The Pairing(6)

He moves on to the story of his most memorable night in London, when a bottle-wielding bartender chased him from a pub for making out with his girlfriend (“My favorite girl in England, so nice for kissing, but we could not be together. Allergic to garlic!”). The bus is eating from the palm of his hand.

I’m barely listening. I’m gripping my knees with both hands, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of me. Not wondering what kitchen Kit has been baking in, not feeling his weight in the air he displaces, not waiting for him to turn his page so I know he’s not just pretending to read. He never looked back before. I shouldn’t be surprised.

Kit turns a page.

If he’s fine, I’m fine.


In the movie, you never see the cliffs in color.

The 1944 Irene Dunne film is all I know of Dover. The one about an American girl who marries an English baronet in World War I. I can’t remember when I saw it—probably when Este was small, because our parents thought anything filmed before 1960 was age-appropriate entertainment for babies. Near the beginning, Irene stands on the deck of a ship and gazes tearfully over the sea at the white chalk cliffs of Dover.

In real life, there are a lot more sheep, and the cliffs’ grassy tops are too green even for Technicolor. The land curves and sways and breathes with the wind and then suddenly, it stops. The rolling English hillside hits some sharp, immediate edge, and where there should be more hills, there’s only a straight, tooth-white, three-hundred-foot drop to the blue sea below.

It would be such a gorgeous view if Kit wasn’t in it. A taste of what’s to come, I guess.

I’m walking with the two Australians by default. Everyone has split into pairs, even Stig and Fabrizio, although Stig looks like he’s regretting it. Part of Fabrizio’s job is making sure none of us get lost, so to be easier to find, he carries a telescopic pole stuck up the ass of a little stuffed Pinocchio puppet. (The puppet, he explains, is because Pinocchio is an Italian story, and he’s Italian, and also, “some Italians do not mind so much from behind—joke! A joke!”) And so Fabrizio and Stig lead the group down the trail, Stig with the gait of an Alpine hiker on a short leash and a puppet getting cheerfully penetrated three and a half feet above his head.

Shortly behind them is Kit, wearing the same leather and canvas sling bag he’s owned since we were fourteen, and then the rest of the group, and finally, the Australians and me.

“It’s Florence for me,” I tell them when they ask what destination I’m most looking forward to. “They’ll have the best wine. And the best collection of butts carved out of marble.”

“Ah, you’ve never been to Spain, have you?” says the blond, whose name is Calum. “There’s nothing like Spanish vermouth, it’ll change your life.”

“You’ve never been to Spain!” says the ginger, whose name is also Calum.

“I went to Bilbao with you, two years ago,” Blond Calum argues.

“No, you didn’t!”

“Yes, I did, you just don’t remember because you were off your tits for three days straight. I was the one who found you when you went off to sleep with the cows.”

While they’re cheerfully arguing, I take the opportunity to text Sloane without Kit six inches from my screen.

tell me, I type, why the fuck kit fairfield is here.

There’s a weird taste in my mouth. I don’t know the last time I typed those letters in that order. I can’t stand to look at them, so I put my eyes on the horizon, where I can just make out France in the distance.

Kit always dreamed about returning to France, ever since his family moved to the States when he was eight. He was born outside of Lyon to a French mom and an American dad, bilingual from birth, and whenever he got bored, his dual citizenship was waiting behind breakin-case-of-emergency glass. I should have seen it coming.

I remember the day the kitchen phone rang at Timo. It had been three days since Kit left me at Heathrow, and I’d taken back-to-back doubles to avoid being alone in our apartment. I heard the shift manager say Kit’s name—I’d set him up with a part-time gig helping with desserts and doughs on weekends—and then I heard him tell the pastry chef that Kit had called in to quit because he was moving to Paris.

That was how I found out. All our lives together, and he didn’t even tell me himself.

I marched into the walk-in and screamed at a bin of potatoes, then clocked out early to put Kit’s shit in boxes. I pulled his baking pans out of the kitchen drawers and his clothes out of our closet and his plants out of the windowsills. I blocked his number and texted his sister that his stuff was ready to be picked up, because I wasn’t paying to ship it to France, not when I had Kit’s half of the rent to cover.

With time, the anger subsided into the sort of lazy, funny grudge you joke about. If a friend asks me what Kit’s up to these days, I’ll say fuck if I know, and we’ll laugh. But he wasn’t wrong earlier. I am still angry.

“Hey, Theo,” Ginger Calum says.

I blink back to Dover.

“Yeah?”

“Anyone ever tell you, you look just like that bird from the Beatles movie that came out last year? The one who played George’s girl in the sixties? Joan something?”

Fuck. Not this, not now.

“Sloane.” I hoped on this side of the Atlantic people would be slower to put it together. “Sloane Flowerday.”