Page 54 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Give me your word,” Dante says, and the words are soft, not flexible. “If you taste the wrong ghost, you stop.”
“I stop,” I say.
“And I hold you upright,” he adds.
“You always did,” I say, and something in his throat moves that has nothing to do with anger.
Gabriella appears in the doorway like the room summoned her. She carries a clean bread plate, a porcelain tasting spoon, a heel of country loaf, a shallow dish of new oil, and a small linen napkin folded square as a truth. Her eyes find mine and she nods once. We’ve run kitchens that would rather lie than tell us what they needed. She knows this language.
We set the station on an empty shelf—plate, spoon, bread, oil. Harrison pulls a bucket into the corner, just in case I don’t like the way the world tastes. Dante stands at my shoulder, close enough that his breath moves my hair, far enough that he’s not a hand on the scale.
“Corks first,” I say, and Harrison leans in with the utility knife again, shaving a scrap-thin curl of wax off the first top. I twist the cork with two fingers so the top edge sweeps a blush of wine onto itself. I dab the porcelain spoon, only the hint of red, less than a raindrop. I touch my tongue to it, just the tip, the way you test milk on a newborn’s skin. I let the taste rise. I spit into the napkin. Bread. Oil. Breathe.
Dried cherry. Cocoa. A little balsamic memory. No shadow. Good wine doing what good wine does.
“One,” I say.
We move to the next. Shave. Twist. Dab. Touch. Spit. Bread. Oil. Breathe.
Dark plum. Candied orange peel. A sweet that doesn’t lie. No metal ghost.
“Two.”
By the third, sweat has gathered at my neck. Not from fear, exactly, but from the way every nerve stands and listens.
“Three,” I say. Figs. Black tea. A note like tobacco under rain. Clean.
“Four,” I say. And then I stop saying anything for a second, because a thin note rides the sugar—bitter almond blown through a tin straw. It isn’t loud. It is definite. It doesn’t care if you believe it. It knows it will win if you don’t.
“Serena?” Dante’s voice is a line he throws me.
I spit hard, even though I only gave the tip of my tongue a kiss. Bread. Oil. I press the bread to the roof of my mouth until it hurts. The world steadies. The ghost lingers, thin and smug.
“Four is wrong,” I say, and the room goes so quiet that I hear the hum in the fluorescent light over the flour bins three rooms away. “Almond. Tin. The whisper we smelled in the vineyard. The touch on the air that makes your neck remember you’re alive.”
Luca swears, low and vicious, like he’s offering to hold the coat of the man I’m about to beat. Harrison has already pulled the bottle out of the case with a towel at its belly and set it aside on the floor like a bomb that wants to be a bottle. He tags the neck with tape, writes a clean 4 in block numbers.
“Keep going,” Dante says, not to rush me, but to burn time the way you burn brush before a fire chooses it.
Five is clean. Six has a soft crack under the sweetness—like the poison thought about living there and then went somewhere else.
“Six,” I say, “is clean, but its cork was near the wrong friends.”
Harrison tags five as good, six as good. He lines them away from four like we’re making islands. He lifts the next case’s slat and I keep going.
Seven is fine. Eight fine. Nine fine. Ten… my tongue hesitates before my head knows why, and there it is again. Almond, less tin, more ghost. A fainter hand. A drop that kissed the cork and didn’t sink, hoping the pour would carry it.
“Ten,” I say.
Harrison’s hands move faster now, careful in a way that is not delicate. He tags it. Eleven is clean. Twelve is clean. I rest a second, not because my mouth needs it, but because my head does. Dante’s hand finds the back of my neck, not to steer, just to say this is my house and I am not letting it take you.
“We have two dirty and two dozen clean,” Harrison says when I’m done with the full pulled six and a random sample of the rest. “Whoever did this didn’t salt the whole ocean. They salted two wells.”
“For the head table,” Luca says. “For the toast.”
“For the patriarch,” I say, throat tight with anger I’ve been saving for men who call what they do strategy when it’s just fear with better shoes. “For the one seat that makes the rest stand.”
Dante’s gaze cuts to me. “You’re sure?”
