The pairing, p.14
The Pairing, page 14
I stand up and pull a pillow off the bed.
“Sure, I mean, why not?”
“Yeah, why not.” He sounds distracted, watching me open the tiny closet to dig out an extra blanket. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sleeping on the floor.”
Kit’s eyes go wide in horror. “No, you’re not.”
“Come on, Kit. The bed is barely a twin.”
“It’s your room, Theo, let me take the floor.”
“One of us spent the entire camping trip in Joshua Tree bitching about how hard the ground was, and it wasn’t me. You just let me know if you find a pea under there, okay?” I drop the blanket at my feet.
“Theo Flowerday,” Kit says, serious as the grave, “if you lie down on that disgusting carpet, I’m going back to my room.”
His sincere face is on. I sigh.
“Okay, fine. But I don’t want you sleeping down there either. So, what?”
We look at the bed. Again, there is an unthinkable solution, and there’s me, and there’s Kit, and I still don’t have it in me to do what I ought.
“Should we…?” I say. Not a question. If I don’t ask out loud, I’m not responsible for whatever happens next.
Kit says, “We’re friends.” Not an answer either.
“Yeah, okay,” I say. “But…”
“But what?”
“Remember how, if I get too sweaty in my sleep, I’m really cranky the next day?”
“Yes, vividly.”
“So,” I say, “I was gonna sleep in my underwear tonight.”
Kit nods several times in rapid succession. “Yeah, that’s—of course that’s fine. We’re friends. It’s your room, you should be comfortable.”
“Cool,” I say, also nodding. Just two friends with a normal dynamic, nodding and nodding. “And you too, of course, if you want to.”
“Yeah, it’s—it’ll be warm, with both of us.”
“Okay. So, I’m gonna…”
“Sure, me too.”
I turn around and tug my sweats off, trying not to listen to the creak of the mattress when he shifts, the whisper of his clothes coming off. I leave my tank on, but from the waist down, I’m only wearing a pair of soft boy shorts.
I feel an unspoken agreement settle between us. This time won’t be like the breakwater in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. This time, we’re going to look.
Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, I love my body. I like my long legs and strong thighs, the bands of muscle in my back and shoulders, the hint of what could be abs, if I tried. I know what I look like in my underwear, and I enjoy watching people experience it for the first time. Kit has seen me so much more naked than this.
Still, when I turn to face him, my heart is thrumming.
His shirt and joggers are folded neatly on the nightstand. He sits on the same spot at the edge of the mattress, wearing only a very small pair of black boxer briefs. The lamplight touches the highest points of his shoulders and chest, the tops of his spread thighs, the dimples of his knees. Shadow pools in the dips of his hip bones. Every bit of him. That elegant, graceful body I knew.
He’s looking at my body in the way only Kit can look at something, like he could eat the world up with his eyes. It’s not just that I want him. It’s that he taught me what wanting was. Anyone would have a weakness for that.
It occurs to me that if I want to have sex with Kit—if I have sex with Kit—it doesn’t mean I love him. Sex doesn’t have to contain love. Those things don’t even need to be in the same room.
“Hey,” Kit says, “there’s your third tattoo.”
I blink a few times.
“Oh!” My hand moves automatically to the spot on my left side. Part of it is still hidden by my underwear, but my third and biggest tattoo runs from my hip down the outside of my upper thigh. “Yeah. It’s sick, isn’t it?”
He peers through the low light. “Is it a snake?”
“It’s a rattlesnake.” I move closer so he can see the details of a western diamondback coiled around a coupe glass. “And look, his cocktail has a little orange slice for garnish.” When I look up, Kit is biting back a smile. “What?”
“Nothing. Just, you said it wasn’t an ass tattoo.”
“What—it’s not!”
“It kind of is.”
“It is an upper thigh tattoo! It’s on my—my—my haunch!”
The laugh he lets out is so delicious I want to swallow it whole. “Your haunch? Are you a pony?”
Maybe it’s the heat, or all the skin, or his laugh, or his attentive pen strokes and the ink stains on his knuckles, but in this moment, I want to find out what he’ll do. If he’s as close to the edge as I am. If he’ll back away from it.
I take his hand and place it right over the ink.
“Does this feel like my ass to you?”
His laugh subsides.
“No,” he says. “No, I guess not.”
He doesn’t take his hand away, but he doesn’t move it either. It just stays, his palm flush and warm against my skin, the tip of his thumb nearly brushing the elastic of my underwear. His eyes hold on to mine. I imagine him pulling me into his lap and parting his lips, think of his fingers and oil and the wet, red flesh of a cleaved tomato. Spit pools in my mouth.
He does nothing.
I shove his shoulder hard enough to play the whole thing off as a joke.
“Move over,” I say. “And stay on your side.”
He makes a sound in his throat and rolls off toward the wall as I climb into bed.
“That’s the plan,” he murmurs.
I switch off the light and crawl under the sheet, hooking my leg over the side of the mattress to anchor myself as far from him as possible. Behind me, Kit settles in. I wish my body didn’t still recognize the exact pitch of the mattress sagging under his weight.
“Good night, Kit,” I say, instead of screaming into my pillow.
A long moment goes by before Kit says, “Good night, Theo.”
* * *
I’m in the desert.
We’re on a blanket in the back of my car with the seats folded down, the hatch open, our boots lined up in the dust by the back tire. These deep summer days in the valley are so long, but Kit wanted to wait up for the Milky Way. He once said it was like a huge butter knife had spread the galaxy across the sky, swirls of stars like blackberry jam.
He tips his head back to moan. I see stars in the shine of sweat on his throat.
His legs are around me. I’m gripping his waist with one hand while the other works him, my hips against the backs of his thighs, his mouth already open when I bend to kiss it. He’s so pretty like this, coming apart. His body follows mine like a disciple.
Sometimes when I’m on top of Kit, when I’m making him sigh and shiver and beg—when I’m fucking him like this—I feel more present in my skin than I ever have. All the pieces in their right places. I wonder if anyone else in the whole blackberry-jam galaxy has ever loved someone so much that it made their soul feel fixed in their body.
Then, in a heartbeat, I’m not in the desert anymore.
I’m with Kit, but we’re inside a restaurant with stained glass windows. I’m atop a wooden table at the center of a feast, surrounded by overflowing dishes of melting chocolate and ripe tomatoes and fruit in spiced syrup. Kit sits on a chair between my parted legs, devouring an apricot, nectar glistening on his lips and chin.
He throws away the pit and brings me to his mouth, and I—
I wake up to a yell on the street.
Fuck.
I’m—where, again? Spain. Barcelona. A hostel near La Rambla. In a single bed, next to Kit.
Only, I’m not next to Kit. I’m wrapped around him, my face on his chest, my arm thrown over his waist, his arm around my shoulders. And I suspect, from the way one of his thighs is pinned between mine, I’ve been grinding against him in my sleep.
Fuck. Fuck.
Sunlight presses on my eyelids, but I’m too afraid to lift them. This is what I get for going to sleep horny—and for bringing up our camping trips, which were mostly an excuse to have sex in creative new locations. One of our memories got out of the vault, and now I’m having wet dreams.
Kit’s breathing is deep and slow, so at least he’s still asleep. If I can manage not to wake him up, he never needs to know.
Carefully, gradually, incrementally, I disentangle myself and roll away toward the other side of the bed.
Just when I think I’ve made it, Kit lets out an unhappy grumble and turns onto his side, pulling me back into his chest.
When Kit and I were together, his body became so familiar that I stopped sensing it as separate from my own. Every inch came as naturally as the slice of my hand through water. Now, I can feel all the subtle changes: his longer hair brushing my skin in new places, the impression of a new scar on his knee. All those hours kneading dough and throwing around sacks of flour—and poets, I guess—have added a layer of lithe muscle to his chest and shoulders.
His hips shift against me. My heartbeat skips as I realize: He’s hard.
He is not, I tell myself, hard for me. It’s a bodily response, like goose bumps, or a sneeze. But if he was hard for me, if he woke up right now and pressed himself against me and scraped his teeth over my pulse, I know I wouldn’t stop him. I’d welcome it. I would send this creaky, too-small bed to the big Ikea store in the sky.
I have to get the fuck out.
I try wriggling away, but with every inch I gain, his body instinctively closes the gap. He’s making unconscious sounds of frustration, whimpers that do absolutely nothing to strengthen my resolve. Every time I feel him hard and heavy through our thin layers of fabric, I have to concentrate on how mortified he would be if he knew what he was doing. I’m saving both our dignities here.
Or at least that’s what I’m trying to do when we tip over the side of the mattress and crash to the floor.
Kit startles awake with a shout that could be a mixture of English and French or just a bunch of affrighted vowels. His arms momentarily tighten around me, and then he goes absolutely still.
“Theo?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Oh, no. Oh God, did I—?”
“No, nothing happened, you’re fine,” I say as Kit releases me and scrambles backward.
He looks like he wishes he had been born a slug, which is obviously how you want a person to look after they’ve spooned you. I think I might start laughing. “It’s not a big deal. It’s, like, muscle memory, and I think I started it anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” he says miserably. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay!” I am laughing now, hysterical, insuppressible hiccups.
“Why are you laughing! I’m embarrassed! This is embarrassing!”
“Sorry!” I gasp. “I’m sorry, I’m just—I’m so glad it’s not me.”
“Theo.”
“Who were you dreaming about? Was it the chocolatero?”
“I—” Kit begins, but he’s cut off by the blaring jingle of his phone alarm. I take it from the nightstand and toss it to him, wiping a tear from my eye as he shuts it off.
“I guess we’re awake,” he says.
“I guess so.”
“Can we please,” he says, “pretend this never happened?”
I look at him, wide-eyed and crumpled against the wall in his underwear, his hair mussed from sleep and falling into his beautiful face. I want to smooth it away with my hands. I want to keep laughing forever. I want to pretend nothing happened, but only because he does.
“Yeah,” I say. “Of course, Kit. Of course.”
He fixes me with a plaintive look. “You mean it?”
“Kit. Come on. It’s us.”
At last, he smiles weakly.
“It’s us.”
He gets dressed to head upstairs, already talking about Sagrada Familia, how he’s read an entire book about it but pictures can’t do it justice. Once he’s gone, I walk over and slide the window shut. My reflection is full of color, my eyes dilated like I’ve had too much to drink. On the street below, two people are kissing.
* * *
There aren’t words for Sagrada Familia.
Maybe, if you could fold everything a person can see and know and experience in on itself, every face, every feeling, if you could max out all the bars on how much a thing can exist, it would be this five-hundred-foot-tall church. Millions of stone details on its facade. Figures and foliage and symbols and painstaking wrinkles of cloth. And somehow, inside, there’s more.
Every last inch has a complex, deliberate geometry, no straight line or unadorned surface. Groves of columns spiral up, transforming from squares to octagons to sixteen-sided shapes to circles, splitting into a canopy of bursting stars. Immense stained glass panes pour rainbows of light through the naves, fiery reds and oranges to one side and drowning blues and greens to the other, tunnels of color deep enough to swim through. Every feature is one detail on top of another and another, strange curves and jagged edges and joining corners that seem impossible.
We’re led around with little transmitter boxes on lanyards, Fabrizio filtering out through tinny earbuds, voice sweet as ever. But I listen instead to the echoing murmurs of hundreds of voices in a hundred languages, the slaps of sandals against marble.
Kit lags behind, and I let myself fall to his side. His earbuds are loose around his neck. The look on his face is pure, slack, sparkling wonder.
I think of the museum in Bordeaux, the painting of the woman on the rubble. How I told myself he’d answer if I asked about the painting.
“Hey,” I say, quiet as the group moves on without us. “Tell me what you read about this place.”
Kit smiles.
In a low, gentle voice, he tells me everything. How the columns and their branching vaults are meant to evoke the feeling of walking through a forest, their double-twisted design inspired by oleander branches. He talks about Gaudí, the artist and architect who devoted forty-three years of his life to building this church, the only love of his life and his great unfinished project, how he lived on the grounds and is buried in the crypt below to be with her forever.
There’s no pretense in his voice, no arrogance, only naked joy and generosity. Happiness to open up a world and share it with me. I turn away so he won’t see me blink the sudden wetness from my eyes. I left that room in Bordeaux specifically to avoid this: the terrible, undeniable, shattering fact of his goodness.
When the rest crumbles—the worst angles, the meanest versions of events, the lies I told myself—what’s left is only Kit. Only the great unfinished love of my life, and a floor I’m still lying under.
* * *
“You can’t use a whole dish as an ingredient!” Kit says, gesturing so expansively that his vermouth almost spills. “That’s cheating!”
“Not even if I buy it prepared and incorporate it?”
“That’s against the spirit of the exercise. On the Fly is for raw materials.”
“Then you shouldn’t be allowed to use chocolate,” I counter. “You should have to march your happy ass down to the shops and crank up the bean grinder, baby.”
Kit’s smile blooms even brighter, color splashing into his cheeks. He’s always loved when I get belligerent for his entertainment.
“You know that’s not the same—”
“Do you churn your own butter too? Do you have a chic little Parisian butter churn? Does it have a holder for chic little Parisian unfiltered cigarettes?”
“Okay!” Kit says, showing me his hands. “Okay, you can use crema catalana to make a milk punch! And I’ll take the only the orange zest from it—”
“Boooo.”
“—and I’ll mix it with ricotta to fill cannoli, and—” He sees the look on my face. “What?”
“Did you make the ricotta, Kit?”
He looks like he might scream, half frustration and half delight, all Theo-and-Kit.
“Yes, Theo, I rode my bike down to the village sheep farm, and I made sweet, tender love to the farmer’s wife all night long so she would let me milk the sheep, and then I carried the pail home and made the ricotta.”
“Then I’ll take the salty tears of the sheep farmer whose wife leaves him for the village hole—”
Kit gasps theatrically. “Hole?”
“—and use them to make a salted Negroni, with a tangerine twist.”
“Campari tangelo marmalade,” Kit says instantly. “Glazing a tangelo-and-five-spice pound cake.”
“I’ll take the Chinese five-spice and steep it in rum and then use the rum to make a Cable Car.”
Kit sets his glass down, still smiling.
“Cable Car. That was … that was what we drank that time we drove to San Francisco for your birthday, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, at that dive in North Beach,” I say. “It was cash only, and we were out of cash.”
“And I pretended to propose so they’d comp our drinks.”
We were only twenty-three then, and we always joked about getting married, like it was so obvious that it wasn’t worth taking seriously. I laughed when he did it. But after, he told me he’d marry me that night if I wanted. That he’d have married me the night we first kissed.
“I’m definitely not beating that one, then,” Kit says. He tips his chin up at me, and I want to press my thumb to the center of it. “You win. I’ll drink the absinthe.”
“Discúlpeme, señor!” I call to the bartender. “Una absenta, por favor!”
We’re in Bar Marsella, the oldest bar in Barcelona, allegedly a haunt of Picasso and Hemingway. Humid night clings to wood-paneled walls and peels away brown paint, steaming cabinets of antique bottles and mirrors mounted behind wobbly tables. A chandelier blinks dustily above as the soles of my sandals stick to the mosaic floor. The bartender drops off a crystal glass of pale green absinthe, a bottle of chilled water, and a paper-wrapped sugar cube, and Kit sets about expertly melting the sugar into the glass.
Down the bar, an older man sits alone with a glass of pale beer and the kind of book you’d pick up at an airport. His khaki shorts and polo scream American tourist. When I check the cover, I do a double take.
