She put a hand on her heart. ‘Good. Because if you ever decide to ban me from drinking Bibliophile, I don’t know what I’d do.’
‘I would never,’ Isamu replied, at the same time as I said, ‘I wouldn’t let him.’
Fiona chuckled. Isamu gave me a long, inscrutable look before rapping his knuckles on the bar. ‘I’m heading out, Sato. I haven’t decided whether to go back to the vineyard tonight after dinner. If I don’t, I might crash on your couch.’
Fuck. That would put a cramp in my study plans. ‘No problem. Yquem will be delighted to spend some time with her uncle.’
He grunted. ‘Nice to see you, Fiona.’
‘You too, Isamu.’
Once he’d gone, Fiona turned to me. ‘Can I ask an impertinent question?’
‘Is it “Why is your brother always so rude about your precious angel of a cat, Satoshi?” Because I’d like to know that too.’
She laughed. ‘No.’
She slid her mostly full glass of wine across the bar. ‘Will you pour me something else? I don’t want to waste wine, but this one isn’t for me. Isamu doesn’t get my palate like you do.’
Had I just spent a year thinking I was in love with her? I was wrong.NowI was in love with her. ‘I think I can manage that.’
I sniffed the wine that Isamu had poured for her. It was an off-dry riesling – a sweeter style of wine that had its devotees, but Fiona was not among them. ‘Is there a particular vibe you’re feeling today?’
She twined a lock of hair around her finger, an image that was definitely going to replay like a GIF in my mind later. ‘Something fun. Light-hearted. It’s been a fuckingday, and I just want something that will cheer me up.’
‘Fun and light-hearted. I can work with that.’
I regarded my wine fridges for a moment before I selected a bottle. ‘Let me introduce you,’ I said, taking two glasses down from the overhead rack, ‘to my good friend arneis.’
I took my wine knife out of my pocket, opened the bottle, smelled the cork, poured a splash into one glass, tasted it quickly to make sure it wasn’t faulty, then poured a tasting measure into the other glass and set it in front of her. ‘Tell me if you like this, or if you’d prefer something else.’
Fiona inhaled the bouquet. ‘Oh yes, this is much more my vibe. There’s pear, apple… maybe a bit of hazelnut? It’s nowhere near as sweet as the other one, but it reminds me of a fruit crumble.’
‘Exactly.’ She was so on the nose she might as well have been reading out of one of my textbooks.
She tasted it. ‘Oh,yes.’
One of the thoughts I usually prohibited myself from thinking slipped through the barricade. Fiona’s ankles locked at the small of my back, her arms wound around my neck, her voice breathy in my ear.Oh, yes.
I forced it away as I filled her glass. ‘Arneis is a difficult grape to work with. It’s a mischievous grape. A trickster grape. The name literally meanslittle rascal. If you leave it on the vine even a day or two too long, it’ll lose all its acidity and you’ll have the most boring wine in the world. But if you get it right, then it’s magical.’
Fiona closed her eyes, but she didn’t pick up her glass again. Instead, she took a long breath, in and out, shoulders relaxing on the exhale.
‘Today’s been a lot, Satoshi,’ she said. ‘Like,a lot. And this is the first thing that has made me feel even a little bit better.’
‘Wine will do that.’
‘Oh, come on.’ She opened her eyes. ‘You know I’m not just talking about the wine.’
I didn’t know whether I wanted to thank or murder the customer who chose that moment to come through the door, just like I didn’t know whether Fiona’s words had delighted or tortured me. ‘Excuse me.’
‘Go, go.’ She saluted me with her glass, still smiling. ‘For once, I’ve got time.’
One year ago, I’d walked Fiona home at four-thirty in the morning. The pre-dawn air was cold and the streets were quiet, the only sound the fall of our feet against the pavement. She had her arms wrapped around herself, fingers clutching at her elbows, shivering, although I’d insisted she wear both her coat and mine.
This is me, she said.
There were some big, expensive houses in Bellerive, and given Matt’s finance bro money, I’d assumed they lived in one of them. Fiona’s home, though, was a modest brick number, a little table and two chairs on the porch, an abandoned hose snaking through a slightly overgrown front garden.
