The Pairing, page 8
France. I’m in France. Four years later and we’re in Bourdeaux together after all.
“Man,” I say. “We’re really here. Look at us.”
“Look at you,” Kit says. “A sommelier and a bar owner.”
“And you’re a gourmet pastry chef,” I counter, feeling my grin spread. “Crazy the difference four years can make.”
“Yeah. A lot changed.” He returns my smile. A couple of children dart past, racing around the fountain. “Not some things, but … still, a lot.”
“I guess it’s kind of good that we broke up, so we could become these cool fucking people.”
Kit’s smile stays fixed, but something changes in his eyes.
“Yeah.”
Shit. We were doing such a good impression of old friends who’ve never seen each other naked, and now I’ve dumped our nudes on the cobblestones.
I search our surroundings for something to break the silence, an emergency fire axe.
At a table outside a bar on the edge of the square sits a man with a head of dark curls. He’s wearing a T-shirt and tan trousers instead of farmhand regalia, but he really looks like—
“Is that Florian?”
Kit follows my line of sight, and his mouth pops open in surprise. “I—I think it is.”
“Is he with—?”
One of the two other men at the table lets out a cackle that unmistakably belongs to Blond Calum.
“Of all the people to get Florian out for a drink,” Kit says, “my money was not on the Calums.”
“Oh, mine was. Those two are trouble. The ginger told me he can never return to Belgium for legal reasons.”
Just then, Dakota and Montana appear on the terrace with matching flutes of pink champagne. Florian waves, and the Calums start pushing tables together so everyone can sit.
“Oh,” Kit says, “this is interesting.”
“It’s like The Bachelor,” I say, fully invested. “Which of those girls do you think wants the fantasy suite most?”
“How do you know it won’t be one of the Calums?”
“Those men are terminally straight.”
“Nobody’s straight on a European vacation.”
“Sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” I observe, picturing Kit picking up tourists at bars in Montmartre.
“Historic precedent. They switch everyone to bisexual at passport control.”
“Damn, that’s what the stamp’s for? Could’ve skipped the line.”
Kit laughs, rubbing a hand across his forehead in a kind of oh Theo gesture that makes the nerves in my fingertips buzz. “The real question is, which one is most likely to succeed?”
“The one with the dark hair—Montana—she’s perkier, which gives her an edge, but Dakota’s a wild card.”
“The blonde?” Kit asks. “She looks bored.”
“Some guys are into that. Should we start a pool?”
“I think—” Before Kit can reveal what he thinks, Fabrizio manifests on the terrace with a bottle of wine and a basket of frites. “Hold on. Game changer.”
We watch as Fabrizio sits next to Florian and throws an arm over the back of his chair. He joins the conversation with a salacious grin, tosses a frite into his mouth, and then dips another in sauce and feeds it to Florian.
Kit outright gasps. “Oh my God.”
“That’s the game, folks.”
“Fabrizio by a mile.”
We both fall apart in laughter, mine shot through with relief. The tension is gone, and that easy current from lunch gushes in like water in the fountain. As long as we can keep finding our way back here, we’ll be fine. We just need an endless supply of Florians.
Which gives me an idea.
“You know who else might have a chance?” I ask Kit.
“Who?”
“One of us.” Kit’s still half laughing, like he doesn’t think I mean it. “I’m serious! He was flirting with both of us. We have a head start.”
Kit shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, I’ll prove it.”
“Theo, don’t—”
He grabs a handful of my sleeve to stop me. I raise my eyebrows, and he lets it go, pauses, then smooths it back into place.
“Why not?”
“I—I just mean—” His olive face has taken on a faint tinge of mauve. “If it’s going to be one of us, why not me?”
Oh. I recognize this approach. Back when we were friends, we used to occasionally compete for the same people. Occupational (bisexual) hazard.
“Is that a challenge, Fairfield?”
“Maybe,” Kit says. “But then, if Fabrizio could pull Florian, maybe the true challenge would be Fabrizio. By the transitive property.”
“Fabrizio’s more available, though. We’re always with him,” I say. “With Florian, there’s a finite window of opportunity. A Florian Fuck Window.”
“Sure, but let’s say one of us succeeds within the Florian Fuck Window,” Kit counters. “The other could just do the same with someone else in the next city. It wouldn’t be a meaningful victory.”
“What are you suggesting? A tournament bracket?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” he says, though he doesn’t look disinterested, “but if I was, I think it would be a matter of seducing a local in the greatest number of individual cities.”
Huh. Now that’s an idea.
I touch my chin with two fingers, thinking. It started as a bit, but now I’m seeing the potential benefits of a friendly-but-horny rivalry. I like us like this. If having sex with other people will keep things with Kit stable enough to enjoy my trip, and we both get an outlet for any leftover sexual friction, then why not?
“A body-count competition,” I muse.
“You don’t have to phrase it like we’re murdering them, but yes, essentially.”
“We do both already have one, from Paris…” The more I think about it, the better it sounds. In fact, the longer I look at Kit, the more I want to have sex with someone.
“Wait,” Kit says. “You’re being serious? You actually want to compete?”
“It sounds fun. I’m down. Are you?”
When I look into Kit’s eyes, I can practically see the pleasure receptors in his brain crackling. He can’t say no, not a hedonist like him.
“Define hookup. Does that include making out, or over the clothes, or—?”
“At least one person has to come,” I say.
“Oh.” Kit blinks. “That’s easy, then.”
“Is it?”
“What, is it not easy for you?”
“No, it’s easy for me.”
“I personally do it all the time.”
“So do I,” I say. “That’s what makes it a competition. I’m like, the number one seed. Of fucking.”
Kit touches his chin. “Proud of you for resisting a seed joke.”
“Thank you, I’m very strong,” I say. “So, what do you think? A little sex wager between friends?”
For a long moment, Kit doesn’t say anything at all. He just looks at me, searching my face so intently that I feel his gaze like a touch.
Then, like he did on that cliff in Dover, he puts out his hand.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
I grin. “Let’s do it.”
When I take his hand, it’s smudged with ink from his sketchbook. His skin burns hot against my palm.
“One more thing, though,” Kit says. His thumb presses into the back of my hand. “Is that star of Fatal Attraction Glenn Close?”
I turn to look, and Kit takes off toward the bar.
SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZPAIRS WELL WITH:
Green Izarra (neat, after dinner), gâteau Basque made with fresh cherries
“Ah, finally!” Fabrizio sings when I board the bus late the next morning. “Our little conquistadore!”
Orla shoves the clipboard at me.
“Go on, we haven’t got all day.”
“Be kind to my Theodora,” Fabrizio says. “It is not her fault. She is in love!”
“I’m not—”
“I am always so happy when my guests sample the local cuisine on their own,” Fabrizio says, winking lavishly. “And when it becomes love! Orla, do you remember the German girl two summers ago, who tried to tell us to leave her in Barcelona with the sailor? Ah, they are married now!”
I push on down the aisle, accepting a round of applause from the Calums and envious but not unfriendly looks from Dakota and Montana. At my seat, Kit is against the window wearing a patterned terry button-down and very small matching shorts.
I heave my pack into the overhead, grab the nearest small item from the outermost pocket, and chuck it at him.
“Ow,” Kit says as a jar of pomade hits him in the arm. He pulls out his headphones. “Good morning.”
“Morning!”
I’m wearing my most shit-eating grin as I flop down next to him and Orla whisks us away from Bordeaux.
“So.” Kit’s tone is light and indecipherable. “How was Florian?”
“He was…” I hold a pause to build suspense. “Surprising.”
“In what way?”
How to explain it? Kit and I may have set the terms of a sex competition yesterday, but we haven’t yet laid out rules for talking about sex with each other. We’re friends, though, and the last time we were friends, we told each other everything.
What happened with Florian was, we went back to his apartment to share another bottle from the château. Then he took me to his bedroom, showed me the contents of the top drawer of his dresser, and asked me if I would use it on him.
“Surprisingly well prepared,” I say, thinking of the supple leather harness he buckled around my hips, the vial of oil he poured over my fingers. “I mean, I knew he had the knees for it, but I didn’t think he had the range.”
Kit’s eyes widen incrementally. “You mean he let you—”
If anyone would know, it’s Kit.
“That was all he wanted.” A strange, small part of me almost wishes Kit could have seen how nicely my hand fit between the two dimples at the small of Florian’s back. Kit is the only one who could truly appreciate how my technique has improved. “I guess you could say I hadn’t pegged him for it.”
Kit’s expression of covetous wonder twists into a grimace.
“Not a pegging pun.”
“He took it really well,” I go on, all eyebrows. “Such a strapping young man.”
“You should be banned from sex for that. You should have to become a monk.”
“Score’s two to one,” I say, cheerfully ignoring his disdain. “Advantage me.”
“I hope you’re enjoying yourself,” Kit says, taking out his book. “It won’t last.”
It’s two hours to our next stop, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing commune on the southwestern coast of France near the Spanish border, so I decide to catch up on my most pressing notifications.
One, the family email chain. Two, a text from the bar manager at Timo. Three, an email from the Somm. Four, an email from Schnauzer Bride. Five, a text from Sloane. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and put the part of me that wants to ignore them all in a chokehold.
I address the bar manager’s crisis first, even though I specifically told everyone at work not to bother me while I was—and I used these exact words—up to my nips in Brie. It shouldn’t be that hard for the guy with my old job to read my notes, but I guess an assortment of random sticky notes in the back office isn’t as intuitive for him as it was for me. I remind him that our small-batch-bitters supplier has to get free tiramisu once a month or he’ll stop giving us a discount, and that those two barbacks can’t be scheduled together because one fucked the other’s girlfriend.
In the family email chain, Dad has sent a long-winded update from set in Tokyo, Mom is location scouting in the Texas Panhandle, Sloane is thinking about leaving a horse’s head in her costar’s bed, and Este is meeting an ambassador’s son for dinner in the Maldives via chartered helicopter. I send back a short report about Paris and Bordeaux, leaving out Kit completely.
After is the Somm, asking if I’ve registered for a distributor portfolio tasting next month. Trade events are important for serious sommeliers, but I hate networking and being expected to look feminine, and I really hate listening to men in blazers and dark jeans jerk each other off about Burgundy. And I can’t give up a weekend of bus bar sales to kiss ass in Scottsdale. I tell him I can’t make it, already hearing his lecture, do I really want to make it in this business, et cetera and so on.
Schnauzer Bride is next, wanting to incorporate at least three but no more than five botanicals from her florist’s samples into her menu. My endurance is fading, so I grind out a few cocktail pitches and lock my phone. Sloane can wait until my brain isn’t so hot.
I press the cool glass of the screen to my cheek and breathe out slowly, soothed by the expanse of French countryside rolling past the window, the funny, skinny trees with puffs of leaves bursting from their tops like dandelions.
Sometimes it’s embarrassing that this is peak performance for me, that I spent the past few years kicking my own ass to achieve twenty minutes of executive function and a fear my life will collapse if I breathe wrong. But most days, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Everything up to age twenty-five was a series of small-to-medium fuckups, until I decided to get my shit together.
I got my shit together because I had to, because I didn’t like myself or my life. But I also did it because every time I lost my keys or forgot a promise, I missed Kit.
Living with Kit was like living in a pixie nest. Every night, I’d find my phone charger relocated to my nightstand and my water bottle beside it, refilled at the precise temperature I liked. Dates circled themselves on the calendar. Fresh flowers appeared whenever the old ones wilted. And no matter how carelessly I unloaded the dishwasher, when I checked the back of the utensil drawer, the measuring spoons were always there.
I loved and resented how good he was at the parts of life I was worst at, and once he was gone, I let resentment win. I made my love into a power drill and built a life I could keep in order myself, because you can’t miss something you don’t need anymore.
But every so often, after an eight-hour shift and an all-night gig, I’ll stumble home to a pile of dishes and think, Kit would take better care of me than this. And for a second, he’ll be there. Putting the cereal bowls away, waiting up with a book, kissing the tension from my shoulders, picking up my slack.
“Theo?”
The real, present Kit is watching me, one headphone out, his book face down on his lap.
“You okay?”
I shake my head.
“Yeah! Yeah, just thinking,” I say. “What, um, what are you listening to?”
“Oh”—Kit glances at his phone—“you’ll laugh.”
“Probably not.”
He gets this tender look on his face, the way he used to when he’d look up at the very top of Mount San Jacinto from the valley floor.
“So, before the trip, I had this idea to make a list of composers who wrote music in each of the tour stops. Because I—” He pauses, searching for the words. This is new. He used to talk in long, breathless sentences until he chiseled down to his point, but now he sifts through his thoughts. “Everywhere we go, I want to experience it entirely. All the way out to its edges. I want to touch it, taste it, drink it, eat it, climb it, swim in it. You can hear a place by walking down the street or sitting next to the ocean or opening a window, but I think if you want to listen to it, it’s in here. Like how bread can taste like the kitchen it’s baked in. Or—”
“Or how wine can taste like the barrel.”
He smiles.
“Yes. Yes, exactly. So, I’m listening to Ravel.”
Without another word, he hands me a headphone. I put it to my ear, and he starts the track over.
* * *
I’ve never seen a movie set in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but I’ve seen sandcastles and dollhouses and ripe white peaches, so, close enough. The buildings cuddle together around narrow streets, some made of pink stone and others crisscrossed with bright red timber and matching shutters. Lazy morning sunlight drips from the pink-orange roofs to the promenade curving around a huge crescent-shaped beach, which Fabrizio says is simply called La Grande Plage. In the hazy blue distance, the Pyrenees rise toward endless sky.
We start our day at the village’s central market. In winespeak, Les Halles has a robust, varied nose, with high intensity aromas of the sea—salt water, abalone shell, wet stones, seaweed, fatty fish. Notes of brined pork and smoked sausage, yeasty bread and burnt crust, fresh clover and geranium and bird of paradise, wild sage. Another elusive note slips in between, something juicy and sharp, like lemongrass or verbena.
That’s the one I follow.
I weave around cheese cases and pans of steaming brioche, past an old woman ordering lamb from a mustached butcher, to a vibrant fruit stand. It reminds me of my go-to frutería back home, except there’s a type of pear I’ve never even heard of, which is rare when you spend your spare time tasting wine with guys competing to name the obscurest berry. These fruits can teach me something. I pick up an apricot and press my nose to its skin.
“Bonjour!”
I startle up from the note I’m tapping into my phone (orangé de Provence: intense, sweet, tart) to see a shopgirl in an apron.
She’s pretty the way Saint-Jean-de-Luz is pretty, breezy and sensuous, her brown face soft and relaxed. Her dark hair is in an informal knot at her nape, and the loose bits have the crispiness of sun-dried seawater. She’s holding a speckled green-red pear and a paring knife, a slice balanced on the blade. She has an air of wife about her. Maybe not my wife, but certainly someone’s.
“You want?” Fruit Wife says.
“Oui.” I nod eagerly. “Wow, yes, please.”
The petal-pink flesh of the pear melts on my tongue like butter with a kiss of cinnamon, and the woman watches me suck juice off my thumb. If my French were better, this is the part where I would go, Are we about to make out?
