“Are you sure you don’t mind watching something you’ve seen so many times before?” Sasha asks, the third time that I mouth along to a well-known line or laugh at a joke before it’s even fully out of the character’s mouth.
“No, definitely not,” I assure her, finishing my glass of wine. “I love watching movies that I know and someone else doesn’t. It’s like getting to experience it for the first time all over again. It’s thrilling, really. As long as you’re enjoying it.”
“I love it! I think it’s hilarious. I just wanted to make sure you were too–” Sasha trails off, her teeth sinking into her lower lip again just before she finishes the last of her food. “You don’t have to–”
She breaks off again, and I think I know what she was going to say. I always feel that way with her, as if I could finish her sentences, as if I know what she’s thinking just by looking at her.
“I’m not here, in this room with you, because I feel like Ihaveto be,” I tell her gently. “I’m here because I want to be here. My day is brighter when you’re a part of it, Sasha. It’s always been that way.”
I hear the slight catch of her breath in her throat.
“Then why–” she swallows hard. “Never mind, I already know the answer to that.”
The movie is still playing in the background, but neither of us is listening to it any longer. All I can see is her.
Her beautiful, delicate face that I never get tired of looking at.
Her rose-petal lips that I can so easily remember what they felt like pressed against mine–against every part of me.
Her soft hair that trailed through my hands, over my face, and my chest, just as it had in my dreams.
I ache, looking at her. I acheforher, and I want to kiss her so badly at that moment that it feels like a physical pain. I can feel myself on the verge of reaching for her, and if I do, I know I won’t stop. We’ll end up in a tangle of bodies on this couch, like teenagers in the world’s most luxurious den, and I won’t be able to hold back.
“I’m going to–” I clear my throat, standing up to take our plates. “I’ll go get the wine.”
“Okay,” Sasha says softly. I can hear the note of disappointment in her voice, and it lets me know all over again that she can read me as easily as I can her, that she knew what I was thinking.
There’s never a moment that I don’t feel as if she and I are two parts of the same whole.
Knowing that I can’t have her makes that feel like the cruelest joke.
8
SASHA
Except for the fact that it’s not a date, that there’s no chance of Max kissing me at the end of the night, and that every other day like today and night like this one will be another not-date, tonight is perfect. From the sneaking to the movie room like guilty children, to the movie and dinner, to the bottles of wine that Max brings back shortly after the tense moment between us and smoothly uncorks, it feels like a dream.
The only difference is that if it were a dream, Max would have kissed me before he left. He might still be kissing me now, instead of decanting bottles of wine. Every moment between us feels charged with that need, and I have to breathe in deeply, reminding myself of what he’d said on the plane.
Those words had hurt, but I couldn’t accuse him of not having been clear.
Max holds out a glass to me, the movie forgotten in the background, just noise now. “Try this one first,” he says. “We’ll start with dry and go to sweeter.”
I sniff it, breathing in the scent. I actually really like wine, and I feel a flutter of excitement at the idea of trying something made from the same grapes that I went out to see today, the same vineyard that I might get to help Max harvest in a couple of months. It feels intimate and cozy, and I try not to let my imagination run away with me as I take the first sip–try not to think of Max and me here together, running the vineyard and the wine business together.
“Oh–that’s very dry.” I cough a little, blinking. “Probably too dry for me.”
Max laughs, taking a sip of his own and nodding in agreement with a wry twist of his mouth. “I actually prefer a dry wine, but that–that’s too much.” He sets it aside, reaching for another glass. “How about this?”
I breathe in the scent of it again and take a small sip, and then another. “Much better.”
I’m not sure how long we sit there like that, tasting wines, laughing as we compare what we like and don’t like, trading glasses back and forth. Neither of us notices when the movie ends or gets up to change it to something else. There’s never an awkward moment of silence, never a time when we look at each other and wonder what to say or do next.
With Max, as always, it feels effortlessly easy.
—-
The next morning, I wake up with a slight hangover and a determination to find something to do around the estate myself that doesn’t involve Max–for my own sanity. I eat breakfast quickly, excusing myself back upstairs to unpack my things. The suitcase has been lying half-open, the clothes I’ve fished out of it tumbling out onto the chair it’s perched on, and I feel guilty for leaving it that way in the otherwise pristine room.