The Pairing, page 15
“Check it out,” I say. “Three seats down. That’s one of Craig’s, isn’t it?”
Kit spots the glossy paperback. The House on the Lake, a John Garrison novel.
“Ah, yes. The one where the wife dies.”
“Isn’t that all of them?”
“Sure, but in this one she comes back as a ghost, which he’s only done two other times.”
I laugh. “How is your dad?”
“He’s alright. Moved into a nice town house in the Village. Still ghostwriting, clearly. His last one was on the list for forty-seven weeks. The Anchorite of Venus.”
“Oh my God, that was him?”
“The most prolific author no one’s ever heard of,” Kit says. He’s looking down into his absinthe, the cloud of sugar slowly clearing. “Truthfully, I haven’t spoken to him in about … six months?”
I don’t say anything. I don’t have to. We both know how out of character that is for him. I swill my sangria and wait.
“Remember that book he was working on when my mom died?”
I think back to that awful summer before eighth grade, climbing into Kit’s bed five nights a week and reading The Silmarillion out loud so he could fall asleep. Ollie had a fresh license, so he did the grocery shopping, and Kit baked a cake once a week in whatever flavor Cora asked. And every day, his dad stayed in his office with a manuscript that couldn’t be delayed.
“It was supposed to be his first book under his own name, right? But his editor hated it, or something?”
“Yeah, that was the story,” Kit says with a grim smile. “So, you know how Ollie works for Dad’s publishing house now? A year ago, he had lunch with Dad’s editor and asked him what he really thought of that book, and the editor had no idea what he was talking about. And so Ollie asked Dad, and it turns out the manuscript never actually existed.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“He never wrote it. He never wrote anything that summer. He only pretended to.”
I think of Kit, age thirteen, braiding Cora’s hair for her.
“Holy shit,” I say.
He’s still wearing his small, grim smile when he continues.
“After that, I started thinking about everything,” he says. “I always trusted there was some design to the choices he made for us. Moving across the world because he got bored, moving across the country when he didn’t want to be in the old house. He was always so impressive to me, this romantic genius who might take us anywhere. Every second of his attention was so shiny and important.”
He takes a sip of absinthe, grimacing at the burn.
“But it was always just whatever he wanted,” Kit finishes. “And he wasn’t there that summer because he didn’t want to be.”
I swear earnestly. “So you haven’t spoken since Ollie told you about the manuscript?”
“Actually, I tried to talk to him when he was in Paris a few months ago,” Kit says. “About all of it. He kind of blew it off, said a lot of words about how much he loves me, which is not at all what the problem has ever been. Afterwards, I had to put him away on a shelf until I can, I don’t know. Process. Figure out what kind of relationship I want with him as an adult.”
“Well, fuck,” I say after a long pause. I feel like bare-knuckle fighting Kit’s dad right now. “Kit, that’s … that must be a lot. I’m really fucking sorry.”
“Thank you,” Kit says, giving me a small, tender smile.
His gaze shifts to the door behind me, and he suddenly swears in French.
“What?”
“I kind of—I forgot that I invited Santiago to meet up tonight.”
“Who?”
“The—”
“¡Hola!” says a smooth voice, and I recognize the chocolatero just as he swoops in to kiss the air beside Kit’s cheek. Kit looks at me with wide, apologetic eyes.
There’s no reason I should be disappointed. I’m the one who told him to call the guy. I put on my most easygoing smile.
“Sorry,” Kit murmurs, “I—”
“Nothing to apologize for,” I say. The chocolatero turns to me, a handsome, dark-skinned man in simple beige and gold linens, and I let him air-kiss me too. “¡Hola, Santiago, qué bueno verte!”
“You remember my friend Theo,” Kit says, and really, after all the work I’ve put in, it shouldn’t sting to be called that.
“¡Sí!” Santiago says warmly. “And this is my neighbor, Caterina.”
A woman appears beside him, tall and graceful and smiling. She pushes her wild hair behind her ear with a paint-smudged hand.
“Caterina,” I say. I glance toward Kit and find him watching me. “Can I buy you a drink?”
* * *
Caterina is a painter. She smells like almond blossoms and turpentine and just broke up with a Dutch girl who captains sunset sails out of the main port. She lives in a skinny apartment building in the Gothic Quarter, one so old its door still has a bronze knocker shaped like a hand holding a persimmon. At the top of the stairs, as she unlocks her flat, I kiss her behind her silver earrings.
Her apartment is a magpie’s nest. Dried flowers hang from the chandelier, strings of translucent citrus slices in every window. Half-finished paintings lean against velvet armchairs and side tables heaving with books. It’s as hot here as it is outside, so she brings out a pitcher of cold water and pours two glasses.
When she presses one into my hand and guides me onto a kitchen chair, I think: I’m not even thinking about Kit right now.
I’m not seeing him and Santiago ahead of us on the walk from Bar Marsella, or the way he glanced at me when Santiago pulled him into the apartment building across from Caterina’s. I’m not even thinking of the way he looked last night on the edge of my bed, or the heat of his hand against my tattoo.
There’s so much to like about Caterina. I like how she floats around the apartment, emptying the rest of the pitcher into her houseplants. I like the paint stains on her hands.
She asks, “What do you want?”
I spread my legs wide, feet planted on either side of my chair. All my unsatisfied need rises to the surface, thick in the sweat on my skin. God, it’ll be good to finally get it out.
“Take off whatever’s under that dress, and come here.”
Caterina does as she’s told, straddles my lap, and kisses me. I kiss her back, hard, her tongue swiping into my mouth, her hands cradling my jaw. I guide her hips with both hands until I can feel her slick and needy against my thigh before I’ve even touched her, which is extremely fucking hot.
Everything is extremely fucking hot, actually. Suddenly, urgently, the heat between our bodies is nearly suffocating. My shirt sticks to my back. Sweat beads in the hollow of my throat. I break off to catch my breath.
“Okay?” Caterina asks, wiping my brow with the back of her wrist. “Do you need air?”
“Sorry, yeah.” The unsteadiness in my voice surprises me. “Could we open a window?”
“I have even better.”
She crosses to a tall, street-facing window and parts the gauzy curtains to reveal a set of narrow French doors.
“Come, look.”
When I join her, we’re on one of the Gothic balconies I admired yesterday. It barely fits us with all the flowers and plants crowded along the railings. Every building on the street has rows of tiny balconies like hers, pressed right up against one another like you could pass a cigarette to the person next door. The balcony across is so close, I can almost touch the curtains drifting from the open door.
As I pull Caterina’s body to mine, I hear it. A voice, close but slightly muted, shockingly familiar. A soft, open moan.
“Uh, does—does Santiago live in that apartment across from you?”
“Hm?” Caterina slips her hand up my shirt. “Oh, yes. Why?”
Another sound, a second voice saying something too low to decipher. Kits voice is rough when he answers, but this time I can make out “yes” and “please.”
Fuck.
Caterina laughs, her nose bumping my shoulder.
“Santiago does this all the time,” she says. “Estoy acostumbrado a eso. Is it bad for you?”
There are about one million reasons why it’s bad for me, but right now, all I can feel is thrumming need, and all I can see is the pitying look Juliette gave me on that beach.
“No,” I say, and I crush my mouth into Caterina’s.
I don’t waste any more time. I press her to the leafy railing and kiss her, my hand slipping under her dress to palm the wet heat between her thighs. She grinds against the heel of my hand.
Someone swears into the night, and I’m pleased with myself until I realize it’s not Caterina but Kit. His is the only voice behind the wafting curtains now, and I can imagine what’s happening. Kit, laid out on his back, lost in Santiago’s mouth.
“Fuck,” I murmur out loud this time, feeling insane. I drop to my knees.
This will work. Going down on an attractive woman always does it for me. Watching the pleasure dawn on her face, feeling her knees start to shake, burying myself in her taste. I shove Caterina’s dress up with one hand and push the other past my waistband.
I narrow my focus to my mouth on her, my own fingers, the hot blood rushing in my ears, her gasps and sighs, the roll of her hips. I give her everything I’ve got until she finishes, hands fisted in my hair, and I start her over again.
I want to—need to get off so fucking badly. Needed it for days, especially since last night, but I—can’t. Can’t get close enough. Can’t chase down the mind-numbing, maddening horizon, the touch of someone who’s not here.
I hear Kit again, whining through clenched teeth, and I know, I know what it fucking means when he sounds like that.
There’s not a sound inside of Kit that I haven’t worked loose. I know the low, imperious tone that means he wants control, the filthy mid-register drawl he uses when he’s feeling indulgent, the huffy swears when he’s pushed to the brink of his patience. When he sounds raw and wrecked like he does right now, it means he wants to take it.
It’s heartbreaking how gorgeous he is like this. Pliant and glassy-eyed, head thrown back. Spreading himself out, offering himself to be pushed down and swallowed up, teased and twisted until he’s begging, gasping, nearly weeping for it.
A shudder courses through me, and I close my eyes and see Kit’s face, the look when he kissed Paloma on that beach, like he wanted me to watch.
I let myself listen. I open the vault.
There he is. There we are. Light spills across our skin. My hand grasps for his, and everything unfolds at once.
On the next swipe of my tongue, I hear three simultaneous gasps: Caterina with her knee hooked over my shoulder, Kit across the alley being sucked off by another man, and Kit bent over our old kitchen counter with my spit sliding down his thighs.
My hand quickens to match my mouth, to match the rhythm of Kit’s breathing. To match the beat of my heart one summer night on a beach blanket in Santa Barbara when I sank down onto him. The click-click of the hazards while he ate me out in my back seat. The kick drum through the speakers as he snuck his hand down my jeans in the middle of a crowd. Caterina’s pulse on my tongue, Kit’s pulse against mine. I push two fingers into her, and his push into me, and mine push into him.
When Kit comes, I hear him, and I see him in our bed, wrists pinned, bright tears in his eyes. I lean my forehead against Caterina’s hip—against Kit’s shoulder—and finish with a rough, punched-out cry.
In the quiet after, I’m left with the part of the memory that tipped me over. It wasn’t how Kit begged me that night, or how he couldn’t walk straight in the morning.
It was in between, when he told me how much he loved me.
That’s exactly what I was afraid it would be.
* * *
I don’t sleep in Caterina’s bed.
It’s not a long walk back to the hostel, but by the time I pass the spires of Cathedral La Seu, I’m running. I sprint all the way up La Rambla, through the huge wheel of Plaça de Catalunya and all its bosomy statues, up four flights of stairs to the room where I woke up tangled in Kit.
When the door is locked behind me, I take out my phone.
I might be falling back in love with kit
Sloane texts back within a minute.
Would that be such a bad thing?
NICEPAIRS WELL WITH:
Pastis and chilled water in a highball glass, pain au chocolat
Would that be such a bad thing?
On the highest plateaus of Provence, in the mountainous countryside above Nice, lavender grows like a motherfucker. It’s purple for miles, purple for years. Purple up to my nips. Every breath smells like lavender, and so every breath smells like Kit.
Sault is a scenic detour on the way to Nice, where we’ll spend two nights before beginning the Italy leg. Everyone’s hangover seems cured by the cool mountain air, except for Ginger Calum, who is throwing up behind a goat pen. Even Orla has climbed down from the bus to explore the lavender fields.
I bend to touch my toes, stretching my back and hamstrings. My knees ache from being tucked to my chest for the last four hours so I wouldn’t accidentally touch Kit. If he knows I heard him last night, or if he heard me, he’s unmoved. He napped all the way through Spain and back into France, lazily picturesque in his soft jeans and a sand-colored T-shirt, lashes fanned serenely against his cheeks.
Meanwhile, I can barely look at him. The fog of horny war has lifted, but I’m still in the trenches. I’m down here, dying. I’ve got trench foot of the heart.
Kit is walking with Orla now, somehow wearing her safari hat on his head. He spreads his arms wide, palms up to the sun, and Orla laughs.
Would that be such a bad thing?
The thing about loving Kit is, it’s objectively the best thing that could happen to anyone. There’s a reason it’s happened to so many people by accident. Loving Kit is like being the strawberry in a flute of champagne. Just floating forever on sparkling bubbles, making dizzy circles, soaking up complexity and being sexy by association.
Being with Kit was different. I can admit it now: The only thing better than loving Kit was being loved by him.
Life with Kit was a good dream. It was just—it was inevitable. It made sense. I’d met him so young and loved him so long that everything I’d ever learned about love had grown into him, until I couldn’t tell where he ended and love began. We used to look at each other with constant astonishment, like no matter how many times we kissed, we couldn’t believe it was happening. And he made me happy, or at least as happy as I could be back then. It was good. We were good.
I’ve had a million temporary lovers since, but the truth isn’t that I haven’t needed something real. It’s that I haven’t wanted it. The thought of starting from scratch, the ordeal of rebuilding something I already spent my whole life building with someone else—it’s exhausting. It’s a fucking Olympic triathlon of mortifying vulnerability, and at the end, I might not even like them as much as I liked Kit. It’d be a relief if I never had to do it.
It’d also be a relief to get back the parts of me that live inside of him. To have somewhere to put all of him contained in me. There are so many things we couldn’t fit into boxes, pieces of ourselves that we can’t access anymore because we could never return them. I’d like to be whole with him.
And that whole me—the Theo of Theo-and-Kit—I like them. They have the best jokes, the most nerve, the biggest ideas. I’d have spent weeks coming up with the recipes I’ve pitched Kit on the fly. It’s possible I wouldn’t even be here if not for Kit. I never would’ve booked this trip on my own, and if I’d been able to get my money back, I don’t know that I would have tried again. I might never have felt the world open wide to me.
Would that be such a bad thing?
Logistically, it would be stupid to fall back in love with Kit. For one, we live 5,600 miles apart. He loves his job and would never leave it, and I’ve never seriously imagined myself doing anything more than what I’ve been doing back home. And even if we lived on the same street, it wouldn’t matter, unless Kit still has feelings for me. And I have every reason to believe he doesn’t.
He said it in San Sebastián: I thought I should let you go, so that’s what I did.
Maybe something more than friendship still shimmers between us—a friction, the tension of two people who know they’re the best at fucking each other—but I know the difference between sex and love. I don’t know which he feels when his body is close to mine, or what he sees when he looks at me. It’s been so long, and I’m not the girl he wanted to marry anymore.
“Theo!”
I spin. Kit’s only a few feet away now. He’s ridiculous out here in a sea of lavender, a sprig between his thumb and forefinger. I shift my weight to steady myself on both feet.
“Did you have anything in mind for the afternoon?” he asks me.
“I—um, the Calums invited me to climb Castle Hill with them.” I glance toward the goat pen. Ginger Calum is now lying flat on his back, halfway under a shrub. Blond Calum prods him with a stick. “But I have a feeling they’re not gonna make it.”
“A friend of mine from pastry school opened a boulangerie in Nice a few months ago,” Kit says. “I thought I might pop in. Do you want to come?”
“Sure,” I say, because there’s no reason to say no. “Yeah, that sounds fun.”
He looks me up and down, like he’s taking his first opportunity to get the whole view of me this morning. My tan work pants cinched at the waist, the dust on my boots, the open collar of my shirt. He reaches up and tucks the lavender sprig behind my ear, his thumb brushing the topmost hoop in my earlobe.
“You’re very handsome today.”
My heart kicks in my chest.
I could ask him. If there’s a lesson to take from the aftermath of us, it’s that. Not here, not now, but maybe during one of our nights alone in a dimly lit bar, I could put my hand on his and ask if he could ever love me again. And if he said no, at least it would be an answer.
