The Pairing(60)

“Lisbon is glorious this time of year,” Thierry says. “I’ll hardly miss Paris.”

“That’s the first lie you’ve told all day.”

“No,” Thierry says. “I also lied when I told you I didn’t buy any ice cream at the store this morning. I just didn’t want to share.”

“That’s alright,” I say. I lift the cake out of the oven and set it down on a tea towel, then carry it into the living room. It’s a galette de Pérouges, made with my grand-tante’s recipe. “I made dessert for both of us.”

Thierry eyes the cake, then my face. “What is this for?”

“Can’t I just do something nice for my favorite uncle?”

“You have your mother’s eyes,” Thierry says. “And I could always tell when she wanted something.”

“Well,” I say, reaching into my pocket, “I know you’re thinking of selling the place, because there’s no one in Paris to pass it down to. But, what if there was?”

I give him the paper and watch as he unfolds it. Within the first few lines of text, he’s beaming.

“Is this true?” he says. “You are coming to Paris?”

I nod.

“Oh, lovely Kit.” He jumps up to hug me, spinning me around like he did when I was much smaller. “Oh, of course, of course it is yours. And Theo? Tell me Theo will come too.”

I smile. “I haven’t told her yet. But I have a plan.”





The first six months after Theo left me, I lived on sex, croissants, and a volume of Rilke’s collected poems from Thierry’s bookshelf.

I sat up at night and drew circles around the lines that most made me think of Theo, copied down the best ones until they stitched together a new verse. Dream in the eyes, the brow as if in touch with something far away. And, Was it not summer, was it not sun—all that heat from you, that measureless radiant warmth? And, Alone: What shall I do with my mouth?

Well. Sex and croissants, that’s what.

It was Maxine who, at the end of a long evening that could have been a first date if she hadn’t seen right through me, went scouring my notebook for a recipe and found the page with the Rilke. She asked, “How long have you loved them?” And I said, “Almost my whole life.” And she said, “Putain de merde,” and opened her cigarette case.

That was the night we became friends, and it was the night I told her about the tour. On the first day of every subsequent summer, she asked if this was the year I’d redeem my voucher, and every year I told her I couldn’t, because I was waiting. I was holding out hope that someday, somehow, Theo would come back.

It isn’t as if I’ve loved the same cold memory all this time. Rilke wrote, Even your not being there is warm with you. I’m in love with Theo’s residual warmth, the indentation she left for me to grow around. All those living petals, never falling.

That’s my life, in the kitchen and the café and the épicerie every morning thumbing orange rinds, nights looking into empty corners of the apartment where a liquor cabinet or a pair of boots might fit, mornings waking up on the left side of the bed. I leave space for Theo to be something that’s still happening to me.

But four years is a long time, and this year when Maxine asks about the ticket, I say I’ll do it as a farewell tour. I’ll take my unsent letter to a beach in Palermo and bury it at sea, and I’ll return to Paris and spend the rest of my life loving someone I’ll never see again.

And then Theo walks out of a dream and onto a bus in London, fiercer and stronger and screamingly hotter than ever before. She can’t stand to be next to me, but she wants to try, so I say yes, because I’ll take whatever she’ll give me. She calls me her friend in the same breath that she proposes having sex with other people, and I say yes to that too, because it’s a good distraction. Because as long as we’re counting, we have something to talk about, and I’ve missed the sound of her voice.

And she’s looking at me while I’m touching someone else, and we’re sleeping in the same bed, and I’m thinking of her every time I sink into another person’s body, and she’s sighing into my palm on the deck of a yacht. I have no room left in myself to hold it all. It has to overflow. And so, I kiss her.

I kiss Theo because I’m in love with her. I always have been. I always will be.


I’m still getting used to how different Theo looks.

The last time I saw her, her hair fell past her shoulders and down her back. She wore nail polish until it chipped away and she painted over it, shadowed her eyelids before work for better tips, wore skirts on weekends. Sometimes I would notice her checking her posture, as if she could soften the natural breadth of her shoulders, make herself delicate.

Now, she stands with her shoulders back, moves as if she knows a thousand ways to use her body and fears none of them. Her face has hardened and sharpened slightly, but it still holds a raw, hardy friendliness that makes strangers tell her their secrets, and there’s never anything on it but freckles. She wears practical boots and overalls with cargo pockets and ugly bucket hats, and her hair is so short that her neck and jaw are always on display.

A month ago I’d have sworn I could never want anyone more than the Theo I knew. Then I saw this new Theo, and suddenly want wasn’t big enough. This is more like need.