He could ask me for anything, and I’d say yes. But as I follow him back to the couch, he gestures to the wine bottles and glasses. “I have to test these and pick a couple for next week’s specials. With tasting notes. Which is, like, the worst part of my job.”
“Free booze is the worst part of your job?”
“Hey, I know it’s a first-world problem, but I never know what to say about this shit. Wine is wine.”
“Why the fuck are you managing a wine bar, then?”
“Same reason you’re not a surfer anymore, I guess. Without the bitchtastic wife.”
Unless he has scars to match mine, he can’t mean literally. Once again, I find myself leaning toward him, waiting for more, but it doesn’t come, and it feels like the end of the world. Or maybe I’m just tired. And fucking greedy. After all, I’m holed up in a warm, comfortable apartment with a hot dude who wants to drink wine with me. What more could I want?
I take my place on the couch. Tanner sits next to me. His knee brushes mine and he makes a sound I think I imagine—Idoimagine, unless he felt the jolt of electricity too, and his face is too impassive for that.
He opens the nearest bottle of wine and empties it into the two glasses he set on the table a while ago.
I eye the bottle with trepidation. “I don’t know jack about wine.”
“Neither do I, really. Only what I’ve learned the last few months.”
“That’s how long you’ve managed the bar?”
“Yup.”
He hasn’t worked for Jerry since the end of last summer. I want to ask him what he did in between, but I don’t. I told him my shit because I wanted to, not because I want him to owe me the same. Also, Tanner often seems tense, but he’s pretty chill right now. I don’t want to trash his mood.
I take the glass of straw-colored wine he hands me. It tastes how it looks—like wine. I drink some more, but nothing changes, so I drain the glass and set it back on the table.
Tanner does the same.
“Aren’t we supposed to spit it out like they do on TV shows?”
He thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “Fuck it. Let’s get drunk.”
Chapter Five
Tanner
“Fuck it. Let’s get drunk.”
It’s crazy talk, but I don’t regret it. Jax is a fun drunk. The measured way he speaks—which I understand more than I want to now—fades, and he’s funny and weird and kind, and everything I need in my life on a night I’d otherwise have spent alone.
We drink all the wine. Jax tells me what he thinks of each one, but I forget to write it down, because I don’t give a fuck.
Actually, that’s not true. I do give a fuck because I’m committed to the people who scraped me from the floor and gave me a job. But I don’t care about grapes and fragrance and fruit right now. I just want to listen to Jax’s melodic, gentle voice, and lose myself in his boyish grin.
So I jog downstairs and gather up more wine samples I haven’t gotten around to tasting and take them back to my living room.
Jax laughs as I dump them onto the table. “Man, I don’t know how I’m gonna do with all this. I haven’t got pissed on wine in years.”
I like how he speaks, and I have no trouble understanding him, even when he says things that are upside down to my American ears. I guess that’s what happens when you study someone’s face so much, and the set of their shoulders, and the way they move their hands.
Language is more than words.
I line up bottles on the table. “Pick one. I’m gonna get more food.”
In the kitchen, I find a bag of Cheetos and upend it into a bowl. It’s all I’ve got that doesn’t involve trashing the kitchen Jax has just put back together for me. I carry them back to the living room.
Jax is still studying the wine bottles. I want to tell him that I couldn’t care less which one he goes with, but I don’t. I sit on the floor and wait.
