The Pairing(114)

Theo shakes their head. “Really? You?”

“I know. It’s been like that with so many things. Baking for myself, or making up recipes, or painting, or drawing. I just haven’t had it in me. I packed that book and all those sketchbooks because I was hoping that something here would bring it out. And now I feel like . . . like I’m starting to come back to life. Like I’m a plant and someone finally remembered to water me.”

After a long moment of thought, Theo says, “You used to get this look on your face when you were baking—this smile, like you were exactly where you were supposed to be.”

I consider this, the differences between now and then, when I was baking my own recipes in my own kitchen. I think I could feel that way again, under the right conditions.

“I might need a new job,” I confess. Theo laughs quietly, and so do I. “What about you? What’ll you do when you get home?”

“I think,” Theo says, tipping their chin up with a declarative air, “I will try to figure out what the one thing I want to do is, and then really commit to that thing.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”

“And I think maybe, maybe, I will talk to Sloane about the money. And maybe I could even move out of the Valley, to somewhere new,” they say. “I don’t know. There’s so much world out here.”

“There is,” I agree.

“Most of all,” they say, “I want us to stay friends.”

God, I didn’t realize how badly I needed to hear them say that until they did. I touch their cheek with my fingertips, swimming in the clear-water blues and greens of their eyes.

“I want that too,” I say. “I don’t want you to ever not be in my life.”

“Good,” they say fiercely. “And I’ll come visit you.”

I raise my eyebrows, teasing. “Will you?”

“I will.” They put their arms around my waist. “And you’ll come visit me, and there could be . . . benefits.”

“Benefits,” I repeat. “I’ll always want your benefits.”

Theo laughs.

When we finish the whiskey, I take my unsent letter and roll it up as tightly as I can, then push it through the bottle’s opening and screw on the cap.

Theo hooks their chin over my shoulder, pressing their cheek against the side of my neck. I imagine us in five, fifteen, thirty years. Best friends an ocean apart, reappearing once every couple of years to burn the bedroom down, then slipping back to our own lives. Always orbiting each other, never fully out of reach.

I could love that ongoing, extant Theo again. There’s so much romance in that, so much beauty in learning how much my heart can endure. Sometimes I think the only way to keep something forever is to lose it and let it haunt you.

I reel my arm back, ready to throw our letter in a bottle to sea, but at the last moment, Theo stops me.

“I want to keep it,” they say. “Maybe I’ll want to read it, one day when I love you less.”





It feels like there must be such a tremendous distance between Palermo and home, between where Theo is and where Theo isn’t, but the flight only takes two and a half hours. I close my eyes to Ravel in my headphones, and when I open them, I’m once again arriving in Paris alone. This time, I’m here because we chose it. That has to count for something.

At home, everything is how I left it. The embroidered pillows on the sofa, the shelves of my and Thierry’s books. Maxine has washed and changed the bedsheets, even spritzed them with the lavender oil I keep beside the bed. The plants in the windows are happy and verdant, their leaves plump and shiny in the early afternoon light. The detailed list of plant care instructions I left on the chalkboard by the kitchen has been erased and replaced with a stick-figure drawing of Maxine and me riding a giant strawberry.

The first thing I do, once I’ve unpacked and showered and applied all the nice skincare products I couldn’t pack, is go to the market. I pick up the basics to ready my kitchen for everyday use again—eggs, butter, milk, ripe tomatoes on the vine, a fresh loaf of peasant bread, paper cartons of berries, lemons, heavy cream—and then carefully select the ingredients for a tarte tatin. Summer will end soon, and in a few months autumn will bring quinces; today, I choose peaches.

I haven’t made a tarte tatin since patisserie school, and it turns out I’ve forgotten how tricky they can be. A quarter of the peaches stick to the pan. Not my best work, but if I’m being honest, Guillaume isn’t the best fuck. Both will do in a pinch.

It’s a twelve-minute bike ride from my apartment to Guillaume’s, and I spend it reflecting on what exactly I’ve been doing with him. I like him, but I like a lot of people. He’s sweet, and he manages the best café in Bastille, and last month he physically mailed me a poem, which means he’s probably at least a little in love with me. I never asked him to be, and I’ve never suggested it would be a good idea. But I do bring him a tart every so often, which Maxine says is “evil, misleading boyfriend behavior.” I haven’t been trying to mislead him. It’s just that the way he smiles every time is so lovely.

He gives me that smile when he answers the door to me and my tart, which makes me feel even guiltier that I’m here to break things off.

I know, the same as I’ve known since I was nine years old in the desert, that I’ll always love Theo. But I can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing with that love. It doesn’t feel fair to go on burying it in other people, showing them all the flowers Theo has frescoed over my heart without telling them I’ve already put someone else’s statue in the fountain at its center. Guillaume is the first on the list. Tomorrow I’ll call Delphine, and Luis, and Eva, and Antoine, and—maybe I should write this down later.