The Pairing(101)

My face, previously warm from the balmy night and Valentina’s compliments, goes cold.

“Oh, we’re not—” Theo begins.

“We’re just friends,” I say before I have to endure the rest of Theo’s sentence. “We split up years ago, that’s true, and the tour did bring us back together.”

I turn to find Theo’s eyes sharp and searching.

“Right,” they say. “But . . . as friends.”

“Ah, I see,” Fabrizio says, sounding disappointed. “Colpa mia.”

I set my attention upon the olives in front of me, studiously avoiding Orla’s sympathetic gaze.

“Well, even so,” Orla says, “you’re friends again, and that’s lovely. Some of my best friends in the world are my ex-girlfriends. I’ve got one in Copenhagen who lets the wife and I borrow her flat when we’re in the mood for herring.”

“Oh, I hear Copenhagen is so cozy,” Valentina says. “Can we come next time?”

“Fabs, you haven’t taken this girl on the Scandi tour yet?”

“I tell the company to never send me on the Scandinavia tour,” Fabrizio says. “Too cold. Not enough sun.”

“Oh wise up, that’s when you let your lady keep you warm. Valentina, love, I’ll take you.”

Theo laughs, and I laugh, and it’s okay.

We talk for an hour while the sun sets. Orla and Fabrizio tell stories of their wildest tour happenings, and Theo and I talk about the strangest people we’ve encountered at our jobs. Valentina tells us that she was working in Rome as an English tutor when she met a Vespa guide who wanted to learn English to travel the world, how they kissed for the first time on Rome’s oldest bridge because he wanted to join her to history. Orla tells us how she met her wife as schoolmates in Derry and waited fifteen years to confess how she felt. It’s simple and warm, the kind of magical human thing that happens in transit when like brushes against like.

“My mother, she would tell me to hold the bottle like this”—Fabrizio holds the wine by its bottom, palm to base with his arm fully extended—“and when I am big enough to hold it this way and touch it to my lips, I am old enough to drink it.”

“And what age was that?” Theo asks.

“Eleven!” And we fall apart laughing again.

Everything is going well until I lean over to refill Theo’s wine, and a condom falls out of my shirt pocket and into the olives.

“Oh God,” Theo whispers.

I try to intercept before anyone notices, but the foil wrapper is now coated in olive oil and shoots out from between my fingers. It lands with a small, wet plop beside Fabrizio’s glass.

The table goes silent.

“So sorry about that,” I say. “That’s—that’s really a design flaw, isn’t it? If anything should be easy to grab when it’s covered in oil—”

Fabrizio claps his hands together with delight.

“So, you are together again!”

“What?” Theo says.

“Yes, of course, when two lovers are reunited, the sex is better than ever. All you want to do is make love, day and night.” He takes Valentina’s hand, glowing with the romance of a poet, and plants a kiss on the inside of her wrist. “When I return home from a tour, Valentina and I—”

“Fabs, darling,” Orla says. “Spare them.”

“We’re not—” Theo says.

“That’s not what it’s for,” I say.

Fabrizio pauses halfway up Valentina’s arm.

“It is for something else, then?”

And it’s been such a long day with so much to process that I can’t think of a single excuse.

A twinkle appears in Fabrizio’s eye.

“Ohhh. You think I invite you here for—ah, I forget the word in English.” He turns to his wife. “The sex with three people?”

Valentina helpfully supplies, “Threesome, amore.”

“Threesomamore.”

“No, amore. Threesome.”

“Ah, yes. Threesome.”

Theo and I lock eyes.

Do we tell him?

Of course we don’t fucking tell him.

“We—” I start.

“We weren’t—”

“I wouldn’t say we—”

“I mean, I may have gotten the impression—”

“We just—we—” I’m losing the plot. “Maybe we—”

Theo glances at me, eyes huge. “I guess we might have . . .”

“We . . .” Fuck it. “Did. Yes, we did think you wanted to have sex with us.”

After a beat, Theo adds, “Respectfully.”

Orla sits back and takes a hearty swig of wine.

“And we’re so sorry for presuming,” I say. “And to you, Valentina.”

“Oh, no need for that,” Valentina says. “This happens sometimes when he tries to make friends.” She takes Fabrizio’s face in her hands and wobbles it side to side. “Look at this man, who could resist you?”

“I keep telling him he’s got to flirt less with the guests,” Orla says to us, “but I don’t think he knows how to stop.”