Disclaimer: All sexual activity described in this story is between fictional characters over the age of 18.
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On Saturday morning, we loaded up the back of the Tahoe, then swung by the Gutierrez house to pick up Marissa at 10 AM. It was a 4 hour drive, but we could not pick up the keys to the house until 3 PM, to allow the cleaning staff time to get in there. Unlike a hotel, they wouldn't be back every day. We planned to stop for lunch around Sacramento, before beginning the uphill ride along Highway 50.
I decided to do the drive, with Mom in the front passenger seat, while Annie and Marissa shared the next seat.
We chatted about mostly inconsequential things, played a couple of road games. I was feeling both excited and nervous about initiating the foursome once we got to the house, but didn't want to bring it up during the drive. I spotted a few kisses exchanged between Marissa and Annie, but nothing that would get us pulled over by CHP.
When I stopped at the rental company office to pick up the keys to the house and exited the Bronco, the air felt chilly, only in the low 50s. Melanie greeted me and said, "There was one small problem in getting the house ready for you to arrive. Apparently, the group which vacated this morning must have been really cold. They kept adding wood to the fire in the fireplace right up to their departure, because the cleaning team found it was still burning strongly when they arrived as their first house of the day. They spread the logs out and smothered the flames with ashes from below them, but the embers continued smoldering before they had to move on to clean the next house. They removed as much ash as they could, but they could not set up your first fire as they normally would have, without it starting to burn. Those logs should be cold by now, if not turned to ash. You might find the house is still pretty warm, though."
I said, "We can deal with that, Melanie. Thanks for the warning, though."
I resumed the drive west out of the town, until I turned onto the side road that leads to several lakefront homes, ours the last among them. When I pulled to a stop in front of ours, I heard Marissa gasp. "You own this?" she managed to say.
"Indirectly, but yeah. I guess you like it?" Annie asked.
"It's magnificent," Marissa gushed. "You kinda made it sound like this square log cabin in the woods. Instead, it's loaded with windows and rooflines and chimneys."
I said, "The chimney closest to you vents the kitchen ovens. The one to the left is for the combination furnace/hot water heater that runs the infloor heating system as well as providing hot water for the showers and sinks. The tall one on the far side of the house is the fireplace in the great room. Let's unload and we can give you the full tour."
Mom had brought enough food for our first three days, with a trip to the local supermarket planned in a day or two. While Mom got that socked away in the refrigerator and cupboards, Annie and I gave Marissa a tour of the rest of the house.
I've always felt that the great room is the highlight of the house, its outer walls all windows, overlooking the deck, the lake and the land between, with the stone chimney dividing them in half, the roof-line meeting it about 15 feet up. A balcony ran along the inner two sides of the room, with the other bedrooms and bathrooms connecting to it, an L-shaped staircase leading up to it in the corner opposite the fireplace, between the entrance to the dining room and the entrance to the master bedroom. The kitchen was between them, separated from the dining room by a bar with stools on both sides, to supplement the big dining table. The view from the balconies were best from either end, nearest the high points of the windows.
The fire in the fireplace was out, the remnants of a few incompletely burned logs apparent. The heat it had produced in the air was still evident, so I did not need to rush to build another, particularly with the supplementation of the in-floor heating that was set to keep the floors at 68 degrees and the air several degrees cooler. Marissa followed us up the stairs, where we briefly showed her the three bedrooms and the two bathrooms up there. I didn't expect we'd be using them, so I closed the bedroom doors, to avoid heating them further. We'd open them up again the day before we left.
We headed downstairs just as Mom came out of the kitchen. "So, which of those bedrooms did you conceive Tyler in, Mom?" Marissa asked. Mom pointed to the one on the right.
I said, "Huh, that's always been my favorite room. I let Annie have the bigger bedroom on the left every year, just so I could stay in it. There used to be a pine tree outside its window where this noisy blue bird made her nest every spring, until it needed to be cut down in 2014, to avoid it falling and hitting the house. She wasn't around two years ago, that I could tell."
Mom asked, "A Steller's jay? Light blue body, dark head with a crest?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
Mom chuckled. "I remember a bird of that breed making a racket out the window while your dad was making love to me in that room. It was warmer than today and we had the window open. I don't think she liked the noises we were making very much. However, I doubt it could have been the same individual bird all those years, since their lifespan is only about a decade. Maybe you remember one of her kids or grandkids, using the same tree to make her nest."
Continuing Marissa's tour, we walked through the sliding glass door in the dining room out onto the deck. Twenty feet wide, it ran along two sides of the house, from the dining room around the great room to the master bedroom, with another sliding glass door there. Opposite each slider and at the corner were steps down into the yard. To the left of the dining room slider was a seating area, with benches built into three sides and an awning overhead. To the right of the master bedroom slider was the hot tub, surrounded by a separate cabana with its own roof. Dominating the center of the deck, where it turned 90 degrees, was the back side of the chimney, rising five feet over the roofline.
Walking down the steps closest to the hot tub to the area between the deck and the lake shore and turning around several times, Marissa exclaimed, "The house is even more gorgeous from this side, combined with the view of the lake and all these trees. No dock or beach, though?"
I answered, "Too rocky here for either swimming or boats." We walked closer to the shore, where I pointed out the numerous rocks just below the water's surface, past the rocks that made up the shore itself, with only a few cresting the waterline. "Why put in a dock, if you can't safely jump off of it into the water or bring a boat in close enough to tie up? Besides, this has almost always been a short-term rental property, where we don't need the added liability for people breaking their necks by trying to dive into the water here. There are public beaches and marinas not far from here, if it warms up enough to swim, which it really only does for a month or two out of the year."