The Pairing(50)

It’s heartbreaking how gorgeous he is like this. Pliant and glassy-eyed, head thrown back. Spreading himself out, offering himself to be pushed down and swallowed up, teased and twisted until he’s begging, gasping, nearly weeping for it.

A shudder courses through me, and I close my eyes and see Kit’s face, the look when he kissed Paloma on that beach, like he wanted me to watch.

I let myself listen. I open the vault.

There he is. There we are. Light spills across our skin. My hand grasps for his, and everything unfolds at once.

On the next swipe of my tongue, I hear three simultaneous gasps: Caterina with her knee hooked over my shoulder, Kit across the alley being sucked off by another man, and Kit bent over our old kitchen counter with my spit sliding down his thighs.

My hand quickens to match my mouth, to match the rhythm of Kit’s breathing. To match the beat of my heart one summer night on a beach blanket in Santa Barbara when I sank down onto him. The click-click of the hazards while he ate me out in my back seat. The kick drum through the speakers as he snuck his hand down my jeans in the middle of a crowd. Caterina’s pulse on my tongue, Kit’s pulse against mine. I push two fingers into her, and his push into me, and mine push into him.

When Kit comes, I hear him, and I see him in our bed, wrists pinned, bright tears in his eyes. I lean my forehead against Caterina’s hip—against Kit’s shoulder—and finish with a rough, punched-out cry.

In the quiet after, I’m left with the part of the memory that tipped me over. It wasn’t how Kit begged me that night, or how he couldn’t walk straight in the morning.

It was in between, when he told me how much he loved me.

That’s exactly what I was afraid it would be.


I don’t sleep in Caterina’s bed.

It’s not a long walk back to the hostel, but by the time I pass the spires of Cathedral La Seu, I’m running. I sprint all the way up La Rambla, through the huge wheel of Pla?a de Catalunya and all its bosomy statues, up four flights of stairs to the room where I woke up tangled in Kit.

When the door is locked behind me, I take out my phone.

I might be falling back in love with kit

Sloane texts back within a minute.

Would that be such a bad thing?





Would that be such a bad thing?

On the highest plateaus of Provence, in the mountainous countryside above Nice, lavender grows like a motherfucker. It’s purple for miles, purple for years. Purple up to my nips. Every breath smells like lavender, and so every breath smells like Kit.

Sault is a scenic detour on the way to Nice, where we’ll spend two nights before beginning the Italy leg. Everyone’s hangover seems cured by the cool mountain air, except for Ginger Calum, who is throwing up behind a goat pen. Even Orla has climbed down from the bus to explore the lavender fields.

I bend to touch my toes, stretching my back and hamstrings. My knees ache from being tucked to my chest for the last four hours so I wouldn’t accidentally touch Kit. If he knows I heard him last night, or if he heard me, he’s unmoved. He napped all the way through Spain and back into France, lazily picturesque in his soft jeans and a sand-colored T-shirt, lashes fanned serenely against his cheeks.

Meanwhile, I can barely look at him. The fog of horny war has lifted, but I’m still in the trenches. I’m down here, dying. I’ve got trench foot of the heart.

Kit is walking with Orla now, somehow wearing her safari hat on his head. He spreads his arms wide, palms up to the sun, and Orla laughs.

Would that be such a bad thing?

The thing about loving Kit is, it’s objectively the best thing that could happen to anyone. There’s a reason it’s happened to so many people by accident. Loving Kit is like being the strawberry in a flute of champagne. Just floating forever on sparkling bubbles, making dizzy circles, soaking up complexity and being sexy by association.

Being with Kit was different. I can admit it now: The only thing better than loving Kit was being loved by him.

Life with Kit was a good dream. It was just—it was inevitable. It made sense. I’d met him so young and loved him so long that everything I’d ever learned about love had grown into him, until I couldn’t tell where he ended and love began. We used to look at each other with constant astonishment, like no matter how many times we kissed, we couldn’t believe it was happening. And he made me happy, or at least as happy as I could be back then. It was good. We were good.

I’ve had a million temporary lovers since, but the truth isn’t that I haven’t needed something real. It’s that I haven’t wanted it. The thought of starting from scratch, the ordeal of rebuilding something I already spent my whole life building with someone else—it’s exhausting. It’s a fucking Olympic triathlon of mortifying vulnerability, and at the end, I might not even like them as much as I liked Kit. It’d be a relief if I never had to do it.

It’d also be a relief to get back the parts of me that live inside of him. To have somewhere to put all of him contained in me. There are so many things we couldn’t fit into boxes, pieces of ourselves that we can’t access anymore because we could never return them. I’d like to be whole with him.

And that whole me—the Theo of Theo-and-Kit—I like them. They have the best jokes, the most nerve, the biggest ideas. I’d have spent weeks coming up with the recipes I’ve pitched Kit on the fly. It’s possible I wouldn’t even be here if not for Kit. I never would’ve booked this trip on my own, and if I’d been able to get my money back, I don’t know that I would have tried again. I might never have felt the world open wide to me.