The Pairing(38)

“What are you talking—?” Kit pinches the bridge of his nose, like he’s thinking very hard. “Hold on. What do you think happened that day?”

“What do I think? I know what happened.”

“I thought I did too,” he says slowly, “but now I’m not so sure.”

I suck in another deep breath and recite the sequence of events, even though I’d prefer to do almost anything else.

“We fought,” I say. “We said a lot of stuff there’s no coming back from. By the time we got through passport control, I didn’t even want to go on the tour anymore, and you said you didn’t either. I said I wanted to go home, and you said you did too. And then you said you needed some space to think, and you walked away.”

Kit says, “And then I came back.”

My mouth opens automatically, but whatever I was going to say disappears into the damp cave air.

For four years, my life has been directed by the simple fact that he walked away. He turned around and never came back. That was the one-line answer when anyone asked, the simple truth.

“You came back?”

“I came back,” he says again, “and you were gone.”

“That was—” I shake my head. “That was because I had already gotten our tickets home, and I had to check our bag.”

Now Kit’s staring at me, the way I was just staring at him.

“Our tickets?” he says. “You got one for me?”

“Of course I did, Kit. I checked us both in, and I texted you your ticket, and then I waited at the gate until the very last call, but you never came.”

Kit closes his eyes and says, “Theo, you sent me your ticket.”

“What? No, I didn’t.” I distinctly remember how my fingers shook as I checked into our combined reservation, pulled up both of our boarding passes, and sent him a screenshot of his.

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t, I remember, distinctly.”

Kit pulls out his phone and swipes through his messages to our conversation. Unlike me, he hasn’t deleted it, so he can scroll directly up from the text I sent him in Paris to our last exchange. I catch a glimpse of one undelivered message from him to me, gone from the screen too fast to read, before he taps on the image above it. The boarding pass I sent him, taken straight from the British Airways app.

At the top, where it should say Kit’s name, it says mine.

I stare at it. Read it three times before I believe it. Of all the idiotic, badly timed, baby-brained fucking accidents, this is the last one I ever thought I could make and maybe the most important one in the entire course of my adult life. I feel faintly nauseous.

“Okay, well, obviously that was a mistake,” I insist, pushing his phone away. “You had to have known that.”

“What I knew,” Kit says, his voice tight, “was that it sounded like you didn’t want to be with me anymore, so I went to have a cry in a very damp airport bathroom, and by the time I got back you were on the other side of security, and you’d sent me a message that clearly—to me—meant you were going home without me.” He touches a hand to his temple, like the memory is stressing him out. “I thought that was your way of breaking up with me.”

“I—I can’t believe you would—” I shake my head. “Kit, does that sound like something I would do?”

“Honestly, yes.”

I—

I think of all the lies I told to get out of meeting him in Oklahoma City. The look on his face when I told him I’d left Santa Barbara. The crash of his coffee mugs when I threw them in a box. How fast I left that bar in Paris.

“Well, I didn’t,” I say to the taxidermied stork over Kit’s shoulder instead of having to look him in the eye. “Why didn’t you just ask? We had agreed we were going home.”

“I didn’t think we had.”

“I did. And I thought—” All this time, I’d been sure. “—I thought you had your ticket and just decided not to get on the plane. I thought you left me.”

Kit says, “I thought you left me.”

I count to three in my head, collect myself.

“Okay, well,” I say, “what about the rest? Why did I have to find out you were moving to Paris from a shift manager at Timo?”

Kit blinks, surprised into a whole new line of confusion.

“That’s how you heard?”

“I was at work when you called in to quit.”

“No, it was a Tuesday lunch shift,” he says. “I specifically called then, because you never worked Tuesday lunches.”

“I picked up a double.”

“Fuck.” He sighs. “I didn’t know. I mean, I figured you’d heard somehow—”

“Yeah, that was obvious.”

“Theo, I wanted to tell you,” he says, sounding like the softer side of miserable. “I did. When you left, I didn’t know what to do. Every time I thought about having to see you and say goodbye, having to—to go into our apartment and disentangle our lives—I couldn’t do it. I took the train to Paris, and I went to the flat. I must have written and thrown away a hundred letters until I got one right.”

He looks into my eyes with a sincerity that’s nearly frantic, like it’ll kill him if I don’t believe him.