Page 18 of Grape Juice
He takes a step back, raking his gaze over me from the bottom up in a way that doesn’t feel hungry so much as carnal. Then, as if by some silent cue, we set about our task without breaking eye contact—marching around in operatic, hyperbolic strides, doing our best to maintain our balance, giggling all the while. Outside, Julian turns on loud French pop music over a set of speakers, presumably while he and the team rinse buckets and sort the day’s final grapes.
“Ilovethis song!” Henri shouts with a glint of wild, feral amusement. He snaps his fingers, stepping side to side with exaggerated effort, dragging his legs through the bog of fruit. “Come here, New York! Dance with me.”
He extends a hand and I grin, accepting it like a wrapped gift. He pulls me toward him with a firm jerk of the arm, catching me as I topple into him, and we move, side to side, like some underwater mass, one of his hands in mine and the other wrapped around my waist.
I rest my head on his shoulder, my free hand on his chest, and I feel the human pliancy of him as we trudge through the cold bath of fermenting grapes—this material that is not yet wine, just the beginning of the thing.
X
Ruby and I arrive at dinner with wet, perfumed hair, looking not so much clean as reborn. Henri appears in a shirt so pure white, it seems holy. Antoine is distributing tapered candles around the table. The wind is gentle tonight, he explains, and he thinks we might be able to keep a flame or two in business.
“Would you look at that!” he exclaims, having lit the first. “It’s elegant, no?C’est élégante.” I nod, charmed by the absolute innocence of his delight—this childlike glee sprouting from a man shaped like a Roman column.
“Have you brought out the wines yet?” Bea calls out from the kitchen. “Dinner is nearly ready!”
“Ah, yes!” Antoine abandons his wax display to look for Julian, who is nowhere to be found. “Henri it is, then.” He produces a ring of rusted, cartoonishly antiquated keys from his pocket. “Why don’t you pick three magnums from the cellar while I finish up here with the ambience—we’re having lemon pasta, sardines, bread. Something that’ll pair well.”
Henri elbows me emphatically in the side, jingling thekeys, and I can feel his smile even without looking up. The lucent warmth of it. “Come with me,” he says. “Allons-y, let’s go.”
I follow him around to the rear of the house, where he tugs open two iron cellar doors and we descend into the ground. Unlike the clinically clean space where we make the wine, this subterranean tavern gives the impression that no one has so much as considered sanitizing in decades. The place is cobwebbed and filthy, the walls lined with shelves labeled by region on slips of paper in a scrawl that is years past legible. The bottles are so thoroughly cloaked in dust, the whole thing feels like hyperbole for “wine cellar.” I love it, this hard-and-fast evidence of time passed.
Henri pulls the string on one finicky lightbulb that hangs in the center of the ceiling, but it hardly sheds enough light for us to see past the cobwebs directly in front of us. He grabs a flashlight shaped like a tulip from a pile just at the bottom of the stairs and switches it on, spraying a narrow, precise beam across the floor. With his other hand, he reaches behind him and clasps mine, leading me farther into the watery depths of the space.
“OK, what is it that we want?” He casts his light haphazardly across the shelves.
“Citrus for dinner. So something rich and creamy to offset all the acid,” I reply. “We’re eating sharp things. We need something soft. Chablis, probably.”
We weave around, waving the flashlight, blowing dust off of labels like anthropologists.
“Here!” I pull a magnum from a bowling-pin stack, holding the label close so I can read the text. It’s a producer my boss Alec loves dearly—a bottle we opened in the office on his birthday once. “Listen, this is the sort of wine that changed a whole generation,” he’d announced then, taking a dramatic stage sip, extending his pause, looking us each in the eyes, relishing in our anticipation.
Henri steps closer, holding the flashlight at an angle to decipher the label. Then, without warning, he clicks it off. “Henri!” I scold, reaching for him instinctively—grasping at spatial awareness in this container of darkness. He stands stock still, making no moves to flip the switch.
I clutch him, blinking as my eyes adjust reluctantly to the dark. I can see his teeth, his shirt (holy white). His eyes too. His high-wattage gaze set upon mine.
“We lost a lot of therapeutic progress without you in the vines today.” He whispers even though there’s no one else to hear us. “Had to spend all day talking to Julian—and wishing he was you, of course.”
“And how did Julian fare as my stand-in?”
“Doesn’t hold a candle.”
I am painfully aware of my breathing, the sound it makes. I want to mute it, listen to him without dilution.Keep on talking to me, I think.Don’t stop ever.
“I...” He pauses, searching for words. Without meaning to—or perhaps meaning to with the full weight of my body—I kiss him. I expect my heart to race, but when I feel his mouth open to me, it calms. Maybe it’s the quiet mask of darkness, the boyish, just-laundered smell of him.Maybe it’s the fact that some part of me has been holding my breath, waiting for this particular moment, since I first arrived.
He pulls me toward him, spreading his hand across my back, and seals the gap between us. It feels good to have this much surface area in contact. His tongue is warm and slow, graceful like calligraphy. He tastes like brûléed lemon. Like a sour-sweet thing, cooked to coax all that hard, bitter pith into tenderness.
Carefully, he removes the bottle I’m still clutching by its neck and places it gently on the floor. Then he draws me close again. Even less space between us now, and I’m euphoric. His fingers nestle neatly into the curvature of my spine. They climb upward, gently feathering the back of my neck. He squeezes me toward him tighter, and still this version of touching is nowhere near close enough. I reach for the nape of his neck, and we both stumble backward, kicking the bottle over.
It falls with a loud, thunderous clank, and we pause, withdrawing. That unkind, now-recurring pang surfaces—of being found, caught, seen.
I reach for the bottle and run my fingers along its contours, determining that it’s not broken. Gratefully, protectively, I scoop it back into my arms, holding it to my chest, hoping it might conceal or at least calm the dramatic rise and fall, the heaviness of my breathing.
“All good?” he whispers, and I nod.
“What are you thinking about now?” he presses.
Kissing, such an odd phenomenon. Already, Henri and I spend so much of each day directing our mouths at each other, speaking ourselves ever closer to something that sounds like intimacy. Unspooling our biographies and our brain material. And yet the simple fact of our mouths, in contact, means something so large. So substantial.
