Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
ELLIS
It is disturbingly easy to get drunk wine tasting.
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 mouths What 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 available before 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 call smooth or round or wavy because 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?”
She huffs out a frustrated breath. “I guess… Like feeling the sun shining through a window. It’s sunshine and it’s there and it’s warm, but it’s not the same as feeling it on my skin.”
I reach out for the champagne, and she hands it my way. I let the bubbles fizz through me, that mild, refreshing sting. And then I kiss her.
I kiss her because there’s no glass or walls or miles between us right now. Just her and her glowing skin and her full lips that taste like sweet, bright grapes. I kiss her because she’s kind and clever and so pretty it takes my breath away. She’s mine and I’m hers, and all my life’s greatest happiness can be traced back to her, so I kiss her because I want to, and forget the rest.
It starts out frantic, licking wine and groans off each other’s tongues. The champagne bottle thumps against her thigh while I cup her face with my free hand. It quickly turns into something languid. Scratchy sighs and slow tugs. I become hyperaware of all five of my senses. I hear the noises that catch in her throat, hear birds chirping. I feel the softness of her skin and skate my thumb along her jaw. I taste her. Feel myself clench and flex where her hands press into my arms and back. When I pull away, I watch her eyes open, heavy and slow. See it when her pupils contract, irises like brandy here in the bright day. Her smile battles with one corner of her mouth first, before it sprawls out to the other. It’s like watching a sunrise lift across her whole face.
“Let’s go back to the shack,” she says dreamily.
I shake my head. “Picnic,” I say.
She lifts one dark eyebrow at me, and I let myself thumb it. “It’s my birthday,” she reminds me with a sassy tilt of her chin.
“I know it is. That’s why I want to get my hand up your skirt and play with you until you come,” I say. And then I step back and lay out the blanket. “I’ve never done that in a vineyard before.”
Her chest rises unevenly. “You can’t always get your way, you know,” she says, primly lowering herself onto the quilt. She stays propped up on her elbows, and her knees shift beneath her skirt, parting slightly.
“I know, Byrd,” I say, heart drumming hard in my chest. I stretch out beside her and lean onto a forearm, planting a kiss on her bare shoulder. “You said you wanted me mean.”
We both watch my hand slide up her shin, bunching the skirt up with it. I pause when her smooth, tanned kneecap is revealed, and I spot the two-inch scar beside it.
Shortly after she and Sam moved in with me and my siblings, she’d been down on her hands and knees helping Sage with a school project, using an X-Acto knife to cut through poster board for something I can’t even remember. She was cutting toward herself and got a little stuck, pulled too hard, and sliced into her own skin. There’s another faint scar in her hairline from when we were in third grade and I dared her to walk across the top of the monkey bars. There are two more scars on her stomach. One from a cesarean when they cut Sam from her, where I watched her split open and saw a whole life pulled out. Another vertical scar from an emergency laparotomy when she had a ruptured fallopian tube, terminology that was burned into my brain when I was stuck in a cold, clinical room waiting for her to be out of that surgery. So many of her scars are related to me. It’s a struggle to breathe around the emotions billowing in my lungs.
“If this is you being mean, I don’t think I’ll survive it when you’re nice,” Wren says. When our eyes lock, she frowns sharply. “What’s wrong?”
I fight to swallow and shake my head. “I’m just happy you came here with me,” I say, throat tight. Fingertips tracing over the scar on her knee. “I’m just happy I get to be with you again. Right now, I mean. I know it’s not… I know you haven’t decided anything. I just thought I never would.” I also plan to never drink wines again if they make my mood this unstable.
She wraps a hand around my neck and pulls me down to her lips. I let half my weight settle onto her, and I swallow her quiet groan. I go back to tracing patterns on her skin with my fingertips.
“So soft,” I say, then hiss when she palms me through my jeans.
“You’re not,” she says into my mouth.
I tease a path up her thigh, let my knuckles brush across her panties, blood surging through my veins at the heat of her. I slide my palm down her other thigh, massage my way back up and over in a circuit until she’s writhing and panting. Small, bitten-off sounds slip out of her against my chin.
“ Please ,” she says like a curse.
I think I make more noise than she does when I finally touch her. Blazing hot, and “So fucking wet.” Wet and lush and perfect. She curls a fist in my hair and tugs. It’s second nature, knowing what rhythm and pressure she likes. Like whisking, but with your finger , she’d once described it when we were younger. I smile against her neck at the memory. She chases my mouth with hers, and all of it, it’s all coming back to me. I know how she’ll start to circle a little and how she’ll get super quiet just before, like she senses it right in front of her and is concentrating on getting it. She’ll clench her eyes shut until she’s about to tip over, and then there , she opens them and looks right at me with a low hum that I’ll feel vibrate all the way through her.
“Get it, baby,” I say, watching her come apart in bliss. She does, another little anguished sound leaving her in a hot, breathy plea, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
She’s still pulsing against my fingertips when she reaches for my zipper, and I ache so badly I can’t think of any reason to say no. “We’re going to have to steal this blanket,” I say, panting before she’s even freed me from my jeans.
“Not if you come in my mouth,” she says, and I think I black out.
We’ve just wrestled my pants down my hips when the sound of feedback blares over a loudspeaker from somewhere. “ We need Wren and Ellis Byrd up at the main house ,” a voice says. “ Wren and Ellis Byrd ,” it says again, drawing out each syllable. It’s like the time we got called into the principal’s office senior year because we got caught by a teacher making out next to Wren’s locker. “ Class starts in one minute. ”