Page 43 of The Pairing

I break the kiss and try to remember the French words forWhere the fuck did they go?

“Où—” Shit, I only know present tense. “Où est—” Wait, that’s singular. “Où sont Kit et Paloma?”

Juliette gives the group a perfunctory once-over and shrugs, her dress falling farther down her shoulder.

“Je ne sais pas,” she says, kissing me again.

I kiss her for four seconds, five.

“Sorry, I just—do you think she took him home?”

Juliette chases after my mouth.

“Je ne sais pas.”

I close my eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of her breath on my skin, but—

“Do you know if she likes him? Like, really likes him?”

She pulls away this time, sitting back with a sigh. She regards me from under her long lashes with an expression that’s soft and almost sad, almost kind, with a bitter finish. The crease between her brows reappears.

She calls out to the bartender, who crawls over to kiss her cheek and listen as she tells him something in French. He looks at me with that same strange expression and says, “She wants you to know you don’t have to do this if you love someone else.”

The words land like a sprained ankle.

“What? I—” I glance between them, a laugh bubbling up from my chest. “Oh, that’s—no, it’s not what you think. Kit’s my friend.”

Juliette and the bartender exchange a look.

“She says you’re lovely, but she doesn’t settle for second place.”

I try to argue, but it’s useless. Whatever Juliette saw between Kit and me, whatever broke inside my brain when I saw him kissing Paloma, whatever was cut loose when my skin touched his in the water—Juliette has decided it’s love. It doesn’t matter how much I insist it’s not.

She presses a kiss to the back of my hand and gives me a pitying smile, and the bartender passes me a bottle.

The short version is, I’m pissed at Kit.

The long version is, we’re on a pintxos crawl through glorious, sun-soaked San Sebastián, and everything is sumptuous and salty and soaked in oil and piled atop the most delectable morsels of crusty bread, and Kit looks happy, and I’m pissed.

I’ve read the San Sebastián portion ofWorld Travelfive times, so I know exactly what Bourdain said about this place. He wrote that it might be the greatest culinary destination in Europe, and that he imagined himself living a perfect life here. I get it—I feel it in every corner of this city, every sand-dusted tile and fuzzy green stone, every brick in every Gothic arch, whiffs of saffron and clove and guindilla at every overstuffed pintxos bar.

We’ve arrived on the last day of Semana Grande, the city’s end-of-summer festival, and the streets are fuckingalive.Street performers balance on milk jugs with puppets on their hands, cooks under tents pound balls of dough into pans, giant-headed mascots chase screaming children through the squares. The chaos is incandescent and overwhelming and viscerally of its own place, like a cava waterboarding.

And still, I’m pissed at Kit.

I don’t want to be pissed. I want to feel the way I did yesterday. I want to be here, on the small peninsula of San Sebastián’s Old Town, in a dim bar with ham hocks hanging from the ceiling, slurping buttered clams and enjoying the company of my friend Kit.

“Oh my God, Theo,” Kit’s saying, passing me a skewer ofpickled olives, peppers, and anchovies on a slice of baguette. “You have to try this one.”

Fabrizio pops up beside us in an even more spectacularly good mood than usual. I’m surprised his shirt’s still on.

“La Gilda! Excellent choice! This is the first Basque pintxo in history. Do you know the filmGilda?”

“With Rita Hayworth?” I ask.

“Yes! This is named for her, because it tastes like how she was in the film. Green, salty, and spicy.”

We find ourselves sharing a little table with the old Swedish couple Kit befriended on the first day. Plate after plate of pintxos pour from the kitchen—slices of tortillas de patatas, mushroom croquetas, velvety goose liver and herb-flecked anchovies on bread topped with duck eggs—so many that Fabrizio sweeps in to help the waiters. Kit sits sideways in his chair and laughs at everything, his body loose with the unmistakable contentment of the recently fucked.

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