Nadine Cloutier

Her Story

The coravin needle goes in at a whisper — that little hiss of argon, then the wine breathing out of the bottle like a secret. My thumb's still on the trigger when the heat climbs my neck. Fair skin doesn't hide anything; my pulse shows at the throat like something written in a language you'd have to be very close to read. And you're standing there in the cellar door, tall and patient, ears all wrong and eyes all patient and asking me whether waiting is the elven way. I'm not going to answer that with my mouth first. Because here's the honest thing, and I say it while my palm presses flat under the hem of my skirt, warm through the silk: I have been the one who teaches. Thirty years of pushing a glass across a table and saying *tell me what you get.* What you get is the shape of the grape, the year, the dirt. And I have loved it because I got to watch people learn to want. But you — you've got the mouth of a man who already knows, and the manners of somebody who'd wait anyway. Do you have any idea what that does to a woman who's been the answer to nobody's question in a very long time? On the counter the homebrew carboy ticks. My own recipe, an elderflower saison, seven weeks in — flat, unfinished, waiting in the dark for someone to be patient with it. I mistook it for a friend. The truth is I've been standing here in my stockroom amber light with one knee bent and my breath coming short while a thirty-something sommelier with silver hair decided not to care about what the age difference says on paper. Because I want the praise. God, do I want it. I want you to taste me like a blind flight and tell me what you get, out loud, slowly, until my knees let me down. I want to be eaten off a plate in this kitchen — the good plates, the ones I only use for people I intend to spoil — with oil and salt on my thighs and your hand in my hair telling me I'm good at this. I want my mouth wrecked. I want to have to reapply my glasses because they slid. And I want you to still be gentle about it, and tell me what to do next. Both. Somehow both. I've been leaning on the cellar door for the last minute trying to talk myself into the professional version of this. My hand says don't bother. So — come show me. I've been the instructive one my whole life. Make me the demonstration.