The Pairing(24)

Some people dye their hair when they go through a breakup. I got a bus.

Kit doesn’t need to know it was a breakup bus, that I was nail gunning my heartbreak out while he was licking crème anglaise off some pastry classmate’s abs. Or that I might never have been fired up enough to take the risk if he hadn’t said what he did on that plane.

“I mean, it did help that I was briefly hooking up with a carpenter.” I see the food coming and pull my elbows off the bar. “But what about you? What’s the pastry game like?”

Over cuttlefish in a garlicky red-wine tomato sauce and cheesecake with orange zest (fiadone, I add to my notes), Kit describes working at a gourmet restaurant inside a five-star Parisian hotel. Early mornings, precise milligrams of ingredients, arranging ribbons of white chocolate with long tweezers like a brain surgeon.

“Honestly, the worst part is the tweezers,” Kit says. “I’m so much better with my hands. When I can get my fingers in, there’s pressure, you know? You can tell from touch if something will give, or if it’s too soft, or— Oh, here.” He passes me a napkin, for the bit of drink that has dribbled from the corner of my mouth.

When I’m finished taking notes—acid, tomato, citrus, island mist, maybe a spritz?—we skip the church and head straight to Place du Parlement in the heart of the district. We stand at the fountain under wrought iron balconets, where Kit points out the sculpted stone faces keeping vigil on the corners of each building.

“They’re called mascarons,” he says, “not to be confused with macarons,” which fills me with another swell of affection.

I can’t believe how much better I feel than I did last night. Can it really be only twenty-four hours since I was at the Moulin Rouge, trying to crush the bloom of nostalgia? Does time move differently in France?

France. I’m in France. Four years later and we’re in Bourdeaux together after all.

“Man,” I say. “We’re really here. Look at us.”

“Look at you,” Kit says. “A sommelier and a bar owner.”

“And you’re a gourmet pastry chef,” I counter, feeling my grin spread. “Crazy the difference four years can make.”

“Yeah. A lot changed.” He returns my smile. A couple of children dart past, racing around the fountain. “Not some things, but . . . still, a lot.”

“I guess it’s kind of good that we broke up, so we could become these cool fucking people.”

Kit’s smile stays fixed, but something changes in his eyes.

“Yeah.”

Shit. We were doing such a good impression of old friends who’ve never seen each other naked, and now I’ve dumped our nudes on the cobblestones.

I search our surroundings for something to break the silence, an emergency fire axe.

At a table outside a bar on the edge of the square sits a man with a head of dark curls. He’s wearing a T-shirt and tan trousers instead of farmhand regalia, but he really looks like— “Is that Florian?”

Kit follows my line of sight, and his mouth pops open in surprise. “I—I think it is.”

“Is he with—?”

One of the two other men at the table lets out a cackle that unmistakably belongs to Blond Calum.

“Of all the people to get Florian out for a drink,” Kit says, “my money was not on the Calums.”

“Oh, mine was. Those two are trouble. The ginger told me he can never return to Belgium for legal reasons.”

Just then, Dakota and Montana appear on the terrace with matching flutes of pink champagne. Florian waves, and the Calums start pushing tables together so everyone can sit.

“Oh,” Kit says, “this is interesting.”

“It’s like The Bachelor,” I say, fully invested. “Which of those girls do you think wants the fantasy suite most?”

“How do you know it won’t be one of the Calums?”

“Those men are terminally straight.”

“Nobody’s straight on a European vacation.”

“Sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” I observe, picturing Kit picking up tourists at bars in Montmartre.

“Historic precedent. They switch everyone to bisexual at passport control.”

“Damn, that’s what the stamp’s for? Could’ve skipped the line.”

Kit laughs, rubbing a hand across his forehead in a kind of oh Theo gesture that makes the nerves in my fingertips buzz. “The real question is, which one is most likely to succeed?”

“The one with the dark hair—Montana—she’s perkier, which gives her an edge, but Dakota’s a wild card.”

“The blonde?” Kit asks. “She looks bored.”

“Some guys are into that. Should we start a pool?”

“I think—” Before Kit can reveal what he thinks, Fabrizio manifests on the terrace with a bottle of wine and a basket of frites. “Hold on. Game changer.”

We watch as Fabrizio sits next to Florian and throws an arm over the back of his chair. He joins the conversation with a salacious grin, tosses a frite into his mouth, and then dips another in sauce and feeds it to Florian.

Kit outright gasps. “Oh my God.”

“That’s the game, folks.”

“Fabrizio by a mile.”