Page 41 of The Pairing

“No, these are my favorites!” Paloma says, touching his arm. “And we must enjoy them while we still can.”

“Is something happening to the shop?” I ask.

“Not yet, but the owner is a thousand years old, and she has no children to pass it on to. I think I’ll die when she finally stops baking.”

Paloma takes us away from the ill-fated pâtisserie and soon enough we’re at the port, air brimming with salt and seagrass and the eye-watering smell of fish. We bob like buoys behind her as she shows us around red-and-green fishing boats, stopping to banter with a fisherman and help a deckhand heave a sack of ice off the pier. It’s deeply dreamy.

I should be bringing her my A game, but Kit’s presence—the scent of salt water on his skin, the faint stain of cherry juice on his lips—is disrupting my process.

Paloma has family throughout southern France and northern Spain, all married to the sea. Her parents met at this very port when her mother was working on her family fishing boat and her father was pulling fish for his family market stall. She says she was born smelling like anchovies.

“I speak five languages in all,” she tells us. “French and Spanish were always my best. My Basque is okay. My Catalan is awful. English I learned in school, and then I lived in Sydney for a while.”

“Sydney, Australia?” Kit asks.

“Yes, I went to culinary school,” she says. “I thought I would be a chef at a famous restaurant, but I hated it. Every day I wanted to come home, until I did. I like it better here. Nobody ever tells me what to do.”

Finally, as the sun begins to set, Paloma asks, “Do you have plans now? I’m meeting friends on Plage de Ciboure, if you want to come.”

Kit and I exchange eye contact.

Tour dinner is optional tonight,I say with my eyes.Skip it?

Skip it.

“We’d love to,” I say.

Paloma lights up. “Quelle chance!”

On a small, secluded beach away from the Grande Plage, one with big rock outcroppings and a view of an old fort on the water beyond, Paloma’s friends make a loose circle in the sand. We’re not the only ones to have brought an offering of food or drink—at the center of the circle, a blanket is spread with plates of oil and soft cheeses, brown paper parcels of jambon and saucisson, loaves of bread, round golden-brown cakes with burnt edges, jugs of lemonade, and a jumble of half-drunk bottles.

Paloma introduces her friends in rapid succession, each lifting a glass from atop fraying pillows or beach towels or sling-back chairs. There’s a bartender, a surf instructor, a butcher, the cheesemonger from the market, a few beachside hotel staffers, a line cook, a bookseller, and a gardener.

“Ah,” Paloma says, “and here is Juliette!”

A woman appears from the direction of the water, her dark hair falling damp and loose around her shoulders. Her sundress is darkened in patches, like she threw it on over her wet swimsuit. She’s carrying a mesh bag of oranges over her shoulder.

Fruit Wife. Her name is Juliette.

I turn to tell Kit, but he and Paloma are already chatting in French with the cheesemonger. Maybe I should institute somekind of weighted system in our competition, like a half-hour head start if only one of us speaks a mark’s native language. Kit should have to sit quietly and let me make the first run at anyone who speaks French, or at least take a disadvantage. Maybe an ugly hat.

But I’m standing before a buffet of the most sexually compelling characters of the Saint-Jean-de-Luz hospitality industry, and Paloma is not the only dish. I plant myself in front of the bartender and hold out my Plavina.

“Salut!” I say. “Your glass is empty. Wine?”

By a stroke of delightful luck, he’s Croatian, so he speaks a few languages and is thrilled to see a wine from home. He calls over one of the hotel guys and the gardener, and I pour everyone a round of ruby red. In turn, the bartender offers me a glug of local white wine aged in underwater tanks beyond the seawall. Naturally, I have five hundred questions about this. Soon, I’ve been absorbed into a cluster of English-speaking oenophiles.

Camping lanterns illuminate the circle as I taste a bit of everything and ask question after question, tipsy and eager and rolling around flavors. The butcher tells me about the nineteen months of aging to create Jambon du Kintoa, which tastes faintly of chestnuts because the pigs roam free on the green Pyrenees slopes eating whatever they find. The line cook passes me a hunk of cheese that tastes almost like caramel. Even Kit drifts by on a slow lap around the sand to tell me the history of the gâteau Basque, with its buttery crust and tart black cherry filling.

Kit comes by more than once, actually. We’ve gravitated to opposite sides of the language barrier, but he seems exclusively interested in the cheese and wines closest to me. At first I suspect competitive sabotage, until I realize he’s checking on me. He’s making sure I’m okay in an unfamiliar place. It holds the comfort of before, when we’d lock eyes across a party and know that whatever happened, we’d get each other home.

On his fifth visit, after someone’s pulled out a speaker to play Kylie Minogue and we’ve all gotten up to dance in the sand, Kit and Fruit Wife find their way to me at the same time.

“Hi, Kit,” I say. And then, with significantly more interest, “Hi, Juliette. It was nice to meet you at the market.”

Juliette smiles, looking ever the wife with her hair down and her dress slipping off her shoulder. I’m not looking at Kit, but I can sense him finally putting together who she is. My hand finds his thigh, and I dig one blunt fingernail into his skin as a warning not to blow this for me. Juliette keeps smiling. My head goes a little wobbly, and I pull my hand away.

She produces an orange from the folds of her skirt and holds it out to me, saying something in French.

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