When I set the bottle down, I turned back and there was Augustus. His black hair was a bit too long, unruly around his face and neck, and he wore a turquoise chef’s blouse that brought out all the reddish notes in his brown skin.
I froze. Every single cell in my body surged toward him, but I stood my ground. “Can I help you?”
He carried a fistful of flowers, blues and pinks and whites, and offered them to me. “I saw you setting up yesterday.”
I pulled my hands behind me, taking a step back. “Not doing this.”
His gaze touched my face, lingered on my mouth, washed over my breasts, thrown into uplift by my posture. I crossed my arms in front, but I could feel the heat in my ears, along my neck.
“I miss you,” he said.
I barked out a bitter little laugh. “Too bad about that pesky wife.”
He looked down, his long black lashes sweeping across cheekbones in a softness that was so childlike and appealing I had to look away. “You know it isn’t a good marriage.”
“I don’t know that, Augustus. Men say whatever they want.”
“Fair enough.” He glanced away, then back, as if to emphasize how straight and therefore honest his gaze was. “It is not a good marriage, I promise you that, but more what I want to say is that I have never felt the way I feel about you. I can’t sleep for missing you.” He settled the flowers on the table between us. “I love you and I think you love me. Life is not always tidy, but we don’t have to suffer in every possible way.”
The words stirred me, I won’t lie. But more I was stirred by the sinews in his exquisitely beautiful hands, by the hollow of his throat and the tiny ruby earring he wore in his left ear. Just standing there, looking at him, I felt weak and lost and acutely lonely. “I’m so mad at you!” I picked up the flowers and flung them at him. They hit his slim belly and fell to the ground.
He picked them up and set them back on the table. “After everything closes, I will have a beer at a little café called Jorge’s, down on State Street. It’s private and quiet, even now. Perhaps we could at least just end it properly. What is it they say?” He gave me that half grin that showed just the smallest flash of white teeth, the glisten of lower lip. “Closure?”
I shook my head. “Just go, Augustus.”
He left behind a fragrant spell that worked its way into my body, spreading like alchemical ink through my veins, staining every molecule with desire. My mind and my body were at war.
My body won. I walked to the bar.
He was waiting, but he had not thought I would come. As I entered, he caught my eye and stood, waiting for me to cross the room, and when I halted in front of him, I saw tears in his eyes. He bent to take my face in his hands and kissed me until both of us were dizzy. We went back to his hotel room and engaged with the bodies we each had so missed. I kissed every inch of his skin, forehead and throat and belly and thighs and the arches of his feet. We fucked like we would die the next day, our skin sweaty and slippery in the hot summer night, and then we licked the salt away, starved for every drop of taste we had missed. He buried his face in my neck, his hands hard on my back. “I can’t bear to lose you again,” he murmured. “I have been out of my mind.”
That very night, I started my campaign, realizing I had one thing on my side: I could be hard to get. “You’re going to have to leave Shanti,” I said. “I love you, but it’s wrong for us to be together like this.”
He slid over me again, kissing me, his hands in my hair. “I will leave her. Just give me some time.”
Chapter Twenty
Maya
As I leave Meadow and Kara at Peaches and Pork, I feel splintery. The smell of the booze in the bar gave me a sense of despair, maybe some PTSD over the wine barrels I split open like I was Paul Bunyan. Now that I’m sober, I can objectively see how wasteful and foolish it was to destroy that vintage. It cost me a fortune. Everything, really. I lost the winery and the house on the land, and it was still not really enough to balance out the damages, the loans we’d carried trying to get to that tipping point, the prestige the label lost.
So much damage from one act of fury. Now Josh has the land and the winery, and I have only what my father left me.
For the first time, it crosses my mind that his death gave me an escape. Where would I have gone, what would I have, if he hadn’t left me the house and the restaurant?
How could I have shattered my whole life like that?
Out in the sunshine, I pause and take a few breaths, letting the feelings rise and bring whatever they want to bring. I see myself on hundreds—thousands—of nights in bars across the world, a quiet, devoted drinker imbibing the best wine the bar had. I told myself I wasn’t a drunk because if the wine was terrible, I didn’t drink it. I never started on bottles of vodka or shots of tequila. I loved a good craft beer, but it was always wine that called me. Good wine.