The Pairing(59)
We nearly drop the bottle, fumbling it between ourselves so that we crash together to catch it. My sandal comes halfway off, and Kit catches me before I trip, propping me up smoothly against the nearest wall.
In the pink bloom of a Monaco sunset, Kit is as breathtaking as he’s ever been. We’ve slowed now, laughter still on our lips but beginning to fade into soft, lilting breaths. My back is against the bricks, and Kit’s hands are on my shoulders.
I bite my lip and look into his face, his dark eyes and expressive mouth, his every unforgettable angle. I love him. I don’t want to, but I do.
He touches my face like he did before, his fingertips soft on my cheek.
And he kisses me.
THE BEGINNING
(Kit’s Version)
Just northeast of Lyon, overlooking the Ain, there sat a medieval village called Pérouges surrounded by walls of honey-gold stone. And within those walls, there was a house.
The house was smallish and modest, with flower boxes that spilled green vines down its cobbly front like tipped watercolor pigment. The garden too was painted a lush, impossible green, and the hills outside the village’s walls were green and amber and the bruised bluish black of wet soil. Somehow the flowers never wilted or browned when I pressed my fingers to their petals, even though we’d been told not to touch them when they were in bloom. When I opened the shutters each morning, the air tasted of irises and sage.
(One day, the love of my life would say this explained everything about me. You can take the boy out of the fairy-tale hamlet, but you can never take the fairy-tale hamlet out of him.)
When we came to California, nothing was green. It was all dust and sand, all rocks. Brown and pale slate, pebbly and craggy, like the alien planets my dad wrote stories about. The only familiar things were the ones we’d brought from home, the mixing bowls and big wooden spoons, the eggbeaters that had to be turned by hand, the dimpled ceramic trays cradling eggs on the pantry’s highest shelf. When I missed home, my maman would open her book of French pastry recipes, and we would stand together at our new kitchen counter and bake something. Still, I missed the colors.
Then came Theodora.
The first time I ever saw her, she was the brightest thing in the classroom. The only spot of full saturation I’d seen since we got to the desert. Brassy orange-blond, rose flush and cinnamon-dust freckles, her lip bitten angry red by the bumpy edges of new teeth. She had eyes like the hills of Rh?ne, blue-green on the outside and honey-gold at the center. I wouldn’t find the right English word for her until spring, when Maman took us out to Antelope Valley to see explosions of wildflowers on the hills. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen, bigger than the ocean out of an airplane window or the bottom of my own heart. So deep and wide, so much of everything at once. We were eight years old, and Theodora was smiling.
I learned the names of all the growing things I never would have seen back home. Lupine, fiddle-neck, Western blue-eyed grass, California poppy, Theo. Superbloom.
Love took root in me before I even knew its name. Theo was a superbloom. The petals stayed.
THE END
(Kit’s Version)
“Kit,” says Thierry, “did you know that parrots taste with the tops of their beaks?”
My uncle is reclined on his favorite chair, reading a guide to bird behavior loudly enough for me to hear from the kitchen. I don’t mind. It’s been nice, after so long, to hear his Lyonnais accent between the soft thumps of cold butter against sifted flour.
I switch on the oven light and ask, “Is that right?”
“It says here that most of a parrot’s approximately three hundred taste buds are located on the roof of its mouth.” He closes the book and holds it to his chest, turning his face to the sun in the vine-fringed windows. “Such a strange, wonderful creature, don’t you think?”
On my mother’s side, from her father’s father’s father, come two inheritances: a love of all beautiful living things and a pied-à-terre in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The latter is how Thierry can afford to live in a Haussmann apartment in the 6th on a part-time ceramicist’s salary, and the former is why he’s filled every windowsill of it with leafy plants.
Some of my favorite childhood memories happened in this apartment: sprawling on the herringbone floors while Thierry told Maman about whichever woman he’d fallen in love with that month, waking up to the bells of Saint-Sulpice, writing postcards to Theo. I haven’t been back since high school, but when I got the letter from école Desjardins, I booked a ticket.
“Only three hundred taste buds? Seems a bit tragic, compared to our ten thousand.”
“They can still taste many foods, though. They even have favorites! Constan?a says her gray one likes mangoes. Benny, I think. Or—no, the gray one is Anni-Frid.” He jots down a note on the side table, determined to remember which of Constan?a’s birds are named after which member of ABBA.
Constan?a, Thierry’s latest girlfriend, lives in Portugal and hates long distance, so Thierry is moving out of the pied-à-terre and into a two-bedroom home in Lisbon with a menagerie of birds. I really do admire how devoted he is to believing every woman he meets is his soul mate. This is the third country he’s moved to for love, after Belgium for Lydia and Japan for Suzu. But this is the first time he’s been so sure that he started looking at selling the place.