A Cork-Breaking Surrender

Cate stood in the middle of the rented apartment in Alfama, barefoot on the cool tile, watching her best friend hold up a length of red silk rope like he was presenting evidence in court. Outside the open window, a tram rattled up a hill she could not see, and somewhere below a woman was singing fado in a voice that made the whole city sound older than it was.

"So," Cooper said, and he wiggled the rope a little, "you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes," Cate said, and she said it fast, before the sensible part of her brain, the part that paired wines for a living and never sent a bottle back until it had checked it twice, could catch up and start second-guessing her. "Yes, I'm sure. Stop asking!"

"Okay. Good." He set the rope on the kitchen counter, coiled and neat, because of course he was the kind of person who coiled rope neatly. "Then we go slow, and you can stop any time, and I mean any time, for any reason, even a dumb reason."

"I know. You've said it four times."

"Five, actually," he said, "but who's counting," and then he grinned at her, and she had to look away and pretend to be very interested in the balcony railing, because that grin was the whole problem, had been the whole problem for seven years now.

Here is how she got here. Cate was twenty-five, a sommelier at a restaurant back in Chicago that she would not name on the internet because her boss read everything, and this trip was her first real vacation alone, booked in February on a whim after a bad week. Wine tour Monday, wine tour Tuesday, market Thursday, a notebook full of tasting notes in handwriting nobody else could read. That was the itinerary. That was the plan.

The plan lasted until Tuesday night, which was the night she had called Cooper at two in the morning Lisbon time, which was still a civilized hour in Chicago, and after twenty minutes of gossip he had asked her, casually, the way he asked everything, what was on her list of things she had never tried. And she had been three glasses of Vinho Verde into the evening and honest to a fault, and she had told him. All of it. The stuff she had only read about, the surrendering, the being told what to do, the whole architecture of it that she had never once let anyone build with her because she was, professionally and personally, the person in the room with the answers.

Cooper had gone quiet on the line for a second, and then he had said, "Well. You know I actually do this. Like, for real, with people who trust me." And Cate had said, "I know," and then her mouth, operating independently again, had said, "My apartment has a guest room," and Cooper had said, "Book me a flight," and that, apparently, was that.

They had been friends since college orientation, when they were both eighteen and standing in the wrong line together, and they had been flirting in the safe, deniable way friends flirt ever since, for seven years, without once acting on it, because acting on it would have cost something and neither of them had wanted to pay. Now he was twenty-five and she was twenty-five and they were standing in a rented apartment overlooking the Tagus, and the rope was on the counter, and the cost was already paid, so to speak.

"Okay." Cooper picked the rope back up. "Safeword. It has to be a word you'd never say in a scene by accident. Something boring."

"Porto."

He laughed. "Porto?"

"Everyone from Lisbon hates Porto. It's the one thing I've learned this week. If I say Porto, everything stops."

"Porto it is." He held out his hand. "Shake on it."

She shook on it, which felt ridiculous and formal and exactly right, and then he said, "Now. Kneel for me, on the tile, right there where the light comes in," and Cate's stomach did something complicated, because it was one thing to talk about kneeling on the phone at two in the morning and another thing entirely to have your oldest friend ask for it in daylight.

She knelt. She did it badly, she knew she did it badly, knees together and shoulders hunched like she was waiting for a bus, and Cooper crouched in front of her and did not touch her right away, just looked, which was somehow worse than touching.

"Knees wider," he said. "Sit back on your heels. Back straight, like there's a string at the top of your head. Hands on your thighs, palms up."

"Like this?"

"Close." He put one hand flat against her lower back and pressed, gently, and her spine corrected itself without her deciding anything, which startled her more than anything else that had happened so far. His other hand tipped her chin up with two fingers, unhurried, until she was looking at his collar instead of the floor. "There. That's you. That's the posture. Every time you drift, I'll bring you back, and you let me, and that is the arrangement. You with me?"

"I'm with me," she said, and he snorted, and she felt the laugh go through her shoulders and out of her, and then she was just kneeling, on tile, in a stranger's apartment that she had rented, looking up at a man she had known for seven years, and it was the strangest and calmest she had felt in months.

"Good," he said. "Color check. Green means go, yellow means slow down, red means stop, Porto means stop and also you're dead to me."

"Green," she said, before he even finished asking, and he raised an eyebrow at her eagerness, and she decided not to be embarrassed about it, or to try, at least.

He got up and went to his bag, the duffel he had carried on the plane, and came back with a folded black blindfold, plain cotton and soft-looking, and he held it up where she could see it.

"Rules first," he said. "This goes on, and then we do a game. Your game, actually, I stole it from you. Three wines, Portuguese, from the bottle shop downstairs. No labels, no looking, scent and taste only. Sommelier stuff. Except you'll be blind, and kneeling, and I'll be the one holding the glass to your mouth. You tell me what each one is. Grape, region, if you're feeling fancy. You get it right, you get a point. You get it wrong," he paused, and she heard the smile in his voice more than saw it, "you get a consequence. Nothing you haven't agreed to. And if you want the blindfold off, say so, and it comes off, no points lost."

"You went downstairs already?" she asked. "When?"

"While you were in the shower. You sing in the shower, by the way. Loudly. The whole street knows."

"That's slander."

"It's fado," he said, "adapted," and Cate laughed, and while she was laughing he slid the blindfold over her eyes and the world went soft and dark, warm cotton and the smell, faintly, of her own shampoo on the fabric, and she realized her breathing had gone slow and even without her permission.

"There you go," Cooper said, quieter now. "Just your nose and your tongue and me. Kneel back up. Posture."

She found the posture again, blind now, knees wider, palms up, and heard him in the kitchen area, the pop of a cork being eased out, the small wet sound of wine going into a glass, and the ordinary domestic-ness of it, in the dark, with her hands open on her thighs, made her feel like she was waiting for something she had been waiting for her whole adult life.

"First one," he said, and his fingers touched her jaw, asking, and she nodded, and the rim of the glass touched her lower lip, and he tipped it just enough.

She breathed in. Swirl of it, the way she had trained herself to do a thousand times at a thousand tastings, except now she couldn't see the legs on the glass or the color, couldn't cheat with her eyes, and the dark made everything arrive at once, bright and almost loud.

"Okay," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected. "Okay, give me a second. I'm going to need a second."

"Take all the seconds you want," Cooper said. "We've got all week."

She took her second. The wine was pale in a way she could hear rather than see, if that made any sense, all white flowers and cold stone and something saline underneath, like licking a rock that had been sitting in the ocean. "Vinho Verde," she said slowly. "But not the cheap beach stuff. Loureiro, I think, maybe with a little Arinto in there. Minho. Northern coast." There was a pause, and then Cooper's thumb traced once along her jaw, which was apparently how he awarded points. "Correct. One for you. Loureiro, with about twenty percent Arinto, and you didn't even flinch at the saltiness. I'm a little annoyed at how easy that looked."

"It wasn't easy," Cate said, and her mouth was dry in a way that had nothing to do with tannins. "It was terrifying and I loved it. Next."

The second wine was red, warmer, dustier, plums and dried figs and a green leafiness running under it that made her think of her grandfather's garage in Rockford, which was a memory she had never once used in a professional tasting and which surfaced now, blind and kneeling, like it had been waiting its turn. "Touriga Nacional," she said. "Dão. The green stem thing gives it away, you can't hide that." Another thumb along her jaw. Two for two. "You went to school for this," Cooper said, and she could hear him smiling again. "I did," she said, chin lifting even though the posture was already holding it there. "Seven years of it. Well, five of it, plus two years of pretending to know things."

"Three for three gets you a reward. Two out of three gets you something else. Third one's coming, no pressure."

"There's absolutely pressure," she said, "that's the entire fun of it," and he laughed, low, and she heard liquid going into a glass and the glass being set down and then nothing, just the apartment and the river and the far-off sound of someone dragging furniture across tile two floors down.

The third wine arrived at her lips and her whole brain lit up. It was rich and a little nutty, dried apricot and orange peel and something honeyed but bone dry underneath, and the finish went on so long she actually made a small involuntary noise against the glass. "Bairrada," she said at once, too fast, and then stopped herself, because something was wrong with