Page 48 of The Pairing

“We were splitting rent. I had to cover your half when you left.”

He scrubs a hand over his face. “Sloane said she was going to help.”

A memory comes back to me: Sloane, taking me out for dinner after the breakup, gently suggesting over dessert that she could help with bills until my lease ran out. I should have known.

“Youasked Sloane to bail me out?”

He holds up his hands before I can get going. Apparently, this is the one thing he won’t allow me to get mad about.

“I sent one text to your sister,” he says flatly, “who was also my friend, who loves you and is a literal multimillionaire, asking if she would be willing to help you.”

“I can’t believe—”

“Theo,” he interrupts. “If I had sent money, would you have taken it?”

For the first time, I imagine how it would have felt to have Kit cut me a check after he broke my heart.

“No.”

“Right,” Kit says. “I thought Sloane had a better chance, butI’m guessing not.”

I don’t say anything. Slowly, boats begin drifting forward, one by one. Someone must have unclogged the river.

“Okay,” I say at last. Kit’s eyes are fixed on the plywood mermaid, his brows set in a rueful arch. He tips his chin up to listen. I squeeze my knees with both hands. “Okay, so, I left you, but only because I thought you left me. And you left me, but only because you thought I left you.”

Ripples of light flash off the water and across Kit’s face, catching on the soft curve of his smile.

“C’est à peu près ça.” I know this one; he always said it growing up. He’s picked it back up since Paris.That’s it, more or less.

All I can do is laugh. “What a dumb fucking series of events.”

Kit laughs too, and finally, we begin to float on.

“So, are we friends?” Kit asks. He’s not even mad. He’s not mad at me for any of it.

Our boat drifts out of the cave and into the sun. I take a breath and try to make my answer come out resolute, but the truth is, things feel less resolved than ever now.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think so.”

Later, we crash into Fabrizio on the beach.

He’s a few drinks in, a crust of sea salt and sand up to his knees, his bare chest glazed with sweat like the outside of a spritz glass. When he kisses my face, his skin smells like chinotto oranges. We’re both so happy to see him. Our human aperitivo.

“Do you know a good place to watch the fireworks tonight?” Kit asks him.

Fabrizio grins and pulls me into his right side, Kit into his left.

“Stay with me, amori miei. I will show you.”

A thick, slow crowd carries us from the beach like flies in honey, across a plaza jangling with carnival games to a hole-in-the-wallcorner bar. Kit and Fabrizio ravish the pintxo counter, and I order a wine I’ve never had, a straw-colored Basque Txakoli that the bartender pours from high above his head into the precise center of my glass without looking. At our table outside, I tell Kit and Fabrizio about the bartender’s pour, how pouring from a height accentuates the tiny, delicate bubbles in the wine. Kit leans in so closely to listen that he nearly tips my glass into Fabrizio’s lap.

We feast, and we laugh, and the sun goes down. Kit reclines in his chair to listen to Fabrizio, a hand buried in his hair to keep it off his face. My mouth waters from the acid of the wine and three helpings of sour La Gilda.

When we’re done, Fabrizio takes us to one of the nicest hotels along the beach, one with spires and arches and Gothic embellishments up its front, where he knows a concierge who lets us onto the rooftop. I wait until the first firework explodes over the bay, until Kit’s eyes are fixed on the sky, to let myself look at him the way I’ve wanted to since Monte Igueldo.

When I do, I see Kit. Not a memory that can be bent or shrunk or cut up into paper snowflakes, but a whole, living person. I see lights flickering over a face I woke up to every morning and shoulders I slept on when I was exhausted from growth spurts. Here, now, under a shower of sparks, he looks just like the person who would have missed me, the one who wouldn’t have left.

The truth is, I never stopped loving that person. I only stopped believing he existed.

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