Bitters and Bonds

I was sitting at a café on the cliff road in Vila do Mar, drinking a lager I didn't really like and thinking about my marriage in the vaguest possible terms, the way you do when you're thirty-four and you've been traveling for work for eleven days straight.

The café was nothing special. Four plastic tables, a striped awning that had given up on being red, and a view of the Atlantic that would have made somebody a lot of money if anybody local cared about that kind of thing. The waiter brought me a second glass of the house lager without me asking, which is the kind of small kindness that can make you stupidly emotional when you're tired.

I'm Georgie, by the way. I brew beer for a living, which sounds more romantic than it is. Mostly it means spreadsheets and cleaning and tasting things that taste like green bananas and regret. The fun part, the part I keep chasing, is the trips. Sourcing trips like this one, where some co-op farmer in northern Portugal walks you through a field of hops his grandfather planted and you get to feel like a pioneer. I'd been chasing that feeling for about seven years now, and somewhere in there I'd stopped noticing that I wasn't chasing it at home anymore.

Annika and I got married seven years ago. We met at a beer festival when she was twenty-five and I was twenty-six, and she asked me whether the sour I was pouring had any actual fruit in it or whether the brewer just liked lying to people. I married her a year and change after we met. She translates freelance, German and Portuguese mostly, which means she can work from anywhere, which means for seven years she waited at home while I went anywhere. This past year she'd stopped waiting in any way that mattered. We'd talk on the phone and it was like two customer service reps confirming a delivery window.

So there I was, day eleven, drinking mediocre lager over the ocean and feeling sorry for myself in a very comfortable way, when I heard a suitcase wheel clatter over the cobblestones behind me.

I turned around mostly out of reflex. And there she was.

Annika. Thirty-three years old, hair stuck to her forehead from the walk up the hill, wearing the green dress she bought in Porto three summers ago, dragging her big stupid flowered suitcase like she'd walked straight off a plane, which she had. She was squinting at me against the sun, and she was glowing, actually glowing, and my chest did this lurch that I hadn't felt in so long I'd kind of forgotten it was a thing my chest could do.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said. Very smooth. Eleven days of professional charm and that was the entirety of the speech.

"Is this seat taken?"

"It's taken by a guy who was about to order a third beer and text you a photo of it, which, in hindsight."

"Don't," she said, and sat down, and laughed, and then her face did something complicated. "God, I'm so jet-lagged. I left Munich yesterday at five in the morning. I've been on three trains. I don't even know if I'm making sense."

"You're making sense."

"I'm not. I couldn't even order this water. I just pointed at the table next to us and said agua and the man said sim and I felt like a genius."

I flagged the waiter and ordered her a coffee and another water, in my terrible Portuguese, and she watched me butcher it with this soft look on her face like I was a dog walking on its hind legs. The waiter went off chuckling.

"When did you decide?" I asked her.

"Tuesday," she said. "I was translating a manual for industrial dishwashers. Forty thousand words about rinse cycles. And I just thought, I could keep doing this in an empty apartment, or I could go find my husband in Portugal." She shrugged. "The dishwasher manual lost."

I reached across the table and took her hand, which sounds small but wasn't. Her fingers were cold from the water glass. I used to know her hands better than my own.

"I missed you," I said. "I mean, obviously. But I don't think I ever said it right."

"You didn't say it at all, mostly."

"No. Mostly I sent photos of beer tanks."

"You did. The tanks were beautiful, though. Very shiny."

We sat there and the sun kept going down and we did the thing we'd been doing for a year, this careful dance around the actual subject. She told me about the trains. I told her about the co-op and the farmer, Senhor Duarte, who was seventy-one and called all his hops his girls. She laughed at that, a real laugh, and something in my ribs unknotted a little.

Then she put her coffee down and looked out at the water and said, "Georgie, I don't know how to talk to you anymore."

"Yeah," I said. "Me neither. With you, I mean. With strangers on trains I'm a delight."

"I know. That's the weird part. You're charming with everyone. Senhor Duarte's girls probably think you're wonderful."

"Two of them do."

She laughed again, then pressed on. "It's not that we fight. We don't even fight. We just sort of stopped trying, and then stopped noticing we'd stopped, and now when we're on the phone I sit there rehearsing things to say like it's a job interview."

"I rehearse too," I admitted. "I had a whole bit planned about the lager here. It was going to be funny."

"Was it?"

"It was mid."

She laughed at that for a while, longer than the joke deserved, and held my hand tighter on the table. "Okay," she said. "So we don't know how to talk. Fine. But I walked up that hill with a suitcase and I watched you from across the square for like four minutes before I made myself come over, and you turned around and smiled before you even saw me properly, and I thought, okay, we don't know how to talk, but we still know how to smile at each other. That has to count."

"It counts," I said. "It counts a lot."

We split the last of the afternoon between that café and a walk down to the harbor, where the fishing boats were doing their noisy sunset business and Annika bought a paper cone of fried sardines from a woman who spoke to her in fast Portuguese that Annika, being the actual translator, understood about sixty percent of. She reported back that the woman had views about my pronunciation and a grandson she thought I should meet. I told her I was flattered but spoken for, and Annika went a little pink and bumped her shoulder into mine, and that felt like more progress than any conversation we'd had in months.

* * *

The next morning I took her to the brewery.

It wasn't really a brewery the way you picture one. It was the back half of a warehouse near the harbor, lent to me by a guy named Rui who ran the whole operation with his cousin and a dog that slept in the grain room. The trip was for me to develop a recipe with their local malt and their coastal well water, and I'd been messing around in this room for the past week and a half, and I'd been dying to show somebody.

"Okay," I said, unlocking the side door. "Fair warning, it's not glamorous."

"Georgie, I've seen your photos. I know it's mostly stainless steel and a dog."

"Ringo is a great dog."

The morning light came through the high windows and hit everything copper and white. The kettle, the mash tun, the fermenters against the wall, all of it shining. Annika stood in the doorway with her hands in her pockets and just took it in.

"Oh," she said. "This is the part of your job you love."

"This is the part," I said.

I walked her through it. The malt Rui had gotten from a farm upriver, sweet and a little biscuity. The well water, which had this mineral edge I'd been chasing all week. And then the kettle, the copper one, this gorgeous old thing that Rui's father had bought secondhand in 1984 and that Rui refused to replace even though it was temperamental as hell.

I put my hand flat on the copper, out of pure habit. It was cool now. I'd cleaned up after my last test batch the day before.

Annika came over slow and stood next to me and looked at my hand on the metal, and then she reached out and laid her fingers over mine, on top of the copper, so we were both touching it.

"I used to love these hands," she said quietly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. On my back, in my hair, holding a glass at a beer festival, telling me lies about fruit. All of it."

I turned my hand over under hers, so our palms met. Her skin was soft and a little cool, same as last night at the café.

"They still work," I said. "Mostly they hold copper kettles and write tasting notes. But they remember."

"Prove it," she said, and looked up at me.

I asked her, plain, "Can I kiss you?"

She laughed, that real one again. "You're asking? Seven years of marriage and you're asking?"

"I'm rusty. Say yes anyway."

"Yes," she said. "Obviously yes, you idiot."

So I kissed her, next to the old copper kettle, in a warehouse that smelled like grain and salt coming through the gaps in the walls, and it was clumsy for about two seconds and then it wasn't. Her hand came up to my jaw and mine went to her waist like they'd never been anywhere else.

"Okay," she said when we broke apart, a little breathless. "Okay. The hands still work."

"Wait till you see what else does," I said, and she swatted me, and outside Ringo started barking at a seagull like he was personally offended by it.

"Take me back to the apartment," she said. "I've been on three trains and I haven't been in a hotel bed with my husband in almost a year, and I'd like to fix at least one of those things."

"You've got the flowers suitcase?"

"I've got the flowers suitcase."

"Then yeah," I said. "Yeah, let's go."

The walk back from the brewery took longer than it needed to because we kept stopping. Annika pointing at doors. Me pointing at cats. A town like this rewards people who aren't in a hurry, and for the first time in a long while neither of us was.

The apartment was on the third floor of a whitewashed building overlooking the cliff road, and by the time we got the key turned the light was going that late gold color that makes even a rented place look like somebody's real life. Annika kicked off her sandals at the door and went to the window and stood there with her arms crossed, looking at the boats.

"Hey," I said.

She turned around. The room was dim, just that gold light coming sideways through the shutters, and she reached for me, both hands finding the front of my shirt, and I went to her, and we fell into a kiss that tasted like salt and something sweet I couldn't name. The sardines, maybe. Or just her, after all this time.

"Hi," she said against my mouth.

"Hi."

"I missed this. Not the sex, well, yes the sex, but this. The standing in a kitchen part."

"There's no kitchen. There's a hotplate."

"The standing in a hotplate part, then."

We undressed each other slow, which was a choice, because after almost a year the obvious move was to not be slow about anything. But she peeled my shirt up my back with both hands like she was unwrapping something she'd been storing, and I got the green dress unzipped and off her shoulders, and it pooled around her feet on the tile, and she stepped out of it and stood there in the dim gold light, thirty-three years old, the same body I'd memorized at twenty-five and let get blurry since.

I put my hand on the curve of her hip and traced it down and around, slow, like I was memorizing it again. Because I was.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm relearning."

"Take your time, then." But her breath caught when my mouth found her throat, right below the ear, and she gasped and grabbed my shoulders, and I felt the shiver go all the way down through her.

"Oh," she said. "Okay. That. Do more of that."

We made it to the bed in stages, the sheets already a mess from me living out of a suitcase for eleven days, and I laid her back and followed her down. Her fingers went into my hair right away, both hands, like she was making sure.

"Can I?" I asked, mouth at her collarbone, hand on her thigh.

"God, yes. Please. You're still asking and I still like it, don't stop asking, just also don't stop."

So I didn't stop. I worked my way down her, taking my time at her nipples until she was arching under me, and then lower, down her stomach, down to where she was already wet and waiting. She was loud about it from the very first pass of my tongue, louder than I remembered, or maybe I just remembered wrong, or maybe a year of quiet had made both of us hungry in ways we hadn't admitted to.

"There," she said, fingers tight in my hair. "Right there, oh, don't you stop, Georgie, please don't you stop."

I didn't. I kept my mouth on her pussy and used two fingers inside her, curling them the way she liked, and she came apart in maybe four minutes, which had to be some kind of record for us, back arching off the tangled sheets, saying a word in German that I understood perfectly well because some words translate themselves.

She pulled me up by the hair after, breathless, and kissed me hard.

"Your turn," she said. "Lie down."

"I'm fine, I just want..."

"No. Lie down. I have been on three trains thinking about this and you don't get to skip your part." So I lay down and she went down on me slow and thorough, and it was my turn to say more with breath than with words, which was fine, because I didn't have words. I had her name, mostly, and a lot of half sentences.

She came up when I was close and climbed over me, and I asked her, "You good? You want to?"

"I have wanted to since the copper kettle," she said. "Come here."

I pulled her down and we slid together, bare, skin to skin, and we both made a sound at the same time that was basically the same sound. She settled onto me and we started a rhythm, slow first, then not slow, and it felt like an apology and a promise at the same time, which I know sounds like a greeting card, but that's genuinely what it felt like, my forehead pressed to hers, her hands flat on my chest.

"I'm sorry," I said, without planning to. "For the last year. For letting it get quiet."

"I'm sorry too. I stopped trying first, maybe. I don't know who stopped first."

"Doesn't matter. We both stopped. We're starting again, right?"

"We're starting again," she said, and kissed me, and moved her hips, and the rhythm picked up.

It built slow. Neither of us was rushing. The light in the room went from gold to blue to nothing much, and somewhere out in the harbor a boat horn went off, and Annika laughed into my shoulder at it and kept moving. When it started getting close for her she whispered something in Portuguese against my ear, fast and soft, and I didn't understand a word of it, but I felt it in her nails on my back, four lines of heat dragging down, and I felt it in the way she clenched around me, and that was enough to take me right to the edge with her.

"What did you say?" I managed.

"I'll translate later," she said. "Right now, please, don't stop, I'm, yes, yes."

She came first, hard, head thrown back, and I followed her over maybe ten seconds later, holding her hips down against me, saying her name into the dark.

We lay in the dark after, her head on my chest, the sheets a disaster, both of us sweaty and done and unwilling to move. The harbor lights came through the shutter gaps in little strips. A dog barked somewhere. Not Ringo. Ringo was locked in a grain room across town, probably still mad about the seagull.

"Okay," she said eventually, into my chest. "Translate time."

"Hm?"

"What I said. Earlier. Want to know?"

"Yeah."

She was quiet a second. "I said, stay. Stay, stay, I don't care about the job, stay."

My chest did something complicated. I held her a little tighter and didn't say anything for a while, because here's where I have to admit what I hadn't told her yet.

See, the trip was scheduled to end. There was a return flight. I'd known about it the whole time, eleven days, it was sitting folded in my jacket pocket, a boarding pass for Thursday morning, Munich via Lisbon. And I hadn't mentioned it. Not at the café, not at the harbor, not when she said stay. I'd just let her talk and kissed her and let the whole evening happen on top of a fact I was sitting on.

That's a bad thing. I knew it was a bad thing while I was doing it.

She'd fallen half asleep on my chest, breathing slow, her hand flat over my heart like she was keeping it somewhere. I eased out from under her careful as a bomb tech, which is a comparison I stand by, because she had a grip even asleep, and I found my jacket on the chair by the window. The boarding pass was where it always was, folded in thirds, softened at the creases from me handling it all week.

I stood there in the dark holding it for a good minute. The harbor lights. Her breathing. The whole day sitting behind me like an argument in my favor.

Here's what I decided, standing there: I wasn't going to tell her while she was half asleep and couldn't argue. That felt like cheating. She deserved to be awake for it, and I deserved whatever came of her being awake for it.

So I pulled my journal out of my bag instead, the travel one, the one with the tasting notes and the water hardness figures and a sketch of Rui's kettle I'd been kind of proud of. I set the boarding pass on the nightstand, on her side, where the morning light would hit it. Then I wrote one line under today's date, plain, no tricks.

She asked me to stay. I want to. The flight is Thursday. Figure out the rest together.

I put the journal on top of the boarding pass, weighted so it couldn't slide, and got back into bed, and she rolled into me without waking up, and I lay there listening to the harbor and feeling her breathe and feeling, underneath the fear, something that had been missing for about a year.

It wasn't relief exactly. It was more like the moment in a batch where the boil finally settles and you know the thing is going to hold. You still don't know how it tastes. But it's going to hold.

Tomorrow she'd see the paper. Everything would change, one way or the other, and I'd be awake for that too.