The Pairing(12)

“I have been known to enjoy a Chateauneuf-du-Pape moment,” she says primly.

“Oh, me too, especially with a gigot d’agneau.”

“Mmm. There’s something in it that brings out the herbs in a stew, but I can’t remember what the French call it.”

“The garrigue,” I say. “The flavor you get when you grow grapes in the southern part of the Rh?ne Valley, because of all the sage and lavender and rosemary down there.”

“That’s the one.” She considers me, politely ignoring the champignon that bounces off my plate and under the table. “Where did you learn these things?”

I could flex, if I wanted. Tell her I spent the last ten years working all the way up from busser to assistant sommelier at Timo, the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Palm Springs. But there’s a new ember of curiosity in her eyes, and she’s the kind of woman who’ll only take your hand after you’ve laid it open before her.

So I say, “Kit probably mentioned my family to you, right?”

Her lashes twitch. “I know of them.”

Of course she does. I’m the unfamous Hemsworth.

“And did you know when I was seventeen, I almost killed my dad’s Best Picture campaign because the cops raided one of my house parties and TMZ reported it?”

“I was in Canada at the time,” Maxine says neutrally. “But I’m sure it’s a good story.”

I smile.

I tell her how Este and Sloane both started getting steady work around the time I started high school, which meant my parents were usually either on their own sets or my sisters’. Kit was in New York, and I was alone in a house with a pool and eight bedrooms and a wine cellar. So, I threw myself a fifteenth birthday party.

Nobody cared much about Theo Flowerday, but everyone likes the kid from the famous family with the unchaperoned party mansion. I’d wanted to feel special. Like I had something to offer of my own. So, I made myself the house-party king of Palm Valley Prep, a magician with my parents’ credit card and a fake ID. My big trick? I could make any drink on demand.

It didn’t matter that I spent hours studying cocktail books instead of SAT prep, or that when I missed my family, I’d go to the cellar and look up every varietal and appellation from wherever they were shooting. What mattered was, you had to be at my parties, and my parties had to have me.

“So, yeah,” I finish. “Plus, I work at a restaurant and handle the wine there.”

Maxine delicately places her empty glass on the tablecloth, concealing my gravy stain.

“I was alone a lot too, at that age.”

Over the next course of salad and a dewy Sancerre, Maxine casually explains that her parents died when she was fifteen and left her and her older sister to raise three younger brothers in a secluded mansion on the edge of Montreal.

She tells it like a morbidly funny children’s story. Two teenage girls managing an estate, chasing geese out of the garden so they wouldn’t hunt her youngest brother, fending off overly helpful aunts and uncles. She talks about learning to bake the family recipes—both the Japanese and the French Canadian ones—for the boys, who in turn forced her to go to pastry school. I don’t tell her I’m sorry. I do ask follow-up questions about the geese, which seems to make her like me more.

I wave over more wine, and we keep talking. About Maxine’s favorite things to bake (fussy breads), about my thoughts as a first-time visitor to Paris (great wine, big fan of the eating-croissants-outdoors industrial complex), about Fabrizio (yes, he’s always like that). The cheese course arrives with a nice-ass Pomerol, and it’s this wine that finally pushes me over the edge into drunk. I stumble through an explanation of Bordeaux’s vintage report until Maxine says, “It’s important to me that you know you sound like an ass,” and I laugh so hard that wine almost comes out my nose.

As I’m wiping my chin, I find Kit watching us like he’s not sure what we’re up to and even less sure he wants to find out.

Maxine raises her glass to him. “Theo and I are friends now!”

Kit replies, “That’s what I’m worried about!”

But the look on his face isn’t displeasure. It’s something a lot more pinkish and complicated.

I give him a real smile, the first he’s gotten from me since before we boarded that plane four years ago. He touches his palm to his heart, then slips away again.

This is my opening to ask Maxine about Kit. What his new friends are like, what he likes to do around the city, if he’s still in search of the perfect cinnamon roll. Instead, I concentrate on my cheese plate.

I’m finishing the Pont l’évêque when Maxine says, “Oh God, he’s flirting with the waiter.”

Across the table, Kit is talking to the waiter refilling his water. The smile on his lips is soft, intrigued, like he’s just noticed the waiter is hot and is curious how he missed it. He murmurs something, and the waiter misses Kit’s glass entirely and has to run off for a towel.

“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s just how Kit is.”

“Please.” Maxine rolls her eyes. She doesn’t seem jealous, more like fondly exasperated. “Do you know how deliberately you have to flirt to get your water refilled in Paris?”

Except, Kit never knew what he was doing. He was deliberate in a lot of things, but never, what? Seduction?