The Pairing(26)
“Ow,” Kit says as a jar of pomade hits him in the arm. He pulls out his headphones. “Good morning.”
“Morning!”
I’m wearing my most shit-eating grin as I flop down next to him and Orla whisks us away from Bordeaux.
“So.” Kit’s tone is light and indecipherable. “How was Florian?”
“He was . . .” I hold a pause to build suspense. “Surprising.”
“In what way?”
How to explain it? Kit and I may have set the terms of a sex competition yesterday, but we haven’t yet laid out rules for talking about sex with each other. We’re friends, though, and the last time we were friends, we told each other everything.
What happened with Florian was, we went back to his apartment to share another bottle from the chateau. Then he took me to his bedroom, showed me the contents of the top drawer of his dresser, and asked me if I would use it on him.
“Surprisingly well prepared,” I say, thinking of the supple leather harness he buckled around my hips, the vial of oil he poured over my fingers. “I mean, I knew he had the knees for it, but I didn’t think he had the range.”
Kit’s eyes widen incrementally. “You mean he let you—”
If anyone would know, it’s Kit.
“That was all he wanted.” A strange, small part of me almost wishes Kit could have seen how nicely my hand fit between the two dimples at the small of Florian’s back. Kit is the only one who could truly appreciate how my technique has improved. “I guess you could say I hadn’t pegged him for it.”
Kit’s expression of covetous wonder twists into a grimace.
“Not a pegging pun.”
“He took it really well,” I go on, all eyebrows. “Such a strapping young man.”
“You should be banned from sex for that. You should have to become a monk.”
“Score’s two to one,” I say, cheerfully ignoring his disdain. “Advantage me.”
“I hope you’re enjoying yourself,” Kit says, taking out his book. “It won’t last.”
It’s two hours to our next stop, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing commune on the southwestern coast of France near the Spanish border, so I decide to catch up on my most pressing notifications.
One, the family email chain. Two, a text from the bar manager at Timo. Three, an email from the Somm. Four, an email from Schnauzer Bride. Five, a text from Sloane. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and put the part of me that wants to ignore them all in a chokehold.
I address the bar manager’s crisis first, even though I specifically told everyone at work not to bother me while I was—and I used these exact words—up to my nips in Brie. It shouldn’t be that hard for the guy with my old job to read my notes, but I guess an assortment of random sticky notes in the back office isn’t as intuitive for him as it was for me. I remind him that our small-batch-bitters supplier has to get free tiramisu once a month or he’ll stop giving us a discount, and that those two barbacks can’t be scheduled together because one fucked the other’s girlfriend.
In the family email chain, Dad has sent a long-winded update from set in Tokyo, Mom is location scouting in the Texas Panhandle, Sloane is thinking about leaving a horse’s head in her costar’s bed, and Este is meeting an ambassador’s son for dinner in the Maldives via chartered helicopter. I send back a short report about Paris and Bordeaux, leaving out Kit completely.
After is the Somm, asking if I’ve registered for a distributor portfolio tasting next month. Trade events are important for serious sommeliers, but I hate networking and being expected to look feminine, and I really hate listening to men in blazers and dark jeans jerk each other off about Burgundy. And I can’t give up a weekend of bus bar sales to kiss ass in Scottsdale. I tell him I can’t make it, already hearing his lecture, do I really want to make it in this business, et cetera and so on.
Schnauzer Bride is next, wanting to incorporate at least three but no more than five botanicals from her florist’s samples into her menu. My endurance is fading, so I grind out a few cocktail pitches and lock my phone. Sloane can wait until my brain isn’t so hot.
I press the cool glass of the screen to my cheek and breathe out slowly, soothed by the expanse of French countryside rolling past the window, the funny, skinny trees with puffs of leaves bursting from their tops like dandelions.
Sometimes it’s embarrassing that this is peak performance for me, that I spent the past few years kicking my own ass to achieve twenty minutes of executive function and a fear my life will collapse if I breathe wrong. But most days, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Everything up to age twenty-five was a series of small-to-medium fuckups, until I decided to get my shit together.
I got my shit together because I had to, because I didn’t like myself or my life. But I also did it because every time I lost my keys or forgot a promise, I missed Kit.
Living with Kit was like living in a pixie nest. Every night, I’d find my phone charger relocated to my nightstand and my water bottle beside it, refilled at the precise temperature I liked. Dates circled themselves on the calendar. Fresh flowers appeared whenever the old ones wilted. And no matter how carelessly I unloaded the dishwasher, when I checked the back of the utensil drawer, the measuring spoons were always there.
I loved and resented how good he was at the parts of life I was worst at, and once he was gone, I let resentment win. I made my love into a power drill and built a life I could keep in order myself, because you can’t miss something you don’t need anymore.