Page 2 of The Pairing

(Theo’s Version)

There’s a dildo on the luggage carousel.

It’s notmydildo. Not that I didn’t bring one, but Kit would never pack ours so carelessly that it could just flop out of my suitcase and go tumbling through baggage claim. There are rules for these things.

I’m alone in London Heathrow, watching the dildo go round and round. It’s purple, shortish but a perfectly respectable girth. On its fourth rotation, I finally step forward and pull my bag off the belt, but I don’t move toward the exit.

I don’t know where Kit is.

Seven, eight, nine, ten times the dildo goes around before a straight-faced airport employee snaps on some gloves and takes it away in a plastic baggie.

I check the time: thirty-five minutes since Kit walked away. I’m too angry to cry, but I have about half an hour until I come completely, spectacularly unglued. I’ll email the tour company later to explain why we never made it, see if I can get a refund. Right now, I just want to go home.

From the British Airways ticketing line, I watch a nervous young couple approach the lost and found to collect their wayward dildo. They’re in the kind of love worth getting humiliated at baggage claim. They leave together, pink-faced and laughing into each other’s shoulders. How fucking sweet.

I ask the agent behind the counter, “What time is the next nonstop to Los Angeles?”

“I don’t care if you give me two hundred pounds and a hand job, Trevor, you’re cut off.” I push the crumpled notes back across the bar, smiling sweetly. “Go home. Work on yourself. Your personality is bad, and not in a fun way.”

At last Trevor relents, allowing himself to be hauled toward the pub’s exit by two other West Ham fans as the crowd cheers another goal on the overhead telecast. One of the Spurs lads he was harassing raises his beer in gratitude. I shake my head and toss a towel over my shoulder, ducking down to finish detaching the blown keg.

“It’s always Trevor,” sighs a bartender. “Absolute fucking wet wipe.”

I snort. “Every bar has one.”

The bartender gives me a commiserative wink, then does a double take.

“Hold on. Who’re you?”

“I’m—” I finally get the keg unhooked and drag it out with a grunt. “—Theo.”

“When’d they hire you, then?”

“Oh, he let me behind the bar because I can change a keg.” I jerk my chin toward the sweaty manager doing his damnedest to keep up with orders. It didn’t take much to convince him to accept some free help. “I don’t work here. I don’t even live here. I got off a plane like two hours ago. Hey!” I snap my towel at a Spurs fan trying to climb on top of his barstool. “Come on, man, be smarter.”

The bartender frowns appreciatively.

“Been to London before?”

I grin. “No, but I’ve seen a lot of movies.”

Truthfully, I haven’t been much of anywhere outside California. There was that close call a couple summers ago when Sloane was filming in Berlin and invited me to come live for free in her hotel suite, but—no, I wasn’t ready. I don’t typically trust myself in unfamiliar places or circumstances. I’ve lived in the Coachella Valley almost my entire twenty-eight years, because it has mountains and desert and huge skies and ravens the size of dogs, and because I already know all the ways I can fail there.

But I’m ready now. I think—IknowI’m ready. Every muscle in my body has been coiled for weeks as the squares on the calendar went by, ready to spring, to find out what I’m capable of. Iloveknowing what I’m capable of.

Other than one cataclysmic morning at Heathrow, this is my first time overseas, which is probably why I’ve put myself behind the bar in a crowded pub during a football grudge match. I jumped off the airport train with all of London at my feet, and instead of museums or palaces or Westminster Abbey, I cut a straight path to the nearest pub and elbowed my way into my element. I’m capable ofthis,mediating bar fights and slamming valves and shouting friendly insults at guys named Trevor, learning the local drinking customs, tasting the regional spirits. I study fauna at their watering hole like it’s National Geographic. I’m the Steve Irwin of having a pint with the lads.

The whole idea of this trip, when Kit and I first booked it, was exactly that: learning. We used to fantasize about opening a restaurant one day, and one night after our fifth consecutive episode ofNo Reservations,Kit had the idea. He found a guided European food and wine tour where we could experience the best and richest of flavors, the most storied traditions of breaking bread, the perfect full-senses immersion to inspire our work.The full Bourdain,he said, which made me instantly fallin love with him all over again.

We saved for a year to book it, and then we broke up on the flight, and Kit fucked off to Paris, and I never saw him again. The reservation was nonrefundable. I came home with a broken heart, a travel-sized bottle of fourteen-year whiskey we’d planned to drink at the final stop in Palermo, and a trip voucher valid for forty-eight months. I told myself that, on month forty-seven, I would take the trip by myself, for me. I’ll stand on the beach and drink our whiskey to mark how far I’ve come. To commemorate being finally, completely over Kit.

And here I am, in a pub five minutes from Trafalgar Square, muscling a new keg into position, being incredibly brave and independent and sexy of my own volition.

I can do this. I’m the Crocodile Hunter. I willlearn,and I will havefun,and I will take it all back to the Somm at work and my kitchen at home where I come up with my own recipes. I will be my best, most confident, most competent self. I will not cram my stuff into my pack in a big tangled wad every morning or drop my phone in the Arno or leave my ID on an airport toilet paper dispenser (again). And I will not, at any point, wish I was doing it with Kit.

I barely even think of him anymore.

I kick the keg the final inch into place with the toe of my boot, then twist the coupler in and push the lever down.

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