Chapter 1: Wine, Wet T-Shirts, and a Broken Zipper
The gravel crunched under the tires as Eric eased the wagon down the narrow drive, the pines on either side so close they brushed the side mirrors like fingers reaching out to say hello. Emma leaned forward in the passenger seat, her hand braced on the dash, watching the cabin materialize through the trees. It was smaller than the pictures suggested. More honest, somehow. The kind of place that didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was, and said so plainly.
"Jesus," Sarah murmured from the back seat. "It's like stepping into a Hemingway novel."
"Minus the misogyny," Emma said without turning around.
"Only mostly."
Eric laughed and killed the engine. They sat for a moment in the sudden quiet, letting the absence of city noise settle over them. Then all three doors opened at once, a coordinated movement born of too many hours in the car and not enough legroom, and the valley exhaled around them.
The air smelled like pine resin and old wood smoke. Emma stretched her arms overhead, feeling her spine pop, the release so good it made her eyes water. The porch faced west and the sun was already halfway behind the ridge, turning the sky the color of a ripe peach. The pines stood black against it, silent sentinels, patient witnesses.
"This is perfect," Sarah said, already at the front door, peering through the screen. "I can't believe you found this place."
"Eric found it." Emma climbed the porch steps and stood beside her friend, both of them looking through the mesh at the dim interior. "He gets credit for approximately one thing per vacation."
"One thing is generous," Eric said, hauling duffel bags from the trunk. His voice was muffled. "I also drove the last four hours. And I didn't complain about anyone's playlist choices."
"Because my playlist choices were flawless."
"Because you threatened to sing along if I complained."
Emma pressed her palm against the screen door and pushed it open. The hinges groaned in protest. Inside, the cabin was exactly as promised: one large room with a kitchenette along the far wall, a wood stove squatting in the center like a fat black toad, and a loft above accessible by a ladder that looked suspiciously homemade. Dust motes floated in the last of the sunlight that angled through the western windows.
"Cozy," Sarah said, stepping past her. "Also, when you said no electricity, I thought you were being cute. You weren't being cute."
"There are lanterns." Eric deposited the bags just inside the door. "And candles. And the refrigerator runs on propane, so you won't have to drink warm wine. I thought of everything."
Emma wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his back. "You did good," she said into his shirt. "I'm impressed."
"I'll add it to the list."
"I don't keep a list."
"Right. That was the other guy."
She laughed and let him go. Sarah had already found the lanterns and was arranging them on the kitchen counter, her movements quick and efficient. She'd been on the road for twelve hours—flying in from Portland that morning, then tagging along on the three-hour drive from Burlington, where she'd met them for coffee that had turned into two coffees and a shared plate of fries—but she looked as fresh as if she'd just stepped out of a spa. Some people were unfair that way.
"I'm going to change," Sarah announced. "I love this outfit, but it's been contaminating itself for eighteen hours."
The loft ladder creaked as she climbed, her cross-body bag swinging from her shoulder. Emma watched her go, then turned to Eric, who was already at the cooler they'd brought from home, cracking open two bottles of red and looking for a corkscrew.
"Don't worry," she said. "I brought one."
"I knew that. I was just testing my uselessness."
"You passed. Failing? Also passing."
She found the corkscrew in her duffel, along with two stemless glasses they'd bought at that gas station in Maine—a stop that Eric had called "a mistake the moment we walked in" and Emma had called "crucial to my continued comfort," which was true mostly because she'd found a sweatshirt with a moose on it that said "MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE." She'd worn it for two days straight before spilling wine on it.
Emma opened the wine and poured, the red glugging into the glasses with a sound like something being decided.
The porch faced west, as she'd seen from the drive, and by the time Sarah came back down the ladder, the sky had deepened to something between orange and blood. The valley stretched below them, all dark green shadows and the last touch of gold on the far ridge. The floorboards of the porch had absorbed the day's heat and released it up through Emma's bare feet where she stood at the railing, glass in hand.
"That's the wine," she said, handing a glass to Eric as he joined her. "Am I wrong, or is this already better than last year?"
"Last year we went to a hotel with paper-thin walls and a man who snored at forty decibels through the plaster."
"That's what I mean. This is better."
Sarah came through the screen door, and Emma heard it before she saw it: Eric's breath catching in his throat, the soft click of surprise that he tried to swallow and couldn't quite manage. She turned.
Sarah wore a white tank top so sheer it might as well have been made of gauze. Her nipples showed dark and soft through the fabric, and she'd done nothing to hide them. No bra, no cardigan, no flushed covering of the arms. Just the tank top and the tightest leggings Emma had ever seen—navy blue, so thin at the knees they were almost translucent—and the whole effect was less an outfit than a statement, a deliberate, unapologetic proclamation of fact.
She held a glass in each hand, one for herself and one for Emma, and she was already smiling, that sharp, knowing smile that had been getting them into trouble since sophomore year of college.
"The water's not on yet," she said. "So I'm assuming no shower tonight. If I smell, blame the hostel in Denver."
Emma took the glass. "You don't smell." She brought the glass to her lips and looked over its rim at her husband. "Eric, stop trying not to stare. You'll give yourself a headache."
He made a sound that was trying to be an apology and became a laugh instead. "I wasn't—" He cleared his throat. "Sorry. I wasn't expecting the, uh, wardrobe change."
"It's hot," Sarah said, settling into one of the two ancient Adirondack chairs on the porch and stretching her legs out in front of her. The leggings absolutely did not leave anything to the imagination. She didn't seem concerned about this. "And it's the middle of nowhere. Figured I could dress how I wanted."
"You absolutely can," Emma said. "That's why we came."
She dropped into the chair beside Sarah and propped her own feet on the railing. She'd changed before they left Burlington, an hour into the drive and forty minutes before Eric noticed, but she'd chosen carefully. A crop top that showed the strip of skin above her shorts—still tan from two weekends of yard work—and thin spandex shorts that ended high on her thigh and hugged every curve that she'd developed in the last few years of treating her body better than she had in her twenties.
She caught Eric's eyes on her, a flicker of heat that had nothing to do with the temperature. He was trying so hard to be good, she knew, trying to balance what he wanted with what he thought was appropriate. She loved him for that. She also wanted to make it impossible for him.
"You're staring too," Sarah said, without looking at Emma. "But you can. Wifely privilege."
"I'm allowed."
"More than allowed, I'd argue. Encouraged."
Emma laughed and drank. The wine was dry and good and went straight to the delightful place behind her eyes where all her worst ideas lived.
The sun dropped behind the ridge and the light went from gold to purple. The crickets started up, a shifting wall of sound that pulsed in and out like the valley itself was breathing. Eric went inside for the lanterns and returned with two lit, hanging one from the porch hook above them and setting the other on the wide wooden arm of his chair. The glow was soft and amber, catching the shine on Sarah's shoulders and the curve of her jaw.
"So," Sarah said. "What's the plan for this weekend? And please don't say hiking. I brought exactly one pair of sneakers and they're meant for airports."
"There's a river at the bottom of the trail," Eric said. "It's a half-mile walk. Easy. You could do it in sandals."
"You're assuming I packed sandals."
"You packed four pairs of shoes, and I know this because I carried them from the car."
"Three pairs are boots. They're shoes in the philosophical sense."
Emma watched them volley, the easy rhythm of old familiarity. Sarah and Eric had been friends for almost as long as she and Sarah had, though in a different register—the two of them shared a needling, competitive dynamic that had always seemed to delight Sarah and baffle Eric in equal measure. She liked watching them together. There was tension in it, but it was the good kind, the kind that kept everyone awake.
"There's also the hot springs," Eric said. "Well, hot water bubbling up through some rocks. You probably wouldn't call it a hot spring, but you'd call it something."
"A hot puddle?"
"Something like that."
"I want a hot puddle."
"There's also the fire pit," Emma said. "And the porch. And the wine. Those are my plans. If anything else happens, it'll be an accident."
Sarah raised her glass. "To accidents."
They drank to that.
The evening unspooled. Someone—probably Eric—made a fire in the wood stove inside, even though it wasn't cold, just to have something to tend to. Someone else—probably Sarah—found the board games in the cabinet beside the kitchen and pulled out a dusty deck of Trivial Pursuit cards that were missing the board. They played with a homemade scoring system that Emma kept on the back of the cabin's guest book, which had entries dating back to 1987 and contained at least three passive-aggressive arguments about the correct way to build a fire.
Emma won, but only because Sarah kept arguing with Eric's answers and Eric kept letting her win the arguments.
By ten, the wine was gone and Emma's cheeks ached from laughing. Sarah was sprawled on the sofa, her bare feet hooked over the armrest, her wine glass balanced precariously on her stomach. Eric sat on the floor, his back against the sofa, his head lolled back so that his hair brushed Sarah's knee. They looked like a painting called Friendship, or Something Adjacent.
"I'm so glad we came," Sarah said, her voice slower now, the wine weaving through her words. "I needed this. You have no idea."
"I have some idea." Emma curled her knees to her chest and watched the fire through the stove's little window, the flames dancing in their small iron cage. "You've been working too much."
"Working is a generous word for what I've been doing. Existing in an office. Slowly becoming an office."
"You're writing the best copy in the company, and you know it."
"The company is a startup that sells subscription-based pet food. The bar is low."
Eric made a sound of protest. "My dog would eat it."
"You don't have a dog."
"I'd get one, just to support your career."
"Careful," Emma said. "That sounds dangerously like a business plan."
"That sounds dangerously like a business plan."
Sarah snorted into her wine glass and set it down on the floor beside the sofa, careful not to tip it. "You're right. I take it back. I'm going to die in an office and be fine with it."
"You're not going to die in an office," Emma said. "You're going to die on a beach in Portugal with three ex-husbands and a lot of money."
"Three ex-husbands? That's ambitious."
"Ambitious is your brand."
Sarah laughed, a full-bodied thing that shook her shoulders and made Eric tilt his head back to look at her. He had that expression on his face, the one he got when he was too tired to filter and too content to care. Emma recognized it from the early days of their relationship, back when they'd stay up until dawn talking about nothing, the hours dissolving like sugar in water.
"I'm exhausted," Eric said, and the words came out on a yawn that cracked his jaw. "The drive. The wine. The altitude."
"The altitude," Sarah repeated. "You've been waiting to use that excuse all night."
The cabin had a TV. This was the detail that had sold Emma on the place—the listing had mentioned it almost apologetically, as if a screen in a mountain cabin were something to be ashamed of, but Emma had seen it as a mercy. Not every night needed to be board games and philosophical conversation. Some nights needed to be horizontal and passive.
"Movie?" Emma asked.
The word hung in the air for a moment, and she watched Sarah and Eric exchange a look—not a meaningful one, not the loaded kind, just a tired, mutual acknowledgment that yes, a movie sounded like the exact right amount of effort for two people who had drained the last of their energy into the wine.
"Where's the TV?" Sarah asked.
"Bedroom."
"Of course it is."
The bedroom was off the main room, past the kitchen, through a door that had clearly been the only real thought put into the cabin's floor plan. It was small and warm, dominated by a bed that took up most of the available space. The quilt was faded and patchworked, something handmade that had probably been in the family for generations. There were three pillows and one bedside lamp, and the TV was mounted on the wall with a bracket that looked like it had been installed by someone who didn't quite trust walls.
Emma climbed onto the bed first. She'd been the one to sleep in the car, head against the window, waking up every time they hit a bump. She was still wearing the crop top and the spandex shorts, and the sheets felt cool against the strip of her bare stomach.
"Are we really doing this?" Sarah asked from the doorway.
"We're really doing this. Get in."
Sarah shrugged and climbed onto the bed on the other side of Emma. Her tank top shifted in the movement, and Emma caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her breast, unbound and soft. Then Sarah was settled, propped against the headboard, her legs stretched out over the covers.
"Eric," Emma said. "You're hovering."
He wasn't hovering, exactly. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking at the two of them on the bed like he was doing math that didn't quite add up.
"I'm just—" He stopped. Started again. "I could take the floor. Or the sofa."
"Don't be an idiot." Emma reached over to the right side of the bed and peeled back the covers. "Get in."
He got in.
Emma raised the remote, found something on one of the streaming apps, and the opening credits filled the screen with a low, ambient soundtrack. Some indie film about a woman who inherits a vineyard in Tuscany. Neither of them had seen it. It didn't matter what they watched.
The bed wasn't built for three people. It wasn't built for two people and a border collie, if she was honest. But they made it work, shoulders touching, hips aligned in a way that felt less like a choice and more like physics. Emma lay on her side, her cheek against Eric's shoulder, her hand resting flat on his chest. Her legs pressed against his.
Sarah lay on his other side. She had turned onto her side too, facing him, her arm folded under her head and her hand near his hip. The tank top had settled, and from this angle, the outline of her nipples was a soft, constant shape in Emma's peripheral vision. She could see the curve of Sarah's waist, the line of her thigh where the leggings pulled tight.
Eric was the middle of the equation, and he knew it. She could feel the tension in his body—not fear, exactly, but awareness. The kind of rigid stillness that came from trying to be normal when every nerve ending was lit up and screaming.
Emma traced a circle on his chest with her fingertip. "Relax."
"I am relaxed."
"You're not."
"I'm watching the movie."
"Nothing's happened yet. It's a woman and a vineyard."
"I'm waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
He didn't answer. Sarah laughed, a quiet breath through her nose, and Eric turned his head toward the sound of it. Emma felt the movement of his neck, the shift of his body under her hand.
"You're impossible," Sarah said. "Both of you."
The movie played on. A woman in a wide-brimmed hat walked through rows of vines. A man with a weathered face said something wise about soil. The score swelled and faded, swelled and faded, and the light from the screen washed the room in pale, shifting colors.
Emma's eyes grew heavy. She was aware of Sarah's breathing on the other side of Eric, slow and regular, the kind of breathing that meant sleep was close. She was aware of the heat of Eric's body, familiar and animal. She was aware of her own self, arranged against him, holding on.
Her hand had drifted to the hem of his shirt without her noticing. Her fingers were on the skin of his stomach, warm and bare.
"Emma," Eric said, low enough that Sarah might not hear it. Might.
"Shhh."
She let her hand rest there. Let the weight of her palm settle. She could feel his heartbeat through his skin, steady and strong, and she thought about the way he'd looked when Sarah first came out onto the porch, the way his throat had moved when he tried not to stare. She thought about the fact that he hadn't failed, not really. He'd looked. She'd watched him look. And she'd liked it.
Sarah shifted beside him, her hand sliding from his hip to the curve of his waist, a movement that could have been accidental and almost certainly wasn't. Her fingers lay still against his side, dark against the pale fabric of his shirt.
No one said anything.
The movie reached its midpoint climax, the vineyard woman standing on a terrace at sunset, wind in her hair, looking out at something vast and unknown. Emma thought about how she felt right now, pressed between her husband and her best friend, all three of them tangled in a bed that belonged to strangers.
She wasn't sure what was going to happen this weekend. She was sure that something had already changed, some gear shifting almost imperceptibly, and that they'd crossed a line that had no name.
The clock on the bedside table said 11:47.
Eric's hand moved, slow and deliberate, until it covered hers on his stomach. He didn't move it away. He just held it there, and the two of them watched the wine woman make a decision, and the fire light flickered across the ceiling, and nobody said a word.
The movie played on. The woman on screen chose the vineyard. She chose the man with the weathered hands and the crooked smile. The credits rolled in soft, scrolling script, and the room stayed exactly as it was.
No one moved to turn it off.
Emma felt the weight of Eric's hand on hers, warm and dry and heavy. She felt the rise and fall of his breathing under her palm. On his other side, Sarah hadn't moved either. Her hand was still on his waist, her fingers curved around the shape of him like she'd forgotten they were there.
The movie continued to play in the background. It was the only light now. The lanterns had burned low. The fire in the stove had settled into a bed of coals that pulsed orange through the little glass window and then faded.
Emma's thumb moved. Just a fraction, a slow drag across the fabric of Eric's shirt, finding the hem, finding skin. She traced the line of his waistband, the small dip at his hip. He inhaled through his nose. She felt it in his ribs.
"You're supposed to be asleep," he said, barely above a whisper.
"I'm not."
"Neither am I," Sarah said.
Her voice was clear, not slurred, not sleepy. She'd been lying there in the dark with her hand on Eric's side and her eyes wide open, and Emma understood that the three of them had been holding their breath together without knowing it.
Emma turned her head. The movement brought her face close to Eric's neck, close enough to feel the heat of his skin, close enough to smell the soap he'd used that morning and the wine on his breath. She pressed her lips to the corner of his jaw, just below his ear, and held them there. Not a kiss. More like a question. A test of what the room would allow.
Eric went very still. Then he tilted his head, just slightly, giving her room.
The bedsheets rustled. Sarah had shifted, turning more fully onto her side, and now she faced him completely. Her arm slid from his waist up to his chest, her palm flat against his sternum, her fingers spread wide. She didn't speak. She didn't hesitate. She moved like someone who had decided something hours ago and had been waiting for the right moment to act on it.
Emma lifted her head and looked at Sarah across the shape of Eric's body. Sarah's eyes caught the glow from the screensaver and held it, dark and steady.
"Tell me to stop," Sarah said.
She said it to Emma.
Emma's heart kicked hard in her chest. The question hung between them, and she knew what it wanted. She knew what it would mean to answer. She thought about the porch and the wine and the way Eric's throat had moved when Sarah walked out in that tank top. She thought about how she'd watched him look and liked it, how she'd wanted him to look harder, how she'd wanted to feel the shape of that wanting in the room with them.
Emma reached across Eric's body and put her hand on Sarah's hand on his chest. Their fingers tangled. Sarah's skin was warm.
"Don't stop," Emma said.
Sarah exhaled, slow and shaky, like she'd been holding that breath for years.
Then everything loosened at once.
Eric's hand came up and covered both of theirs, his palm spanning the back of Emma's hand and the back of Sarah's, pressing them down into the wall of his chest. Emma felt Sarah's fingers curl between her own, felt the slight dampness of her palm, felt Eric's pulse thudding under all of it like a drum being struck from the inside. She leaned in and kissed his neck, a real kiss this time, open and slow, tasting salt.
Sarah did the same on the other side. Her lips brushed the hinge of his jaw, then down, then to the hollow of his throat where his pulse was quickest. She kissed him there and lingered, and Emma watched over the bridge of Eric's nose as Sarah's mouth moved against his skin.
Eric made a sound that wasn't a word. His free hand found Sarah's hip and closed around it, and the other one found Emma's thigh, and he held them both like a man drowning and grateful for it.
The sheets had twisted. The blanket had been pushed down to the foot of the bed. Emma's leg hooked over his, and her bare stomach pressed against the thin cotton of his shirt, and her hand slid up from his chest into Sarah's hair, which was thick and tangled and smelled like the drive and the wind.
Sarah turned her face into Emma's hand without letting go of Eric's throat. She kissed Emma's palm, then her wrist, then the inside of her forearm, moving slow and deliberate, marking a path.
Emma's breath caught.
"Sarah," she said.
"Yes."
"I didn't—" She stopped. Started again. "I didn't know I wanted this."
"Neither did I." Sarah's voice was low and steady. "But I did. I do."
Eric turned his head and pressed his mouth to Emma's shoulder, then her collarbone, then the tender spot behind her ear. His breath was hot and uneven. His hand on her thigh tightened, then loosened, then slid higher, under the fabric of her shorts, finding the bare skin of her hip.
"What do you want," he asked, into her hair, into her ear. "Tell me what you want."
Emma didn't have words. She had a body, and the body knew things the words didn't. She pulled Sarah's hand off Eric's chest and brought it to her own waist. She pulled Eric's hand up from her hip and pressed it flat against her sternum, where her heart was going like a rabbit. She pulled them both in until they were a knot of limbs and breath and heat, and she kissed Sarah's mouth because she wanted to and because she could and because the wanting felt like finally.
Sarah kissed her back. Her lips were soft and sure, and it lasted long enough that the screensaver flicked to a new color, green light washing over their tangled hands and half-lidded eyes. When they broke apart, Eric was watching them with an expression she'd never seen on him before. Not lust, exactly. Something older than that. Awe, maybe. Or gratitude.
He kissed Sarah then. Emma watched him do it. She watched the way his hand came up to Sarah's cheek, the way Sarah's eyes fluttered closed, the way their mouths met like a question and an answer arriving at the same moment. And then Emma lowered her head and pressed her lips to the corner of Sarah's jaw, right where it met the long muscle of her neck, and she kissed down the column of her throat while Eric kissed the other side.
Sarah gasped. Her hips shifted. The leggings did nothing to hide the shape of her.
Their hands moved everywhere. Over fabric, over skin, over the lines and curves of three bodies that had known each other for years and were only now learning the geography. Emma's fingers traced Sarah's ribs through the sheer tank top, and then under it, up to the soft weight of her breast, and Sarah arched into the touch. Eric's hand slid from Emma's sternum down her belly, and then into the waistband of her shorts, and she stopped breathing for a second. Then started again.
Somewhere in the tangle, lips found skin. On collarbones and the insides of wrists and the backs of necks. On the tenderest parts, the places where pulse was easiest to find. Light kisses that left shivers in their wake. Heavy ones that lingered.
Emma couldn't tell whose hand was where anymore. She only knew that she was touching and being touched, and that the room had gone quiet except for the sounds they made—breath, and murmur, and the low creak of the bed as the physics of three bodies shifted toward something new.
The screensaver faded to black.
In the dark, everything felt more honest.
Eric's hand found hers under the covers. Sarah's leg pressed against hers. Their breathing synchronized, then fell out of sync, then found each other again. The fire in the stove, banked and dying, gave one last flare of light that turned the ceiling to gold for a second before it went dark.
Then there was only the soft sound of the valley outside, and the crickets, and the three of them, and whatever came next.