“You have a podcast voice and unresolved brand strategy.”
Naomi laughed, and even Marieke lost the battle with her mouth.
The group spread out, reading labels and peering into cases. I moved toward the far wall, where a row of older bottles rested behind glass, their labels cream-colored and slightly uneven at the edges.
Nick stepped in behind the group.
The room became smaller.
He didn't come straight to me. He spoke briefly with Marieke near the door, checked the small window set high in the wall, then moved to my side when the others drifted toward a display of auction bottles.
Not close enough to touch.
Close enough for my skin to remember.
“Still with me?” he asked.
I kept my eyes on a bottle marked with a year that had meant nothing to me until I started counting how long a person could keep something sealed and still call it preserved.
“Physically, yes.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
The quiet around us changed.
A laugh broke from the other end of the cellar, Graham’s voice carrying through the cool stone room. Someone opened the outer door, and a blade of terrace light cut across the floor before disappearing again.
Nick waited.
The man could outwait stone.
I turned my head. “You’ve made up your mind.”
His eyes stayed on mine. “Yes.”
He said it like a man who had already done the hard part in private.
My pulse moved once, hard.
“About me?” I asked.
His gaze dropped to my mouth for less than a second. When it returned, the answer was already there.
“About us.”
Us.
A short, ordinary word with catastrophic implications.
I looked back at the bottles because glass and cork suddenly seemed more stable than my own body. “That’s a confident position for a man with incomplete information.”
“I know enough.”
“You don’t know what happens when I leave.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what I can offer.”
