The Pairing(116)
“What about you?” I ask Maxine, eager to change the subject. “Did you go on any dates while I was gone?”
Maxine scoffs, reaching for her glass. “Darling, I don’t even know the last time I met someone I’d consider putting my mouth on.”
“Maxine,” I plead. “There has to be someone.”
She considers, leaning back in her chair, an elegantly rolled spliff dangling from her manicured fingers.
“Did you say you got Fabrizio’s personal number?”
“I did,” I say, unable to suppress a smile. Another North American victim of Fabrizio’s charm offensive. “But listen to this.”
Maxine offers to stay over, knowing how much I hate sleeping alone, but I tell her I’ll be fine. I should get used to it. I walk home through dusk, stopping at the market on the way. I have an idea I want to test.
The sun is gone by the time I get home. Theo should be on their layover now. Somewhere just outside the city, they’re ordering a bitter coffee at Brioche Dorée and browsing French liqueurs in the duty-free store, looking out of airport windows into the same night as me. Tomorrow we’ll be back on separate hemispheres, but for a few short hours tonight, we’re in the same city.
I lay all my ingredients out on the kitchen counter and get to work making the madeleines I dreamed up while looking at The Birth of Venus.
It’s all going well, until I turn on my stand mixer. It’s been so long since I used it, a screw must have come loose somewhere without my notice. It rockets across the narrow kitchen, bouncing off the refrigerator and toward the framed paintings on the adjacent wall. In a fraction of a second, the garden scene I noticed last night takes a direct hit and tips sideways, the hanging wire on the back tugs the decades-old nail out of the wall, and it crashes to the kitchen floor.
Miraculously, the glass hasn’t broken. A corner of the frame has split, but the painting itself is unharmed.
When I turn the frame over to check the back for damage, I see something I never knew was there: an inscription, written in French and dated two years before my parents met.
I have to sit down when I recognize my mother’s handwriting.
Thierry,
Happy birthday, my dear brother!
Please do not let your girlfriend hang this one in her house. I would like to see it again! HA—just kidding. I hope one day I can be more like you. If I can give my whole heart to love without fearing the cost, I will regret nothing.
Love, your sister Vi
My breath catches.
I read the last sentence again, and again.
I put my hand over my heart. I feel it pounding, feel it breaking. Feel the love forever regenerating.
I’ve been willing to accept being wrong about so much. About the choices I made when I thought I knew best, about the dreams I believed would materialize if I simply decided they should. About Paris, about what Theo wanted. About love meaning a person must give up everything, and love meaning a person must give up nothing. About what we deserved from each other. I’ve gotten down on my knees and begged myself to understand that I’ll never do it all right like I do in my fantasies, that a love that’s ended is the only kind I can have, because I can’t possibly lose it.
But before all of those things, I was a boy in a ridiculous fairy-tale hamlet. I was a child with his mother’s eyes and heart, a heart she wanted to give over to love. And I have the one chance of my life to do the same, and I’m in my kitchen making madeleines because I’m afraid of the cost. God, she would never let me hear the end of it.
What am I doing? What have I done?
The clock on the oven says a quarter to ten. Theo should be boarding in an hour and a half.
If I run—if I catch the fastest cab in Paris—if I buy the first available international ticket on the way to the airport—if I can get to the gate in time—
If I can catch Theo before they get on the plane, I can tell them I was wrong. That I was afraid, but I don’t want to be anymore. That being with them is worth anything. Everything. Whatever it costs, however it ends. The only thing I’d regret more than losing them is never getting to love them the way I could love them now.
The chance I’ll make it is so small, but I have to try. I have to.
I turn off the oven, pocket my keys, snatch my wallet and my passport from the bowl above the fireplace, charge toward the door and throw it open and—
On the other side of my apartment door, wide-eyed and breathless, their pack still on their shoulders and their right hand raised as if to knock, is—
“Theo.”
They stare.
“Hi.” They scan my frantic expression, the passport in my hand. “Were you going somewhere?”
“The airport,” I say faintly. Theo is here. Theo is here, at the pied-à-terre, on my doormat. “How did you—”
They hold up a yellowed, crinkled envelope. It’s been unfurled from the tight roll I put it in, and one side is ripped open.
“Return address.”
“You—” I try to form words, to get my head to stop spinning. “You opened it.”
“I was on the plane from Palermo,” Theo says, “and I realized, I’m never going to love you less.”
I’m gripping my passport so hard I think I might tattoo its crest into my hand.
“There I was, on another plane without you. And there you were, in Paris without me. Everything we’ve been through, everything we said to each other, everything we’ve done to try to be better, and we’re right back where we started. And somehow, we talked ourselves into believing that means we’ve grown up. But, Kit, I have grown—I’ve grown into someone who’s better for you. And you’ve become someone who’s better for me. And I know you want to put our friendship first, and I’m so afraid of fucking that up. I’m so, so afraid of fucking everything up all the time. I don’t know how we would make it work, I don’t even know where we would live, or what my life is supposed to look like, or what happens if I take the wrong chance, but—but that’s not the worst mistake I could make. This isn’t the worst mistake I could make. The worst mistake I could ever make is pretending I’d be happy as just your friend for the rest of my life. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, but I couldn’t go home without saying it.”