The pairing, p.3
The Pairing, page 3
“Theo.”
“In fact, if you’re gonna say anything to me now, how about”—I put on an imitation of Kit’s musical voice, complete with the faintest hint of a French accent, once lost but now brought back from the dead by Paris—“‘Theo, I’m so sorry about everything, I really fucked you over, that was pretty shitty.’”
“Theo.”
“‘I never should have left y—’ Are you laughing? Seriously?”
“It’s—”
Something wooly nudges my thigh.
“That,” Kit says.
That is a stout white sheep, who has apparently escaped the castle flock. The bell around her neck suggests this isn’t her first jailbreak.
“Oh,” I say. She stares up at me with her watery black eyes and prods me again with her nose. The bell rattles. “Hi.”
“I was trying to tell you,” Kit says.
I pat her fluffy head like she’s a dog. She bleats approvingly.
“As I was saying—”
The sheep butts my leg, harder now.
“Hey! Okay, okay.” I try to pet her, but she ducks and butts me again. “Really?”
“Baa,” she replies.
“The point is—ow—you can’t just act like I’m the same and you’re the same and everything’s fine, because—”
“Baa!”
“—because it’s not.”
Kit’s face is serious, even as the sheep clamps her teeth around the hem of my overalls.
“I’m not the same,” he concedes. “And I’m sure you’re not. And I would have liked to talk to you, but, Theo, what part of blocking my number was supposed to make me think that was welcome?”
I look down at the sheep in time to see her cough up a clump of grass on my boots. Nearly missed my bus, almost hit by a car, committed assault and battery, heard a man call my little sister “a top sort,” regurgitated on by a sheep, and now trapped with my ex, who is making an inconveniently good point.
“I am sorry,” Kit says. “For all of it.”
Kit was born with a sincere face. He means everything he says, and he looks like it.
When I look at him, I believe he really is sorry. Not that it’s enough, but it is at least true.
“And I’m sorry if I overstepped,” he says. “Old habits.”
I think of Kit, age eleven, plucking a bee stinger out of my foot. Kit, age twenty-three, waking me up when I overslept for work.
He opens his little bag, and the sheep finally turns her attention from me, eyeing Kit curiously as he shakes a few orange bits from a foil pouch into his palm.
“Hi, beautiful,” he says in his softest voice. “Would you like to leave poor Theo alone and have a snack?”
She plods over and starts eating out of his hand, as happy and gentle as a lamb.
“Dried apricots,” he tells me.
Against my own wishes, my jaw unclenches. Maybe, if I’m being honest, I needed Kit away from me because it’s so hard to stay mad in his presence. Anger doesn’t like to hang around him.
“Look,” I say. “You being here—this isn’t the trip I had in mind.”
“Me neither,” he says, still feeding the sheep.
“But this is important to me, okay?” I say. “So I’m going to do it.”
“Yeah, of course it is. You should.” He’s nodding, still horribly sincere. “I was thinking, if you’re uncomfortable, I could … hop off in Paris? Stay home?”
So he is still in Paris.
Even worse, he means this too. It shows not only on his face but in the set of his shoulders, the plaintive tilt of his chin.
He really isn’t the same. Something has firmed up, like the center of a crème brûlée that was sloshy custard the last time I saw it. He seems … completed, somehow. The Kit I knew was restless and hungry. This person is steady, self-sustained.
This new Kit thinks he’s doing me a favor. He thinks he can handle this, and I can’t.
Fucking Sheep Boy over here wants to be the bigger person.
“No, that’s stupid,” I say. “Don’t do that.”
He blinks. “Why not?”
“Because we both paid for our own ticket,” I point out. “And besides, I don’t know anyone else on this tour. Do you?”
Kit shakes his head.
“So, if anything happens, at least we’ll have…” What’s a noncommittal way to describe what we are to each other? “Someone who knows our blood type, or whatever.”
Kit considers that. The sheep licks his palm.
“Are you saying you want to be friends?”
“I’m saying I didn’t fly across the world to feel weird and bad for three weeks. I came to drink champagne and eat cannelloni until I throw up. So, we could try … peacefully coexisting.”
Kit tucks the inside of his cheek between his back teeth, hollowing it out prettily.
“I’d like that.”
“And maybe we don’t have to talk about everything that happened,” I say. “Maybe we just get through it. And then it’s done.”
After a long moment, Kit holds out the hand not covered in sheep saliva.
“Okay,” he says. “As long as that’s what you want.”
I take his hand in mine, and we shake on it.
“AB positive,” Kit says. My blood type.
“O negative,” I say back. His.
“Baa,” says the sheep.
PARISPAIRS WELL WITH:
Ulysse Collin “Les Maillons” Blanc de Noirs Extra Brut poured by a flustered waiter, brioche mousseline
I’ve learned a lot from taking the Court of Master Sommeliers certification exam three times. Most important: I have a naturally gifted nose.
When I’m sweating in front of stone-faced judges for a blind tasting, the faint distinction between fennel and anise calms me down. When Timo closes for the night, and the dishwashers are scraping forty-two-dollar hand-stuffed tortellini into the trash, and the chef sommelier sets down a glass of white and tells me to identify it, I can clock the spiciness of a grape grown in red slate soils or the airiness of a sandy coast.
Some of that is practice—sniffing produce, licking rocks on mountain hikes, a Rocky Balboa training montage through every botanical garden in Southern California—but you can’t teach instinct. I didn’t have to be taught to match the note of white pepper in the chef’s new special to a bottle of Aglianico, or to concoct a gimlet that tastes like a bride’s memory of her mother’s perfume. My nose just tells me. When I’m uncertain, or intimidated, or worried I’m about to fuck something up, I can count on that.
So, I prop open the window of my single room in Paris, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. Notes: dark roast coffee, fresh bread from the café down the street, garden aromas of foxglove and elderberry, sulfur from the igneous rock in the cobblestones, car exhaust and ivy and cigarette smoke.
My heart rate slows. My fists unclench. I open my eyes to see Montmartre’s rosy bricks and slate mansard roofs, the city splayed at the foot of the hill.
I can do this. It’ll be fun. It’s a morning pastry tour through Paris, not The fucking Hague. It doesn’t matter that Kit literally left me to study Parisian pastry. It doesn’t matter that I once whispered to the universe, I don’t ever want to know how Kit is doing, I’d rather imagine him sitting alone in an empty room forever, and instead the universe has answered with a live-action role-play of Kit’s daily life, starring Kit.
“I’m in Paris,” I say, pulling on light wash jeans and a boxy linen button-up. “I’m in Paris,” I say, checking the mirror, thankful for short, effortless shag haircuts. “I’m in Paris,” I say on my way out, like if I say it enough, it’ll stop feeling so weird and big.
I’m here. I’m unbothered. I’m peacefully coexisting. I look great, I smell nice, and I’m going to eat my weight in chou à la crème.
Kit appears as I’m waiting for the jangly old elevator.
I’m surprised to see a creature of comfort like Kit in our tiny Montmartre hostel when he has his own pied-à-terre a few miles away, but he has always loved committing to a bit. He’s probably all juiced up to play tourist. Tasting everything like it’s the first time, falling in love all over again, aesthetically jerking himself off.
“Morning,” he says with a small smile.
“Morning,” I say.
I note his drapey linen shirt and pale blue trousers. Then I look down at myself and try not to swear out loud.
“We’re wearing—” he begins.
“—the same outfit,” I conclude. “You know what? I’m gonna take the stairs.”
* * *
“Mark your name off, love, so I know I’ve not left anyone behind,” Orla says as she thrusts a clipboard at me.
I draw a check next to Flowerday, Theodora, take my seat in the last row, and pull out my phone. Sloane’s texted, We just got new pages and Lincoln has twice as many lines now. He’s definitely fucking the director. How’s Kit?
Last night, she called between shoots and demanded to hear everything. The Kit subject is tricky with my sisters: They’ve known him as long as they can remember, and he’s, well, Kit. Even after everything, I know they only stopped speaking to him and his siblings out of loyalty to me, and we were the only exception to Sloane’s opinion that love is a waste of time. She might actually be enjoying this.
oh, you know, I reply, he’s kit. Then, have you considered also fucking the director?
Not every problem can be solved by sleeping with it, Sloane replies.
not with that attitude.
I see Kit coming and move to the window seat before he has the chance to magnanimously offer it to me.
“I was going to tell you to take the window,” Kit says as he sits down, “since it’s your first time in Paris.”
I force myself to smile.
“How do you know I haven’t been to Paris since the last time we saw each other?”
“I don’t,” Kit concedes. “Have you?”
I fold my arms. “No. But I could have.”
Orla takes us to our local guide by way of a scenic tour. We careen around the wide, lawless circle of the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées to the gardens that fringe the Louvre, then over the silver-green Seine and around the island that holds Notre-Dame. It’s a nearly cloudless August morning, and the sun glitters on the golden dome of Les Invalides. Fabrizio tells us how Napoleon divided Paris into arrondissements, this pretty grid of uniform limestone and slate. Everything is peach and lilac and cream, except for the gardens, which are riotously green.
When we arrive at the park across from Le Bon Marché, a woman is waiting at the carousel in the chic, all-black ensemble of someone who’d prefer to be anywhere but next to a children’s amusement ride. Her lavender hair is cut in a severe chin-length bob, and she’s petite, but her boots add a few inches. She eyes Fabrizio’s puppet on a stick with long-suffering distaste and gamely accepts an air-kiss from him, even when one of Pinocchio’s dangling feet kicks her smooth, stern forehead.
“Group, this is Maxine!” Fabrizio says. “She is a pastry chef here in Paris! She leads our Parisian pastry tour since last year. Knows the best pâtisseries, orders the best for us. Maxine, will you introduce yourself?”
“I’m Maxine,” Maxine says with finality, and Kit stifles a laugh.
“Okay!” Fabrizio claps his hands. “Andiamo!”
Maxine leads us out of the park and to a small corner shop with a simple black sign declaring HUGO & VICTOR.
“This,” Maxine says, in brusque English, “is where we begin. My favorite pâtisserie in Paris.”
The pâtisserie is so small that we can only squeeze inside in shifts, but it smells heavenly. One section is all house-made chocolates in boxes made to look like Victor Hugo hardcovers. Another is dedicated to artisanal marshmallows. Glass cases hold pavlova clouds topped with split figs, bubbles of sunshine-yellow yuzu cheesecake, and precise triangles of tarts—grapefruit, lime, apple and caramel, tonka bean, passionfruit. Maxine orders a mountain of pastries, and at the sidewalk tables outside, she floats around telling us about everything.
“These are called financiers,” she says of a small loaf-shaped almond cake, explaining that some say their name comes from their ability to hold shape for hours in the pockets of Parisian stockbrokers. “And this—could you—” She gestures.
And Kit, who’s closest, takes the financier and swaps her a tube-shaped pastry with a golden crust and a kiss of icing sugar at its peak. It kind of looks like a dick.
“Merci,” she says. “This is my favorite brioche in Paris. Will you?”
At her polite cue, Kit carefully cuts the brioche open to reveal bouncy, round air bubbles and a pocket of raspberry compote.
“Parfait, mon cher,” she says to him. He smiles, pleased to have pleased her. Teacher’s pet. “The typical brioche you buy from the store is a loaf, yes? This is brioche mousseline. It is traditionally baked in a cylinder mold or even a tin can, and it has twice as much butter as most brioche. A rich man’s brioche. You will taste—”
Someone at another table interrupts, calling out a question for Maxine. Kit murmurs something to her in French, and when she nods, Kit trots off.
“I can answer that for you!”
Maxine’s pretty lips quirk into a smile as she describes the process of brioche dough, and I squint from her to Kit, suspicious.
Kit has this thing—we used to call it his “condition”—where he accidentally makes people fall in love with him. He never knew he was doing it. He just happened to be born with the face of a fancy little god-prince and a way of approaching every interaction with total, sincere interest. Attempting a casual flirt with him is like trying to discuss the weather with the sun.
If my first experience in Paris is Maxine falling for Kit right in front of my dick brioche, I might jump in the Seine.
We carry on through the 6th and 7th Arrondissements, visiting pâtisseries and boulangeries and chocolateries. My thumbs almost can’t keep up with the notes on my phone. At a narrow chocolate shop lined with antique cigarette machines, Maxine hands out paper cones of creamy one-hundred-percent dark chocolate. At a sleek pâtisserie owned by a famed French chef, we try glass-smooth cakes shaped like mangoes and hazelnuts and, my favorite, a complex olive oil cake in the shape of a green olive.
I try to focus on flavors, but it’s hard to ignore how Kit travels the streets of Paris like he was born in them. It’s one thing to share someone’s life and then find yourself spectating on it, and another to watch him live the dream he left you for. He buys groceries here. He picks up loaves of bread and makes plans for lunch. While the rest of us are gawking at the Eiffel Tower, he’s ducking back into a pâtisserie to chat with the head chef like an old friend. If he ever stands on these cobbles and thinks of his life with me, he probably considers it quaint. Small, cute, a bit embarrassing.
Our penultimate stop is a macaron shop, and we sit in the square around Fontaine Saint-Sulpice passing them around, tasting flavors so much bigger than their delicate packages: banana and acai, lychee with raspberry and rose, yuzu with wasabi and candied grapefruit.
I’m looking at the fountain, inventing names for the saints inside the niches—St. Edna the Indignant, patron saint of stabbing your ex with a chocolate spoon because you’ve been cast as quaint backstory—when someone says, “You look really familiar.”
It’s one of the two twentysomething girls I noticed when I first boarded the bus, the shorter one with shiny black hair. I’m gathering that she and her friend are some kind of travel influencers.
“I don’t think we’ve met before,” I tell her, praying I’m not already two for two on getting clocked as a Flowerday.
“No, I think we have,” she says. “You were making drinks at the Coachella after-party at the Saguaro, right? The bar that was, like, in a big van?”
I blink a few times, amazed. I was hired for that party. One thing about a freelance mobile bar in a Volkswagen Microbus is, influencers love it. I’d hoped one of them would book me for another job, but no one seemed to remember me.
“You were there?”
“Oh my God, yes!” She turns to her friend, a beachy blonde in a micro-cropped sweater-vest and cargo pants. “Ko! I was right!”
The blonde pauses her scroll through her phone to regard me for one blank second over her skinny sunglasses.
“You made the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever had in my life,” she says in complete monotone. “I would literally kill for you.”
“That’s Dakota,” the first girl says. “I’m Montana.”
I instantly love this. Did they come as a combo pack?
“I’m Theo.”
“Theo! You’re so cool!” Montana says. “Who’s your brand partner? Do they rent that van out?”
“Oh, just me,” I say. “The bus is mine. I got it secondhand and converted it.”
“Wow, slay,” she says. “Listen, I go to a lot of parties with a lot of open bars, and you are literally so talented. That blood orange margarita, with the peppers? You should be doing, like, Bella Hadid’s birthday or something. Why aren’t you in LA?”
“Thank you, wow,” I say, meaning it. “But it’s honestly just a side hustle. Weddings, parties, catering on weekends. I have a regular job at a restaurant in Palm Springs.”
“I was telling Dakota—”
Over Montana’s shoulder, I notice Kit talking to Fabrizio. His voice separates from the chatter and drifts to my ears.
“—that’s what I think, at least,” he says.
“You know so much about the French pastry,” Fabrizio says. “How is this?”
“I’m a pâtissier at a hotel in the First Arrondissement,” Kit says. “I actually graduated from École Desjardins with Maxine.”
“Oh! You know our Maxine!”
“I know her very well. I told her she should apply to be a local guide when the spot opened up. She might not show it, but she loves doing this.”
“Finally, I can thank someone for sending Maxine to us!” Fabrizio says. “She is a goddess.”
