Page 66 of The Pairing

I didn’t even consider that Apolline might be one of Kit’s pastry school lovers, or that this is why he wanted so badly to help her. I was in her kitchen fantasizing about a life with him whilehe was baking croissants for her. He was thinking of their pastry school hookups while I was contemplating pulling him into the back of a bar and asking if he could find it in himself to love me. That is. . .deeply fucking embarrassing.

I stare out over the sparkling rush of the Riviera and feel like the biggest jackass in the south of France. So, I do what I usually do when I feel like a jackass: I call Sloane.

She answers from set, tucked into a director’s chair with pages of sides folded in her lap, her hair in rollers. I squint at the screen—that doesn’t look like a wig.

“Hello, world traveler,” she says, biting into a carrot stick. “Reunite with any old flames lately?”

“Did they make you dye your hair?”

“Oh, this?” She gestures to the dark brown hair, which was the same orange-blond as mine last time I saw her. “I did this out of self-defense. Less time in hair and makeup with Lincoln.”

“It looks good.”

“No, it doesn’t, I’m shaving my head when this is over. Why do you look like someone pissed in your pinot gris?”

I sigh. “So, that text I sent you yesterday about Kit—”

A banner at the top of my screen interrupts me. It’s an email from Schnauzer Bride.

Panic stabs between my ribs. I never responded to her that night in Barcelona, did I? And the next day I was too fucked up over Kit to think about it, and today I got caught up at the boulangerie, and—

The subject line reads “TERMINATION OF CONTRACT <3,” with a bunch of sparkle emojis.

“Fuck!” I swear, opening the email. “Fuck, goddammit, I just got a really bad fucking email.”

“What? From who?”

I skim Schnauzer Bride’s record of every time I ever missed a call or took too long to answer an email, ending with my two days of silence following her shipping-barge crisis. My heart rate accelerates at every bullet point, all the way down to the last line, where she wishes me luck in the future and demands her deposit back.

“I just lost my biggest client of the season, and I—I already maxed out my credit card ordering all the shit for that gig, and there’s no fucking way I’m breaking even now. God, I’m such a fucking—” Idiot, jackass, piece of shit, dumb fucking disaster, pathetic failure. I scrunch up my fist and grind it against my forehead. “Fuck!”

“Oh,” Sloane says. “Bummer.”

I drop my fist and stare at her face on the screen.

“It’s kind of significantly more than a bummer.”

“No, it is,” Sloane says, looking more sincere now. More like she feels sorry for me. “Should we discuss the nuclear option?”

“I’m not borrowing money from you.”

“Why not? You can’t spell Sloane without ‘loan.’”

“That’s not funny.”

“It is,” Sloane disagrees, biting into another carrot, “but as I have told you a million times, it wouldn’t be a loan. I could be your investor. I’d be buying in. I could have our guy draw something up and wire you fifty grand tomorrow.”

Jesus. “Fifty grand?”

“Okay, a hundred? Two hundred? What do you need?”

“I don’t want any money, Sloane,” I insist. “The whole point of the bus was—is—I mean, it’s because I love doing it. It’s a creative outlet, and people think it’s hot, but it’s also—”

“To prove you can do something by yourself,” Sloane finishes. “I know. You’re not ripping the curtain back on any secrets here, Theo.”

“Then you know why I can’t take the money.”

“I get why you won’t take money from Mom and Dad, but I don’t get why you won’t take it from me.”

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