Page 26 of The Pairing

This time, when Florian holds the bottle over Kit’s glass, Kit loosens one of his shoulders and tilts his head to the side. He slips Florian a languid smile, letting the sunlight gild the ridges of his jaw and throat.

Oh. That’s someone I haven’t met before. The Sex God of École Desjardins.

When Florian leaves, Kit’s glass holds more than mine. He turns that smile toward me, eyes bright with laughter and something else I can’t name.

“Well.” I take a swig that’s somewhat bigger than necessary. “We’ll see who wins the next round.”

“In the meantime,” Kit says, passing me a honey-soaked piece of baguette, “taste this.”

I take it in the name of friendship, doubtful his boutique honey can possibly be as good as he says. Kit is the kind of person always pursuing the most of everything—the highest thread count, the ripest peach—but sometimes he gets lost in aesthetics. I’m not expecting much when it hits my tongue, especially not with my mouth still coated in sugars from the wine.

But then the flavor blooms.

“Damn.”

“Right?” Kit says, positively beaming.

“It’s actually fucked up how good that is,” I say. “The lavender with the floral notes from the wine, the violet and peony.”

Kit sags onto his elbows, gratified, and regards me from under heavy eyelids. “When did you become so good at wine tasting?”

Unlike with Maxine, I have no problem flexing for Kit.

“I’m the assistant sommelier at Timo now.”

His eyes widen. “You are? Since when?”

“Unofficially, like, three years? But I didn’t fully switch over from bar manager until last year.” I pause, then decide to just sayit. “After I took the certification exam.”

“You—” He sits up. “Theo, you passed the sommelier exam?”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s technically a lie, but just barely. My exam is scheduled for the day after I get home, and I know I’ve learned enough to pass now. There’s no way I’ll fail a fourth time. And I’m not going to walk it back, not with Kit marveling at me like this.

“That exam is insanely hard, isn’t it?” Kit says. “The somm at my restaurant said he threw up his first time.”

“It’s not that bad,” I say, as if I didn’t serve the table counterclockwise instead of clockwise the first time I failed, or forget the thirteenth German wine region the second time. (See you in hell, Saale-Unstrut.) I drain my glass. “I have some other stuff going on, but sommelier is my day job now. Or, night job, I guess.”

I wave over another refill and ask Florian how many crates of grapes he can carry at once. Kit wonders out loud how far Florian could carryhim.When we compare glasses, they’re exactly the same level of two-thirds full.

It goes on like that for the rest of lunch, Kit and Florian and me. We mop up the fig jam and honey and melon drippings with our bread, ask for refills until we’ve lost count, make Florian laugh and blush, turn our mouths purple. I smile at Kit. Kit smiles at me.

And every time we hold our glasses together, every time the lip of his glass almost touches the lip of mine, I try not to think,This is the closest we’ll ever come to kissing again.

We spend the afternoon at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the city of Bordeaux, where I float from room to room, not bothering with most of the plaques.

It’s not that I don’t care about art. Iloveart. But prestige art is my parents’ shop talk, and eventually, you get bored of it. While my dad was directing contemplative period pieces and my mom was adaptingLady Chatterley’s Lover,I was watching everyFriday the 13thsequel. My favorite is the one where Jason is cryogenically frozen for 445 years and goes to space. The day I said that to my dad was probably one of his top ten parental heartbreaks.

The art I like best is unpretentious, highly saturated, and fully committed to what it’s doing even when it’s bad.Especiallywhen it’s bad. I like B movies and slashers and eighties action flicks, anything with a synth music cue and a cocaine-fueled screenplay. I don’t want to analyze the creator’s intentions. Subtlety is for wine; I want to feel what the art wants me to feel and feel it big. Kit got so upset that I refused to readThe Lord of the Ringswhen we were kids, but the movies had all the feelings in them.

For me, it’s enough to look at a painting and think,I like it. Or,This makes me feel sad. Or,This reminds me of myself. Or,That’s a fucked-up looking dog.

When I enter the next room, the first thing I notice is the huge painting of a woman kneeling on crumbling stones. She’s wearing a dark blue coat with a gold sash over a billowing white dress, and her arms are uplifted, her palms out-turned. The look on her face is sad but vengeful. Her tits are mostly out.

The second thing I notice is Kit, transfixed before her, a fountain pen and a little sketchbook in his hands.

I used to always catch Kit like this when I’d visit him at work, back when we lived together after he finished his degree. His front desk job at the Palm Springs Art Museum wasn’t stimulating enough for him, so he’d take extra-long breaks to sketch the exhibits.

Why did I find that so charming? He was just posing, wasn’t he? Too cultured and deep to sit at his desk on his phone like a simple receptionist.

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