Page 47 of The Pairing

“No, I didn’t, I remember, distinctly.”

Kit pulls out his phone and swipes through his messages to our conversation. Unlike me, he hasn’t deleted it, so he can scroll directly up from the text I sent him in Paris to our last exchange. I catch a glimpse of one undelivered message from him to me, gone from the screen too fast to read, before he taps on the image above it. The boarding pass I sent him, taken straight from the British Airways app.

At the top, where it should say Kit’s name, it says mine.

I stare at it. Read it three times before I believe it. Of all the idiotic, badly timed, baby-brained fucking accidents, this is the last one I ever thought I could make and maybe the most important one in the entire course of my adult life. I feel faintly nauseous.

“Okay, well, obviously that was a mistake,” I insist, pushing his phone away. “You had to have known that.”

“What I knew,” Kit says, his voice tight, “was that it sounded like you didn’t want to be with me anymore, so I went to have a cry in a very damp airport bathroom, and by the time I got back you were on the other side of security, and you’d sent me a message that clearly—to me—meant you were going home without me.” He touches a hand to his temple, like the memory is stressing him out. “I thought that was your way of breaking up with me.”

“I—I can’t believe you would—” I shake my head. “Kit, does that sound like something I would do?”

“Honestly, yes.”

I—

I think of all the lies I told to get out of meeting him in Oklahoma City. The look on his face when I told him I’d left SantaBarbara. The crash of his coffee mugs when I threw them in a box. How fast I left that bar in Paris.

“Well, I didn’t,” I say to the taxidermied stork over Kit’s shoulder instead of having to look him in the eye. “Why didn’t you just ask? We had agreed we were going home.”

“I didn’t think we had.”

“I did. And I thought—” All this time, I’d been sure. “—I thought you had your ticket and just decided not to get on the plane. I thought you left me.”

Kit says, “I thoughtyouleftme.”

I count to three in my head, collect myself.

“Okay, well,” I say, “what about the rest? Why did I have to find out you were moving to Paris from a shift manager at Timo?”

Kit blinks, surprised into a whole new line of confusion.

“That’s how you heard?”

“I was at work when you called in to quit.”

“No, it was a Tuesday lunch shift,” he says. “I specifically called then, because you never worked Tuesday lunches.”

“I picked up a double.”

“Fuck.” He sighs. “I didn’t know. I mean, I figured you’d heard somehow—”

“Yeah, that was obvious.”

“Theo, I wanted to tell you,” he says, sounding like the softer side of miserable. “I did. When you left, I didn’t know what to do. Every time I thought about having to see you and say goodbye, having to—to go into our apartment and disentangle our lives—I couldn’t do it. I took the train to Paris, and I went to the flat. I must have written and thrown away a hundred letters until I got one right.”

He looks into my eyes with a sincerity that’s nearly frantic, like it’ll kill him if I don’t believe him.

“And then,” he says, “the day I was going to send it, Cora called to say you’d packed my things. And when I tried to textyou I realized you’d blocked my number, and I thought, that’s it. Theo’s done with me. I’d taken too long and lost my chance to change your mind. And after what you said on the plane, I thought I should respect what you wanted. I should let you go. I should live with it. So, that’s what I did.”

He leaves it there, letting me pick it up and do what I want with it, like I have the first idea where to put this piece I never knew was missing. This unexpected fucking complication. The idea that I survived losing him with an anger I hadn’t even earned.

The whole thing, my story where Kit plays the traitor—it doesn’t make sense with two broken hearts.

When I find my voice, I ask, “What about the rent?”

“What?”

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