Page 132 of The Pairing

At the top of my shoulder, they paused. “Oh.”

I didn’t realize they’d reached my tattoo until they smoothed their finger across it.

“Surpasses all jewels,” they said in a quiet voice. “I just remembered why I know that.”

When I turned to them, I saw tears in their eyes.

And suddenly we were in a different bed. We weren’t two adults reunited; we were two wide-eyed children in a bedroom with stars on the ceiling, during the worst summer of my life.

It happened in a way I think my mother would have loved. It was almost a fairy tale. A silent curse from an enchanted garden, an eternal slumber. For so long I held on to that idea to make her death seem less pointlessly cruel, but in the end, it was a single, stupid accident. She slipped and hit her head in the greenhouse, went to sleep certain she hadn’t seriously injured herself, and never woke up. There was no sickness, no terrible event. One day she was there, and the next she wasn’t, and life as I knew it went with her.

I was thirteen. Ollie was sixteen, and Cora was ten. None ofus knew what to do, not even Dad—especially not Dad. But Theo, somehow, did.

They were close enough to our family to know what each of us needed, and removed enough to do the things none of us could. All summer, they skateboarded two miles each way from their house to mine. They asked us our favorite meals, wrote lists of ingredients, and assigned Ollie to grocery shopping. They knew I loved baking and Cora loved cakes, but that Maman’s recipes were unusable for now, so they borrowed cookbooks from the library and shoplifted issues ofGood Housekeepingfrom the drugstore. And, when I couldn’t fall asleep for days at a time, they climbed into bed with me and read out loud from my favorite book,The Silmarillion.

“Maman read it to me when I was six,” I told them.

“In French, right?” Theo asked in that simple, direct way of theirs. “Well, I’m reading it in English, so it’s different.”

By then, I had known for years that I loved Theo. But in my bed in the desert that unthinkable summer, I knew that no matter what happened between us when we were older, they would always be the person who did this for me. That would always matter more than anything.

I never could find words to tell them what it meant to me, but when Theo’s thirteenth birthday came that autumn, I tried to put it in a card. On the back, I wrote a few lines from my favorite chapter ofThe Silmarillion:the story of the mortal man Beren and the elf princess Lúthien. Beren, after many long, hard years in the wilderness, saw Lúthien dancing on the glades of Doriath in the light of moonrise and fell in love.

For Theo, I wrote a line from Beren’s speech to Luthien’s father, the king:And here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and surpasses all jewels.

I never told Theo, but I thought about getting a tattoo of those last three words for years. I finally did it a year after our breakup.I still wanted it. It still meant something to me. I’d had the gift of being loved to the center of my soul twice in my life, and even if both of those people were gone, the love had been there. It was still there, in the shape it had made me into.

When Theo touched the ink in the sea near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, I was sure they’d put it together. I couldn’t decide if I was disappointed or relieved that they didn’t. But last night, when they recognized it, when I was reminded of what it meant to me, I looked into their eyes and knew. I just knew.

“I love you more than anything,” I said. “But I can’t do this.”

It was the last thing I wanted to say and the only thing I could. I lost Theo once by chasing a dream without considering its cost. I can’t take that risk again, not even if the dream is them.

The problem is, I can’t promise I won’t repeat the same mistakes. I can’t know if this will end, or when, or how, and I don’t know if we could come back from it again if it did. If there’s a chance that one day I’ll never see them again, and I could change that fate now by never taking the chance, then I’ll stop here. I’ll make the bargain.

They were silent for a long time, their cheek against my shoulder blade.

Finally, they said, “Neither can I.”

We live on different continents, they said. We have different lives.

One of the core truths of Theo is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’ll sacrifice what they want to protect what they have. Our friendship is a sure thing, and they would choose that sure thing over anything.

“But I still love you,” they said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I still love you.”

We kissed, and we cried, and we told each other we were doing the right thing. That these are the kind of painful choices adults learn to make to keep something for life. One day it wouldn’t hurt so much, and we’d be grateful we had done it.

Then Theo said, “What now?”

They looked so heartbreakingly gorgeous then, with their mussed hair and bruises on their collarbones and wet, pink-rimmed eyes. I had to let them go. But I thought a thing like this deserved a true goodbye.

“What if we’re together for the last day,” I said, “just to see what it’s like?”

“You got us aboat?”

“I mean,” Theo says, looking down at the thing from the pier, hands on their hips like a captain surveying his vessel, “technically, it’s a dinghy.”

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