The Private Reserve

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Wine, Women, and Weeknights

Thank you for reading Wine, Women, and Weeknights! This exclusive bonus chapter takes place three months after the end of the novel. Elise and Sofia are settled into their relationship, living between their two apartments, and Sofia has just received a case of something very special from a producer in Burgundy.

Enjoy. 🔥

Sofia texted at four: Come to Decant after close. Wear something you don’t mind getting stained.

Elise stared at the message for a full minute, cycling through every possible interpretation and landing, predictably, on the filthiest one. She texted back: That narrows it down to everything I own, since you’ve ruined most of my wardrobe.

Sofia: Accurate. Side door. 8pm. Don’t eat.

The instruction not to eat was either culinary or sexual, and with Sofia, the distinction was largely theoretical.

Decant was dark when Elise arrived. The tasting room was closed, the horseshoe table bare, the zinc bar gleaming in the ambient light from the street. She climbed the stairs to Sofia’s office and found the door open, the room transformed.

The round table had been pushed to the wall. In its place, the leather armchair sat in the center of the room, flanked by two small tables. On one: a row of six wine glasses, each containing a different pour — colors ranging from pale gold to deep, opaque purple. On the other: a blindfold.

Sofia was leaning against her desk in a black silk wrap dress, barefoot, her hair loose. She looked like she’d been waiting. She looked like she’d been planning.

“You set up a tasting,” Elise said from the doorway.

“I set up a lesson.” Sofia crossed the room. Took Elise’s jacket. Hung it on the hook behind the door with the precise, unhurried movements that Elise had learned to read as the opening bars of something deliberate. “A producer in Beaune sent me six bottles from a single vineyard — six different vintages, six different expressions of the same terroir. I’ve been saving them.”

“For what?”

“For someone worth sharing them with.”

Elise looked at the glasses. The blindfold. The armchair positioned like a throne in the center of the room. “And the blindfold?”

“Optional. But I think you’ll want it.”

“Why?”

Sofia stepped close. Close enough that Elise could smell her — bergamot, warm skin, the faint residual sweetness of the wine she’d been tasting while she set up. Her hand found Elise’s jaw — the gesture that started everything, the same deliberate placement of her palm against bone.

“Because tonight isn’t about identifying notes or evaluating structure. Tonight is about what happens when I pour wine into your mouth and follow it with mine. And you experience more when you can’t see it coming.”

Elise’s entire body clenched. Three months in, and the woman could still dismantle her with a sentence.

“Sit,” Sofia said.

Elise sat.

The blindfold settled over her eyes and the world narrowed to sound and sensation. Sofia’s footsteps on the hardwood. The crystalline chime of a glass being lifted from the table. The soft displacement of air as Sofia moved close.

“First wine. Open your mouth.”

Elise parted her lips. Sofia tipped the glass — not to Elise’s lips but above them, letting a thin stream of wine fall directly onto her tongue. The wine was cold, golden, electric with acidity, and the surprise of the delivery — the wine arriving from above, hitting her tongue like rain — made Elise gasp.

“Swallow,” Sofia murmured. “Now tell me where you feel it.”

“Front of my mouth. Bright. Tingling. And—” She swallowed again. “My chest. I can feel it in my chest.”

“That’s the acidity triggering your vagus nerve. The same nerve that fires when you’re aroused.” Sofia’s voice was close now — her breath warm on Elise’s cheek. “Your body doesn’t distinguish between the electricity of great wine and the electricity of great sex. The nervous system treats them identically.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I would never fabricate neuroscience to seduce you. The seduction works fine without it.” Sofia’s lips brushed Elise’s ear. “Second wine.”

This time, Sofia held the glass to Elise’s mouth properly — tilting it, letting the wine flow across her lower lip and into her mouth with a controlled precision that was, itself, a kind of touch. The wine was different: rounder, warmer, with a depth that sat on the middle of her tongue like a warm hand pressing gently.

“This one’s older,” Elise said. “Softer. Less aggressive. It doesn’t fight — it just… arrives.”

“2015. A warm vintage. The grapes had more sun, more sugar, more time to develop. Like a relationship that’s past the early tension and has settled into something deeper.” Sofia’s fingers trailed along Elise’s collarbone, exposed by the V-neck she’d chosen. “Less sharp. More generous.”

“Are you describing the wine or us?”

“Yes.”

Sofia kissed her. The taste of the 2015 Burgundy mixed with the taste of Sofia’s mouth, and the combination — the earthy, cherry-dark warmth of aged Pinot Noir layered over the warm, specific flavor of the woman she loved — was a blend that no vineyard had ever produced and that Elise would spend the rest of her life trying to replicate.

The kiss deepened. Sofia’s hand moved from Elise’s collarbone to the neckline of her shirt, fingers tracing the edge of the fabric, dipping below it to find the swell of her breast.

“Third wine,” Sofia said against Elise’s mouth.

“I don’t care about the third wine.”

“You will.”

The third wine was poured directly onto Elise’s throat.

A thin, cold stream that traced a line from the hollow below her ear to the dip of her collarbone, and Sofia’s mouth followed it — tongue flat and warm against skin, licking the wine from Elise’s neck with a deliberateness that made Elise grip the armrests hard enough that the leather creaked.

“Jesus, Sofia—”

“This is the 2010. The best vintage in the case. I wasn’t going to waste it on a glass.” She licked a stray drop from the hinge of Elise’s jaw. “You taste better than the stemware.”

“You are — objectively — insane.”

“I’m a sommelier. We have unconventional serving methods.”

Sofia pulled Elise’s shirt over her head. The cool air hit bare skin at the same moment Sofia poured a measure of the 2010 directly into the hollow between Elise’s breasts, and the wine — cold, ancient, extraordinary — pooled there and caught the dim light and Sofia lowered her mouth and drank from Elise’s body with the focused, reverent attention she’d bring to any irreplaceable vintage.

Elise made a sound that started as a word and ended as something much less articulate. Sofia’s tongue was tracing the wine’s path across her chest, following each rivulet, catching each drop, and the sensation — wet and warm and deliberate — was lighting up nerve endings that had been dormant all day and were now, in the space of thirty seconds, operating at full capacity.

“You said don’t eat,” Elise managed. “You didn’t say anything about being eaten.”

Sofia laughed against her sternum. The vibration travelled through Elise’s ribcage and settled somewhere much lower. “Fourth wine.”

“Where are you pouring this one?”

“Where do you want it?”

“Lower.”

Sofia knelt between Elise’s legs in the armchair and poured the fourth wine — a pale, cool rosé — on the inside of Elise’s thigh. The cold liquid ran down sensitive skin and Sofia’s mouth chased it, kissing and licking a path from mid-thigh to the crease of her hip, and by the time she got there Elise was trembling so hard the armchair was shaking.

“Pants off,” Sofia said.

“Yours too.”

“In a minute. This is still my lesson.” She undid Elise’s jeans with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had done this enough times to have developed a technique, and pulled them down along with her underwear, and Elise was bare from the waist down in the armchair in Sofia’s office and blindfolded and the situation was so reminiscent of their first private session that Elise felt a hot wave of memory crash through her — the first blindfold, the first almost-kiss, the Viognier and the word softer and the entire beginning of everything.

“You’re thinking about the first time,” Sofia said.

“How do you always know?”

“Because I’m thinking about it too. Every time we’re in this room.” She pressed her mouth to the inside of Elise’s knee. “Fifth wine.”

She didn’t pour the fifth wine on Elise’s body. She took a sip herself — held it in her mouth — and then put her mouth between Elise’s legs and let the wine and her tongue arrive together.

The sensation was beyond description. Cold wine and warm mouth. The sharp, mineral bite of aged Burgundy against the most sensitive nerve endings in her body. Sofia’s tongue, slick with wine, moving against her with the devastating patience she’d brought to every tasting, every lesson, every single moment of their relationship — the patience of a woman who understood that rushing a great experience was a form of disrespect.

Elise cried out. The blindfold doubled everything. Without sight, every nerve ending was amplified — the feel of Sofia’s mouth, the lingering cold of the wine, the rough texture of her tongue, the precise pressure she applied and adjusted and maintained with the relentless focus of a woman whose entire career was built on the principle that great things deserve complete attention.

“Good,” Sofia murmured against her, and the word vibrated through Elise’s core and she almost came right then — from a single word, from the accumulated Pavlovian weight of every time Sofia had said good and meant you are exactly right and I see you and you are more than enough.

Sofia worked her with wine-slick lips and tongue until Elise was shaking and gasping and gripping the armrests and saying Sofia’s name in a voice she wouldn’t recognize on a recording — broken, desperate, pitched somewhere between prayer and profanity.

“Come for me,” Sofia said. “The sixth wine is for after.”

Elise came so hard she saw constellations behind the blindfold. The orgasm rolled through her in long, seismic waves — clenching, releasing, clenching again — and Sofia stayed with her through every one, her mouth gentle and steady, her hands anchoring Elise’s hips, holding her together while she fell apart.

Later, on the floor of the office, tangled in Sofia’s wrap dress which had been removed at some point during Elise’s enthusiastic reciprocation, they drank the sixth wine from the same glass.

It was the oldest — the 2005, twenty-one years in bottle. It tasted like time. Like patience. Like the accumulated depth of something that had spent two decades becoming itself and had arrived, finally, at a state of completeness that was quiet and enormous and utterly without pretense.

“How is it?” Sofia asked. She was lying with her head in Elise’s lap, her hair spread across Elise’s bare thighs, looking up at her with the unguarded expression that still, after three months, made Elise’s chest ache.

“It tastes like us,” Elise said. “If we had twenty more years.”

“We will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. And if you doubt me, I have five more vintages to prove it.”

Elise leaned down and kissed her — upside down, tasting the 2005 Burgundy on Sofia’s lips, tasting the future on her tongue.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know,” Sofia said. “I can taste it.”

Thank you for reading Wine, Women, and Weeknights! If you enjoyed Elise and Sofia’s story, please consider leaving a review — it helps other readers find the book.

For more sapphic romance from Aurora North, visit fractalenigma.com/aurora-north/

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