Page 92 of The Pairing

“You—but you said—”

“I never technically said I slept with her,” I point out. “I just didn’t contradict you.”

“So, to be clear,” Theo says, laying their hands flat on the bar,“neither of us got laid in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Damn.” They sit back, laughing in disbelief. “Well, this is embarrassing for us both.”

“Is it?” I ask, smiling. “Maybe the only thing better than sex is having friends on the Côte d’Argent.”

“A wholesome sentiment from the Sex God of École Desjardins.”

The—quoi?

“The what?”

“Oh, don’t be coy.” They roll their eyes. “Maxine told me all about it.”

Oh, no. That could mean anything.

“What exactly did Maxine tell you?”

Theo shrugs. “Essentially, that you sucked and fucked your way through pastry school, and everyone was in love with you.”

“Inlovewith me?” I repeat, stunned. “Theo, did—did you ever think my best friend might have been exaggerating to make me look good to my ex?”

“Well—” Theo blinks. “I thought she was your girlfriend at the time.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Theo, no.” I rub a hand across my face. We can’t keep doing this. “Do you want the honest truth?”

Theo hesitates for only a second.

“Yes.”

“It’s true that in pâtisserie school I had . . . a lot of sex,” I say. Theo’s mouth forms a thin line, as if I’m just showing off. “And I’m sure some of them had feelings for me, because I—I was kind of raw for a while. Kind of pouring out a lot of love in a lot of directions, trying to, I don’t know, get it all out of me. Because you were gone so fast and so completely, and I couldn’t shut it off.”

Theo’s gaze drops from my face to a cocktail napkin, their mouth softening.

“But, while that may be an excellent way to get someone intobed, it’s a terrible way to get them to stay,” I go on. “I was a mess. No one could put up with me for more than a week. I had to learn to be better at picking people up so I wouldn’t have to sleep alone in the apartment that was supposed to be ours. That’s all. Maxine is a saint, but she’s also protective to a fault. She would’ve told you anything to make it sound better for me.”

A pause, only the bar noise around us. Theo seems to be chewing on this information. I thumb the base of my glass, hoping they don’t find it too pathetic.

Finally, their voice almost too low to be heard, they ask, “So, it was hard for you? When I . . . ?”

It shouldn’t shock me to learn Theo thought their exit from my life was easy for me. As long as we’ve known each other, Theo’s great misconception has been that people don’t miss them. It’s hard for them to believe that they have so much to offer, that people want them around and think of them fondly when they’re gone. They don’t expect anyone to care if they leave. It’s affected us before, and often—when I moved to New York, when they dropped out of school, when we’d have a tense conversation and they’d avoid me for days. Under pressure, they would vanish, and they loved themself so little they were surprised when it hurt me.

In my memory, I see a small Theo outside my old house in the Valley, dropped off by the family driver with an overstuffed suitcase.

Adult-sized Theo continues: “I kind of figured you didn’t think of me once you got to Paris. I thought you found better things to care about, and I was, you know. Backstory.”

We’ve come so far from who we were when we met, but some things hold out.

“Theo, you could never be backstory,” I say. “I thought about you every single day. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, and you had disappeared. And it seemed so . . . clean. Like you didn’t even hesitate. And that killed me.”

After a pause, Theo says, “For what it’s worth, it killed metoo.”

As much as it hurts to think of Theo in pain, it is worth something. It helps, in some strange, sad way, to know they were as fucked up as me. That I was alone with it not because they didn’t feel it, but because they never told me.

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