Page 25 of Grape Juice
“Vanilla, ammonium, tinfoil. Like salt and something just heated.”
He kisses me. “Something just heated. That’s you.”
He stretches an arm out so I can roll over onto him, and I rest my cheek against his bicep. He breathes heavily for several beats. “I... definitely feel like a human.” He smiles between labored exhales and cups my chin with his hand.
I trace my fingers along the sides of his abdomen, relishing the quietness of being alone, unclothed, side by side. I catalog the constellation of scratches, bruises, smudges of dirt decorating each of our forms. I hadn’t felt it all before, the violence of rugged earth against raw body—but now, we both have this odd latticework of evidence, some testament to the fact that this act indeed transpired, staged on cold earth.
“How are you?” I ask, whispering so close to his face, I can see individual lashes.
He strokes my hair and breaks eye contact to look up toward the sky. “I feel like this was... correct. I’m sure there will be other things I feel later, anxiety and all that. But right now, this just feels like it’s supposed to feel.”
I smile, nestling my forehead into his arm.
“And how doyoufeel?” he asks, turning back toward me.
“Definitely not like a robot,” I reply with a grin. I feel like a person, I should say. How lovely and inconvenient.
“Good.” His smile is sleepy, sated. Wizened, perhaps. “Shall we get back before they send a search party?”
By now, it’s dark enough to imply we’ve been gone too long. Everyone will be showered and downstairs, buzzing around, slicing bread and setting the table.
We sit up and toss our clothes back on, brushing dirt from each other’s limbs, pointing out the scratch marks and indents mottled into our flesh with glee. He removes twigs from my hair and smooths the mass of it down, turning me around as he does so to ensure that he’s assessed our damage from each possible angle.
“Good?” I ask, and he nods.
“Even better. Quite remarkable, actually. And me?”
“Quite remarkable, actually.”
We walk back, shaking out our garments, and as we near the house, he slings an arm over my shoulder—the most outsized, uppercase gesture he’s dared in front of the others. But in this moment, we aren’t hiding. Not from Antoine, not from each other. It feels good, the largeness of him wrapped around me, the two of us moving as one more tethered thing in this landscape of intertwined vines.
XIII
By the time we return to the house, the masses are humming around the kitchen. “Need some help?” I ask Ruby, who is pitting a mountain of peaches at the counter.
“No, but you can surelypretendto help me.” She bumps me affectionately with her hip, and I pull a knife from the drawer below me. “And where’veyoubeen?” She lowers her gaze and inhales deeply, performatively. “You smell like sex.”
I try to ground the corners of my mouth, project some semblance of nonchalance, but the distinct euphoric bliss of having just fucked a beautiful man in a thicket of pinot noir in rural France—well, that is hard to dilute.
I lose my battle to restrain my glee. A smile widens across my chin, and I wink. Ruby laughs and touches a finger to my nose. “You absolute minx!” she exclaims in a half attempt at whispering. “Where?”
I shrug, flashing her a guilty smirk. “The vines.”
She beams, clapping her hands together enthusiastically. “Cheeky!” This time, she doesn’t feign trying to keep her voice down.
Henri brushes past me to shuck corn with Julian and pulls at my T-shirt gently as he passes. I look at the floor to temper my eagerness, mask my grin—or at the very least, to render it less obvious. But I feel Ruby’s pupils laser-focused on me, and when I gaze up to meet her stare, we both burst out laughing in full-bodied heaves. “You’ll give me proper details later,” she says in my ear and goes back to halving peaches. I stand beside her idly, clutching my still-clean knife like a baton.
At dinner, I feel flayed in a good way. Skinless, exposed to the world. Like I’ve never experienced anything this up close before. We eat white bean salads, corn, enormous vats of coq au vin that Bea has been cooking all day—a row of deep red Le Creuset pots dotting the table like steaming bullet points.
Henri sits beside me and holds my hand under the table, his thumb against my wrist. While we eat, I listen to Pietro wax nostalgic about women’s feet in flip-flops on the beaches in Sicily. Ruby laughs so hard she snorts and spills wine down her front. Hands move across the table like birds, toasting glasses, passing food, gesticulating in maniacal waves. The whole meal is like white Burgundy—tastes like a million dollars bottled right up. Like all the forgivable clichés about decadence and rarity manifest.
Feeling Henri’s pulsing palm against mine, I remembersomething Emma once told me about proper, full-on romantic affection. That at its absolute best, it makes everything else richer and more salient: jobs, friendships, apartments, bowls of cereal. More Technicolor, better seasoned. And on this matter, Emma is an expert: For her, romance is the gasoline that propels life. She once told me that she’d let a crush pull two of her baby teeth out in the third grade, and the absurdity of the thing made me want to know her forever. Now it doesn’t strike me as so ludicrous. I might’ve offered Henri an incisor too if he’d asked.
For dessert: fresh peaches, basil from the garden, vanilla ice cream, Henri’s palm moving in slow circles on the small of my back.
When the time comes to clear plates, Pietro pinches my cheek tenderly. “You look like you’re on party drugs,amore,” he says, then giggles. “Lucky girl.”
Inside, Ruby and I dry the dishes side by side, bubbling over with the buzz of not-yet-shared gossip. When at long last we can excuse ourselves, we leave the stacks of glasses and trays balanced on the countertop, skip upstairs, and sit cross-legged on Ruby’s bed, both of us clutching our respective plastic Nalgene bottles.
