Page 123 of The Pairing

“Orla.” This is what I get for assuming all women in safari hats can be trusted.

“You must know we talk about everything. The tour is the same every time, but the people are different. The guests are our entertainment.”

Satisfied with the sugar, I reach for the little glass pot of yogurt Valentina took from the refrigerator and add it in.

“Well, I hope we’ve given you a good show,” I say, genuinely meaning it.

“I think right now it is a tragedy. Tell me, why are you not together? You do not tell Theo how you feel?” He reads my face, then puts down his whisk in despair. “Why,Professore?”

“Because I don’t know if I deserve to.”

I crack the eggs and add vanilla and, as I whisk it together, tell Fabrizio the most simplified version of our story. Our lives together, the Paris mistake, the breakup, my father, how I never let Theo go, what I almost did last night in Rome before I caught myself. When I’m done, I have Fabrizio sprinkle the flour and baking powder and salt into my bowl while I go on mixing.

“I understand,” Fabrizio says. “You love Theo. You do not want for Theo a selfish lover who takes away choices.”

“Yes.”

“And so, you take away the choice to be with you.”

“I—” My hand falters on the whisk. “No, that’s not—”

“This is what it sounds like to me.”

“I—I just want to do the right thing for Theo.”

“Sì, and only you know what this is?” He’s at the pantry, searching for the last ingredient, a neutral-flavored oil. His tone is casual, as if he delivers axis-shifting insights to all his houseguests. “Ah, it is as I fear. Only olive oil. Okay?”

“Uh—sure,” I say, barely hearing him.

He sets the oil beside his mother’s mixing bowl and takes in my expression, then reaches out with easy affection to stroke mycheek.

“When I met Valentina,” he says, “there was another man who loved her. He was the son of a rich man, with a good job close to home, and her mother liked him very much and me not at all, so I believed she will be happier with him. So, when he tells her he loves her, she says to me, ‘Fabrizio, what should I say?’ And I tell her, ‘I want you to be happy.’ And when he asks her to marry him, she says to me, ‘Fabrizio, what should I say?’ And again I tell her, ‘I want you to be happy.’ And the night before her wedding, she comes to my door, and she says to me, ‘Fabrizio, what should I do?’ And I tell her again, ‘I want you to be happy.’ And she says to me, ‘Fabrizio, idiota, all I ever want is to be happy with you.’”

The oven dings, preheated.

“What I mean is, if I say how I feel sooner, Valentina’s father does not have to tell the priest why his daughter is not coming to her wedding,” Fabrizio says with a grin. “It was not for me to protect her from my heart. It was only for me to let her see it and decide if she will keep it.”

He glugs oil into the bowl and takes the whisk from my hand, replacing it with a well-seasoned wooden spoon. I should start folding if I want the batter to come together. But I’m frozen on the spot, overpowered by the plain truth. Maybe it’s not a matter of whether I deserve to tell them. Maybe it’s that they deserve to know.

From the balcony, laughter grows. The door slides open.

“I will say one more thing,” Fabrizio adds in a low voice. “How Valentina looked at me the night before her wedding—this is how Theo looks at you.”

Near midnight, full of wine and olives and cake, Theo and I call a cab back to the hostel. We make it two blocks before we dissolve into long-delayed, incredulous laughter.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” Theo says, wiping their eyes.

“I think we might be friends for life? With Fabrizio? Somehow?”

“What the fuck.” They smooth a hand down their face. “God, this whole competition was so. . .stupid. We’re being stupid, aren’t we?”

“It definitely hasn’t been my finest work,” I say. “Sexually, yes, but not intellectually.”

“It’s stupid,” Theo concludes. “And it’s immature. We’readults.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

Theo shakes their head. “But when I first saw you in London, it was like I was an insecure twenty-two-year-old again.”

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