The Pairing(29)

And so, Kit and I became curiosity gluttons together. Fifty percent of our friendship was sitting at tables going “ooh!” and shoving bites at each other. When we exhausted every cuisine in the Coachella Valley, we drove all over the state for roadside stands and chili festivals and beachside fish shacks. We’d take any risk, as long as it was something you ate or drank.

We were twenty-one when we first started daydreaming of a restaurant of our own, a small bistro with a simple, seasonal menu and new cocktails every week. We’d call it Fairflower. And from then on, everything we tasted had a bright, new tang of possibility.

I miss that flavor sometimes. I haven’t been able to find it since.

“Do you remember the fancy-ass restaurant in LA?” I ask Kit. “The one we went to for your birthday?”

I know not to bring up our relationship now, but this was before, when I was still in what I thought was unrequited love. It was Kit’s twenty-second birthday, and he wanted to try this restaurant he’d read about. God, we both wanted to like it so much more than we did.

I watch his face, waiting for the shadow I saw when I mentioned the breakup yesterday, but he brightens.

“Oh my God. The molecular gastronomy place.”

“Now that was a nouns-only menu.”

“It was less of a menu and more of a poem.”

“All the portions were, like, microscopic.”

“The octopus foam.”

“Who thought of octopus foam?” I say, the same thing I said when it arrived at our table that night.

“Octopus should never be foam!” he says, the same reply he had then.

“The bill was three hundred dollars, and we were still so hungry after, we went to—”

“Original Tommy’s, for chili cheese fries.”

“Yes.” I picture us in our nicest outfits, eating chili cheese fries out of the back hatch of my car. Hollywood, neon glow, Olivia Newton John on the parking-lot speakers, and a big, scary, brilliant secret in my heart.

I finish my tiny glass of room-temperature water, still smiling. Kit slides his over to me, and I finish that one too.


After lunch, we’re set loose on the beach. Kit turns to me and asks, “What do you want to do?”

I’m mad at myself for leaving my swimsuit at the hostel, but I refuse to let that come between me and a place like this. I shade my eyes and scan the blue horizon, all the way to the rock formations rounding out the bay.

“I want to go see those rocks.”

Kit nods. “Then let’s go see those rocks.”

He flags down a delivery guy for directions, and we leave the beach to climb uphill along a narrow, snaking road hidden among the trees. We go up and up and up, until we reach a little white chapel at the crest. From here, I can see everything from the green knees of the mountains to the horizon, and over a shambly wooden fence, the grass gives way to striations of gray rock cascading toward the water.

“Well,” I say. “Just as I thought. Rocks.”

Kit laughs and shakes his head. “Come on.”

He ignores the locked gate and the sign barring visitors from the area and flits through a gap in the fence posts, heading downhill.

“What are you doing?” I yell.

He turns, grinning over his shoulder, light on his feet. “You wanted to see the rocks. I’m getting you to the rocks.”

This has always been the difference between us. I look at a mountain and think, What a nice view. Kit looks at a mountain and thinks, I wonder if I could climb that.

I sigh, duck through the fence, and follow.

I catch up to him at the shoreline, where the rocks flatten into a shelf pummeled by waves, mist shimmering over our faces. Kit pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and plants his hands on his hips, pleased with his work.

He’s found us our own private cove.

A long, narrow, concrete breakwater juts out from the shore, its surface slick and dark from catching the tide. We walk it until we can see the Grande Plage around the edge of the rocks, and then we sit down on its edge. I lay my bag of cherries from the market between us, and Kit unwraps his cheese. With help from my pocketknife and Kit’s traveling jar of honey, we share both. The cherries are fantastically tart with a plummy sweetness, better than any cherry I’ve tasted before. Shout-out to Fruit Wife.

We don’t discuss any of this. It just happens, like any of the thousands of meals we’ve eaten together. We’ve lapsed into our shared first language.

“That book you’ve been reading,” I ask Kit. “What’s it about?”

Kit swallows a bit of cheese.

“It’s about this English girl named Lucy who falls in love with a man she meets while traveling to Florence,” he says, “but of course everyone is being very Edwardian about it, so now she’s engaged to another man who’s a better match but a total drip.”

“Man, I hate when the girls get all Edwardian.” I pretend to sigh, and Kit laughs. “Is it good?”

He leans back on his hands and contemplates the question.

“I like reading E. M. Forster because it’s always gay, even though this one is about a man and a woman,” he says. “Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there’s a . . . resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world. Like when Legolas and Gimli walk into Minas Tirith and immediately start criticizing the landscaping.”