Page 120 of The Pairing

This is cool.

“We’re coming!” I say, stepping out of my shoes.

“Not how we thought we’d be,” Theo mumbles, “but yeah.”

And so we find ourselves around Fabrizio and Valentina’s table in an adorable kitchen with sea views and yellow countertops and shelves of antique teapots filled with seashells. Orla opens the wine, Fabrizio pours, and Valentina sets out dishes of marinated olives and crusty bread. Above the toaster oven hangs a framed photo of the two of them laughing in tiny swimsuits, up to their perfect thighs in crystal clear water off a white sand beach. Mon Dieu. He really has been married this whole time.

“So, Valentina,” Theo says, already recovering their charm by sheer brute force, “what has Fabrizio told you about us?”

“Oh, I have heard that you are an expert on wine,” Valentina says, “so I hope you like this one. I took it from the cellar at his parents’ restaurant, though I do not always know if his mother has good taste.”

Fabrizio gasps theatrically and fires off a string of Italian; Valentina ignores him.

“It’s perfect,” Theo says, amused.

“And I hear that you are a pâtissier in Paris, very impressive,” she goes on, smiling at me. “And that you are star-crossed lovers who fell back in love on Fabrizio’s tour!”

My face, previously warm from the balmy night and Valentina’s compliments, goes cold.

“Oh, we’re not—” Theo begins.

“We’re just friends,” I say before I have to endure the rest of Theo’s sentence. “We split up years ago, that’s true, and the tour did bring us back together.”

I turn to find Theo’s eyes sharp and searching.

“Right,” they say. “But. . .as friends.”

“Ah, I see,” Fabrizio says, sounding disappointed. “Colpa mia.”

I set my attention upon the olives in front of me, studiously avoiding Orla’s sympathetic gaze.

“Well, even so,” Orla says, “you’re friends again, and that’s lovely. Some of my best friends in the world are my ex-girlfriends. I’ve got one in Copenhagen who lets the wife and I borrow her flat when we’re in the mood for herring.”

“Oh, I hear Copenhagen is so cozy,” Valentina says. “Can we come next time?”

“Fabs, you haven’t taken this girl on the Scandi tour yet?”

“I tell the company to never send me on the Scandinavia tour,” Fabrizio says. “Too cold. Not enough sun.”

“Oh wise up, that’s when you let your lady keep you warm. Valentina, love, I’ll take you.”

Theo laughs, and I laugh, and it’s okay.

We talk for an hour while the sun sets. Orla and Fabrizio tell stories of their wildest tour happenings, and Theo and I talk about the strangest people we’ve encountered at our jobs. Valentina tells us that she was working in Rome as an English tutor when she met a Vespa guide who wanted to learn English to travel the world, how they kissed for the first time on Rome’s oldest bridge because he wanted to join her to history. Orla tells us how she met her wife as schoolmates in Derry and waited fifteen years to confess how she felt. It’s simple and warm, the kind of magical human thing that happens in transit when like brushes against like.

“My mother, she would tell me to hold the bottle like this”—Fabrizio holds the wine by its bottom, palm to base with his arm fully extended—“and when I am big enough to hold it this way and touch it to my lips, I am old enough to drink it.”

“And what age was that?” Theo asks.

“Eleven!” And we fall apart laughing again.

Everything is going well until I lean over to refill Theo’s wine, and a condom falls out of my shirt pocket and into the olives.

“Oh God,” Theo whispers.

I try to intercept before anyone notices, but the foil wrapper is now coated in olive oil and shoots out from between my fingers. It lands with a small, wet plop beside Fabrizio’s glass.

The table goes silent.

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