The Pairing(23)

It’s strange to hear her name from his mouth, but of course he would ask. Sloane’s the most important person in my life, and he’s known her since she was five, which is two whole years longer than the rest of the world has known her.

“She’s good. Busy, but that’s how she likes it. I’m sure you’ve, you know. Seen her around.”

“Yeah, I have,” Kit says, and I wonder, not for the first time, how many times he’s seen my sisters’ faces on a screen and thought of me. “She was incredible in that thing with Colin Farrell last year. How long did it take her to get her Irish accent that good?”

“Like a week. I swear she’s not human. She just started working on this new one, like a turn-of-the-century, high-society New York accent.”

“What’s that one for?”

“Oh, you’d be into it. It’s an adaptation of The Age of Innocence, but like, weird. Very A24. The script is nuts. Her agent says it’ll be her first Oscar nomination.”

“That’s incredible!” Kit says sincerely. “Is she playing May or the countess?”

“Winona Ryder.” I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen the Scorsese film from 1993. “She really wanted to be Michelle Pfeiffer, but the director said she comes off too friendly.”

“Sloane? Sloane who wanted her audition monologue to be Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? When she was ten? That Sloane?”

“Curse of the former child star,” I sigh. “What about Cora? How’s she?”

Kit laughs under his breath, and I smile. Cora’s still Cora, then.

“Last year she stole Dad’s credit card and charged seventeen hundred dollars at Dave & Buster’s,” he says. “This year she unionized the staff of her Dutch Bros.”

“Hey, that’s really cool!”

“She doesn’t work there.”

We talk about my youngest sister, Este, who just wrapped a five-episode run on a big-budget HBO show, and his older brother, Ollie, who’s now in marketing at a publishing house in New York.

Near an intersection, the road branches diagonally, like whatever lies this way is too old to abide a grid system. It starts as a secret alley, then opens wide, dark cobblestones giving way to the big, smooth, pinkish tiles of the Place du Palais.

Tourists filter through arched antique doors with paper shopping bags and ribbon-tied candy boxes. Cafés overflow onto smoke-tinged terraces. A delivery man zips between Kit and me on a butter-yellow bicycle, fresh loaves of bread bouncing in its basket. It’s like its own tucked-away village, forgotten by time and walled off by rows of lavender and peach buildings that sparkle in the evening sun. At the edge of the square stands a massive, medieval gate topped with a truly fantastical number of pointy turrets. We go under it and down another storybook street, toward one of the historic churches Fabrizio mentioned, église Saint-Pierre.

We’re almost there when I glance down a side street and notice the letters over a bright blue restaurant entrance: A CANTINA COMPTOIR CORSE. Corse like Corsica, like the island.

“Kit,” I say, stopping. He stops too, even though the rest of the group is leaving us behind. “I have to go try something. For work.”

Kit simply nods and follows. It’s not until after we’ve pushed deep into the noisy pub, grabbed the last two leather stools at the bar, translated the menu, and put in an order that he finally raises a question.

“You said this was about work,” Kit says, “but you didn’t order any wine.”

I cross my ankles under the bar. My boot grazes the cuff of his pants.

“You know how I told you I traded the Soobie for a Volkswagen bus?”

I tell him about my bus, gutted and built out by hand into a bar I can drive around the Valley, how I design custom cocktails for weddings and bachelorette parties and influencers that come in for Coachella. Then I tell him about next month’s monster wedding gig: 350 guests, eight bespoke recipes, and a bride who emails me five times a day expecting prompt responses to questions like Did I mention one of the drinks must be served in these custom tiki mugs that look like my pet schnauzer? and Can you make a drink that tastes like the vacation to Corsica where we fell in love?

I leave out one major detail: I’m barely bringing in enough money to make back what I spend, and before I got hired by Schnauzer Bride, I was close to packing it in.

“Anyway,” I finish, “I need to find out what Corsican flavors are like so I can design a cocktail that reflects ‘the complexity of our love,’ which, you know. He’s a hedge fund manager named Glenn, but sure.”

“Theo, this is . . . wow.” Kit stares at my phone, which I’ve opened to the Instagram page for my bus, a grid of cocktail money shots and my hands holding drinks out of the service window I installed. His eyes are wide and sparkling when he looks up, and a wave of warmth sweeps through me. The only thing bigger than Kit’s capacity for wonder is how it feels to be at the center of it. “You built that yourself?”

Obviously, it was harder than I’m making it sound. Almost a year of sweating and swearing, watching hours of tutorials online. I got on a first-name basis with my local Home Depot sales associates. I ripped out and replaced the floors, put in a new engine, scraped the rust off and repainted, rigged tanks and pipes and sinks, pasted wallpaper and sanded the countertops and salvaged coolers from work.