Page 35 of The Pairing

“The bill was three hundred dollars, and we were still so hungry after, we went to—”

“Original Tommy’s, for chili cheese fries.”

“Yes.” I picture us in our nicest outfits, eating chili cheese fries out of the back hatch of my car. Hollywood, neon glow, Olivia Newton John on the parking-lot speakers, and a big, scary, brilliant secret in my heart.

I finish my tiny glass of room-temperature water, still smiling. Kit slides his over to me, and I finish that one too.

After lunch, we’re set loose on the beach. Kit turns to me and asks, “What do you want to do?”

I’m mad at myself for leaving my swimsuit at the hostel, but I refuse to let that come between me and a place like this. I shade my eyes and scan the blue horizon, all the way to the rock formations rounding out the bay.

“I want to go see those rocks.”

Kit nods. “Then let’s go see those rocks.”

He flags down a delivery guy for directions, and we leave the beach to climb uphill along a narrow, snaking road hidden among the trees. We go up and up and up, until we reach a little white chapel at the crest. From here, I can see everything from the green knees of the mountains to the horizon, and over a shambly wooden fence, the grass gives way to striations of gray rock cascading toward the water.

“Well,” I say. “Just as I thought. Rocks.”

Kit laughs and shakes his head. “Come on.”

He ignores the locked gate and the sign barring visitors from the area and flits through a gap in the fence posts, heading downhill.

“What are you doing?” I yell.

He turns, grinning over his shoulder, light on his feet. “You wanted to see the rocks. I’m getting you to the rocks.”

This has always been the difference between us. I look at a mountain and think,What a nice view.Kit looks at a mountain and thinks,I wonder if I could climb that.

I sigh, duck through the fence, and follow.

I catch up to him at the shoreline, where the rocks flatten into a shelf pummeled by waves, mist shimmering over our faces. Kit pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and plants his hands on his hips, pleased with his work.

He’s found us our own private cove.

A long, narrow, concrete breakwater juts out from the shore, its surface slick and dark from catching the tide. We walk it until we can see the Grande Plage around the edge of the rocks, and then we sit down on its edge. I lay my bag of cherries from the market between us, and Kit unwraps his cheese. With help from my pocketknife and Kit’s traveling jar of honey, we share both. The cherries are fantastically tart with a plummy sweetness, better than any cherry I’ve tasted before. Shout-out to Fruit Wife.

We don’t discuss any of this. It just happens, like any of the thousands of meals we’ve eaten together. We’ve lapsed into ourshared first language.

“That book you’ve been reading,” I ask Kit. “What’s it about?”

Kit swallows a bit of cheese.

“It’s about this English girl named Lucy who falls in love with a man she meets while traveling to Florence,” he says, “but of course everyone is being very Edwardian about it, so now she’s engaged to another man who’s a better match but a total drip.”

“Man, I hate when the girls get all Edwardian.” I pretend to sigh, and Kit laughs. “Is it good?”

He leans back on his hands and contemplates the question.

“I like reading E. M. Forster because it’s always gay, even though this one is about a man and a woman,” he says. “Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there’s a . . . resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world. Like when Legolas and Gimli walk into Minas Tirith and immediately start criticizing the landscaping.”

I turn the idea over in my head. “Sort of like how I love older action movies because they’re inherently homoerotic.”

He exhales a short laugh through his nose. “I can’t wait to find out what you mean by that.”

“Kit. Come on. How many times have you watchedPoint Breakwith me? And how many times did we watchSpeed? Those are two of the best action movies of the early nineties, and at their heart, both are about Keanu Reeves having this intense, soul-deep connection with the other lead, this crazy chemistry engine that works so well it’s basically sex. The only difference is that one is Sandra Bullock and one is Patrick Swayze.”

Kit touches his fingers to his lips, like he’s thinking hard now. “I never thought of it that way.”

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