Page 36 of The Pairing

“OrRoad House! OrTop Gun!” I go on, propelled. “All the greatest action movies of the eighties, the most grab-ass, baby-oiled, hyper-masculine movies ever made, don’t work without this underlying sense of everyone’s dick being hard the whole time. That,thatis fucking gay! They made the loop all the way around to gay! And that’s the secret sauce. Nowadays everyone’s so afraid of accidentally making a gay movie thatnobody’sdick is hard, which is why there hasn’t been a truly iconic action hero in the last twenty years.” I spit out a cherry pit and add, “Except John Wick.”

The corners of his mouth tuck under into an appreciative upside-down smile.

“I like how you brought it full circle with Keanu.”

“Right?”

“You really landed that plane.”

“He doesn’t get enough credit for what he’s done for the community,” I say. “The Matrix? Gender.”

“Mm,” he hums in amused agreement. “You’re making great points.”

Of all the things I missed about having Kit as my best friend, this might be the biggest. The foreveryes, andof our conversations, every thought a continuation of the last, every random inconsequential detail of our lives dominoing into one another. Especially here, in our big, swirling, mutual soup of sex and gender.

We came out to each other four years apart—Kit first, to my absolute lack of surprise. Based on how he moved through the world, I’d always suspected he was either fruity or engaged in some kind of spiritual romance with the cosmic essence of the earth for which there were no human words. I should have known then that I was bisexual too; we understood each other too well to not be the same. But I was only fourteen, and I wasn’t ready to know that about myself until eighteen.

He was so happy when I told him, pulled me so close that my Slurpee exploded all over us both. We had to jump the fence of the apartments behind the 7-Eleven to rinse off in the pool. It was likeour world became twice as wide, like we could finally talk about colors no one else could see.

There’s a second coming-out that I haven’t done yet with Kit. Something I wasn’t ready to know about myself until a few years ago. I watch him scrape the meat off a cherry pit with his teeth. Is this the right moment? Our first time alone together as friends again?

“Hey.”

Kit turns, his eyes the color of top-shelf whiskey in the sun.

“The cherries,” I say. “On the fly.”

An old game of ours, invented when we first started fantasizing about Fairflower. I watch him recognize it, whiskey eyes glittering like I’ve dropped in a sugar cube.

“Oh,” he breathes. “Okay, let me think.”

I make a game-show-buzzer sound. “No thinking!”

“Okay, okay! I’m making an éclair. Cherry and mascarpone filling, quince and cherry jelly on top. And a mirror glaze, just to be sexy.”

“Very nice.” I pull my knees to my chest. “I’m taking the quince, and I’m making a ginger-quince syrup and putting it in an old-fashioned, with Angostura bitters and Four Roses and orange peel.”

“Then I’ll take the bitters and put them in a dark chocolate cake. Chocolate ganache with cayenne and cinnamon.”

“I’m mixing the cayenne with salt and gochugaru and putting it on the rim of a persimmon margarita.”

“Persimmon compote and blitzed hazelnuts for a cinnamon-roll filling, with persimmon–cream cheese frosting when it’s fresh out of the oven.”

“Fuuuck.” I press my forehead to my knees. “I wanna eat that.”

“So do I,” he agrees. “Do I win?”

“I think so. I don’t know how to top that.”

“That’s—” He interrupts himself with a cough.

“A first for me, yes,” I say. “And you tried to shame me formydirty jokes.”

“It’s not my fault,” Kit sighs. He tips his head up, letting the sea breeze sweep his hair from his flushed face. “It’s too nice out here. I can’t work under these conditions.”

“It really is.” I gaze out over the water, imagining I could see a seaweed-wrapped starfish washing up from the ocean floor, the wiggling dots of the Calums on borrowed surfboards, a pod of dolphins, someone swimming home for dinner. “What must it be like to live here?”

Kit considers it. “I think I’d like life by the water. Especially out here on the Côte d’Argent, where you get the mountains and the ocean, and the flora too. It almost reminds me of Santa Barbara.”

---