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Café Musain was nearly empty that particular afternoon—one of those rare days when there was no meeting scheduled, no gathering to fill the room with passionate discourse and revolutionary fervor. The proprietor moved about his business, and upstairs rooms stood silent and waiting.
Downstairs, however, were two figures who sat as unmovable as the furniture itself: Enjolras, seated at a table with papers spread before him, laboring over what would become a pamphlet; and Grantaire, several tables distant but still within orbit , engaged in work that suggested—miracle of miracles—some commerce.
Enjolras had been writing for perhaps an hour, transforming thought into word, conviction into argument, when he found his attention wandering. It was an unusual occurrence; Enjolras prided himself on on his focus to any given task at hand. And yet, inexplicably, his gaze kept drifting toward Grantaire.
The man was drawing. Not idly, as Enjolras might have expected, but towards some purpose. Before him lay what appeared to be architectural sketches: building facades, measurements, indicators of actual employment, or at least contracting, rather than mere dilettantism. It was, Enjolras reflected with some surprise, the first evidence he had ever witnessed that Grantaire did anything productive with his time.
But more striking than the work itself was the manner in which Grantaire performed it. His hand moved across the page with a startling steadiness, rendering exacting lines, and all the while—most arresting of Enjolras's attention—he drank. Not carelessly, desperate gulping to drown his sorrows, but steadily, speaking to the suggestion wine was as necessary to his process as the ink in his pen.
Enjolras counted the empty glasses that had accumulated at Grantaire's elbow. Four. No, five; and the fifth half-empty already.
Before he could stop himself, Enjolras spoke. "How many of those do you intend to consume before the day is done?"
It was not kindly said. He know he spoke with judgment, though if Courfeyrac were to raise a brow, he would dress it as inquiry to remedy an incomprehension.
Grantaire looked up, and for a moment Enjolras thought he would receive one of his mocking responses; some quip about Bacchus or the virtues of perpetual intoxication. Instead, Grantaire set down his pen and regarded Enjolras with surprising earnestness.
"As many as it requires," he said, "to maintain the world at its proper distance. Not so near that I feel its teeth in my throat, not so remote that I cease to feel anything at all. It is a balance, you understand—one I have spent years perfecting, degree by degree, glass by glass."
The answer was so lacking in his usual defensive irony that Enjolras found himself momentarily bereft of response. He turned back to his pamphlet, determined to refocus on his work, but— accursed things!— his eyes kept returning to Grantaire and his bafflingly steady hands, and last of all to the glass raised and lowered time and time again.
"Your hands," Enjolras said, and was surprised to hear himself speaking again. " They do not tremble. How is this possible, with all you've consumed?"
Grantaire's smile was wry, though perhaps he was unaware of how the corners curled tinged with a bleakness. He held up his right hand, demonstrating its steadiness. " When one has cultivated tolerance as I have cultivated mine, it requires more than mere wine to induce trembling." He regarded his own fingers. "This is what addiction looks like when properly refined, Apollo: perfect equilibrium achieved through perpetual maintenance. I am not drunk, you see. I am balanced. Remove the wine, and then you would witness trembling. But with it?" His fingers danced gracefully, flipping an invisible coin between their numbers. "Steady as the stars in their courses."
"I would not know," Enjolras said, and there was a certain stiffness, a slight emphasis in his tone that made Grantaire look at him more closely.
"Have you never been drunk?"
Enjolras felt himself grow defensive, though he could not have said why. "Of course I have. Once, years ago. But I did not like how it made me feel. Detached, lacking control, too much like my mind were separated from my body by some thick fog. Control was lost, and I—" He trailed off, swallowed, returned to his papers. "I did not care for it."
The words were factual, but they contained within them an unmistakable judgment, an implicit criticism of Grantaire's entire mode of existence.
Yet to Enjolras's surprise, Grantaire did not seem offended. Instead, his eyes—those eyes that usually held only mockery or melancholy—began to sparkle with something like delight, the pleasure of a teacher who has discovered an apt pupil where none was expected.
"Ah," Grantaire said, rising with only the slightest unsteadiness, "that is because you approached the experience with all the grace of a man throwing himself into a river without having learned to swim. You drank to become drunk, not to experience drunkenness. You treated wine as a destination rather than a journey." He crossed the space between them, and Enjolras's stiffened entirely at the approach. "You have never drunk with a true connoisseur of the form."
The stiffness spread, cutting to the quick of him with a slice he could not name and did not wish to examine. Grantaire reached for Enjolras's empty cup—the one that had, most assuredly, held water—and without asking permission, poured wine into it from his own bottle.
The liquid caught the afternoon light, transforming, and Enjolras found himself mesmerized by it, by the way Grantaire's fingers wrapped around the bottle's neck, by the steadiness of his pour, by the dark stain the wine left on the rim of the glass where it touched.
Grantaire held it out, an offering.
"Drink with me," he said, a priest offering communion. "Let me teach you how to savor the experience, and how you might go about to lose yourself properly."
Every faculty Enjolras possessed counseled refusal. This was dangerous, he knew—though he could not have named the nature of the danger. Yet there was something in the pit of his stomach, some unnamed sensation that was neither quite anxiety nor quite anticipation. He was acutely, painfully aware of Grantaire's proximity as the golden afternoon light dappled his never-quite-smile, mere inches behind the dark wine suspended between them, a question awaiting answer.
It was reckless. He knew it was reckless, though he could not have said why.
He took the glass.
"First," Grantaire said, settling into the chair beside Enjolras rather than returning to his own table, and the intimacy of that choice did not go unnoticed, "you must look at it. Wine is not merely a beverage, it is an experience for all the senses. See how the light passes through it? The color tells you stories, if you know how to read it."
Enjolras looked at the wine. It was wine. Red, barely translucent, unremarkable. He raised it to his lips.
"No," Grantaire said, and the word held no true reprimand, instead sitting almost tender in the correction. His hand rose—not touching Enjolras, but near enough that the potential of touch could even be seen by the blindest of leaders of men. "You are doing it again: drinking merely to wet your throat! That is not the art I am teaching."
He lifted his own glass in demonstration. "Watch. First, the sight—we have established that. Now, the scent." He brought the glass to his nose and breathed. His chest expanded with the inhalation, his lips parted slightly, and—gracious—Enjolras nearly averted his eyes at the obscenity in the attention he gave such a simple act. Enjolras felt as a voyeur prying into act: intimate and private, watching a man in a moment of pleasure he believed himself alone to experience. "You seek notes: fruit, earth, oak, whatever reveals itself. Acknowledge the gift, allow your senses to fully register what you are about to receive into your body."
The words were spoken with uncharacteristic richness, mirroring the near-sensuality in the slowness of his movements. They transformed each simple act, making Enjolras's mouth go dry even as he held his glass. He found himself watching the curve of Grantaire's throat, the parting of his lips and expansion of his chest with each inhalation. With effort, he forced his attention back to his own glass and mimicked the gesture.
The scent was stronger than he'd expected—not unpleasant, but sharp, complex, layered with things he couldn't identify but found himself wanting to understand.
"Good," Grantaire murmured, and the approval sparked Enjolras's pulse , which he would not inquire into. "Very good. You are a quick study, Apollo. I suspected you might be. Now, when you drink, do not swallow immediately. Let it rest on your tongue. Feel the texture—wine has texture, you see. Some are smooth as silk, some rough as hemp. Some leave your mouth feeling parched, others coat it like honey. Attend to everything. Notice everything."
He drank, and Enjolras watched—helpless not to watch—the movement of his throat, the way his eyes half-closed, and the subtle relaxation of his shoulders. When Grantaire lowered his glass, his lips were stained darker, wine-dark, and he looked at Enjolras with an expectancy that seemed weighted with more than the mere question of whether instruction would be followed.
"Your turn."
Enjolras drank. He tried to do as Grantaire had instructed—holding the wine in his mouth, attending to its qualities—but it felt artificial, like attempting to perform some ritual whose significance he did not fully grasp. The wine was warm and tart and filled his mouth with sensations he had no vocabulary to describe.
"What do you taste?" Grantaire asked, leaning closer.
"Wine," Enjolras said.
Grantaire laughed, and who would have known it to be a thing of beauty? "We shall work on that. Try again. This time, cease thinking about what you are supposed to taste. Simply notice what is actually present. Let yourself experience it without judgment. Just feel.”
Just feel. When had Enjolras ever done anything without analysis, without the mediating presence of thought? But he tried. Drank again, and this time attempted to simply notice—the wave spreading across his tongue, the taste that changed and evolved even as he held the wine in his mouth, revealing new dimensions, new complexities.
And thus began what could only be termed a lesson, though in what subject Enjolras could not have said with certainty. Grantaire poured, instructed, demonstrated. He spoke of wine with the gravity of teaching language, each glass a sentence to be parsed and comprehended. There was something professorial in his manner; perhaps this were the one domain of expertise he possessed, and was determined to impart his wisdom.
"The key," Grantaire said, refilling both their glasses, "is to drink slowly enough that you can observe the changes as they occur within you. Intoxication is not a destination at which one suddenly arrives. It is a journey with distinct stages, each possessing its own character and revelations. If you rush, you miss everything of value."
They drank. And drank again. The afternoon light shifted, growing longer to paint the world in shades of amber and honey. Enjolras found himself increasingly aware of sensations never before fathomed: the weight of the glass, the relaxing of his chest, and the marginal progress each swallow made in loosening that staunchness that always held clenched within him.
"Tell me what you're feeling," Grantaire said, and the closeness was undeniable in its intimacy. "Not what you think you ought to feel."
Enjolras frowned, trying to articulate something that wanted to exist just beyond the reach of words. "My hands," he said slowly, looking down. They were fuzzy and far away, and nearly belonged to someone else. "There's a tingling in my fingers. As if... as if the blood is moving through them differently than before. Like I can feel my heart in them."
"Good. That's the wine opening your veins, making the blood flow more freely.” Grantaire's praise was more intoxicating than the drink thus far, and Enjolras found himself craving more of that approval, wanting to give him the right answers, to be the student Grantaire apparently wanted him to be. “What else?"
"My thoughts." Enjolras paused, noticing even as he spoke how much longer it took to translate internal experience into external expression. Each word seemed to require more effort than usual, though he were reaching through some invisible medium to grasp them. "It takes me longer to think through what I want to say. There is a delay between the impulse to speak and the words themselves emerging. Like... trying to walk through water instead of air."
"Perfect." Grantaire's eyes were bright with the genuine pleasure of having found an apt pupil. "That is one of the first effects on the mind. Your thoughts are still functioning—you are clearly still quite articulate—but they are functioning more slowly, having to push through resistance. The wine is dulling the usual quickness of your wit. Do you find it unpleasant?"
Enjolras considered. "Not unpleasant, precisely. Strange. Unfamiliar. I am accustomed to my mind responding immediately to my will. This feels like being a passenger in my own body rather than the coachman."
"And now we understand," Grantaire said with a wry smile that held more sadness than mirth, "why revolutionaries who love control do not typically embrace drink. You wish to command yourself, and the wine makes you realize you are not entirely in command. But there can be freedom in that realization, too. When you cease constantly ordering yourself about, sometimes you discover things that were always present but hidden beneath all that control."
He poured again, and Enjolras noticed that his own hand reached for the glass without conscious decision, the rhythm of the evening intwining in him.
"What about your body?" Grantaire asked, more carefully this time. "How does it feel?"
"Warm," Enjolras said. "Everywhere. I feel as though I sit close to a fire. My skin feels... alive. The air touching it, the fabric of my clothes—I am aware of these things in a way I ordinarily am not."
"That is the same effect—the wine opening your blood. Your body is giving off heat, and yes, your skin becomes more alive to every touch. In winter, it's one of the few pleasant aspects of heavy drinking." Grantaire smile was not a smile. "Though it is deceptive, of course. Many a drunk has frozen to death thinking himself perfectly comfortable."
They continued, and with each glass, Enjolras found himself sliding deeper into this strange new country of altered perception. His observations became more comprehensive, if clumsier, the wine teaching him a new language for his own physical existence.
"The room feels larger," he said at one point, looking about them. "Or I feel smaller. The distance between things seems... uncertain. The measurements of the world have become approximate, rather than exact."
"The wine plays tricks on the eye," Grantaire nodded. "One of the more interesting effects. Distances become unreliable. I particularly enjoy that effect; it makes the world seem more mysterious. Less knowable, and therefore more interesting."
"You enjoy that?" Enjolras asked, usual certainties loosened enough to allow real inquiry. "The uncertainty?"
"I enjoy all of it," Grantaire said, and there was something almost defiant in his tone, defending not just his drinking but his entire philosophy of existence. "The heat, the softening of sharp edges, the way time becomes elastic and unimportant. Even the parts I care little for—the nausea and headaches, when the following morning becomes a divine punishment—I bear them because the journey is worth it.”
“The journey.”
"Yes," Grantaire said, his voice rough now, barely above a whisper. "Everything is beautiful and strange. Everything is… heightened. Every sensation magnified. The wine makes the body more receptive, more alive to touch." He picked up his glass with a hand that trembled slightly—the first tremor Enjolras had seen from him—and drank deeply. "It is one of the more intoxicating effects, in every sense of the word."
Enjolras found himself studying Grantaire's face with depth never before permitted. In this of all days, with wine in his blood and his usual self-control loosening, he could admit things he normally kept locked in some dark recess of his mind.
Grantaire was compelling.
Not in the classical sense—his features were too irregular, his dissolution too evident in the shadows under his eyes and the slight puffiness that spoke of too many nights like this one. But there was the way he moved, the way he spoke when he forgot to hide behind mockery made him more alive. His hands as they moved were animated. His voice when stripped of irony was rich. The curve of his mouth, the line of his throat—
Dangerous thoughts. Enjolras pushed them away, or tried to, but they kept returning with increasing insistence.
"Time," Enjolras said, needing desperately to redirect his attention to something, anything else. "You mentioned time. It feels—I cannot determine how long we have been sitting here. Has it been an hour? Two hours? Longer?"
"The wine stretches and shrinks time according to its own logic," Grantaire answered. "A delightful effect, that. Minutes can stretch like pulled sugar floss or contract to nothing. The present moment becomes enormous, swallowing both past and future. One exists only in the now, and there is something quite freeing in that—to be liberated from the tyranny of clocks and calendars."
He leaned closer, and Enjolras could smell the vintage on his breath. "I think," Grantaire said, lower, "that the next thing you will notice is a certain loosening. Not just of your body—you are already experiencing that—but of your mind. The inhibitions that normally govern what you say and do will begin to feel less absolute: suggestions rather than commandments. Rules whose authority suddenly seems questionable."
His hand came to rest on Enjolras's arm—just his fingers, really, pressing lightly where the sleeve of his shirt ended and bare skin began. “It's here that you'll feel it most—”
The touch was casual, meant to illustrate some point about sensation, perhaps, or about the heightened awareness that wine brings. But to Enjolras—
Heat bloomed where Grantaire's fingers pressed against his sleeve: concentrated, radiating outward and downward, pooling low in his belly. His breath caught. A wave of sensation swept through him, and he realized with a mixture of mortification and hot insistence utterly alien to his usual experience of himself that he was aroused.
This particular observation, he decided with what remained of his faculties, would absolutely not be reported to Grantaire.
"—and your senses become less reliable," Grantaire was saying, oblivious to the crisis he had precipitated and still lecturing. " The wine asks: why not? Why deny yourself? What is the virtue in refusing pleasure, in maintaining distance, in keeping yourself locked away from experience? You will find yourself less certain of where your body ends and the world begins. The boundaries blur. Some people find it disorienting. I find it—"
He stopped mid-sentence, seeming to notice where his hand was, to lose his train of thought, and removed his hand. Enjolras felt the loss of that contact with an acuteness that alarmed him, suddenly plunged into cold water after basking in a hearth's glow.
"People tend to start babbling at this stage," Grantaire said after a moment, distracted. "Treating me like a confessional, spilling secrets they had never voice sober. I find myself surprised you're not doing that."
"I am thinking through anything I wish to say three times before I say it," Enjolras admitted. The words came slowly, carefully shaped. "Perhaps four times."
Grantaire's laugh was delighted, a caress. "That is perfectly you. Even drunk, you censor yourself." He leaned back, regarding Enjolras with amusement and perhaps even fondness. "But you are already bold in your declarations: in your speeches and insults alike. You say what others dare not. I cannot imagine what could possibly be crossing your mind that would require such supervision."
Enjolras said nothing. Could not, would not say what was actually occupying his thoughts: the way Grantaire's mouth looked when he drank with the slight sheen the wine left on his lips, the persistent awareness of his body occupying space too close and not close enough. He would certianly not say that he wanted to touch, to be touched, to close the small distance between them and discover whether Grantaire's skin was as warm as it looked in this honeyed light.
The silence stretched between them, growing heavier with each passing second. Enjolras watched Grantaire's face shift—a kind of retreat, a closing off, interpreting the silence and drawing conclusions from it.
He was wrong, whatever he thought. But Enjolras could not correct him without revealing what he was actually thinking, and that remained impossible. Wasn't it? Hadn't it always been impossible?
Grantaire cleared his throat and poured again, but the air changed between them; the ease of the lesson replaced by a tension that made Enjolras's already-heightened senses feel almost painful in their acuity.
They drank more. The light continued its slow decline toward evening, painting everything in deep shades and deeper shadow. Enjolras moved deeper into intoxication, that strange land where nothing felt quite real and yet more real than it had ever been. His body existed at some remove from his mind, and yet he was more conscious of it than usual, with his heart beating too fast, breaths growing shallow, and the persistent heat attributed to the man sitting beside him, so close their sleeves nearly touched.
"Your eyes have gone dark," Grantaire observed, and Enjolras realized with a start that he had been staring, that his gaze had been fixed on Grantaire with an intensity that surely could not be mistaken for casual observation. "Your pupils are dilated. That is the wine working on your body."
"I know," Enjolras said, though he was not certain he had known before Grantaire had named it. "I can feel it. My heart—" He pressed his hand to his chest, feeling the rapid percussion beneath his palm. "Is that normal? This rapidity?"
"Perfectly normal. Wine quickens the blood before it slows it. Your body is responding to what you've consumed." Grantaire's gaze had grown more intense, though whether from his own continued drinking or from something else, Enjolras could not say. His voice dropped even lower. "What else do you feel?"
Everything, Enjolras wanted to say. I feel everything. Every sensation seemed magnified to an almost unbearable intensity: from the air on his skin to the weight of his own clothes.
And the sound of Grantaire's breathing, so close. The persistent, undeniable pull of desire.
"I feel..." he began, then stopped, uncertain.
"Tell me," Grantaire said softly, and there was a current in his voice—urgent, almost hungry—that made Enjolras's mouth go dry despite the wine.
"I feel as though I am discovering my body for the first time," Enjolras said finally, slowly, choosing each word with care despite the way they seemed to slip and slide away from him. "As if I have been living in my head all my life, and the wine is forcing me to remember I have a physical form. That I can be—" He stopped, swallowed. "That I can be touched."
The last word emerged barely above a whisper, fraught with implications Enjolras had not consciously intended but could not now retract.
Grantaire inhaled sharply. His hand moved—unconsciously, Enjolras thought—reaching out and then stopping halfway, hovering in the air between them, not trusting himself to complete the motion.
"That is the gift and the curse of it," Grantaire whispered, though it could not have been louder to Enjolras's ears. "The wine shows you yourself. All the things you ignore or suppress or do not permit yourself to acknowledge. It brings them to the surface whether you desire it or not, whether you are prepared for the revelation or not."
Enjolras knew—with the part of his mind that still functioned, that still maintained some connection to reason and propriety—that he should look away. End this lesson, return to his papers and his revolution and his carefully ordered life where such feelings did not exist because he did not permit them to exist. But the wine had done something to the mechanism of his will, and he found that he could not move.
Could not do anything except stare at Grantaire and think about touching and being touched.
It was Enjolras who moved first.
Later, he would not be able to say what exactly prompted him to lean forward and close that small but significant distance between them to press his lips against Grantaire's with a clumsiness born of inexperience and intoxication. He would not remember deciding to kiss him—only that one moment he was sitting there, his heart racing and his thoughts spinning in lazy, wine-soaked spirals, and the next he was doing it, wine dissolving inhibitions and the very barrier between thought and action.
The kiss was a revelation.
Everything was: the softness of Grantaire's mouth, so much softer than Enjolras had imagined (and when had he imagined it? When had that thought crept in?), the sharp intake of breath of surprise or relief (please be relief, he could not bear to be the fool—), the way the world seemed to contract until it contained only this: the pressure of lips, the taste of wine mingled with wine until he could not distinguish his own taste from Grantaire's, the heat and the wanting and the absolute impossibility of stopping now that he had begun.
Through the fog of intoxication, Enjolras tried to maintain some thread of observation. If he observed, it might remain a lesson yet. His lips tingled. His heart accelerated— the already-rapid heartbeat that now worried him that he might vibrate apart with the force of it all. And there! Grantaire's hand rising to rest tentatively, almost reverently, against his jaw, fingers trembling. Could Grantaire not quite believe this was happening, needed the physical confirmation that it was real?
The sound—had he made that sound, that small desperate noise that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest, some part of himself he had never accessed before? Or had it been Grantaire? He could not tell, could not distinguish between self and other.
Grantaire's mouth opened against his—invitation or surrender—and Enjolras followed without thought, deepening the kiss without hesitation, learning its contours and possibilities with an urgency that was both drowning and like flying. His hands found their way to Grantaire's shoulders, anchoring himself against the spinning, impossible fact of kissing and being kissed.
Time became even more elastic, stretching like forming glass. How long they met, Enjolras could not have said. He was aware only of sensation and the synchronicity of breath into one shared rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, and then the loss of breath entirely.
When they finally parted—slowly, reluctantly, a tearing of two things that had fused together—Enjolras was breathing hard, staring at Grantaire with an expression that must have revealed everything he had been trying so desperately to hide.
Grantaire's own eyes were wide, lips parted and darker from the kiss, face flushed. He looked as stunned as Enjolras felt.
For a long moment, they simply looked at each other, and Enjolras felt the weight of what had just transpired settling over him as a heavy cloak: warm and suffocating in equal measure.
Grantaire spoke first, stripped of usual defenses. "I suppose I should not have kissed back. It is not fair, with you being in this state. But I am a weak man, and I am rarely able to summon the strength to do difficult things."
The words were apologetic, self-recriminating, but underneath was a raw honesty that Enjolras knew he must honor—
"No," Enjolras said, and the words came without moderation, as all the ones before. "I suppose I knew that already."
The moment they were spoken he felt the spell break and the evening shatter. Grantaire's face closed off, that familiar mask of detachment sliding back into place, armor donned against attack.
The lesson was over.
Enjolras found excuse to leave perhaps an hour later. He could not return to his work in such a state.
Whether Grantaire also left after, Enjolras could not say.
Three days later, Les Amis de l'ABC reconvened.
Three days during which Enjolras labored to focus on his work, the great cause that had always been his lodestone and his purpose, while some part of his mind—that traitorous part newly awakened by wine and touch—remained preoccupied with other matters.
Specifically: with the morning after. He had woken in his own bed with a headache of such spectacular proportions that he had briefly considered the possibility that his skull was actually fracturing. Every sound had been an assault, every ray of sunlight a blade driven into his eyes. He had understood then, viscerally and completely, why Grantaire drank again the following day: not for pleasure, but for the relief of dulling a pain that felt like divine retribution for the hubris of seeking pleasure.
At that meeting, Enjolras sat in his customary place and led the discussion with his usual intensity. Or, so he hoped it appeared. In truth, part of his attention remained elsewhere; fixed on the figure in the corner, the man who sat with his bottle and his glass but who was not, tonight, watching Enjolras.
Grantaire was, in fact, studiously avoiding looking at Enjolras at all, gaze fixed on his drink or the wall or anything except the man who had kissed him three nights ago.
The awkwardness was a presence between them, as palpable as another man seated at the table. The meeting proceeded. Plans were made, speeches delivered. Gradually, the friends began to disperse, heading off into the Parisian night.
Grantaire stood to leave, still without having looked directly at Enjolras even once.
And Enjolras, watching him gather his things while trying very not to appear as if he were fleeing, made a decision. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a decision made itself within him, emerging from some deeper stratum of his being where wine had taught him to look, where desire lived alongside conviction.
He reached for his own glass—filled tonight with wine, not water—and waited until Grantaire's path to the door would necessarily take him past Enjolras's table and avoidance would become impossible without obvious rudeness. At the precise moment when Grantaire could not help but see him, Enjolras caught his eye and held it, refusing to permit him the escape of looking away.
Then, deliberately, he raised the glass to his nose. Inhaled slowly, deeply, exactly as he had been taught. Brought it to his lips and drank—not gulping, but savoring; letting the wine rest on his tongue, attending to its texture, its warmth, its thousand subtle qualities. The way it felt as it slid down his throat, bloomed into heat in his chest, and began its newly-familiar work of loosening and opening and revealing.
He kept his eyes on Grantaire the entire time.
The wine was smooth tonight—smoother than the wine from that afternoon three days ago, or perhaps his palate had been educated already. It was warm as blood in his veins, sweet as the memory of a kiss that should never have happened but had happened nonetheless and changed something fundamental in the architecture of his understanding of himself.
Grantaire stood frozen, eyes wide, and Enjolras saw understanding dawn in them: what he promised or threatened, or merely suggested.
Finally, Enjolras lowered the glass deliberately, and Grantaire remained motionless, perhaps fearful that any movement might break whatever fragile thing had just been constructed between them.
The future stretched out before them, unmapped and uncertain, full of possibilities that Enjolras had never allowed himself to consider and still was not certain he should consider now. But the wine was warm in his blood, and Grantaire was looking at him with an expression that was hope and fear and desperate longing all at once, and Enjolras found that he could not look away.
He raised the glass again and drank.