The Pairing(7)

“That’s the one!” Blond Calum says. “You could be her! Or the other one, doesn’t she have a sister who’s an actress? What’s her name?”

“Este.”

“Yeah! Wow, if they had a sister who was normal, you could be her. Like the third Hemsworth brother.”

My jaw clenches for more than one reason. “I get that a lot.”

I turn away, squinting at the sun while the Calums debate which of my little sisters is hotter.

“Hey, Theo?”

Kit has appeared in front of us, salty breeze swirling his hair around his face, hands tucked politely into his pockets. He looks like a hero from one of his romantic paperbacks on the way to ravish someone in a field of violets. I’m already exhausted.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

Oh, he wants to talk now.

He leads us out of earshot, to a small outcropping through a gap in the trail’s wooden fence. From here, I can see the sheep grazing near the castle, and I wish more than anything I could be one of them. Not a care in the world, no struggling freelance gigs or famous relatives, no fraught reunions with exes who fucked your life up so much you had to make a new one. Just grass.

Kit arranges himself atop a small boulder, crossing an ankle over his knee. I wait for him to say something, to start apologizing for what happened between us, to act like it happened at all. He doesn’t.

“What did you want to talk about?” I finally ask.

“Oh,” Kit says. “I didn’t. I just—I overheard.”

He overheard.

This isn’t about us. It’s about Kit saving me from strangers asking questions about my family, knowing better than anyone how that makes me feel. And now I have to stand here and receive his annoying fucking empathy.

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“What?” Kit says. “No, I just didn’t want those guys to say anything weird to you about Este or Sloane.”

I shrug. “People say plenty of things to me all the time.”

“I’m sure they do,” Kit says. “I just felt—”

“Bad for me, yeah, I got that,” I say, “but here’s the thing. You stopped being part of my life. So you don’t get to jump in when you feel like it now.”

Kit touches a finger to his lips. “Okay.”

“I mean,” I go on, anger spiking in my chest, “if you wanted to look out for me, I can think of a few times you could have deigned to speak to me the past few years.”

“Theo.”

“In fact, if you’re gonna say anything to me now, how about”—I put on an imitation of Kit’s musical voice, complete with the faintest hint of a French accent, once lost but now brought back from the dead by Paris—“‘Theo, I’m so sorry about everything, I really fucked you over, that was pretty shitty.’”

“Theo.”

“‘I never should have left y—’ Are you laughing? Seriously?”

“It’s—”

Something wooly nudges my thigh.

“That,” Kit says.

That is a stout white sheep, who has apparently escaped the castle flock. The bell around her neck suggests this isn’t her first jailbreak.

“Oh,” I say. She stares up at me with her watery black eyes and prods me again with her nose. The bell rattles. “Hi.”

“I was trying to tell you,” Kit says.

I pat her fluffy head like she’s a dog. She bleats approvingly.

“As I was saying—”

The sheep butts my leg, harder now.

“Hey! Okay, okay.” I try to pet her, but she ducks and butts me again. “Really?”

“Baa,” she replies.

“The point is—ow—you can’t just act like I’m the same and you’re the same and everything’s fine, because—”

“Baa!”

“—because it’s not.”

Kit’s face is serious, even as the sheep clamps her teeth around the hem of my overalls.

“I’m not the same,” he concedes. “And I’m sure you’re not. And I would have liked to talk to you, but, Theo, what part of blocking my number was supposed to make me think that was welcome?”

I look down at the sheep in time to see her cough up a clump of grass on my boots. Nearly missed my bus, almost hit by a car, committed assault and battery, heard a man call my little sister “a top sort,” regurgitated on by a sheep, and now trapped with my ex, who is making an inconveniently good point.

“I am sorry,” Kit says. “For all of it.”

Kit was born with a sincere face. He means everything he says, and he looks like it.

When I look at him, I believe he really is sorry. Not that it’s enough, but it is at least true.

“And I’m sorry if I overstepped,” he says. “Old habits.”

I think of Kit, age eleven, plucking a bee stinger out of my foot. Kit, age twenty-three, waking me up when I overslept for work.

He opens his little bag, and the sheep finally turns her attention from me, eyeing Kit curiously as he shakes a few orange bits from a foil pouch into his palm.

“Hi, beautiful,” he says in his softest voice. “Would you like to leave poor Theo alone and have a snack?”