Monroe
AGEING: The process of sealing wine in a container for an extended period of time in order to allow its taste to improve
I have beard burn.
I twist in front of Julien’s bathroom mirror, examining the faint red patches on my chest, stomach, and thighs that still haven’t faded in the couple of hours it’s been since Julien and I collapsed onto his bed. There’s a satisfied smirk on my face as I assess the damage. It makes me feel naughty, like the grown up version of hiding a secret hickey as a teenager.
Everything about this feels naughty. My clothes are still strewn across the kitchen floor. There’s a mostly-empty bottle of wine on the counter, and there’s a very sexy Frenchman lying naked in the bed I just crept out of. I know the scene is going to appear less deliciously illicit and more distressingly reprehensible once we open all the curtains to face the light, but for now, I’m half-asleep and willing to duck back under the covers.
“Sstqelurr?” Julien slurs when I slip into bed beside him again.
I chuckle softly. “What?”
He tries again, and I can make out enough to realize he’s trying to ask me what time it is in French.
“Almost nine,” I answer in the same language.
He huffs and shifts closer to me, eyes still closed as he covers me with his arm and tucks me against his chest. My head rests under his chin, and I inhale his scent, the rhythm of his exhales lulling me back to sleep.
When I wake up again, the limbs tangled around mine are blazing with enough heat to turn the space under the covers into an oven. I’m only awake enough to know I have to escape, but when I start wriggling to free myself, the arms just clamp around me even tighter. A man’s voice murmurs in protest, and awareness of my current location slowly dawns.
“Julien,” I grumble in a voice thick with sleep, “you’re a human furnace.”
“Hmmm?”
“Release me.”
“Oh.” He pauses to yawn. “Right. Sorry.”
I realize the sound that must have woken me up is someone’s phone buzzing—possibly two someone’s phones buzzing. I swipe the grit from my eyes and flail my hand around over the edge of the bed near where I know I dumped my purse last night. I catch the strap and pull my phone out as Julien curses while reaching for his own on the nightstand.
I take one bleary-eyed look at the notifications and let the phone drop back to the ground.
“Shiiiit,” I drawl.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I roll over to find Julien swiping at his screen. He looks different without his glasses on, softer—less like he’s sizing everything up. He always looks at things like he’s assessing, analyzing, trying to figure out the way they work and how to make them work better. Now, though, lying in bed like this, he doesn’t look curious. He just looks tired.
“This is not going to be an easy day,” he announces before copying me in tossing his phone back where he found it.
I wonder if this is my cue to leave. Even in the heat of last night, I knew the morning would be awkward. We didn’t take the time to set up terms beforehand, to decide what last night was even meant to be.
“So, um,” I begin, “we had sex.”
He squeezes my thigh under the blankets. “We did.”
“Do you...think we should have?”
He fixes me with an impassive stare. “Do you?”
There’s that professor-esque tone again, like he knows the correct answer even though he’s the one asking the question.
“I...don’t know,” I finally admit. “It seemed more straightforward in the moment, but now it’s all complicated.”
“What’s complicated about it?”
I give him a ‘Seriously?’ raise of my eyebrows.
