Page 52 of The Pairing

I turn the bombone over on my tongue.

The chocolate is dark and rich, almost peppery. The wet warmth of my mouth melts it down to the caramel and citrus-kissed cream at the center. I focus on how it coats the flat of my tongue, the body of it, the nuttiness.

A bead of sweat rolls down my spine and into the crack of my ass, breaking the last bit of my concentration.

We’re standing in the arched doorway of a chocolatería on La Rambla, the wide, busy, tree-fringed walk that runs from central Barcelona to the Mediterranean Sea. The buildingshere are a strange mix of new and old, incongruent pieces of a long-lived city keeping up with its people. A sixteenth-century church across from a shop serving dick-shaped waffles, a McDonald’s wedged between saints. A dog lies panting in the alley nearby, stealing shade from the big market, La Boqueria. Old women in booths sell fresh flowers and cups of sliced fruit, young men zip by on electric scooters, and the sun scorches every cobble and brick.

Magical, vibrant Barcelona has welcomed us with a heat wave. It’s thirty-six degrees Celsius, which means nothing to me but made Kit go “Holy God” when he saw it on his phone. I’ve been covered in a sticky layer of sweat since I stepped out of the hostel.

“Barcelona,” says our local chocolate guide, a thin Catalan woman with dyed red-orange hair, “is the city that brought chocolate to Europe.”

This is the first stop on our afternoon chocolate crawl: aconfectioner built in the shell of a historic pasta shop, jade and gold mosaic glass glittering on its facade. Inside, wooden filing drawers and glass shelves of chocolates cover the back wall, and the long case holds elaborate cheesecakes the size of my palm. Our guide sent around boxes of bombones—bonbons—for us to try, and I’ve picked a gem-shaped chocolate filled with crema catalana.

As our guide explains how crema catalana differs from crème brûlée, I reach into my pocket for my phone and find . . . nothing.

“Shit,” I whisper. We had an hour of siesta between arrival and this tour, and I thought I was being so responsible by plugging my phone in to charge. “Shit.”

Kit nudges me, brow raised in question.

“Left my phone at the hostel.” I wipe my hand across my sweaty forehead, which doesn’t help since my hand is also sweaty. “I was gonna take notes—Fabrizio said the tour is ten stops, I’ll never remember it all.”

I shouldn’t be surprised, not after the last twenty hours. My hookup from the bar couldn’t get me off, and then I had to pass six hours on a bus next to Kit, fresh off whatever beachside orgy he must have had. I may have created an untenable situation. My blood is not spending a lot of time near my brain.

Kit takes out his pocket sketchbook and his fountain pen.

“I’ll take notes for you.”

I stare. “You want me to—dictate?”

“Yeah, I’d like to experience your sommelier process. Tell me what to write. Tastes like the spirit of a wild stallion, or something.”

I know he’d let me take the pen and do it myself. But this is the kind of thing Kit likes to do for his friends. He gets this satisfied little smile when he’s solved someone’s problem, and I want to watch it tug at his mouth.

His mouth. Last night, at the club. Apple and spice.I want him.

“Make sure you write down the filling,” I say, resolving tosmother the memory in chocolate. “And there are notes of black pepper, can you put that?”

The tour takes us across La Rambla and into the Gothic Quarter, the oldest part of the city, where mosaic sunflowers and stone flourishes burst out of shops between displays of souvenir magnets. The roads are so narrow that the apartment balconies on either side can’t be more than a few feet apart, flags and laundry and tendrils of green plants strung from their iron railings like a hanging village, a thin strip of blue sky visible only when you look straight up.

We wander into a glossy shop that specializes in turrón—Spanish almond nougat—where we taste soft turrón topped with burnt egg yolk and creamy marzipan striped with candied squash. We crunch into chocolate-dipped churros and chew chocolate-coated slices of blood orange, rind and all. At the oldest chocolatería in the city, a handsome young chocolatero gives us cava bombones made with the shop’s two-hundred-year-old grinding wheel. These are so incredible, I can only watch in mute bliss as Kit uses his charm to get two more just for us.

By the time we reach the ruins of the city’s Roman wall, half of the group is going slightly wild from the heat and the sugar. Stig looks on slackly while Montana slips a morsel of chocolate between Dakota’s lips with her fingers. One of the Calums is singing Spanish love songs. Birgitte and Lars might want to get a room, though I can’t tell if they need a nap or a quickie.

Kit stays close so I can describe flavors and textures into his ear, his pen gliding over the page, his presence as suffocating as the humidity. Everything is overwhelming. The thick air, the richness melting on my tongue, the radiating warmth of bodies around us, licks of damp hair at Kit’s temples when he sweeps it up off his neck. My words go sluggish and slurred, and Kit puts his lips to my ear to ask me to repeat myself, which only makes me dizzier. My body wants to sink into his voice like a fever dream.

The chocolate crawl rolls directly into a tapas crawl near thewater, this one led by Fabrizio, whose eyes are already dark and glazed before the first round of drinks. Somewhere on a sidewalk embossed with a pattern of almond blossoms, I find myself briefly in Montana’s orbit, watching her watch Dakota and the Calums ahead.

“You know what’s funny?” she muses. “How sometimes you look at a man and it’s like,Oh, yeah, that.And then you look at a woman and it’s like,Ooh, yes, this.”

I nod, mostly knowing what she means. For me, it’s more that I like different genders from within different parts of me. Like I turn to face the light from a different direction every time.

Kitilluminates me entirely. Today, I’m catching all that light. I’m catching so much, I’m nearly cooking.

We drift from back rooms to basements in a haze. Crispy patatas bravas in red-brown salsa, hunks of fried dogfish, blood sausage, Manchego with fig jelly, heaps of paella, one million varieties of ham. Blond Calum passes me my first glass of Spanish vermouth, dark brown over ice like Coca-Cola. Its flavor is almost too deep and fragrant to describe to Kit, a heady mix of marjoram and coriander and sage and a hundred other things. I immediately order another.

I think distantly of Paloma’s guide to Barcelona, but I can’t recall any of it now. I only remember Kit’s thumb on the hinge of her jaw. I see her pulling Kit into her bedroom that night after the beach, tasting the salt left by our swim, covering his mouth so he won’t wake her family. I can almost hear his muffled moan like I’m listening from the next room, and—

Fuck.

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