‘Fiona, look at me.’
‘No,’ she moaned. ‘I’m just going to sink into the floor and sneak out later when you’re not looking. Don’t mind me.’
‘Come on. Look at me. Please.’
She dropped her hands slightly, fingers digging into her cheekbones just beneath her eyes.
‘You’re beautiful.’ I felt like I was standing on the lip of a volcano. Everything was burning, and I was on the edge, about to fall in. ‘And you’re lovely. Anyone would be lucky to be with you. Especially men, but also vibrators. They’d be so lucky.’
That drew a laugh from her, muffled in her palms. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For not throwing me out all the times my mouth gets ahead of my brain.’
My mouth did not get ahead of my brain. I thought about it before I said it. I was on the very edge of the volcano’s crater, and the ground was shaky beneath me, but I probably had just enough strength left to step back from the brink.
But then she dropped her hands, and she smiled at me, and it was like sparkling wine in my veins, and I lost control of my footing.
‘We’re friends, right?’ I asked.
‘Of course we are.’
‘You deserve pleasure, Fiona,’ I said. ‘And if you need someone to give it to you, I’m here.’
Chapter ThreeFiona
Tasting today: 2021 albariño, Rías Baixas, Spain.
A day at the beach in a glass: bright sun and sea-spray, until the inevitable bitterness of getting burned.
I had a problem with getting ahead of myself.
It had been worse since Matt left, fantasising turning to catastrophising, but I’d been this way my entire life, forever skipping to the end of the story while everyone else was still at the beginning. Age five, I’d spotted another girl with the same colour ribbons in her pigtails as me, and I’d decided we were going to be best friends before she’d even told me her name was Kaitlyn. Age thirteen, I’d failed one history test and immediately concluded that I was eternally destined to be the black sheep of my academic family. Age twenty-two, a man I’d been sleeping with for nine months asked me to marry him, and I’d jumped straight to happily ever after without asking a single question.
Age thirty-four, I had a graphic sex dream about the nice boy from the bar a few days after seeing him passionately making out his boyfriend in the alley, and my mind had skipped forward like a rock over water to a future where I got all in my head about it and made things between usextremelyweird.
That was the last thing I wanted. I had come to truly value our friendship, and he’d been so, so wonderfully supportive helping Lex navigate coming out. So in the interests of preventing that future from coming to pass, I’d boxed the dream up and put it away. It wasn’t that deep, I told myself, burying it in the dark recesses of my mind: just a combination of misfiring synapses and Matt being gone for work more than usual. It wasn’t the first random sex dream I’d ever had about someone inappropriate, and it wouldn’t be the last. It didn’tmeananything.
But then the words,You deserve pleasure, Fiona, and if you need someone to give it to you, I’m herecame out of Satoshi’s mouth, and that box I’d hidden exploded open.
It felt like I’d been hit with a computer virus that had suddenly flooded my system with pornography, all the thoughts I hadn’t let myself think happening to me all at once. Satoshi’s lips on mine. Satoshi’s body against mine. Satoshi’s hands on me, those deft, capable, strong fingers currently curled around the stem of his wineglass caressing me gently before gripping me tight, and—
Wine. Wine was supposed to be about pleasure. He was talking about giving me wine, not an orgasm.
‘You already give me plenty of pleasure.’ I raised my glass to him, trying my best not to let my face turn tell-tale red.
‘I’m not talking about the wine.’
… oh.
‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,’ Satoshi said. ‘Tell me no, and I’ll never raise this subject again. But I mean it, Fiona. You deserve to feel good. Let me give that to you.’
I seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
For a long moment, we sat there, looking at each other across his desk. My heart was racing so fast that I wouldn’t be surprised if he could hear it. My scalp was tingling, but not in the icy wayit had earlier, sitting across from Matt in the mediation meeting. It felt charged, like all my hair might stand on end. Electric.
I couldn’t speak. I’d forgotten how to do that too.
But Satoshi was looking at me, nothing but kindness and a question in his eyes, and I – sad, lonely, touch-starved Fiona, who maybe hadn’t buried that dream quite as deep as she should have – was nodding.
The corners of his mouth curved upwards, cheeks dimpling. ‘All right, then.’
