The pairing, p.18
The Pairing, page 18
A wounded sound catches in my throat.
I lay my hand on Kit’s thigh to tell him I’m hot for this—so incredibly fucking hot for this—and when he nods, I know it’s more for me than Émile. It almost feels like I’m dreaming when he brings the peach to his mouth and puts out his tongue.
Émile and I both watch with rapt attention as Kit laps at the peach’s livid center. His hesitance is gone, absolutely no shame in the way he laves and sucks, only a familiar, voracious enthusiasm. Juice runs down his chin. I can barely believe what I’m seeing, that I get to watch him put on such a pretty show.
With a hand on the side of my neck, Émile leans in and follows Kit’s example until their mouths meet. Then they’re kissing, nectar and spit dripping onto my shoulder and down my chest. Kit keeps moaning, letting out these desperate little whines, and he’s hard against me as Émile’s tongue fucks into his mouth, and I’m imagining putting something else in his mouth, imagining Kit trailing nectar-sticky kisses from Émile’s mouth to mine.
Then Émile is kissing me with the same mouth that was kissing Kit, peach juice in his rough stubble, Kit all over his lips. I know Kit is watching, that I’m pushing myself into his familiar hardness, and it’s too late for me to stop. I’m too fucked up and buzzed and catastrophically turned on to entertain shame. Everything is happening through an iridescent haze of unreality, and my hand is moving on instinct, slipping down between my legs. Finally, finally, Kit makes deliberate contact with me, his fingers ghosting over my jaw, and I respond automatically, close my eyes and lean my face toward his touch and—
A foghorn, of all stupid fucking things, interrupts before I get my hand down my swimsuit bottoms. The yacht has returned to the harbor. More guests are coming aboard. I sit up, and Kit’s hand vanishes from my face.
“Ah,” Émile says, reluctantly drawing away. He gets to his feet, stretching athletically as if he were out for a light jog rather than trying to initiate a three-way. “The host must attend to his duties. I will return.”
He takes my hand and kisses the back of it.
“When I do, I hope you will have begun without me.”
And then he’s gone like a god of luxury linens, and we’re suddenly, inescapably alone. And I’m suddenly much more sober than I was two minutes ago.
That was—
We were—
Kit pulls away first, but I pull away harder.
“Theo,” Kit starts, breathless and dark-eyed.
Something you need to know about Kit is, his name isn’t actually Kit. His parents started calling him Kit because he was quick and wily like a little fox, and it was easier for his older brother to say, so it stuck. But his real name is Aurélien. The golden one. It fucking suits.
The golden one doesn’t make careless mistakes. The golden one doesn’t twist himself into knots over long-lost love. The golden one wasn’t about to jerk off in front of the ex he still wants because he had one too many caviar bumps and needed an outlet for his frustrations. The golden one is kind, and reliable, and thorough, and so unruinable that even this could barely persuade him to touch me. It’s not fucking fair.
“You know what would be so funny?” I say.
Kit barely reacts. I notice with some satisfaction that he’s still hard.
“What?”
“If I did this.”
I snatch a bottle of Dom Pérignon from the ice bucket on the table and take off running.
I run all the way down the stairs to the main deck, through the party to scoop up my shoes and our shirts and, for the hell of it, some expensive-looking coasters, and soon I’m sprinting down the spillway and onto the pier, sandals slapping wildly against the planks. Kit is only a few seconds behind, chasing me down the pier, and I feel like screaming with hysterical laughter. I feel like flying. I want to be golden too.
We race through the streets of Monaco, our shirts billowing and a bottle of Dom in my fist, and we start to laugh. We ricochet between alley walls, drunk on the rush of adrenaline, and I pop the cork out of the champagne. Bubbles stream down my forearms and over my feet until I fasten my lips on the opening and catch them in my mouth. I pass it to Kit, and he drinks, and I sing at the top of my voice, “Farewell and adieu all you fair Spanish ladies!”
We nearly drop the bottle, fumbling it between ourselves so that we crash together to catch it. My sandal comes halfway off, and Kit catches me before I trip, propping me up smoothly against the nearest wall.
In the pink bloom of a Monaco sunset, Kit is as breathtaking as he’s ever been. We’ve slowed now, laughter still on our lips but beginning to fade into soft, lilting breaths. My back is against the bricks, and Kit’s hands are on my shoulders.
I bite my lip and look into his face, his dark eyes and expressive mouth, his every unforgettable angle. I love him. I don’t want to, but I do.
He touches my face like he did before, his fingertips soft on my cheek.
And he kisses me.
THE BEGINNING(Kit’s Version)
Just northeast of Lyon, overlooking the Ain, there sat a medieval village called Pérouges surrounded by walls of honey-gold stone. And within those walls, there was a house.
The house was smallish and modest, with flower boxes that spilled green vines down its cobbly front like tipped watercolor pigment. The garden too was painted a lush, impossible green, and the hills outside the village’s walls were green and amber and the bruised bluish black of wet soil. Somehow the flowers never wilted or browned when I pressed my fingers to their petals, even though we’d been told not to touch them when they were in bloom. When I opened the shutters each morning, the air tasted of irises and sage.
(One day, the love of my life would say this explained everything about me. You can take the boy out of the fairy-tale hamlet, but you can never take the fairy-tale hamlet out of him.)
When we came to California, nothing was green. It was all dust and sand, all rocks. Brown and pale slate, pebbly and craggy, like the alien planets my dad wrote stories about. The only familiar things were the ones we’d brought from home, the mixing bowls and big wooden spoons, the eggbeaters that had to be turned by hand, the dimpled ceramic trays cradling eggs on the pantry’s highest shelf. When I missed home, my maman would open her book of French pastry recipes, and we would stand together at our new kitchen counter and bake something. Still, I missed the colors.
Then came Theodora.
The first time I ever saw her, she was the brightest thing in the classroom. The only spot of full saturation I’d seen since we got to the desert. Brassy orange-blond, rose flush and cinnamon-dust freckles, her lip bitten angry red by the bumpy edges of new teeth. She had eyes like the hills of Rhône, blue-green on the outside and honey-gold at the center. I wouldn’t find the right English word for her until spring, when Maman took us out to Antelope Valley to see explosions of wildflowers on the hills. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen, bigger than the ocean out of an airplane window or the bottom of my own heart. So deep and wide, so much of everything at once. We were eight years old, and Theodora was smiling.
I learned the names of all the growing things I never would have seen back home. Lupine, fiddle-neck, Western blue-eyed grass, California poppy, Theo. Superbloom.
Love took root in me before I even knew its name. Theo was a superbloom. The petals stayed.
THE END(Kit’s Version)
“Kit,” says Thierry, “did you know that parrots taste with the tops of their beaks?”
My uncle is reclined on his favorite chair, reading a guide to bird behavior loudly enough for me to hear from the kitchen. I don’t mind. It’s been nice, after so long, to hear his Lyonnais accent between the soft thumps of cold butter against sifted flour.
I switch on the oven light and ask, “Is that right?”
“It says here that most of a parrot’s approximately three hundred taste buds are located on the roof of its mouth.” He closes the book and holds it to his chest, turning his face to the sun in the vine-fringed windows. “Such a strange, wonderful creature, don’t you think?”
On my mother’s side, from her father’s father’s father, come two inheritances: a love of all beautiful living things and a pied-à-terre in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The latter is how Thierry can afford to live in a Haussmann apartment in the 6th on a part-time ceramicist’s salary, and the former is why he’s filled every windowsill of it with leafy plants.
Some of my favorite childhood memories happened in this apartment: sprawling on the herringbone floors while Thierry told Maman about whichever woman he’d fallen in love with that month, waking up to the bells of Saint-Sulpice, writing postcards to Theo. I haven’t been back since high school, but when I got the letter from École Desjardins, I booked a ticket.
“Only three hundred taste buds? Seems a bit tragic, compared to our ten thousand.”
“They can still taste many foods, though. They even have favorites! Constança says her gray one likes mangoes. Benny, I think. Or—no, the gray one is Anni-Frid.” He jots down a note on the side table, determined to remember which of Constança’s birds are named after which member of ABBA.
Constança, Thierry’s latest girlfriend, lives in Portugal and hates long distance, so Thierry is moving out of the pied-à-terre and into a two-bedroom home in Lisbon with a menagerie of birds. I really do admire how devoted he is to believing every woman he meets is his soul mate. This is the third country he’s moved to for love, after Belgium for Lydia and Japan for Suzu. But this is the first time he’s been so sure that he started looking at selling the place.
“Lisbon is glorious this time of year,” Thierry says. “I’ll hardly miss Paris.”
“That’s the first lie you’ve told all day.”
“No,” Thierry says. “I also lied when I told you I didn’t buy any ice cream at the store this morning. I just didn’t want to share.”
“That’s alright,” I say. I lift the cake out of the oven and set it down on a tea towel, then carry it into the living room. It’s a galette de Pérouges, made with my grand-tante’s recipe. “I made dessert for both of us.”
Thierry eyes the cake, then my face. “What is this for?”
“Can’t I just do something nice for my favorite uncle?”
“You have your mother’s eyes,” Thierry says. “And I could always tell when she wanted something.”
“Well,” I say, reaching into my pocket, “I know you’re thinking of selling the place, because there’s no one in Paris to pass it down to. But, what if there was?”
I give him the paper and watch as he unfolds it. Within the first few lines of text, he’s beaming.
“Is this true?” he says. “You are coming to Paris?”
I nod.
“Oh, lovely Kit.” He jumps up to hug me, spinning me around like he did when I was much smaller. “Oh, of course, of course it is yours. And Theo? Tell me Theo will come too.”
I smile. “I haven’t told her yet. But I have a plan.”
CINQUE TERREPAIRS WELL WITH:
Sciacchetrà, Ligurian focaccia with fresh basil
The first six months after Theo left me, I lived on sex, croissants, and a volume of Rilke’s collected poems from Thierry’s bookshelf.
I sat up at night and drew circles around the lines that most made me think of Theo, copied down the best ones until they stitched together a new verse. Dream in the eyes, the brow as if in touch with something far away. And, Was it not summer, was it not sun—all that heat from you, that measureless radiant warmth? And, Alone: What shall I do with my mouth?
Well. Sex and croissants, that’s what.
It was Maxine who, at the end of a long evening that could have been a first date if she hadn’t seen right through me, went scouring my notebook for a recipe and found the page with the Rilke. She asked, “How long have you loved them?” And I said, “Almost my whole life.” And she said, “Putain de merde,” and opened her cigarette case.
That was the night we became friends, and it was the night I told her about the tour. On the first day of every subsequent summer, she asked if this was the year I’d redeem my voucher, and every year I told her I couldn’t, because I was waiting. I was holding out hope that someday, somehow, Theo would come back.
It isn’t as if I’ve loved the same cold memory all this time. Rilke wrote, Even your not being there is warm with you. I’m in love with Theo’s residual warmth, the indentation she left for me to grow around. All those living petals, never falling.
That’s my life, in the kitchen and the café and the épicerie every morning thumbing orange rinds, nights looking into empty corners of the apartment where a liquor cabinet or a pair of boots might fit, mornings waking up on the left side of the bed. I leave space for Theo to be something that’s still happening to me.
But four years is a long time, and this year when Maxine asks about the ticket, I say I’ll do it as a farewell tour. I’ll take my unsent letter to a beach in Palermo and bury it at sea, and I’ll return to Paris and spend the rest of my life loving someone I’ll never see again.
And then Theo walks out of a dream and onto a bus in London, fiercer and stronger and screamingly hotter than ever before. She can’t stand to be next to me, but she wants to try, so I say yes, because I’ll take whatever she’ll give me. She calls me her friend in the same breath that she proposes having sex with other people, and I say yes to that too, because it’s a good distraction. Because as long as we’re counting, we have something to talk about, and I’ve missed the sound of her voice.
And she’s looking at me while I’m touching someone else, and we’re sleeping in the same bed, and I’m thinking of her every time I sink into another person’s body, and she’s sighing into my palm on the deck of a yacht. I have no room left in myself to hold it all. It has to overflow. And so, I kiss her.
I kiss Theo because I’m in love with her. I always have been. I always will be.
* * *
I’m still getting used to how different Theo looks.
The last time I saw her, her hair fell past her shoulders and down her back. She wore nail polish until it chipped away and she painted over it, shadowed her eyelids before work for better tips, wore skirts on weekends. Sometimes I would notice her checking her posture, as if she could soften the natural breadth of her shoulders, make herself delicate.
Now, she stands with her shoulders back, moves as if she knows a thousand ways to use her body and fears none of them. Her face has hardened and sharpened slightly, but it still holds a raw, hardy friendliness that makes strangers tell her their secrets, and there’s never anything on it but freckles. She wears practical boots and overalls with cargo pockets and ugly bucket hats, and her hair is so short that her neck and jaw are always on display.
A month ago I’d have sworn I could never want anyone more than the Theo I knew. Then I saw this new Theo, and suddenly want wasn’t big enough. This is more like need.
We’re in Monterosso al Mare, the northernmost of the five villages clustered along the curve of Italy’s northwestern coast, Cinque Terre. Here, pastel palazzos cascade down steep cliffs to the bright blue Mediterranean Sea. Terraced farms line green hills, growing olives and lemons and basil, and rows of striped umbrellas cram the pebbly beaches below. It’s wilder and warmer here than on the Côte d’Azur, but the salt on the air is the same, and the resort beaches are almost the same, and so I am thinking—miserably, inescapably—about Monaco. About yesterday, about need.
I’m thinking about Theo between my open thighs, nothing but dried sweat and salt water between our skin. About how casually she settled there, ready for anything, while it took everything in me to keep my voice steady and my hands still. The weight of her gaze on my mouth, the pressure of her hand on my thigh, her damp hair on my shoulder, all the hysterical need I poured into Émile so Theo wouldn’t feel it. I was so completely willing to do anything she wanted, and so afraid that the moment I touched her, she would know it meant so much more to me.
I wonder, as I watch her ruthlessly shred basil leaves, if that was the last time we’ll ever be that close.
Theo’s wearing boots today—her sensible Blundstones—with hiking shorts and yesterday’s linen shirt, still smelling of sea salt and expensive champagne. Perhaps she chose them for this morning excursion on a basil farm because a good viticulturist is always prepared. Or maybe it’s because I kissed her, and she’s going to kick me off a palazzo.
I hold a leaf between my thumb and forefinger and squeeze until the fibers collapse, but its new, wet bruise only reminds me of the shine on Theo’s lower lip in a dark alley. Theo’s mouth against mine for five long seconds before I broke off and I started apologizing. The cool laugh she forced when I swore I was drunk and caught in the moment, that I hadn’t meant it.
We walked back to the hotel in silence, and she hasn’t spoken to me since. Not on the bus here, not during our tour of the farm, not when we were set loose to gather our own basil, not even during our adorable old farmer’s lesson on making pesto. Presently, she’s focused on crushing leaves with a righteous, wholehearted fury. The table creaks under her mortar and pestle, bottles of olive oil rattling nervously.
“Are you alright, Theo?” Stig asks.
“I’m great,” Theo says brightly, which means she’s angry, and when she’s angry, she breaks things.
My hands are graceless on my own pestle, the taste of regret too thick in my mouth to get the flavors right. It took time to understand how I’d made Theo so angry she could leave me back then, but this time it’s simple. I’m supposed to be her friend, and I kissed her. All the flirting and innuendos, the platonic nudity and almost threesomes—I made them mean something she never agreed to. I’d kick myself off a palazzo if I could.
