November 1997
Greg's eyes followed her to and from the living room as Stacy cleared their dinner plates from the coffee table. She paid him little attention, her mind overtaken with the details of her upcoming trial-depositions, the sloppy draft of her opening statement, tomorrow's client preparation. When she bypassed the couch and reached for the binder and legal pad protruding from her bag, Greg sighed quietly.
"Stacy, stop."
Bent at the knees, she glanced over her shoulder to find him staring at her, hunched in his seat. His thumb idly stroked the bowl of his wine glass. Stacy's sigh echoed his, guilt surfacing to pull her mouth into a frown.
"Honey," she said apologetically, "thank you for dinner. I really appreciated it, but I need to get this work done. I have to review my statement and organize all my case notes. They're a mess. I'm sorry."
He ignored her gratitude and her apology. "The case doesn't even go to trial until Thursday. You're already working ahead of schedule. You could afford to take a night off."
"I need to prepare."
"You'll be fine. Come on, sit down."
She eyed him, unable to repress a smile when he thrust his bottom lip out and batted widened eyes at her. "A few hours," she relented, sitting beside him and accepting the full wine glass he offered her. "That's all."
"That's all I need." He refilled his own glass. "That's more than enough time for you to mellow out and release some pent-up sexual tension, right here, bent over the back of the couch" he said, growling and craning his head to nuzzle her neck.
"More than enough time for me to get you off, you mean? No, if I'm going to take a break, I'm not doing any kind of work."
He pressed a line of kisses over her jaw. "I don't expect you to. You never do any of the work when you're drunk. You're surprisingly submissive."
"I'm not drunk."
"Not yet."
"Greg, you're not going to get me drunk with a few glasses of cheap, ten-dollar merlot." She flattened one hand against his chest and shoved him into the cushions, the wine in his hand nearly spilling out of his glass. He scowled at her. "Oh, don't look at me like that. You know it takes more than this"-she raised her glass-"to get me drunk. Get a few stiff drinks in you, on the other hand, and you'll be the one bent over the back of the couch."
His scowl deepened, his eyes squinting at her. "No way I'm that easy, not even for you."
"Easier." Lips touching the rim of the glass, she muttered under her breath, "You're such a lightweight."
"What?" He shifted to face her, haphazardly setting his glass on the coffee table, where it teetered for a moment before coming to rest. "What did you say? I'm a what?"
She sipped her wine, smirking. "A lightweight," she replied, over-pronouncing each syllable. "You're a lightweight."
"I am not." As if to prove a point, he scooped up his glass and drained it.
A snort accompanied a disbelieving laugh. "So I assume your performance at last month's fundraiser was, what, a spontaneous audition for the role of Trinculo? You had five drinks and-"
"Five and a half. Learn to count."
"-you somehow fell off your bar stool, your stationary bar stool, giggling like a little boy. I wasn't sure if I should get you a wheelchair or a set of building blocks."
He dramatically slapped his hand over his chest, gasping. "Thou liest, most ignorant monster," he accused. "You had to take your heels off because you couldn't walk across the room without twisting your ankle, which I had to wrap, by the way. I also seem to recall a messy blowjob that was a clear indication of-"
"You lost the ability to recall much of anything around your third J&B. At least I was lucid," she said. A grin pulled at her mouth when he scoffed.
He pointed a finger at her, its tip inches from her nose. "Listen, I was tossing back hard liquor while you were sipping at weak cocktails. You can't compare our respective tolerance for alcohol based on that experience. It has to be done systematically, in a controlled setting. We have to consume equal amounts of the same alcohol, at the same time. But I am certain that spending a few hours nursing a couple Cosmopolitans without collapsing does not give you bragging rights."
For a moment, she held his stare, recognizing the unspoken challenge scrolling across his eyes like a flashing marquee. She calmly lowered her glass to the table without breaking eye contact, raised her eyebrow, and said, "Okay, Greg, if you want to turn this into a science experiment, fine, I'm game." Without waiting for a response, she rose from the couch and strode into the kitchen.
"We're not using my good stuff," he warned, "especially if you're just going to puke it up in a few hours."
"You finished your 'good stuff' with Wilson two nights ago," she called. When Stacy returned, she carried an unopened bottle that she had stashed in the corner of the cabinet and a pair of tumblers, both filled with ice. She offered the bottle for Greg's inspection. "We'll use this instead."
Greg's brows furrowed. "What is it?"
She gasped in mock-horror. "What? You mean, you don't actually know everything?" She returned his glower with a playful grin. "It's Ouzo, from Greece."
"Really? Because all those Greek letters on the bottle made me believe it was from Japan."
"You just asked me-"
"What it is, not where it's from. Come to think of it, though, where is it from?"
"Greg, I just said-"
"Yeah, Greece, but where did you get it?"
She sighed, exasperated, and pulled the cork from the bottle. "Weiss, about two weeks ago, after he came back from his Mediterranean cruise. He bought a bottle for everyone in the office."
"That's an odd gift for an employee, isn't it?"
"Jealous?" she asked, filling their glasses to cover the ice, the clear liquid turning a milky white.
"No," he answered, fitting one hand around his glass. "It's just not every day your boss presents you with foreign liquor." He raised the glass to his nose for a sniff. "Wow, what the hell is this made with, licorice?"
"Aniseed. It's similar," she said, watching him warily peek over the rim of his glass. "Greg, stop, you like licorice. There isn't much of a difference."
"Yeah, except you don't drink licorice."
"Oh, stop whining. Any more and you'll have to forfeit."
"Forfeit? I thought this was a science experiment."
Stacy shook her head and grinned, raising the glass to her lips. "This was never an experiment." His sly smirk confirmed her suspicion. "Now shut up and drink. I don't have all night and I'm looking forward to drinking you under the table."
"That's seven." Coming out of Greg's mouth, however, the words sounded more like "thaseben", sloppy and slurred together.
Somehow the two of them had migrated from the couch to the floor and now shared one corner of the coffee table. Greg spun his empty glass on its edge like a toy top, leaving trails of condensation across the table's wooden surface. Stacy caught the glass in mid-spin and poured him a refill.
As she filled her own glass, he suddenly spoke. "You know, Greece has the tenth longest coastline in the world." Before she could manage an answer, he continued. "Canada has the longest. I think the U.S. is seventh. No, eighth." He swirled the contents of his glass, tipped his head back, and swallowed his eighth round, hissing as it went down.
Stacy followed suit. "Eight," she said, wiping a runaway dribble from the corner of her mouth. "You can rank countries by the length of their coastlines?"
He shrugged, reaching for the bottle to refill his own glass. "Just the first ten." He closed one eye in thought. "Canada, Norway, Indonsia-" He frowned, then carefully pronounced, "Indonesia, Russia-"
Stacy held her hand up. "No, stop. It's okay. I believe you."
"I also know the English translation of the Greek national anthem. Well," he added, "the first ten verses, but there's, what, a hundred and fifty of them? Something like that. I bet you don't know the first five," he challenged, raising his glass to his lips.
"No," she said, smugness creeping into her voice, "but I don't have to memorize the English translation. I can read the Greek one."
Greg's glass never made it to his mouth. He stared at her, lowering it back to the table. "What? Really?"
She nodded, grinning. "Really."
His eyes searched her face. "Prove it," he said, pushing the bottle towards her.
She twisted it to find a paragraph on the back label. "You want me to read this?"
"Unless you have any other Greek texts lying around, yeah."
She chewed on her bottom lip, scanning the lines of alphas and omicrons, lambdas and upsilons. It had been a while. "I haven't translated anything in a long time," she said. "So it might be a little rough, just so you know."
Greg braced one arm behind him and shifted his weight, nearly toppling onto his side as his hand swept through the air, urging her to continue.
She sighed and, occasionally stopping and starting, read, "Isidor Arvanitis combines aromatic seeds and botanicals from Lesvos with the sovereign aniseed from Lisvori, which is considered the best in the world, creating a unique Ouzo."
He gazed at her with a mixture of scrutiny and fascination. "Are you sure that's what it says? You didn't just make that up?" Leaning over the table, he pulled the bottle close to his face.
"Jesus, Greg, I could dig up my Greek-to-English dictionary and prove it to you." She kept the book hidden with a box of family mementos, stuffed in the back of the bedroom closet. She hadn't opened the box in seven years; after her mother's death, there had been no need.
Greg pressed his index finger to his chin, considering her offer. "Well, if you don't mind..."
Huffing a frustrated breath, Stacy stood abruptly. She held her arms out and searched for balance as she swayed where she stood, the world tilting on a diagonal. Shaking her head as if to clear it, she blinked and righted herself, turned, and walked into their bedroom. Minutes later, she returned to find Greg draining another glass full of Ouzo. She dropped the paperback near his leg. "Here, check for yourself."
Greg spent a few minutes matching words, noisily flipping pages, mumbling words to himself. Apparently satisfied, he raised his face to her and patted the open book. "You used this often," he asserted. "Lots of notes, dog-eared pages. Did you have a childhood pen pal or something?"
Still standing above him, her arms crossed, she said, "Greg, it doesn't matter. You're barely going to remember this in the morning anyway."
"Was it a foreign lover?"
"I had a grandmother. She sent me letters."
"In Greek?"
"Considering she was from Greece, yes. She never learned English, so I learned Greek. Well, I learned it well enough to translate it and write some basic sentences, but that's all."
Greg dropped his head to the book, his fingers rapidly shuffling through the pages. When he reached the last page, he opened the book wide and extracted several tiny bordered photographs, their colors muted and dull. Stacy crouched next to him, suddenly filled with bittersweet nostalgia as her eyes fell on the images. She breathed a soft laugh. "My grandmother," she said, reaching for one of the photographs, "also sent me these. She said that she hoped I could visit and see all of these places for myself." Stacy traced her finger over a blue window shutter-she knew the colors were bold in person, shockingly vibrant against the smooth white walls of the buildings, all constructed in the style so common to the Cyclades it had become a cliché among westerners. "But this is as much as I've seen of Greece." She put the picture on top of the others and took the book from Greg's hands, closing it.
Greg's voice broke the silence. "Well, this is getting too sentimental for me and I need to take a piss." He stumbled, throwing out a hand to brace himself on the arm of the couch as he stood.
Stacy rose with him and grasped his forearm to steady him. "I think it's about time to quit our experiment anyway," she said, leading him towards the bathroom.
His arm curled around her shoulders, the tips of his fingers digging into the muscle. He swayed as he walked. "Does that mean I won?"
"I think you lost, Greg. You can hardly walk."
"No, I won. You said you were quitting. That means you lost."
Stacy opened her mouth to argue, but he tripped over his own foot and crashed against the wall. She slipped her arm around his back and helped him regain his footing, fighting a smile and uttering, "Yeah, you won all right."
"What?"
"Nothing," she said, guiding him into the bathroom. As she turned to leave him to his business, she called, "Try not to fall into the toilet. I'm not fishing you out."
As he unzipped his jeans, he shot her a playful sneer, which she returned before shutting the door. When he left the bathroom, his hands still damp with water, he reached for her and his arm returned to her shoulders as they silently shuffled across the hall.
Greg fell face-first into bed, raising his arms above his head to hug his pillow. Stacy undressed and managed to strip him to his shirt and shorts before stretching out beside him, her head fuzzy with alcohol and exhaustion. She turned on her side, one hand sliding up his back, over his neck, into his hair. Her fingers played with the strands, smoothing unruly pieces at the crown of his head as a warm smile spread across her face. She lifted her arm as he shifted onto his side to face her, his arm falling heavily over her hip. Closing his eyes, he shimmied down the length of the bed to nuzzle her breasts. As he dropped a clumsy kiss between them, he mumbled, "I love your breasts."
She stroked her hand through his hair, a laugh dancing up her throat. "Thank you, honey. Go to sleep."
"I love you."
Stacy's breath hitched and skittered out of her. Her eyes closed. Her arms circled around him, hands slipping under his shirt to press against his back and draw him closer to her. Stroking between his shoulder blades, she ducked her head and whispered into his hair, "I love you, too."
Within minutes his body relaxed in her arms and his breath, warm against her skin, evened to a steady rhythm. Briefly, her thoughts fluttered to her work, untouched and unfinished in her bag. Greg stirred beside her, his arm tightening around her as he slept. A deep sigh left her, and Stacy brushed her thumb over his cheekbone, deciding to let the defense rest until the morning.