The Pairing(5)

In real life, people are staring.

“I’m okay, Birgitte!” Kit says with a little wave at the retirees across the aisle. He’s already befriended some elderly Swedes.

It’s never like this in my head, like I’m the same old catastrophe he couldn’t put up with anymore. He’s supposed to see that I’m somebody now. A brave new Theo, in control of every situation. The damn Crocodile Hunter.

I untie the bandana from my neck.

“Come here,” I say, wetting the cloth with water from my pack.

“It’s really fine,” Kit insists. “It’s already stopping.”

“Then let me clean you up.”

Kit’s expression flickers, somewhere between cautious hope and the queasy, trapped look of a man being charged by a grizzly.

“Okay.”

I reach for him from the right, but he turns his face to the left. I go to reach from the left, but he corrects too fast and turns his face to the right. We miss each other two more times before I clamp a hand around his chin and tilt his jaw directly toward me.

Our eyes lock, both of us caught by surprise.

Bad move. Steve Irwin never went around grabbing crocodiles by their handsome little jaws. At least, none that he’d had sex with.

“Hold still,” I say, refusing to look away first. Kit blinks slowly, then nods.

I dab away the blood, aware with every second that I’ve made a grave miscalculation. From this position, I have no choice but to study his face and all the ways it has and hasn’t changed from twenty-four to twenty-eight. Mostly he looks the same, just a bit more mature and defined. He has the same architectural cheekbones and curious eyebrows, the same soft mouth, the same lash-fringed brown eyes with that familiar flung-open brightness they’ve held since we were kids. The most noticeable difference is the slightest curve to the statue-straight nose from my memory, which I’m pretty sure is not my fault.

He’s looking at me, and I wonder if he’s doing the same. I’ve changed more than he has. No more makeup, unrulier brows, more freckles. A few years back, I stopped trying to make all the disparate features of my face work together the way I thought they were supposed to and started appreciating each individual piece. My wide mouth and its upturned corners, the angles of my jaw and cheeks, my slightly oversized nose. I love the way I look now, but I don’t know if Kit will. Not that I care.

I release him and tuck my hand under my leg before it can do anything else stupid.

“Huh, you were right,” I say. “It did stop. That was fast.”

“I broke my nose a couple years ago,” Kit tells me. “It bleeds easy now, just not for long.”

A weird spark of loss swirls up, like when Kit and I would watch a show together and I would find out he’d skipped ahead without me. Like I should have known this, somehow.

I don’t ask. We sit a foot apart, a bandana full of his blood in my hand as the bus trundles past the white plaster rows of Notting Hill Gate. I’m trying to remember the tour destinations I was so excited about this morning, Bordeaux and Barcelona and Rome, but Kit’s hair keeps falling into his eyes.

“Your hair is shorter,” Kit says in a strange, neutral voice.

“Yours is longer,” I point out.

“We almost have—”

“The same haircut.”

Kit exhales a sound between sigh and a laugh, and I have to grit my teeth to keep from screaming.

This is supposed to be my Saturn return voyage of self-realization. And now I’ll have Kit in every frame, doing nauseating Kit things. Charming old Swedes, waxing poetic about sfogliatella, fondling the foliage, summiting Tuscan hills in the glow of dusk, smelling like—is that lavender? Still?

“This is unbelievable,” Kit says, shaking his head like I’m an acquaintance he ran into at Trader Joe’s and not the lifelong love he abandoned at an airport in a foreign country. “How are you?”

“Good,” I tell him. “Really, really good, until about, oh”—I check the time—“fifteen minutes ago.”

Kit takes this in stride. “Sure. That’s good.”

“And you? You look . . . healthy.”

“Yeah, more or less intact,” Kit says with an enigmatic smirk that makes me wish my pack had hit him harder. “I’m—”

Fabrizio’s romance-novel voice croons over the bus’s PA system.

“Ciao a tutti ragazzi! How are you today? Good? Yes, good! If you do not know, my name is Fabrizio, and I am your guide for the next three weeks, and I am very happy to be sharing with you the flavors of France, Spain, and Italy—and yes, the sights, also!”

And in that moment, Kit does something unfathomable: he pulls a paperback out of his backpack, opens to a marked page, and starts reading. As if we weren’t in the middle of our first conversation in four years. As if the only remarkable thing about our two-hour ride from London to Dover is that it must be passed with a book. I just got kicked through the doors of my own personal haunted nightmare mansion, and Kit is reading A Room with a View.

The pages are yellowed at the edges, like he got preoccupied with his chic Parisian life and left it in a windowsill for a few months. I’m less interesting to him than a book he forgot he had.

Fabrizio tells us about his childhood in his parents’ restaurant in Naples, explaining that we meet in London because it’s an English-speaking tour, but the tour won’t officially begin until tomorrow morning in Paris. We’re pulling off at Dover to see the cliffs before sunset and then pushing on to Paris for two days in the City of Lights.