared.

He is a dangerous looking man without being tall and whenever he materializes anywhere the men clustering around his wife tend to scatter. That was the case here. It was almost comical watching the more persistent ones suddenly melt into the surrounding crowd like the jackals when the lion arrives.

We finished up the Calvados and ordered another jug. The rough Norman pottery that the best Calvados is served in is almost as interesting as the drink itself. The shape and heft of the jug is reminiscent of French working people over the centuries. And of course, the thick walls of the jug keep the Calvados delightfully ice cold.

We really didn't need to change for dinner since the ambience of the place was informal. We sat and talked and watched the sunset appear until our reservation. Then we moved to an outdoor table and had an outstanding meal. Mel was hilarious throughout. Her talents for acting and mimicry were incredible.

Almost anybody we had been in contact with during the meal ended up being mimicked as soon as they left the table. But that wasn't the surprise. It turns out that my mother was better than Mel at literally putting on a character and walking around wearing them.

I think that is because Mom and Mel are so open and instinctual and I am too much like my daddy; rational and controlled. I would use the word "Inhibited" but I am aware of how crazy I can get during sex and so that word would never correctly describe me.

Daddy wanted to go back to the boat, which was moored less than 200 yards away. I watched him as he made his way around the harbor on the huge chunks of flagstone paving that comprised the street.

He was also dressed in a fisherman's sweater and jeans, just not so skintight. The French, some of whom were taller than him, were all getting out of his way as he walked. Daddy is a very sweet man inside. But on the outside, he is as scary tough looking as a Doberman, or some other kind of guard dog.

I knew he wanted to go back to the boat to have his nightly drink and cigar. I saw him board, pour his first helping of Johnny Walker Blue and light his cigar. If you don't count my mother, who he can never be separated from, my daddy is a solitary person. His life in that Iraqi prison must have been horrible. But my Daddy just kept living his life as best he could until he could get back to my mother.

Then it came to me in a flash of inspiration. His total devotion to her was less a matter of her perfect body and beautiful face, than it was a case of her unconditional love for him. I filed that insight away under the heading of, "What I want out of a true relationship with a man".

My mother says I am too analytic and perhaps I am. But the concept of two people who fill in all of the missing pieces of the other person's life was a real breakthrough in my own concept of what love really is.

My daddy treats the gift of my mom's love as something precious, not as his right, and he reinforces that understanding in every aspect of their relationship. That made up my mind . I am going to enjoy what life holds until I find a man who can cherish the love what I give him.

In the meantime, the sun was down, and we were looking for something to do. My mother is a cat and so she likes the nighttime. Mel and I were looking for men to wind up. That meant we had to find a nightclub.

Fortunately, the best one in the area was in plain sight directly diagonal from where we were on the other side of the harbor.

So, we walked the 400 yards to Le Vintage. It was a little, probably former, fisherman's cottage right on the end of the causeway between the inner and outer harbor. Our boat was prominently obvious on that side of the harbor.

The place itself was a little crowded but it featured an African American guy and a tenor saxophone sound that just reeked of lonely, rainy nights in New York City. We sat and listened for a while but nobody who looks like us is going to escape being asked to dance.

The first guy who came over asked Mel. That made sense because she was the easiest to pick out; her hoodie practically glowed in the dark. All of the tunes so far were sad and melancholy, and Mel plastered herself on the guy like they had been best friends since childhood.

Then two guys who might have been brothers asked mother and me to dance. In a club we probably looked like sisters since my mother is agelessly hot and I might look older than I actually am.

The guy who had asked my mother to dance was trying to get her to put her arms around his neck, rather than dance in the classic style. She finally relented but she was not giving him any romance. The guy who was dancing with me was holding me like he really wanted to dance.

We all swayed back and forth out there, with my mother occasionally retrieving her partner's hand from her butt and putting it back where it belonged. When the dance ended, she actually thanked him, which given the look on her face was more a case of etiquette than true gratitude.

I marveled as usual at my mother's ability to attract men. She still has a body that is like catnip to people who like voluptuous women. But it is her total womanly confidence and the spirit, that just radiates off of her, makes her exceptionally visible and attractive to the male population.

We both returned to our table and put out the psychic "No Trespassing" sign that women use to warn away prospective Lotharios. It is all in the body language and facial attitude. We both wanted to watch my little friend in action.

Mel was still dancing with the guy who had originally asked her. Except she was now jamming her boobs into him and playing with his hair while she humped her mound against one of his thighs. I was getting turned on just watching her and I imagine the guy was at full mast.

My mother, who is a master of the sport, was providing expert play-by-play commentary along the lines of, "See how she does that little sigh and moan there. That always convinces them that they are going to get lucky." I could have done without all of that information because I had seen Mel in action before.

She was clearly not hungry tonight and so when the next song ended, she stepped back and said brightly "Thank you for the dance. That was fun", as if they had been dancing at a cotillion instead of dry humping in a Honfleur nightclub.

She then walked back to us with a kittenish smile on her face, having added one more male to her growing list of conquests. Her partner was standing there looking like Mel had hit him between the eyes with a mallet.

He got his raging hard-on under control and turned and headed for our table with fire in his eyes. I am the biggest and strongest of the three of us, so I stood up to intercept him.

I said, "Pardon!! Vous allez?" He said in American English, "Get out of my way!! I am going to get that little cock teasing bitch and we are going to go somewhere and have a little fun!!"

I said, "No you're not" and did a thing that I mastered in my extensive work with Israeli Krav Maga. It involves the nerve centers more than it does the muscles and it is hard to tell whether the fiery pain, or the paralysis of the arm, is worse.