The pairing, p.13
The Pairing, page 13
“I’d wait until track twelve.”
“Wow, you have gotten patient. Did you start meditating?”
“I have simply learned how rewarding it can be to take my time,” I say. “It’s called having range.”
“Range,” Kit repeats, leaning closer. “Sure.”
“In fact, if you want any tips, let me know.” I shift toward him. “I’m happy to help.”
“If I ever need advice on using spit as lube, I know who to ask.”
“And I’ll hit you up next time I’m trying to, like, fuck a poet.”
“Oh, poets are easy,” Kit says, breath warm against my cheek, all apples and spice. “They just want to be thrown around.”
“Sounds like you’ve been throwing some poets around, Kit.”
“I told you, I’ve been practicing.”
“Still finding that hard to believe.”
“I have references.”
“And I have doubts.”
“Give me an hour and I can prove it.”
“An hour’s not nearly long enough.”
The eye contact is overwhelming, so I look at his lips instead. They part to reveal pink tongue against white teeth, and for one smothering moment, the only thing in Spain is that mouth, the plush promise of it, the way it would feel to push inside.
It crushes me then, slams into me and pulls me down: I want him. I still want him.
I kick my stool backward and jump to my feet at the same moment Kit does.
“There has got to be someone in this club who wants to fuck me,” I say.
Kit looks away, eyes wild. “I’m sure you’re right.”
We split up, not bothering to fight the crowd blocking Fabrizio. Instead, I find someone leaning against the back wall with a beer. I chat them up in clumsy Spanish, and at the first sign of interest, I ask if they want to get out of here. When they say yes, I turn to declare victory, half expecting Kit to be there.
He isn’t far, but he’s not waiting for me. He’s on his way out of the club with a group of hot locals of various genders, his arm over a woman’s shoulder, being swept away into the night. I left him alone for ten minutes, and he got himself invited to some kind of polyamorous Spanish sex party.
He meets my eye and smiles, fingers tangled in a stranger’s hair.
“That still only counts as one!” I call, but he’s already gone.
BARCELONAPAIRS WELL WITH:
Spanish vermouth over ice with an orange garnish, turrón de yema tostada
I turn the bombone over on my tongue.
The chocolate is dark and rich, almost peppery. The wet warmth of my mouth melts it down to the caramel and citrus-kissed cream at the center. I focus on how it coats the flat of my tongue, the body of it, the nuttiness.
A bead of sweat rolls down my spine and into the crack of my ass, breaking the last bit of my concentration.
We’re standing in the arched doorway of a chocolatería on La Rambla, the wide, busy, tree-fringed walk that runs from central Barcelona to the Mediterranean Sea. The buildings here are a strange mix of new and old, incongruent pieces of a long-lived city keeping up with its people. A sixteenth-century church across from a shop serving dick-shaped waffles, a McDonald’s wedged between saints. A dog lies panting in the alley nearby, stealing shade from the big market, La Boqueria. Old women in booths sell fresh flowers and cups of sliced fruit, young men zip by on electric scooters, and the sun scorches every cobble and brick.
Magical, vibrant Barcelona has welcomed us with a heat wave. It’s thirty-six degrees Celsius, which means nothing to me but made Kit go “Holy God” when he saw it on his phone. I’ve been covered in a sticky layer of sweat since I stepped out of the hostel.
“Barcelona,” says our local chocolate guide, a thin Catalan woman with dyed red-orange hair, “is the city that brought chocolate to Europe.”
This is the first stop on our afternoon chocolate crawl: a confectioner built in the shell of a historic pasta shop, jade and gold mosaic glass glittering on its facade. Inside, wooden filing drawers and glass shelves of chocolates cover the back wall, and the long case holds elaborate cheesecakes the size of my palm. Our guide sent around boxes of bombones—bonbons—for us to try, and I’ve picked a gem-shaped chocolate filled with crema catalana.
As our guide explains how crema catalana differs from crème brûlée, I reach into my pocket for my phone and find … nothing.
“Shit,” I whisper. We had an hour of siesta between arrival and this tour, and I thought I was being so responsible by plugging my phone in to charge. “Shit.”
Kit nudges me, brow raised in question.
“Left my phone at the hostel.” I wipe my hand across my sweaty forehead, which doesn’t help since my hand is also sweaty. “I was gonna take notes—Fabrizio said the tour is ten stops, I’ll never remember it all.”
I shouldn’t be surprised, not after the last twenty hours. My hookup from the bar couldn’t get me off, and then I had to pass six hours on a bus next to Kit, fresh off whatever beachside orgy he must have had. I may have created an untenable situation. My blood is not spending a lot of time near my brain.
Kit takes out his pocket sketchbook and his fountain pen.
“I’ll take notes for you.”
I stare. “You want me to—dictate?”
“Yeah, I’d like to experience your sommelier process. Tell me what to write. Tastes like the spirit of a wild stallion, or something.”
I know he’d let me take the pen and do it myself. But this is the kind of thing Kit likes to do for his friends. He gets this satisfied little smile when he’s solved someone’s problem, and I want to watch it tug at his mouth.
His mouth. Last night, at the club. Apple and spice. I want him.
“Make sure you write down the filling,” I say, resolving to smother the memory in chocolate. “And there are notes of black pepper, can you put that?”
The tour takes us across La Rambla and into the Gothic Quarter, the oldest part of the city, where mosaic sunflowers and stone flourishes burst out of shops between displays of souvenir magnets. The roads are so narrow that the apartment balconies on either side can’t be more than a few feet apart, flags and laundry and tendrils of green plants strung from their iron railings like a hanging village, a thin strip of blue sky visible only when you look straight up.
We wander into a glossy shop that specializes in turrón—Spanish almond nougat—where we taste soft turrón topped with burnt egg yolk and creamy marzipan striped with candied squash. We crunch into chocolate-dipped churros and chew chocolate-coated slices of blood orange, rind and all. At the oldest chocolatería in the city, a handsome young chocolatero gives us cava bombones made with the shop’s two-hundred-year-old grinding wheel. These are so incredible, I can only watch in mute bliss as Kit uses his charm to get two more just for us.
By the time we reach the ruins of the city’s Roman wall, half of the group is going slightly wild from the heat and the sugar. Stig looks on slackly while Montana slips a morsel of chocolate between Dakota’s lips with her fingers. One of the Calums is singing Spanish love songs. Birgitte and Lars might want to get a room, though I can’t tell if they need a nap or a quickie.
Kit stays close so I can describe flavors and textures into his ear, his pen gliding over the page, his presence as suffocating as the humidity. Everything is overwhelming. The thick air, the richness melting on my tongue, the radiating warmth of bodies around us, licks of damp hair at Kit’s temples when he sweeps it up off his neck. My words go sluggish and slurred, and Kit puts his lips to my ear to ask me to repeat myself, which only makes me dizzier. My body wants to sink into his voice like a fever dream.
The chocolate crawl rolls directly into a tapas crawl near the water, this one led by Fabrizio, whose eyes are already dark and glazed before the first round of drinks. Somewhere on a sidewalk embossed with a pattern of almond blossoms, I find myself briefly in Montana’s orbit, watching her watch Dakota and the Calums ahead.
“You know what’s funny?” she muses. “How sometimes you look at a man and it’s like, Oh, yeah, that. And then you look at a woman and it’s like, Ooh, yes, this.”
I nod, mostly knowing what she means. For me, it’s more that I like different genders from within different parts of me. Like I turn to face the light from a different direction every time.
Kit illuminates me entirely. Today, I’m catching all that light. I’m catching so much, I’m nearly cooking.
We drift from back rooms to basements in a haze. Crispy patatas bravas in red-brown salsa, hunks of fried dogfish, blood sausage, Manchego with fig jelly, heaps of paella, one million varieties of ham. Blond Calum passes me my first glass of Spanish vermouth, dark brown over ice like Coca-Cola. Its flavor is almost too deep and fragrant to describe to Kit, a heady mix of marjoram and coriander and sage and a hundred other things. I immediately order another.
I think distantly of Paloma’s guide to Barcelona, but I can’t recall any of it now. I only remember Kit’s thumb on the hinge of her jaw. I see her pulling Kit into her bedroom that night after the beach, tasting the salt left by our swim, covering his mouth so he won’t wake her family. I can almost hear his muffled moan like I’m listening from the next room, and—
Fuck.
I’m not listening. The door is closed. The way is shut, I think, so delirious that one of Kit’s Tolkienisms bobs to the surface.
And it is delirium. The soft-focus overfullness of decadence. I’m not the only one losing my mind—the atmosphere inside our last stop, a century-old restaurant called El Sortidor, is palpably erotic. Dusk filters through the stained glass windows, bringing out everyone’s finest features. Have the Calums always been so ruggedly handsome? Did I never notice how well Montana wears a sundress? Fabrizio could be Apollo as he demonstrates the technique for pan con tomate, rubbing garlic and a freshly split tomato over oily bread. I watch Kit’s fingers move, always so good at following instructions, applying pressure until the tomato is nothing but juice and pulp.
As I’m staring at a chunk of potato to get ahold of myself, Kit tucks his face into the side of my neck.
“Do you think,” he says in a low voice, “the Calums have ever explored each other’s bodies?”
This too is unbearably horny, even as a joke. Down the table, the Calums are absorbed in a conversation so intense they’re speaking almost directly into each other’s mouths.
I laugh and gulp down humid air, turning to Kit. He’s wearing the shirt with the embroidered flowers from our second night in Paris, and it makes me think of him braced over me on the bed in the back of that bar. I can still feel his breath cooling the sweat on my nape.
I keep my voice steady as I say, “All the best friendships get there sooner or later.”
* * *
I don’t have it in me to find a hookup for tonight. I’m too full, and the day was too long. I’m overdosing on Barcelona. It’s like being too tired to sleep. Too horny to fuck.
Instead, I return to my room and unlock my phone to fourteen emails and six missed calls from Schnauzer Bride. Her custom schnauzer tiki mugs have fallen off a shipping barge.
I scroll as I wash my hair, one arm out of the shower to keep my phone dry. My single room is so tight that I’m dripping on the nightstand from the en suite bathroom. I feel around my soup pot of a brain for something coherent to say.
A text from Kit pops up.
is the air conditioning in your room working?
I frown.
yeah why
hm. second question: how good is your spanish?
“What’s going on?” I ask when Kit picks up.
“My aircon doesn’t work,” Kit says. I hear him climbing onto his bed, whuffs of breath and rustling linens.
“Oh, shit.”
“Can’t say I’m shocked,” he says. “I was honestly more surprised they have air conditioning at all.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, the room is about sixty square feet and was facing the sun for the last eight hours; I’d say it’s … not ideal.” More sounds, like he’s poking at the air conditioner. “I opened a window but it isn’t doing much.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I might see if they have any other rooms? That’s why I asked about your Spanish.”
My Spanish is significantly better than my French thanks to four years in high school and a lifetime in Southern California, but even I can’t help. Earlier, I overheard the front desk guy telling a couple of backpackers they’re full for the night.
The only other option is such a bad idea that I shouldn’t even consider it. Before Kit texted, I was planning to slide my freshly clean body under the crisp top sheet and get myself off until the fog of horniness dissipated. I don’t know how I’ll survive without some sort of release. But I feel bad for him.
“Do you wanna crash in my room?” I offer before I can talk myself out of it.
“Your— Oh.” The rustling on his end stops. “Really? Are you sure?”
No. “Yeah, fuck it.”
“That’s— Thank you, Theo,” he says. “I’ll be down in five.”
He hangs up, and I stand there in my matchbox of a room, staring at the black glass of my phone screen.
“Okay,” I say out loud. “Okay. That’s fine.”
I throw my phone at the bed and do a lap, pulling on sweatpants and the first shirt I can reach, toweling my hair, sweeping lip balm tubes and pomade into my dopp kit, shoving clothing into my pack so Kit will think I’ve stopped leaving my laundry wherever it falls. By the time he knocks, my room looks like it belongs to a real adult.
I open the door to Kit in a rumpled T-shirt and soft cotton joggers. His hair is half wet. He smells like lavender and the same soap he used to keep in our shower.
“Hi,” he says, smiling apologetically.
“Hi.”
“Thanks, again. I hope this isn’t too weird.”
“No, of course not,” I say, even though it feels a little like my head is floating away from my shoulders. I step aside to let him in. “We’re friends, right?”
“Yeah, we are.”
“So, no biggie.” I shrug. “It’s a sleepover. We’ve had a million of those.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look at me, busy stepping out of his shoes. “Of course.”
The room suddenly feels too small, too hot from the lingering shower steam. I pace over to the window and open it.
“I don’t know if it’s much better than your room.”
“Trust me, it is.” He hovers near the en suite, holding his shaving kit. “Do you mind if I…?”
“Yeah, knock yourself out.”
“Amazing, thank you.” He steps toward the sink, pauses, then turns back. “Oh, I forgot to give this to you earlier.” He reaches into the pocket of his joggers and hands me his flimsy little sketchbook. “Keep it.”
“You don’t have to—I can just copy the pages down or take some pictures.”
“Theo, I packed twelve of those. I don’t mind.”
I run my fingers over the blue stripes on the sketchbook’s brown paper cover, the neat letters spelling CALEPINO. I imagine him picking it out at a stationery store in Paris, stuffing a whole bundle of them into his pack, his face shining with anticipation. The first few pages are loose sketches of streetlamps and stray dogs, then notes from that first chocolatería. And—
“Kit. What is this?”
I flip forward—the rest of the pages are the same. For every stop, he’s transcribed my notes in his slanting script, and on the opposite page, sketched a simple illustration.
“Yeah, I, ah, I thought it might help to have visual references?” He leans out of the en suite with his toothbrush in his mouth, toothpaste foaming along his bottom lip. “I mean, you always hated books without pictures, didn’t you?”
“Fuck off.” I go back through the pages—the crescent of a dipped orange slice, the churro’s rough ridges. He even did a cross section of my first bombone to show the layers of caramel and cream filling. “Kit, this is … really cool.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
I wish I could see the look on his face, but he’s spitting toothpaste into the sink.
It’s strange and strangely calming to stand next to the bed and look at Kit’s drawings while he does his skincare routine. I listen to the soft clicks of bottle caps and splashes of water, sounds I used to hear every night. I could close my eyes and be in our old apartment. I could smell his plants. I could feel the weight of his head on my chest.
I reach the last page and stop. There, an unfamiliar hand has written a series of digits, smudged like the writer was in a rush.
“Whose phone number is this?”
The water shuts off, and Kit releases the short oh of someone caught in the act.
“That would be the, ah,” Kit says, appearing in the doorway, “the number of that chocolatero who gave us extra chocolates. I meant to tear that page out.”
Ah. Of course. Almost forgot I was dealing with the Sex God of École Desjardins.
“Kit Fairfield, you dog.” I rip out the page and hold it out, showing him all my teeth when I grin. “You gonna use it? Ask him on a hot date tomorrow?”
Kit folds the page up and zips it into his shaving kit without looking at it.
“I don’t know. Do you think I should?”
“Well, what’s the score?”
He sits at the foot of the bed, right on the edge. He’s never been so cautious with a bed of mine before. Even when we were friends, he’d pour himself across the whole thing. I want to push him onto his back for the sake of consistency. Instead, I sit down next to him.
“One for each of us from Paris,” he says. “Florian, that makes two for you. And Juliette for you in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”
I let him think it’s true. “And Paloma for you.”
“Mm. And with last night … God, was that only last night?”
“I know.”
“That makes four for you, three for me. So I guess, if I want to catch up, I could message him.”
