Page 40 of The Pairing

I hold up my bottle. “A cheeky Croatian Plavina. Should be cute and beachy, a little juicy.”

Kit sighs.

“This isn’t fair. You’re just going to do your thing, and it’ll be over.”

“What thing?”

“Your sommelier thing, where you lower your voice and tell them the grapes taste like elderflower because the wind blew in a southeasterly direction in Provence last July, and then everyone wants to have sex with you.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Everyone?”

“Theo!” a crisp voice calls out from above. “Kit!”

We look up to find Paloma leaning out of the open window of the apartment over the bakery.

“I was about to leave to meet you at the port,” she says, “but then I look out my window, and there you are! And I see you went swimming, well done!”

The shutters of the window above Paloma’s rattle open, and a bearded old man’s head pops out. He looks at us, then calls down to Paloma in a language that sounds like both Spanish and French and also nothing like either.

“What’s he saying?” I whisper to Kit.

“I think he’s speaking Basque.”

“Isn’t your mom’s family Basque?”

“Yeah, on her mom’s side, but she didn’t speak the language.”

“This is my great-uncle Mikel,” Paloma says to us. “He wants to know if either of you are fit for marriage.”

“Uh—”

A much smaller but equally curious face appears in another window, a girl around twelve with a flute in one hand and a cookie in the other.

“What’s Papa Mikel yelling about?” the girl yells to Paloma. “Who’s here?”

“Just some friends!”

Paloma’s cousin squints at us. “They don’t look like any of your friends!”

“They’re visiting! I met them at the market! Stop being nosy or I’ll tell your mama!”

“Tell me what?” says a middle-aged woman in the window beside Great-Uncle Mikel.

“Léa isn’t doing her flute practice!”

“Palomaaa!”

“Léa!”

“I’ll come down,” Paloma says to us, closing her shutters. The only one left in a window is Great-Uncle Mikel, lighting a cigarette.

“I love this fucking town,” I say to Kit, who shakes his head, breathless with laughter.

Paloma bursts out of the street-level door beside the bakery wearing short-sleeved coveralls identical to the ones from this morning, sans fish guts.

“Sorry for my family,” she says. “We have lived in this building for seventy-five years, so it’s very interesting when someone new comes around.”

“I guess you won’t be impressed by these, then,” Kit says as he shows her the bakery box.

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