The Pairing(76)

“2016,” I read off the bottle, jaw slack in astonishment. “But yes, you got it.”

Montana gasps delightedly, and our table cheers. Ginger Calum puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles. Theo takes a silly little bow.

They taste the other two and correctly identify a Chianti Classico and a Carmignano, each time to riotous applause. A ridiculous balloon of pride swells in me. I spent so long wanting Theo to throw themself into something the way I knew they could, and here they are, being great.

I once read a line in Mrs. Dalloway that stuck with me because of how well it described Theo’s place in my life. Clarissa sees Sally in her pink dinner frock and, after listing every other visitor and activity in the house, thinks, All this was only a background for Sally. To me, Theo is the eternal foreground. I put them at the center of every room. It’s gratifying when the room agrees.

Trattoria Sostanza is ours for the night, booked out for an endless Italian dinner. The restaurant barely fits our entire tour group, but that only adds to the experience. Bottles of wine and water flow from hand to hand, plates of oil and herbs from table to table, baskets of bread passed around like the collection at Sunday mass. My back is pressed to Stig’s back like we’re two travelers from the north crammed into the same carriage on a Grand Tour. Fabrizio is leaning over to the next table, shouting to be heard as he explains the courses of an Italian meal. “That is the beauty, in Italy you do not have to choose pasta or meat! You have pasta for primi, meat for secondi!”

For primi, we have hand-pinched tortellini simmered in butter and rough-cut pasta in a perfectly simple meat sauce, and then comes secondi, when we truly feast. Fabrizio expounds on the subtleties of traditional Tuscan cookery that make a country dish like bistecca alla fiorentina taste so complex: how the charcoal embers must be stoked to the exact right temperature, hot enough to achieve a fragrant crust when the beef is laid close to it for a few short minutes, but not so hot that it cooks out the marbled, ruby-red center. Meanwhile, a skillet of breaded chicken fried in a centimeter of pure, golden butter requires no explanation—it’s just fucking delicious.

But as our plates are cleared for dolci, I think the dish that has surprised me most is the tortino di carciofi—eggs swirled in a pan around a cluster of fried artichokes to make a puffy, perfectly round omelet.

“Fabrizio,” I say, “do you know the story of Caravaggio and the artichokes?”

He doesn’t, so I tell him how Caravaggio, a hotheaded young bisexual street brawler and one of the most masterful Italian painters in history, went to dinner with friends at an osteria in Rome. The waiter brought him a dish of artichokes, some cooked in oil and some in butter, and when Caravaggio asked which was which, the waiter told him to sniff them and find out.

“And so Caravaggio—”

A hand slides into my lap, and my thoughts skid to a halt.

Beside me, Theo innocently sips their wine, as if their other hand isn’t on the inseam of my shorts under the tablecloth.

“Go on,” Fabrizio says, “what does Caravaggio do?”

“Yeah, Kit,” Theo says, smiling. Their hand slips higher. “Go on.”

I shoot Theo a pleading look, undermined by the way my legs reflexively spread under the table.

“So Caravaggio’s furious, and he grabs the artichokes, and hhh—” The word evaporates as Theo fully palms me through my shorts. I play it off as a cough, reach for my glass. “He throws the whole dish at the waiter’s face.”

“No!” Fabrizio gasps.

“Hits him right in the mustache.”

“Not the mustache,” Theo says.

“Non i baffi!” Fabrizio agrees. “And then?”

“And then—” Theo gives me a maddeningly brief squeeze before taking their hand away, leaving me wanting. I forget the end of the story. “And then he jumps up, steals a sword off the guy at the next table, and tries to attack the waiter, and that’s when he gets arrested.”

Fabrizio, delighted, thanks me for a new story to use in Rome. As soon as he’s pulled into another conversation, I lean in to Theo’s ear.

“What are you doing?”

Theo smiles angelically. “Telling you my plans for the night.”

“Oh.” I nod. “Good to know.”

After that, I expect us to sneak off when dinner ends, but we each get the arm of a Calum flung over our shoulders, and before we can protest, we’re whisked into the streets of Florence. Stig is with us too, and Fabrizio, and Montana and Dakota and a few more of the younger people from the tour group. We wind up in a small, dark bar with glittering glass mosaics and red leather booths and a swordfish on the wall. Fabrizio has Theo order for us, and the bartender uncorks two bottles of young Brunello.

After so many days together, conversation flows easily. Theo and Stig compare notes on backpacking through the Rockies versus Jotunheim. Fabrizio and the Calums discuss their favorite New Zealand beaches. I prop my elbows on the bar and beg Dakota and Montana to tell me more about their work trip to Tokyo, where they dropped acid with a Moroccan prince. Theo insists on buying two more bottles for the group, this time a softer, fruitier Morellino di Scansano.

By round three, Stig and Fabrizio are shouting about the last World Cup, and Dakota and Montana are bending their heads together at one end of the bar, whispering behind their hands. At the other end, the Calums unconvincingly pretend to study the cocktail menu instead of eavesdropping. I watch Theo accept a glass from a handsome bartender who eyes them with interest, but they’re already turning their body toward mine, bumping our knees together.