Page 54 of Left of Forever

A little more than an hour after Emilia sits us at a table on the covered patio overlooking the vineyard and the big house in the distance, I’m good and buzzed.

“It’s the tiny sips that get you,” Wren muses. “Especially when they’re tasty and you wanna toss ’em back.” She demonstrates.

“Is that it? I keep downing the ones I don’t like to get it over with quicker,” I say, snorting a laugh into my glass.

Other patrons have slowly joined us over time, too. A few families mill around on the hillside lawn area that slopes down to the edge of the vines. Mostly, it’s other couples at nearby tables on the deck, and one in particular that I think is fueling our consumption.

“—on the nose, pear, with crushed rock, fresh grass, lychee, and honeydew,” the man says. Some people look more like animals than people to me, and I swear to god this one’s a ferret.

I might be approaching drunk.

I catch Wren’s eyes, and she mouthsWhat the fuck?with a nod in his direction. I shrug. Beats me.

“On the palate, it shows vibrant flavors of tropical fruit and citrus. Really a remarkably bright finish,” he adds. Should we applaud? His partner merely hums her agreement.

He pours his next glass and sniffs loudly into it before he swirls it, tips it back, and swishes it around his yapper like snooty Listerine. Right down to how he spits it back into a metal canister.

“Lovely perfume of Daphne. Freshly sliced apples—”

“I bet they were days old,” I mutter out the side of my mouth to Wren. “Old, wormy, NON-sliced apples.”

“—and Anjou pears. Finishes with jasmine tea and a drop of honeysuckle. Definitely a Burgundian aging technique. SUCH a velvety mouthfeel.”

“I’ll give you a velvety mouthfeel,” says Wren into my ear. I give her my best scowl over my sunglasses. This evil woman cannot make me get hard while listening to Ferret Face. Her full lips slip into a grin, and I hook my foot around her chair to haul her a few inches closer.

Ferret moves on to the next wine. “For fuck’s sake, do you think he’s training for something?” Wren whispers. The light puff of it against the shell of my ear sends chills up my arms.

“—a touch of pine and forest floor,” I hear Ferret say. Wren mouths,FOREST FLOOR??And I laugh silently. “That complex oak just explodes on the tongue, doesn’t it?”

Wren bursts into a fit of giggles, and I choke on my water. “Yeah, we gotta get out of here,” I manage.

We grab a bottle of her favorite thing we tried—the champagne—plus one of their to-go platters with meats, cheeses, and nuts, and a borrowed picnic blanket that they have availablebefore we head for the vineyard. I pop the bottle open and pass it to her when we’re a safe distance into the maze. She takes a hearty sip, licks her lips, and says, “Mmmm. I’m detecting notes of grape.” Which surprises a shout of laughter out of me.

She halts and I look down at her to find her expression serious. “I missed that,” she says quietly, almost like it upsets her to acknowledge it. “I missed making you laugh like that.”

Probably it’s all the tiny sips of wines, but a variety of different feelings are making me feel drunk on them, too. She’s the same woman I’ve always known. Same big, glittering eyes. Same wide, full mouth. Sharp jaw, smooth neck, wild, rioting curls I couldn’t callsmoothorroundorwavybecause they’re all of it. But I’m disoriented looking at her now, nonetheless. I feel fucking stricken.

“I missed it, too,” I say, voice ragged. I’d said it to her last night, too, but I also realize she was topless at the time and maybe she thought I only missed her half naked, specifically.

“What’re you thinking about?” she asks, intrigued by whatever my face is doing.

“You, naked,” I admit. To her flattened look, I add, “And how I missed making you feel anything. Turning you on, making you happy. Even missed annoying you.” A new flavor on the palate—Ferret would be impressed—but there’s an undercurrent of something bitter I can still detect, too. Like some small, pathetic part of me realizes how much power she has over me. How much she owns me. I’ve known I belonged to her since I was six, in one way or another, no matter the years I resisted it beyond being friends. I’ve never felt like I deserved her back.

The rest of me is a brute that wants to take and push and claim again.

I pull the plastic water bottle out of my back pocket and chug it. My pickled brain has no business getting this complex.

She chews over what she wants to say and continues walking, the ground crunching quietly under her boots. We’ve gone far enough that we’re tucked between two tall hills striped in rows of vines, only the tops of the surrounding buildings visible. “Strange that it doesn’t feel like it’s been five years,” she says, taking a pull from the champagne bottle.

I hitch the blanket higher on my shoulder and snort. “It felt longer,” I say sullenly.

“Were you happy?” she asks. “I mean, like, did you get to a place where you were okay? Where you were able to feel happiness?”

I choose my words carefully. “I think so, yeah. I’m not naturally exuberant or anything to begin with, but… In comparison to those last years, once I got out of the thick of it after the divorce, I felt lighter again, I guess. What about you?”

“Yeah,” she says tightly. “I felt happiness. It was just different.”

“How?”