The Pairing(53)

“Mes sauveurs!” Apolline cries, sweeping Kit up to kiss him ferociously on each cheek. She does the same to me, and I find that I like her, her fiery eyes and the vivid color in her round cheeks and the way she still smells like raspberries. I also find that I don’t really have any desire to try to sleep with her.

We gather around the central workstation and feast on leftover pastries, which is the first time I’ve actually gotten to taste Apolline’s recipes. They’re incredible, perfectly buttery and surprising and complex. I can’t believe Kit and I made these.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I ask Apolline.

“In the case by counter, anything you want.”

I leave the kitchen to fetch a Perrier for myself, then grab another for Apolline and a sparkling lemonade for Kit. Hands full, I have to shoulder the kitchen door, so I don’t see them at first. It’s not until I step inside that I realize what’s happening.

The small of Kit’s back is against the edge of his workstation. Apolline is pressed close to him from chest to hip. Her hand is in his hair, and they’re kissing.

I drop one of my bottles, catching it with my boot before it smashes on the floor. It bangs into a proofing rack.

Kit and Apolline spring apart.

“Sorry!” I say, my voice unnaturally high. I cough and overcompensate, unnaturally low. “Sorry, I—I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

“Theo—” Kit starts.

“You guys clearly have some catching up to do,” I say. Fuck, is that why we came here? Does Kit have history with her? It was like a rite of passage in our year. . . . “I’m gonna— I’ll see myself out.”

“Theo, you don’t—”

“No, no, it’s totally cool! Really great to meet you, Apolline.”

I leave the bottles and shove out of the kitchen, out of the boulangerie, and away from Apolline’s street.


Castle Hill is only open for another half hour by the time I reach it, so I climb the steps two at a time. For some reason, it feels right to get as much topographical distance as I can from this afternoon.

I didn’t even consider that Apolline might be one of Kit’s pastry school lovers, or that this is why he wanted so badly to help her. I was in her kitchen fantasizing about a life with him while he was baking croissants for her. He was thinking of their pastry school hookups while I was contemplating pulling him into the back of a bar and asking if he could find it in himself to love me. That is . . . deeply fucking embarrassing.

I stare out over the sparkling rush of the Riviera and feel like the biggest jackass in the south of France. So, I do what I usually do when I feel like a jackass: I call Sloane.

She answers from set, tucked into a director’s chair with pages of sides folded in her lap, her hair in rollers. I squint at the screen—that doesn’t look like a wig.

“Hello, world traveler,” she says, biting into a carrot stick. “Reunite with any old flames lately?”

“Did they make you dye your hair?”

“Oh, this?” She gestures to the dark brown hair, which was the same orange-blond as mine last time I saw her. “I did this out of self-defense. Less time in hair and makeup with Lincoln.”

“It looks good.”

“No, it doesn’t, I’m shaving my head when this is over. Why do you look like someone pissed in your pinot gris?”

I sigh. “So, that text I sent you yesterday about Kit—”

A banner at the top of my screen interrupts me. It’s an email from Schnauzer Bride.

Panic stabs between my ribs. I never responded to her that night in Barcelona, did I? And the next day I was too fucked up over Kit to think about it, and today I got caught up at the boulangerie, and—

The subject line reads “TERMINATION OF CONTRACT <3,” with a bunch of sparkle emojis.

“Fuck!” I swear, opening the email. “Fuck, goddammit, I just got a really bad fucking email.”

“What? From who?”

I skim Schnauzer Bride’s record of every time I ever missed a call or took too long to answer an email, ending with my two days of silence following her shipping-barge crisis. My heart rate accelerates at every bullet point, all the way down to the last line, where she wishes me luck in the future and demands her deposit back.

“I just lost my biggest client of the season, and I—I already maxed out my credit card ordering all the shit for that gig, and there’s no fucking way I’m breaking even now. God, I’m such a fucking—” Idiot, jackass, piece of shit, dumb fucking disaster, pathetic failure. I scrunch up my fist and grind it against my forehead. “Fuck!”

“Oh,” Sloane says. “Bummer.”

I drop my fist and stare at her face on the screen.

“It’s kind of significantly more than a bummer.”

“No, it is,” Sloane says, looking more sincere now. More like she feels sorry for me. “Should we discuss the nuclear option?”

“I’m not borrowing money from you.”

“Why not? You can’t spell Sloane without ‘loan.’”

“That’s not funny.”

“It is,” Sloane disagrees, biting into another carrot, “but as I have told you a million times, it wouldn’t be a loan. I could be your investor. I’d be buying in. I could have our guy draw something up and wire you fifty grand tomorrow.”