The Pairing(4)

Orla slams the luggage compartment.

“Very full, this tour,” Fabrizio tells us onboard. “Maybe a seat in the back? And I have one next to me!”

From beside the driver’s seat, I can see every row of passengers, my companions for the next three weeks. I glance over at Stig—we’re the only ones who came on this trip alone.

Of course. A trip like this is meant to be shared. Float together down the Seine, toast champagne glasses, take windswept photos of each other on a beachside cliff, eat from the same plate and talk for the rest of your lives about that one incomparable bite. Those are the kind of memories built for two to live inside, not one.

I tip my chin up and march down the aisle, leaving the seat for Stig.

I pass two Australian guys shouting with laughter, a pair of older women with matching visors speaking Japanese, a few retired couples, two girls in crop tops, several sets of honeymooners, a Midwestern mom and her bored-looking adult son, until finally, I see it. The very last aisle seat is empty.

I can’t get a good look at the person huddled against the window, but I don’t catch any red flags. They wear a soft-looking T-shirt and faded jeans, and their hair hides their face. They might be sleeping. Or at least pretending to sleep so nobody sits beside them. They probably want a seatmate as much as I do, which is not at all.

I take a breath.

“Hi!” I say in my friendliest voice. “Is this seat taken?”

The person stirs, brushing loose waves of brown hair back from their face. The only warning I get before they turn to face me is a smudge of paint on their left hand, from the first to third knuckle.

I know those hands. They’re always stained the same way, with ink or food dye or watercolor pigment.

Kit looks up, furrows his elegant brow, and says, “Theo?”


Maybe that cab did hit me.

Maybe I was flattened in a zigzag crosswalk, and afternoon commuters are gathered around saying what a shame such a hot young piece of ass should have to go out as roadkill outside a Boots. Someone at The Sun is drafting a headline—GOOD NIGHT FLOWERDAY! “Theo Flowerday, oldest and most disappointing daughter of Hollywood director power couple Ted and Gloria Flowerday, dead after wandering into traffic, to no one’s surprise.” Maybe everything since has been a dying fever dream, and I’ve arrived in hell, where I’ll be forced to share three weeks of the most sensuous, romantic sights and flavors of Europe with a stranger whose perineum I could describe from memory.

All that seems more likely than the reality that the person seated in the last row is actually Kit.

“You—” I keep staring at him. He keeps being there. My ears are ringing, suddenly. My legs have gone numb. “You’re not here.”

He holds up a hand as if to prove he’s corporeal. “I think I am, though?”

“Why are you here?”

“I have a ticket.”

“So do I. They—they gave me a voucher, but I—”

“Me too, I—”

“—never got around to—”

“—didn’t want it to go to waste, so—”

In some cobwebby corner of my brain, I must have known we had the same vouchers with the same expiration dates, but I never imagined that somehow we would—we would—

“Please tell me,” I say, shutting my eyes, “we didn’t book the same fucking tour.”

The bus jerks into drive, and my knees buckle—half of me lands in the empty seat, the other half in Kit’s lap. My backpack swings around and smashes squarely into Kit’s face.

Into the hair behind my ear, voice thick and muffled and gently amused, Kit says, “So you’re still mad at me, then.”

I swear, clawing toward my own seat. Kit’s eyes are scrunched shut, his hand clamped over his nose.

“Orla’s got a lead foot. Are you—?”

“I’m fine,” Kit says, “but don’t panic when I show you.”

“Show me wh—” He removes his hand to reveal an absolutely spectacular nosebleed. “Jesus!”

“It’s okay!” Blood dribbles out of his left nostril, already pooling in the hollow of his Cupid’s bow. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“It looks pretty fucking bad, Kit!”

“My nose just does this now.” He sneezes out few tiny red bubbles. “It’ll stop in a second.”

Now. Now, as in there was once a then, in which we were in love and I knew what his nose did and didn’t do.

When someone is your best friend for sixteen years, your boyfriend for two, and your first and only love, it’s not easy to edit them from your life, but I’ve done it. Everything that could be erased or deactivated or deleted has been: every number blocked, every Polaroid and souvenir T-shirt packed away in cardboard boxes in one of Sloane’s spare closets. I’ve curated my own life to know nothing about his, not his job or his haircut or whether he ever finished pastry school in Paris. I’m pretty sure he does still live in Paris, but until this moment, he could have joined the Navy and had an arm bitten off by a shark for all I knew.

If I do think about Kit, in the fantasy I don’t have, because I don’t think about him enough to have a specific fantasy scenario, we’re colliding at the door of a restaurant in Manhattan. He’s on a date, and I’m on invitation to sample the wine list, and whatever tragic artist he’s with gets bonked in the head by the door when he sees me in my bespoke suit and knows I’ve finally made it, that I have a fulfilling career and an endless parade of lovers, that I’ve gotten my shit so comprehensively together I’ll never need him or anyone else ever again. And I don’t even notice him.