The moment was almost too subtle to notice, the kind of slip that could easily be brushed off as nothing. Two glasses sat side by side, one hers, one his. But when her hand moved across the table, she didn’t reach for her own. She wrapped her fingers around his instead, lifting it smoothly, casually, as though she had made a mistake. He might have pointed it out, might have laughed at the error—but before he could, she raised it to her lips. The rim touched her mouth, the very spot where his lips had lingered moments ago. And she didn’t stop. She drank slowly, deliberately, holding his eyes as she tilted her head back.
When she set the glass down, her smile was small but knowing. There were no apologies, no flustered excuses. Instead, she slid the glass back toward him, close enough that their hands nearly touched in the exchange. Her fingers brushed against his for just a second, light but unmistakable, as if she wanted him to feel the transfer in his skin, not just see it with his eyes. The taste of the wine on her lips seemed irrelevant; what mattered was the invisible exchange—the quiet intimacy of sharing the same glass, the same touch, as if she had claimed a piece of him through something so ordinary. The entire act had been dressed in nonchalance, but every second of it was deliberate.
He knew because of the way she leaned back afterward, waiting. She didn’t look away. She let him see the faint moisture still clinging to her lower lip, the suggestion that she carried something that had belonged to him. And though he could have reached for his glass again, could have erased the evidence by drinking from it himself, he hesitated. She had made him conscious of every small gesture, every unspoken current running beneath the table. It wasn’t just a drink she had borrowed—it was an intimacy she had taken, a boundary she had crossed with a smile, daring him to imagine what else she might take if he let her.