Page 63 of The Pairing

I bend to touch my toes, stretching my back and hamstrings. My knees ache from being tucked to my chest for the last four hours so I wouldn’t accidentally touch Kit. If he knows I heard him last night, or if he heard me, he’s unmoved. He napped all the way through Spain and back into France, lazily picturesque in his soft jeans and a sand-colored T-shirt, lashes fanned serenely against his cheeks.

Meanwhile, I can barelylookat him. The fog of horny war has lifted, but I’m still in the trenches. I’m down here, dying. I’ve got trench foot of the heart.

Kit is walking with Orla now, somehow wearing her safari hat on his head. He spreads his arms wide, palms up to the sun, and Orla laughs.

Would that be such a bad thing?

The thing about loving Kit is, it’s objectively the best thing that could happen to anyone. There’s a reason it’s happened to somany people by accident. Loving Kit is like being the strawberry in a flute of champagne. Just floating forever on sparkling bubbles, making dizzy circles, soaking up complexity and being sexy by association.

Beingwith Kit was different. I can admit it now: The only thing better than loving Kit was being loved by him.

Life with Kit was a good dream. It was just—it was inevitable. It made sense. I’d met him so young and loved him so long that everything I’d ever learned about love had grown into him, until I couldn’t tell where he ended and love began. We used to look at each other with constant astonishment, like no matter how many times we kissed, we couldn’t believe it was happening. And he made me happy, or at least as happy as I could be back then. It was good. We were good.

I’ve had a million temporary lovers since, but the truth isn’t that I haven’t needed something real. It’s that I haven’t wanted it. The thought of starting from scratch, the ordeal of rebuilding something I already spent my whole life building with someone else—it’s exhausting. It’s a fucking Olympic triathlon of mortifying vulnerability, and at the end, I might not even like them as much as I liked Kit. It’d be a relief if I never had to do it.

It’d also be a relief to get back the parts of me that live inside of him. To have somewhere to put all of him contained in me. There are so many things we couldn’t fit into boxes, pieces of ourselves that we can’t access anymore because we could never return them. I’d like to be whole with him.

And that whole me—the Theo of Theo-and-Kit—I like them. They have the best jokes, the most nerve, the biggest ideas. I’d have spent weeks coming up with the recipes I’ve pitched Kit on the fly. It’s possible I wouldn’t evenbehere if not for Kit. I never would’ve booked this trip on my own, and if I’d been able to get my money back, I don’t know that I would have tried again. I might never have felt the world open wide to me.

Would that be such a bad thing?

Logistically, it would be stupid to fall back in love with Kit. For one, we live 5,600 miles apart. He loves his job and would never leave it, and I’ve never seriously imagined myself doing anything more than what I’ve been doing back home. And even if we lived on the same street, it wouldn’t matter, unless Kit still has feelings for me. And I have every reason to believe he doesn’t.

He said it in San Sebastián:I thought I should let you go, so that’s what I did.

Maybe something more than friendship still shimmers between us—a friction, the tension of two people who know they’re the best at fucking each other—but I know the difference between sex and love. I don’t know which he feels when his body is close to mine, or what he sees when he looks at me. It’s been so long, and I’m not the girl he wanted to marry anymore.

“Theo!”

I spin. Kit’s only a few feet away now. He’s ridiculous out here in a sea of lavender, a sprig between his thumb and forefinger. I shift my weight to steady myself on both feet.

“Did you have anything in mind for the afternoon?” he asks me.

“I—um, the Calums invited me to climb Castle Hill with them.” I glance toward the goat pen. Ginger Calum is now lying flat on his back, halfway under a shrub. Blond Calum prods him with a stick. “But I have a feeling they’re not gonna make it.”

“A friend of mine from pastry school opened a boulangerie in Nice a few months ago,” Kit says. “I thought I might pop in. Do you want to come?”

“Sure,” I say, because there’s no reason to say no. “Yeah, that sounds fun.”

He looks me up and down, like he’s taking his first opportunity to get the whole view of me this morning. My tan work pants cinched at the waist, the dust on my boots, the open collar of my shirt. He reaches up and tucks the lavender sprig behind my ear, his thumb brushing the topmost hoop in my earlobe.

“You’re very handsome today.”

My heart kicks in my chest.

I could ask him. If there’s a lesson to take from the aftermath of us, it’s that. Not here, not now, but maybe during one of our nights alone in a dimly lit bar, I could put my hand on his and ask if he could ever love me again. And if he said no, at least it would be an answer.

But if he said yes—

If he said he could fall again, I’d tell him I already have.

At the corner of two streets in Nice, a young woman slumps on a doorstep under a sign that saysBOULANGERIEin gold letters. She’s staring at a cup of tea like she might start crying into it. A huge splatter of pink-red covers her apron and shirt and mats the ends of her blond hair. She looks like hell.

“Apolline?” Kit says.

She looks up and sees Kit, her exhausted eyes going wide in surprise.

“Kit? Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?”

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