The Pairing(10)

If my first experience in Paris is Maxine falling for Kit right in front of my dick brioche, I might jump in the Seine.

We carry on through the 6th and 7th Arrondissements, visiting patisseries and boulangeries and chocolateries. My thumbs almost can’t keep up with the notes on my phone. At a narrow chocolate shop lined with antique cigarette machines, Maxine hands out paper cones of creamy one-hundred-percent dark chocolate. At a sleek patisserie owned by a famed French chef, we try glass-smooth cakes shaped like mangoes and hazelnuts and, my favorite, a complex olive oil cake in the shape of a green olive.

I try to focus on flavors, but it’s hard to ignore how Kit travels the streets of Paris like he was born in them. It’s one thing to share someone’s life and then find yourself spectating on it, and another to watch him live the dream he left you for. He buys groceries here. He picks up loaves of bread and makes plans for lunch. While the rest of us are gawking at the Eiffel Tower, he’s ducking back into a patisserie to chat with the head chef like an old friend. If he ever stands on these cobbles and thinks of his life with me, he probably considers it quaint. Small, cute, a bit embarrassing.

Our penultimate stop is a macaron shop, and we sit in the square around Fontaine Saint-Sulpice passing them around, tasting flavors so much bigger than their delicate packages: banana and acai, lychee with raspberry and rose, yuzu with wasabi and candied grapefruit.

I’m looking at the fountain, inventing names for the saints inside the niches—St. Edna the Indignant, patron saint of stabbing your ex with a chocolate spoon because you’ve been cast as quaint backstory—when someone says, “You look really familiar.”

It’s one of the two twentysomething girls I noticed when I first boarded the bus, the shorter one with shiny black hair. I’m gathering that she and her friend are some kind of travel influencers.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” I tell her, praying I’m not already two for two on getting clocked as a Flowerday.

“No, I think we have,” she says. “You were making drinks at the Coachella after-party at the Saguaro, right? The bar that was, like, in a big van?”

I blink a few times, amazed. I was hired for that party. One thing about a freelance mobile bar in a Volkswagen Microbus is, influencers love it. I’d hoped one of them would book me for another job, but no one seemed to remember me.

“You were there?”

“Oh my God, yes!” She turns to her friend, a beachy blonde in a micro-cropped sweater-vest and cargo pants. “Ko! I was right!”

The blonde pauses her scroll through her phone to regard me for one blank second over her skinny sunglasses.

“You made the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever had in my life,” she says in complete monotone. “I would literally kill for you.”

“That’s Dakota,” the first girl says. “I’m Montana.”

I instantly love this. Did they come as a combo pack?

“I’m Theo.”

“Theo! You’re so cool!” Montana says. “Who’s your brand partner? Do they rent that van out?”

“Oh, just me,” I say. “The bus is mine. I got it secondhand and converted it.”

“Wow, slay,” she says. “Listen, I go to a lot of parties with a lot of open bars, and you are literally so talented. That blood orange margarita, with the peppers? You should be doing, like, Bella Hadid’s birthday or something. Why aren’t you in LA?”

“Thank you, wow,” I say, meaning it. “But it’s honestly just a side hustle. Weddings, parties, catering on weekends. I have a regular job at a restaurant in Palm Springs.”

“I was telling Dakota—”

Over Montana’s shoulder, I notice Kit talking to Fabrizio. His voice separates from the chatter and drifts to my ears.

“—that’s what I think, at least,” he says.

“You know so much about the French pastry,” Fabrizio says. “How is this?”

“I’m a patissier at a hotel in the First Arrondissement,” Kit says. “I actually graduated from école Desjardins with Maxine.”

“Oh! You know our Maxine!”

“I know her very well. I told her she should apply to be a local guide when the spot opened up. She might not show it, but she loves doing this.”

“Finally, I can thank someone for sending Maxine to us!” Fabrizio says. “She is a goddess.”

“Isn’t she?” I can hear the smile in his voice. The way he used to sound when he talked about me.

The morning shifts into focus. I never needed to worry about Maxine falling in love with Kit. Maxine and Kit are already in love. Their eyes probably met over a tart, and Maxine knew her life was about to turn to gold dust and candied petals, and now purple hairs cling to Kit’s shower curtain, and— “—so anyway, now he’s on house arrest,” Montana is saying.

I snap back to our conversation.

“Sorry, who?”

“The guy who did Bella Hadid’s last birthday,” Montana says. “So there’s an opening, if you want me to ask my friend who knows her friend?”

“That’s—really generous!” I hedge, unsure how to tell Montana that I prefer to avoid the celebrity circuit without telling her why. “But—what do you do? Travel content, right?”