Page 94 of The Pairing

As the crowd begins to cheer, I stand and pull Theo to their feet. They slide the ring onto my left hand, and it fits. The inside is still warm from their skin. We’re laughing together, swept up in the moment, clutching each other’s hands while the bartender pops a bottle of champagne and someone chants, “Bacio, bacio, bacio!”

“They want us to kiss!” Theo shouts.

I tell them, “Sell it, then.”

So Theo takes me in their arms and dips me low. For one dizzy second, all I see is their face, close and complicated with feeling, and I try to tell them with my eyes to just do it. Kiss me, haunt me, handle me recklessly.

They slip their hand between our mouths and kiss the back of their own fingers. Drinkers applaud; the bartender clangs a bell. We know how to make it convincing.

On the walk to the hostel, we stumble into an alley, my back against a yellow stucco wall and Theo’s mouth on my neck. We’re loose and hazy from hours of steady drinking, tired and reaching for each other with a desire like returning to an abandonedcup of coffee. It was hot and strong before, but now the sugar has settled at the bottom.

I open my eyes to see dark green shutters across from us, a cat lounging on the sill behind them. It’s one of those small details that reminds me these places are real and belong to people we’ll rarely meet while passing through, that Florence will forget us even if we remember it for the rest of our lives. I find it terribly romantic, the evanescence.

I rut lazily into the warm press of their thighs. They kiss my neck, my jaw. We’re moving slowly—so slowly it’s hard to know when we stop trying to fuck and start simply holding each other.

My arms circle tightly around Theo’s waist. Theo’s hand cradles the back of my head, their fingers clenched in my hair. It’s been so long since anyone has held me like this. It’s been so long without them. I could cry with relief.

We stay there, not speaking and not letting go, until the cat in the window yells at us and Theo breaks off laughing. They make a joke in a shaky, too-loud voice and stagger away.

But I felt their breath catch against me, and I see the strange brightness in their eyes when they pass through the glow of a convenience store window. When I return their ring, they slip it into their pocket without looking at it. They smile like it’s nothing. I don’t know if I believe it.

We go south. Orla drives us through the hills toward Siena, past the tower houses of San Gimignano and the walled palazzos of Montepulciano, along cow pastures and olive groves and patchy wheat fields. In the distance, copper-and-green hills fold over one another like mussed-up linens in a bed as wide as the sky. The motorway exits east toward crunchy gravel roads that bounce us in our seats until the bus pulls off at an overgrown stone gate.

Theo, who fell asleep mid-sentence before we even left, jolts awake against my shoulder and picks up where they left off.

“Sort of a—” Huge yawn, eyes being rubbed. “—a circles and squares thing. Or, I mean, squares and rectangles. All Chianti Classico is made in Chianti, but not all Chianti made in Chianti is Chianti Classico.”

“Sure,” I say, smoothing a stray piece of their hair, “I’m always saying that.”

Theo scowls sleepily. “Are we here?”

“We’re here.”

Hereis Villa Mirabella, a centuries-old Tuscan villa tucked along the edge of Greve in Chianti. Before Theo passed out, they were explaining how important those two details are—something about counterfeiting and subzones and the percentage of Sangiovese grapes, and how only a small cluster of nine communes are legally designated as makers of Chianti Classico. I don’t know. Theo’s a brilliant person full of interesting thoughts, but I was mostly watching their mouth.

“Ciao a tutti ragazzi, hello everyone!” Fabrizio calls out. Heexplains that our room arrangements will be as usual—shared rooms for pairs who booked together, singles for solo travelers—and that a dinner prepared with ingredients fresh from the surrounding farmland will be served at nine, or whenever the cook feels like it. “The rest of the day is yours—swim, bicycle, eat, drink, make love, it is your choice.”

We pour out of the bus and down the front walk to a hedged gravel terrazzo shaded by crepe myrtle trees, fig trees, lemon, apple, elm, white poplar, clusters of hortensia bushes with pink flowers. Yellow-striped chairs and bistro tables sit prettily under lemon-yellow umbrellas. It all culminates in the villa itself, four floors tall and twice as wide, its white stucco facade engulfed in ivy and hanging wisteria.

An older woman wearing a dress the same shade of yellow as the umbrellas awaits us at the doorstep, bearing a basket of fresh linens and the gravity of someone in charge. Pair by pair, she distributes antique keys as Fabrizio reads names off his clipboard, until Theo and I are the last two.

After much whispering in Italian, the signora retires to the house, and Fabrizio pulls us aside.

“Amici,” he says, “Signora Lucia tells me there is a mistake. When we send the names for the tour group, there is—how do you say—a glitch? Because your original reservation is together, you have the same reservation number. It is very rare that guests book together, and then cancel together, and then use the reservation again for the same tour but not together—you see how this becomes confusing for our little office man? And I will tell you, we have a new man and I do not think he is very good. Terrible personality. We are trying to send him to the Germany office.” Fabrizio trails off darkly, probably imagining the terrible office man in especially uncomfortable lederhosen. “But, the problem. Lucia has assigned for you the same room.”

“Oh.”

I glance at Theo.

“That’s—”

“And I ask if there are more rooms, but they are repairing the third villetta. I even tell her about your situation, but—”

“It’s okay,” Theo says firmly. Fabrizio and I both pause. “We don’t mind.”

“You don’t?” Fabrizio furrows his brow.

He looks to me, then to Theo, and to me again.

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