"Walk?" I asked.
He grabbed his cigarettes and met me at the back door.
The vineyard started at the back wall of the property and ran in neat rows down the slope toward the river. My father had planted the first vines when I was small, and they'd gone wild in the years the family spent away. We'd pruned them back, re-staked the trellises, and the grapes came in thick and dark for the first time in over a decade.
Jasper lit a cigarette and followed me between the rows. The sun had dropped behind the western ridge, leaving the skystreaked orange and purple. The vines came up to our shoulders, heavy with fruit, and the air smelled like warm earth and the green bite of unripe grapes.
"Papá used to walk these rows every evening," I said. "Right around this time. He'd check the leaves, test the soil. He said you could tell everything about a vine's health from the color of the leaves at sunset."
Jasper smoked and walked beside me, keeping pace while I talked.
"He'd be proud of you," Jasper said.
I stopped walking. He stood in my father's vineyard with a cigarette between his fingers and the last of the daylight on his face. The vines moved in the breeze, and the sky kept bleeding color, and I stood there with my father's dirt under my boots, and I couldn't speak because if I opened my mouth, what came out was going to wreck me.
"Yeah," I said when I could. "I think he would."
We walked the rest of the rows in quiet, checking the vines the way my father taught me. Jasper asked about the color of the leaves and the weight of the clusters and whether the birds had gotten to the south end again. He'd learned the questions over months of walking these rows with me. He'd never be a farmer. But he asked anyway every evening, and he remembered the answers.
By the time we got back to the house, the light in the living room was off. Mamá had taken Mila to bed. The kitchen was clean, the porch light on, the house quiet the way it only got after everyone had settled in.
Jasper caught my wrist in the hallway.
"I have something for you," he said.
"Yeah?"
"In the bedroom."
I raised an eyebrow. "Romantic."
"Practical."
He steered me through the door, closed it behind us, and crossed to his side of the bed where he opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a matte black case, sleek, about the length of his forearm.
"Happy anniversary," he said.
"Our anniversary was two weeks ago."
"It was on back order." He held it out. "Custom job."
I opened the case. Inside, nestled in black foam like it had its own security detail, lay a vibrator. Matte black with a subtle curve, a ridged shaft that looked like it had opinions about what it was going to do once it got inside me, and a control panel flush with the base that I already knew he wouldn't let me touch.
I looked at Jasper. He'd already settled into the chair by the window, legs crossed, pulling his cigarette pack from his pocket. He shook one out, lit it, and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. The lamp beside him threw warm light across his face. He looked like a man about to run an operation, which, knowing Jasper, he absolutely was.
"Custom," I said.
"Mm."
"You had a vibrator custom made."
"I did research." He took a drag. "Extensive research." He held up his phone, screen tilted so I could see the app, which had a sleek interface with sliders and pattern curves. "I control the speed. The pattern. The rotation. The thrust depth." He scrolled through something. "There are fourteen modes."
"Fourteen." Of course there were fourteen. The man had made spreadsheets for my mother's tile choices. I should have known he'd bring the same energy to taking me apart.
"I narrowed it down to six." He looked at me over the phone. "Take your clothes off."
I pulled my shirt over my head. He tracked the movement from his chair, a cigarette between his fingers, eyes steady. I kicked off my jeans and boxers and stood there, letting him look. He swept his gaze down my body and then back up, slowly, the way he surveyed a room before deciding how to take it apart. Except the room was me. And I was going to let him.
