Page 28 of The Pairing

I cross my ankles under the bar. My boot grazes the cuff of his pants.

“You know how I told you I traded the Soobie for a Volkswagen bus?”

I tell him about my bus, gutted and built out by hand into a bar I can drive around the Valley, how I design custom cocktails for weddings and bachelorette parties and influencers that come in for Coachella. Then I tell him about next month’s monster wedding gig: 350 guests, eight bespoke recipes, and a bride who emails me five times a day expecting prompt responses to questions likeDid I mention one of the drinks must be served in these custom tiki mugs that look like my pet schnauzer?andCan you make a drink that tastes like the vacation to Corsica where we fell in love?

I leave out one major detail: I’m barely bringing in enough money to make back what I spend, and before I got hired by Schnauzer Bride, I was close to packing it in.

“Anyway,” I finish, “I need to find out what Corsican flavors are like so I can design a cocktail that reflects ‘the complexity of our love,’ which, you know. He’s a hedge fund manager named Glenn, but sure.”

“Theo, this is . . . wow.” Kit stares at my phone, which I’ve opened to the Instagram page for my bus, a grid of cocktail money shots and my hands holding drinks out of the service window I installed. His eyes are wide and sparkling when he looks up, and a wave of warmth sweeps through me. The only thing bigger than Kit’s capacity for wonder is how it feels to be at the center of it. “You built that yourself?”

Obviously, it was harder than I’m making it sound. Almost a year of sweating and swearing, watching hours of tutorials online. I got on a first-name basis with my local Home Depot sales associates. I ripped out and replaced the floors, put in a new engine, scraped the rust off and repainted, rigged tanks and pipes and sinks, pasted wallpaper and sanded the countertops and salvaged coolers from work.

Some people dye their hair when they go through a breakup. I got a bus.

Kit doesn’t need to know it was a breakup bus, that I was nail gunning my heartbreak out while he was licking crème anglaise off some pastry classmate’s abs. Or that I might never have beenfired up enough to take the risk if he hadn’t said what he did on that plane.

“I mean, it did help that I was briefly hooking up with a carpenter.” I see the food coming and pull my elbows off the bar. “But what about you? What’s the pastry game like?”

Over cuttlefish in a garlicky red-wine tomato sauce and cheesecake with orange zest (fiadone,I add to my notes), Kit describes working at a gourmet restaurant inside a five-star Parisian hotel. Early mornings, precise milligrams of ingredients, arranging ribbons of white chocolate with long tweezers like a brain surgeon.

“Honestly, the worst part is the tweezers,” Kit says. “I’m so much better with my hands. When I can get my fingers in, there’s pressure, you know? You can tell from touch if something will give, or if it’s too soft,or— Oh, here.” He passes me a napkin, for the bit of drink that has dribbled from the corner of my mouth.

When I’m finished taking notes—acid, tomato, citrus, island mist, maybe a spritz?—we skip the church and head straight to Place du Parlement in the heart of the district. We stand at the fountain under wrought iron balconets, where Kit points out the sculpted stone faces keeping vigil on the corners of each building.

“They’re called mascarons,” he says, “not to be confused with macarons,” which fills me with another swell of affection.

I can’t believe how much better I feel than I did last night. Can it really be only twenty-four hours since I was at the Moulin Rouge, trying to crush the bloom of nostalgia? Does time move differently in France?

France. I’m inFrance.Four years later and we’re in Bourdeaux together after all.

“Man,” I say. “We’re really here. Look at us.”

“Look atyou,” 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.

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