Page 19 of The Pairing

“So, the same thing, but with more absinthe,” I conclude, pleased thathisdrink order hasn’t changed much. My boulevardier swishes across my tongue, perfectly bitter.

Kit watches me over his glass, lashes lowered, almost smiling and almost not. It’s a look he’d get when he was building a recipe around one ingredient, like he was rotating it in his mind and imagining it as part of a whole. He’s seeing me in a scene from his life in Paris and deciding whether I complement the flavors.

Immediately, intensely, I don’t want to let him reach a conclusion. Instead I say the first disruptive thing that comes to mind.

“So, how did you break your nose?”

He blinks. “Sorry?”

“Your nose. You said you broke it a couple years ago. How did it happen?”

“Oh.” He lowers his glass. “On a water taxi in Venice.”

I have feelings about two parts of his response: the part that means he’s already had his first time in Italy without me, and the part where he was on a water taxi, which is objectively funny. It’s easy to choose which to focus on.

“Let me guess,” I say. “The boat passed under a window and you were struck by a falling wheel of Parmesan.”

Kit laughs. “I wish.”

“Turf dispute with a gondolier.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I hooked up with a water taxi driver while I was staging at a restaurant in Venice for a few weeks. He was distracted while driving and overestimated the height of a bridge.”

“Oh my God. Please tell me the distractionwasthe hooking up.”

Kit’s eyes sparkle. “It was my birthday.”

“Incredible. Wow. So glad I asked.”

“What about you? Any broken bones?”

“No, but check this out.”

I hold out my right hand, palm up, showing off the thin ridge of a scar from thumb to wrist. “Longboarding accident. Heard an ice cream truck and hit a curb. Stitches and everything.”

“Longboarding? I thought you stopped skating when we were sixteen.”

“That was until I got rid of the Soobie,” I say. My old silver Subaru hatchback, may she rest in peace.

“No!” Kit gasps, genuinely aggrieved. “The Soobie? When?”

“A few years ago. Traded it for a Volkswagen bus.”

“NowthatI can see,” Kit says. I flip my hand over, and his eyes land on the tattoo on my forearm. “That’s new too.”

“Oh, yeah.” Neither of us had tattoos when we broke up, but I’m so used to mine now, I forget I haven’t always had them. The one on my right arm is a kitchen knife, spanning from elbow to wrist. “I got it year before last. It’s—”

“The knife fromHalloween,right?” Kit guesses, with the deadpan delivery of someone forced to sit through the movie with me every October. He’s the first one to ever get it right on the first try.

“Everybody assumes it’s a chef’s knife because I work at a restaurant. Like, what if I just lovecinema?” I point to his left wrist, where a tiny whisk is inked in fine black lines. “Is that your first?”

“Third, actually,” he says. “A bunch of us from my pastry school year got them together when we finished.”

“Cute. I have three too.” I pull up my left sleeve to show him the saguaro on my bicep. “This one was my first, for my twenty-fourth birthday.”

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