Chapter 13: Getting To Know You

I woke early Saturday morning. I’d slept ok, I guess. But I’d had dreams. Dreams I wasn’t sure I should be having. Dreams that involved me and a girl that I shouldn’t be in bed with, doing things we shouldn’t be doing. And the fact that the girl in question was sleeping cuddled up next to me, in one of the sexiest pieces of lingerie I had ever seen, didn’t help. I hauled my ass out of bed around 5:00, without waking Kate, and went to have a shower.

The shower didn’t help. I had an erection that was not going to go away on its own any time soon. I squirted some bodywash onto my hand, and lathered myself up. It didn’t take long. I think I stroked my shaft maybe a dozen times, then painted the shower wall with one of the biggest loads of come I have ever ejaculated.

I rinsed myself and the wall off, and then dried off, pulled on a robe, and went into the kitchen. Made coffee. Sat at the table to drink it. Sighed. It was going to be a long day.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved spending time with Kate. And I was looking forward to having this time alone with her, as a way to get to know her a bit better. But I wasn’t prepared to get to know her the way she wanted me to get to know her. And if she was going to spend the day teasing me, like she had last night, I was going to explode.

I had to find a way to get her mind off of sex, or I’d never survive. But how? Shit. I had no idea that teenage girls were like this. Teenage boys, yes. I’d been one, once. I knew all they thought about was sex. But girls? That was new to me.

So what could we do that would distract Kate from her mission of getting me inside her pants?

Food. That was it. Food. Kate loved food. If I could give her a day where she experienced some good food, maybe she’d forget about the other things she wanted to experience. We’d go across the border into Quebec, find some markets, try some cheeses, eat some Quebecois treats. That was it. Food would save me. I opened up my laptop and started to plan a route.

I was drinking my third cup of coffee, and feeling pretty good about the day, when I heard the toilet flush. Kate came down the hall a few minutes later. She was still in that damn nightgown. Stores really should check I.D. before they sell things like that. I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“Alex? Are you ok? I was worried. I woke up and you were gone.”

“I’m fine, Katie. I just had a few things I wanted to organize this morning, so I got up. Hey, I have a plan for the day. What do you say you get showered and dressed, and then we head across the river and experience some Quebecois cuisine?”

She gave me a smile that could have powered half the city.

“That’d be awesome! What should I wear?”

“Something comfy. We’ll be in and out of the car a lot.”

She grabbed a cup of coffee and headed for the guest bathroom. I got dressed, then finished figuring out our itinerary. When Kate came down the hall, in leggings and the pink sweater that Jess had given her for Christmas, I helped her into her coat and we headed down to the garage to get the car.

The first stop, almost as soon as we crossed over into Hull, was for breakfast. I took her to a place I’d been to many times before. It didn’t look like much from the outside, or, for that matter, from the inside either. But they made one hell of a good breakfast. I convinced her to let me order, and when the plates arrived with the fried eggs, sausage, bacon, homefries, baked beans, and toast with a dish of cretons, I thought her eyes were going to bulge out of her head. She pointed at the cretons.

“What’s this?”

“Cretons. Put some on your toast. It’s made from pork, and onions, and some kind of spices - but you’ll figure that out better than I can. It’s really fatty, but oh so good.”

She tried it. And she liked it.

“I’ve never had anything like this before, Alex. It’s amazing!”

I had to agree. I like cretons too, but try not to eat them all that often.

“Maybe we can buy some along the way today to take back home with us,” I suggested.

We ate, and then I paid, and we hit the road again, heading out into the country. As we drove, Kate called Jessica, and filled her in on what we’d been up to since we’d left. She told her about spending the day with Taylor yesterday, and how much fun it had been to explore downtown Ottawa. In response to a question from Jess, she said she’d been behaving, and that we had talked a lot. Kate put the phone on speaker, and Jess said she loved me, and I said I loved her too, and she thanked me for taking such good care of her sister. I told her I was having a lot of fun. And I meant it.

Our first post-breakfast stop was a cheese factory, one of three I hoped to stop at that day. Katelyn sampled several kinds of cheese, and asked if we could buy some. I said that was why we were here, and told her to get what she wanted, but that we’d be stopping at some more places too. She picked out three types and got a piece of each. I paid, and we returned to the car.

The next stop was also a cheese factory. She sampled a few more varieties, and bought a couple of pieces of the kinds she liked best.

The third stop was something different: a cidermill, which was also known for its vinegars. I thought she was going to die. She talked to the young woman behind the counter for ages, and we ended up being taken back to see the cider press and the barrels that they aged the vinegar in. By the time we left, we had several litres of cider and three different kinds of cider vinegar.

For lunch, I took us to a place I’d found online that I thought looked good. Though it was after Christmas, we both had tourtiere, the French Canadian meat pie made with ground beef and veal and pork and grated vegetables. And then, since you can never have too much pie, we had sugar pie, or tarte au sucre, for dessert. I could see Katie’s mind working, as she tried to figure out what was in the various dishes and how she could recreate them at home. We bought some tourtiere to take home, as well, so that Jess could try them, and then carried on with the route I had planned.

The next stop after lunch was at a sugar shack. It was too early for the sap to be running, of course, but they had syrup and maple candy for sale. Kate was amazed at the different grades of syrup, and after asking me if she was spending too much money, and being told she was fine, she bought a large jug of amber syrup for pancakes and a smaller jug of dark syrup for cooking. She also bought some maple sugar and some candies to take back for Jess. She also bought a jar of maple mustard.

The third cheese factory was different from the other two, because they used sheep’s milk, not cow’s milk. We were there for quite a while, and ended up walking down to the barn to see the sheep in their winter yard.

Finally, we stopped at a little butcher’s shop that was famous for its sausages, or so the internet had told me. They also sold cretons. Katie got a tub of that, and several different kinds of cured sausage, and some other, more ordinary looking, sausages that she said would make a lovely dinner some night.

By this time, I was beginning to wonder where we would put our luggage when we drove home the next day. My little car was loaded down with food. If I was going to take Katie on road trips like this often, I was going to need to get a bigger vehicle. I’d had an old SUV, but had gotten rid of it when the guys gave me the convertible, since my condo had only one parking spot. I realized, in hindsight, that that decision had been shortsighted.

Over the course of the day, when we weren’t talking about the food we were eating or sampling or buying, we talked about all kinds of things. Kate told me about how she was doing in school. She disliked the courses that involved reading and writing, like English and history and geography. She liked learning French, though, and had started taking Italian last year as well - in both cases, because of her love for the food of those two countries. We also talked about what she wanted to do after high school, in more detail than we had on Boxing Day. She knew that there was a good cooking program at a college in Toronto, that would give her some more of the basics but also teach her some of the things she didn’t know how to do, like pastry making and cake decorating and plate presentation. She could cook, incredibly well, most of which seemed to be by instinct and practice, but she was afraid that she didn’t have the skills that would take her to the next level.

As we left the sausage factory, my phone chimed. I had a text from Kim, who wondered if Kate and I would come to their place for dinner. Jake was still out of town, so it would just be her and Taylor. I asked Kate what she thought, and when she said it was fine with her, I texted back and said we’d love to. We drove home, and carried the food upstairs to keep it in the fridge overnight. I picked up the mail from the floor inside the door, and noticed that the credit cards for Jess and Kate had arrived. I stuck them away to give to them when we got back to Oshawa. There was also an envelope for me with my niece as the sender. I tucked that away for later as well.

Then we headed back down to the car again, and drove to Kim’s. The evening was a lot of fun. Kate and Taylor had figured each other out, and realized neither was a threat. Kim had made one of my favourite dinners, her mom’s fish chowder, and had gotten some lovely bread to go with it. We shared a bottle of wine, and Kim poured small glasses for the girls, and we talked about Jake’s new job and the buyout. I asked Kim if she’d list the condo for me, and if she knew of someone who might be able to help me find a place in Oshawa. She agreed to be my agent for the sale when I was ready for that, and she gave me a recommendation of an agent she knew, who she said would help me find what I wanted and not mess with me, especially if I told her that I was a friend of Kim’s. The girls chatted about school and what they’d gotten for Christmas. At the end of the night, Kate got hugs from both Taylor and Kim, and I got hugs and kisses - on the cheek from Taylor, on the lips, as always, from Kim.

As we drove back to my condo, Katie looked at me and said, “I see why you love her. Kim, I mean. She is really special. And I’m sorry I misread your relationship at first.”

I laughed. “It’s ok. Like I said last night, lots of people have done that.”

When we got upstairs, I asked her what she wanted to do. She looked, longingly, at my widescreen TV. “Can I see what’s on? You likely have way more channels than we do. We just have basic cable. Jess says that’s all we need.”

I laughed. “Jess is right. It is all you need. But yes, you can see if you can find anything worth watching. I’m going to go do some work in my study - come and find me if you need anything.”

I lingered long enough to make sure she knew what she was doing with the TV. I shouldn’t have worried. And, wouldn’t you know it, she found the cooking channel. A woman dressed all in white was stuffing a pork roast with cloves of garlic. Food porn. Kate was thrilled.

I went to my desk and started sorting through the mail that had piled up over the few days that I’d been away. Most of it was junk. There were a few Christmas cards, and a couple of bills, though mostly I get those electronically. And they all come directly out of my chequing account in any case.