The pairing, p.2
The Pairing, page 2
I can’t get a good look at the person huddled against the window, but I don’t catch any red flags. They wear a soft-looking T-shirt and faded jeans, and their hair hides their face. They might be sleeping. Or at least pretending to sleep so nobody sits beside them. They probably want a seatmate as much as I do, which is not at all.
I take a breath.
“Hi!” I say in my friendliest voice. “Is this seat taken?”
The person stirs, brushing loose waves of brown hair back from their face. The only warning I get before they turn to face me is a smudge of paint on their left hand, from the first to third knuckle.
I know those hands. They’re always stained the same way, with ink or food dye or watercolor pigment.
Kit looks up, furrows his elegant brow, and says, “Theo?”
* * *
Maybe that cab did hit me.
Maybe I was flattened in a zigzag crosswalk, and afternoon commuters are gathered around saying what a shame such a hot young piece of ass should have to go out as roadkill outside a Boots. Someone at The Sun is drafting a headline—GOOD NIGHT FLOWERDAY! “Theo Flowerday, oldest and most disappointing daughter of Hollywood director power couple Ted and Gloria Flowerday, dead after wandering into traffic, to no one’s surprise.” Maybe everything since has been a dying fever dream, and I’ve arrived in hell, where I’ll be forced to share three weeks of the most sensuous, romantic sights and flavors of Europe with a stranger whose perineum I could describe from memory.
All that seems more likely than the reality that the person seated in the last row is actually Kit.
“You—” I keep staring at him. He keeps being there. My ears are ringing, suddenly. My legs have gone numb. “You’re not here.”
He holds up a hand as if to prove he’s corporeal. “I think I am, though?”
“Why are you here?”
“I have a ticket.”
“So do I. They—they gave me a voucher, but I—”
“Me too, I—”
“—never got around to—”
“—didn’t want it to go to waste, so—”
In some cobwebby corner of my brain, I must have known we had the same vouchers with the same expiration dates, but I never imagined that somehow we would—we would—
“Please tell me,” I say, shutting my eyes, “we didn’t book the same fucking tour.”
The bus jerks into drive, and my knees buckle—half of me lands in the empty seat, the other half in Kit’s lap. My backpack swings around and smashes squarely into Kit’s face.
Into the hair behind my ear, voice thick and muffled and gently amused, Kit says, “So you’re still mad at me, then.”
I swear, clawing toward my own seat. Kit’s eyes are scrunched shut, his hand clamped over his nose.
“Orla’s got a lead foot. Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” Kit says, “but don’t panic when I show you.”
“Show me wh—” He removes his hand to reveal an absolutely spectacular nosebleed. “Jesus!”
“It’s okay!” Blood dribbles out of his left nostril, already pooling in the hollow of his Cupid’s bow. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It looks pretty fucking bad, Kit!”
“My nose just does this now.” He sneezes out few tiny red bubbles. “It’ll stop in a second.”
Now. Now, as in there was once a then, in which we were in love and I knew what his nose did and didn’t do.
When someone is your best friend for sixteen years, your boyfriend for two, and your first and only love, it’s not easy to edit them from your life, but I’ve done it. Everything that could be erased or deactivated or deleted has been: every number blocked, every Polaroid and souvenir T-shirt packed away in cardboard boxes in one of Sloane’s spare closets. I’ve curated my own life to know nothing about his, not his job or his haircut or whether he ever finished pastry school in Paris. I’m pretty sure he does still live in Paris, but until this moment, he could have joined the Navy and had an arm bitten off by a shark for all I knew.
If I do think about Kit, in the fantasy I don’t have, because I don’t think about him enough to have a specific fantasy scenario, we’re colliding at the door of a restaurant in Manhattan. He’s on a date, and I’m on invitation to sample the wine list, and whatever tragic artist he’s with gets bonked in the head by the door when he sees me in my bespoke suit and knows I’ve finally made it, that I have a fulfilling career and an endless parade of lovers, that I’ve gotten my shit so comprehensively together I’ll never need him or anyone else ever again. And I don’t even notice him.
In real life, people are staring.
“I’m okay, Birgitte!” Kit says with a little wave at the retirees across the aisle. He’s already befriended some elderly Swedes.
It’s never like this in my head, like I’m the same old catastrophe he couldn’t put up with anymore. He’s supposed to see that I’m somebody now. A brave new Theo, in control of every situation. The damn Crocodile Hunter.
I untie the bandana from my neck.
“Come here,” I say, wetting the cloth with water from my pack.
“It’s really fine,” Kit insists. “It’s already stopping.”
“Then let me clean you up.”
Kit’s expression flickers, somewhere between cautious hope and the queasy, trapped look of a man being charged by a grizzly.
“Okay.”
I reach for him from the right, but he turns his face to the left. I go to reach from the left, but he corrects too fast and turns his face to the right. We miss each other two more times before I clamp a hand around his chin and tilt his jaw directly toward me.
Our eyes lock, both of us caught by surprise.
Bad move. Steve Irwin never went around grabbing crocodiles by their handsome little jaws. At least, none that he’d had sex with.
“Hold still,” I say, refusing to look away first. Kit blinks slowly, then nods.
I dab away the blood, aware with every second that I’ve made a grave miscalculation. From this position, I have no choice but to study his face and all the ways it has and hasn’t changed from twenty-four to twenty-eight. Mostly he looks the same, just a bit more mature and defined. He has the same architectural cheekbones and curious eyebrows, the same soft mouth, the same lash-fringed brown eyes with that familiar flung-open brightness they’ve held since we were kids. The most noticeable difference is the slightest curve to the statue-straight nose from my memory, which I’m pretty sure is not my fault.
He’s looking at me, and I wonder if he’s doing the same. I’ve changed more than he has. No more makeup, unrulier brows, more freckles. A few years back, I stopped trying to make all the disparate features of my face work together the way I thought they were supposed to and started appreciating each individual piece. My wide mouth and its upturned corners, the angles of my jaw and cheeks, my slightly oversized nose. I love the way I look now, but I don’t know if Kit will. Not that I care.
I release him and tuck my hand under my leg before it can do anything else stupid.
“Huh, you were right,” I say. “It did stop. That was fast.”
“I broke my nose a couple years ago,” Kit tells me. “It bleeds easy now, just not for long.”
A weird spark of loss swirls up, like when Kit and I would watch a show together and I would find out he’d skipped ahead without me. Like I should have known this, somehow.
I don’t ask. We sit a foot apart, a bandana full of his blood in my hand as the bus trundles past the white plaster rows of Notting Hill Gate. I’m trying to remember the tour destinations I was so excited about this morning, Bordeaux and Barcelona and Rome, but Kit’s hair keeps falling into his eyes.
“Your hair is shorter,” Kit says in a strange, neutral voice.
“Yours is longer,” I point out.
“We almost have—”
“The same haircut.”
Kit exhales a sound between sigh and a laugh, and I have to grit my teeth to keep from screaming.
This is supposed to be my Saturn return voyage of self-realization. And now I’ll have Kit in every frame, doing nauseating Kit things. Charming old Swedes, waxing poetic about sfogliatella, fondling the foliage, summiting Tuscan hills in the glow of dusk, smelling like—is that lavender? Still?
“This is unbelievable,” Kit says, shaking his head like I’m an acquaintance he ran into at Trader Joe’s and not the lifelong love he abandoned at an airport in a foreign country. “How are you?”
“Good,” I tell him. “Really, really good, until about, oh”—I check the time—“fifteen minutes ago.”
Kit takes this in stride. “Sure. That’s good.”
“And you? You look … healthy.”
“Yeah, more or less intact,” Kit says with an enigmatic smirk that makes me wish my pack had hit him harder. “I’m—”
Fabrizio’s romance-novel voice croons over the bus’s PA system.
“Ciao a tutti ragazzi! How are you today? Good? Yes, good! If you do not know, my name is Fabrizio, and I am your guide for the next three weeks, and I am very happy to be sharing with you the flavors of France, Spain, and Italy—and yes, the sights, also!”
And in that moment, Kit does something unfathomable: he pulls a paperback out of his backpack, opens to a marked page, and starts reading. As if we weren’t in the middle of our first conversation in four years. As if the only remarkable thing about our two-hour ride from London to Dover is that it must be passed with a book. I just got kicked through the doors of my own personal haunted nightmare mansion, and Kit is reading A Room with a View.
The pages are yellowed at the edges, like he got preoccupied with his chic Parisian life and left it in a windowsill for a few months. I’m less interesting to him than a book he forgot he had.
Fabrizio tells us about his childhood in his parents’ restaurant in Naples, explaining that we meet in London because it’s an English-speaking tour, but the tour won’t officially begin until tomorrow morning in Paris. We’re pulling off at Dover to see the cliffs before sunset and then pushing on to Paris for two days in the City of Lights.
He moves on to the story of his most memorable night in London, when a bottle-wielding bartender chased him from a pub for making out with his girlfriend (“My favorite girl in England, so nice for kissing, but we could not be together. Allergic to garlic!”). The bus is eating from the palm of his hand.
I’m barely listening. I’m gripping my knees with both hands, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of me. Not wondering what kitchen Kit has been baking in, not feeling his weight in the air he displaces, not waiting for him to turn his page so I know he’s not just pretending to read. He never looked back before. I shouldn’t be surprised.
Kit turns a page.
If he’s fine, I’m fine.
* * *
In the movie, you never see the cliffs in color.
The 1944 Irene Dunne film is all I know of Dover. The one about an American girl who marries an English baronet in World War I. I can’t remember when I saw it—probably when Este was small, because our parents thought anything filmed before 1960 was age-appropriate entertainment for babies. Near the beginning, Irene stands on the deck of a ship and gazes tearfully over the sea at the white chalk cliffs of Dover.
In real life, there are a lot more sheep, and the cliffs’ grassy tops are too green even for Technicolor. The land curves and sways and breathes with the wind and then suddenly, it stops. The rolling English hillside hits some sharp, immediate edge, and where there should be more hills, there’s only a straight, tooth-white, three-hundred-foot drop to the blue sea below.
It would be such a gorgeous view if Kit wasn’t in it. A taste of what’s to come, I guess.
I’m walking with the two Australians by default. Everyone has split into pairs, even Stig and Fabrizio, although Stig looks like he’s regretting it. Part of Fabrizio’s job is making sure none of us get lost, so to be easier to find, he carries a telescopic pole stuck up the ass of a little stuffed Pinocchio puppet. (The puppet, he explains, is because Pinocchio is an Italian story, and he’s Italian, and also, “some Italians do not mind so much from behind—joke! A joke!”) And so Fabrizio and Stig lead the group down the trail, Stig with the gait of an Alpine hiker on a short leash and a puppet getting cheerfully penetrated three and a half feet above his head.
Shortly behind them is Kit, wearing the same leather and canvas sling bag he’s owned since we were fourteen, and then the rest of the group, and finally, the Australians and me.
“It’s Florence for me,” I tell them when they ask what destination I’m most looking forward to. “They’ll have the best wine. And the best collection of butts carved out of marble.”
“Ah, you’ve never been to Spain, have you?” says the blond, whose name is Calum. “There’s nothing like Spanish vermouth, it’ll change your life.”
“You’ve never been to Spain!” says the ginger, whose name is also Calum.
“I went to Bilbao with you, two years ago,” Blond Calum argues.
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did, you just don’t remember because you were off your tits for three days straight. I was the one who found you when you went off to sleep with the cows.”
While they’re cheerfully arguing, I take the opportunity to text Sloane without Kit six inches from my screen.
tell me, I type, why the fuck kit fairfield is here.
There’s a weird taste in my mouth. I don’t know the last time I typed those letters in that order. I can’t stand to look at them, so I put my eyes on the horizon, where I can just make out France in the distance.
Kit always dreamed about returning to France, ever since his family moved to the States when he was eight. He was born outside of Lyon to a French mom and an American dad, bilingual from birth, and whenever he got bored, his dual citizenship was waiting behind break-in-case-of-emergency glass. I should have seen it coming.
I remember the day the kitchen phone rang at Timo. It had been three days since Kit left me at Heathrow, and I’d taken back-to-back doubles to avoid being alone in our apartment. I heard the shift manager say Kit’s name—I’d set him up with a part-time gig helping with desserts and doughs on weekends—and then I heard him tell the pastry chef that Kit had called in to quit because he was moving to Paris.
That was how I found out. All our lives together, and he didn’t even tell me himself.
I marched into the walk-in and screamed at a bin of potatoes, then clocked out early to put Kit’s shit in boxes. I pulled his baking pans out of the kitchen drawers and his clothes out of our closet and his plants out of the windowsills. I blocked his number and texted his sister that his stuff was ready to be picked up, because I wasn’t paying to ship it to France, not when I had Kit’s half of the rent to cover.
With time, the anger subsided into the sort of lazy, funny grudge you joke about. If a friend asks me what Kit’s up to these days, I’ll say fuck if I know, and we’ll laugh. But he wasn’t wrong earlier. I am still angry.
“Hey, Theo,” Ginger Calum says.
I blink back to Dover.
“Yeah?”
“Anyone ever tell you, you look just like that bird from the Beatles movie that came out last year? The one who played George’s girl in the sixties? Joan something?”
Fuck. Not this, not now.
“Sloane.” I hoped on this side of the Atlantic people would be slower to put it together. “Sloane Flowerday.”
“That’s the one!” Blond Calum says. “You could be her! Or the other one, doesn’t she have a sister who’s an actress? What’s her name?”
“Este.”
“Yeah! Wow, if they had a sister who was normal, you could be her. Like the third Hemsworth brother.”
My jaw clenches for more than one reason. “I get that a lot.”
I turn away, squinting at the sun while the Calums debate which of my little sisters is hotter.
“Hey, Theo?”
Kit has appeared in front of us, salty breeze swirling his hair around his face, hands tucked politely into his pockets. He looks like a hero from one of his romantic paperbacks on the way to ravish someone in a field of violets. I’m already exhausted.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
Oh, he wants to talk now.
He leads us out of earshot, to a small outcropping through a gap in the trail’s wooden fence. From here, I can see the sheep grazing near the castle, and I wish more than anything I could be one of them. Not a care in the world, no struggling freelance gigs or famous relatives, no fraught reunions with exes who fucked your life up so much you had to make a new one. Just grass.
Kit arranges himself atop a small boulder, crossing an ankle over his knee. I wait for him to say something, to start apologizing for what happened between us, to act like it happened at all. He doesn’t.
“What did you want to talk about?” I finally ask.
“Oh,” Kit says. “I didn’t. I just—I overheard.”
He overheard.
This isn’t about us. It’s about Kit saving me from strangers asking questions about my family, knowing better than anyone how that makes me feel. And now I have to stand here and receive his annoying fucking empathy.
“Am I supposed to thank you?”
“What?” Kit says. “No, I just didn’t want those guys to say anything weird to you about Este or Sloane.”
I shrug. “People say plenty of things to me all the time.”
“I’m sure they do,” Kit says. “I just felt—”
“Bad for me, yeah, I got that,” I say, “but here’s the thing. You stopped being part of my life. So you don’t get to jump in when you feel like it now.”
Kit touches a finger to his lips. “Okay.”
“I mean,” I go on, anger spiking in my chest, “if you wanted to look out for me, I can think of a few times you could have deigned to speak to me the past few years.”
