The Pairing(70)

I force myself to stare at the paper cups of coffee Theo put in my hands. Both are dark, one black, the other a shade lighter. Theo finishes shoving euros into their hip pack and takes the darker coffee from me, cornetto flakes swirling through the hot morning air.

As we set off through a narrow alley toward the Duomo, I ask, “You take your coffee black now?”

“Ever since I started having coffee with my somm every day,” Theo says. “This is how he takes it. I have a theory it’s the source of all his power.”

“The Somm . . . is it still the same guy? The one with the ponytail and the tattoo of a rat smoking a cigar, and the—”

“The leather dusters, yeah.”

“Same pastry chef as well?” I ask. I liked the old one.

“Nah, there’s a new guy, but he’s not as good,” Theo says. “Your order’s still the same, right? Little cream big sugar?”

I smile. It’s an old joke, something I mumbled once when I was too tired for English, the kind of thing that sticks.

“Little cream big sugar,” I confirm. Theo’s mouth angles into a satisfied smirk. They take another bite of cornetto, revealing an orange jam at its buttery center. “What’s the filling?”

“Albicocca,” they say in a muffled Super Mario Italian accent. They swallow and translate, “Apricot.”

“Black coffee and they know Italian? Wow, the Bourdainification of Theo Flowerday,” I say, failing to pretend this doesn’t turn me on. I would fuck Anthony Bourdain at any stage of his life and we both know it.

“Yes, like Tony I’ve picked up all the food words and swears from working in fine dining. Vaffanculo!” A passing Italian teenager whips around. “Not you! Scusa!”

We turn onto another tight street, buildings with the same golden-brown walls and green shutters as the last one and the ones before that. Tourists and taxis and men on scooters crowd the road and the high, cobbly sidewalks, but what dominates the view is the massive structure looming ahead at the street’s opening, the side of a cathedral so broad and tall it eclipses the world beyond. A sliver of brick dome peeks out like a red crescent moon.

Theo holds up their pastry, matching its crescent shape to the dome.

“What’s the difference between this and a croissant?”

“A cornetto has eggs in the dough,” I say. “Croissant dough is all about the butter. That’s why croissants are flakier, and a cornetto’s texture is more like—”

“A brioche,” Theo notes.

“Right,” I say, smiling. Maxine did say they’d been un bon étudiant. “Can I try? I’ve heard apricots are sweeter in Italy.”

Theo passes the cornetto to me, and I taste, letting the compote touch every part of my tongue.

“They are sweeter,” I say. Theo’s looking at me with amusement. “What?”

They untuck their sunglasses from their shirt pocket and slide them on.

“You remember what you were doing in that dream I told you about?”

The dream about me eating them out on a restaurant table in Barcelona? I’d sooner forget how to make a baguette.

“Yes.”

“Well, in my dream, you ate an apricot too.”

Theo grins and takes off running toward the piazza.

When I’ve pulled myself together enough to catch up, they’re standing before the cathedral with their head craned back. Their grin has spread into the silent, incredulous laugh usually reserved for a particularly good stunt in a Fast & Furious movie.

“This might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” they say.

When you spend four years studying Renaissance art and architecture with a special focus on southern Europe, you inevitably find yourself in romantic love with the Duomo di Firenze—the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florence Cathedral, the Duomo. I’ve dreamed of standing here. I knew, intellectually, that it would be nearly three times the height of Notre-Dame and one and a half times the size. I’ve read about every elaborate detail, from the architecture Brunelleschi invented to make the dome physically possible to the hundreds of thousands of intricate green, pink, and white marble panels placed by hand to adorn the exterior. And still, it shocks me.

It reminds me of a cake. Gum-paste details for the window tracery, sugar lace for the foliage over the portals, precise layers of vanilla and raspberry and pistachio joconde for the polychrome marble. Like the Tower of Pisa, I can only understand the Duomo in terms of dessert.

“I can’t believe people made this,” I exhale. “I can’t believe I get to see it.”

Theo turns to me.

“Haven’t you—I thought you’d already been to Italy?”

“Only Venice.”

“Oh. So, the rest of the places on the tour will be new to us both?”

I forgot they don’t know.

“They’ve all been new to me, except Paris, and I went to Nice once when I was five,” I say. “We were supposed to go to these places together. It felt wrong to go without you.”

Theo bites their lip, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. I think of the sudden hardness of their voice in Paris, when they said they could’ve gone without me. I believed them then, but now—je ne sais pas.

Finally, they say, “Do you wanna see something interesting?”