The Pairing(8)

She plods over and starts eating out of his hand, as happy and gentle as a lamb.

“Dried apricots,” he tells me.

Against my own wishes, my jaw unclenches. Maybe, if I’m being honest, I needed Kit away from me because it’s so hard to stay mad in his presence. Anger doesn’t like to hang around him.

“Look,” I say. “You being here—this isn’t the trip I had in mind.”

“Me neither,” he says, still feeding the sheep.

“But this is important to me, okay?” I say. “So I’m going to do it.”

“Yeah, of course it is. You should.” He’s nodding, still horribly sincere. “I was thinking, if you’re uncomfortable, I could . . . hop off in Paris? Stay home?”

So he is still in Paris.

Even worse, he means this too. It shows not only on his face but in the set of his shoulders, the plaintive tilt of his chin.

He really isn’t the same. Something has firmed up, like the center of a crème br?lée that was sloshy custard the last time I saw it. He seems . . . completed, somehow. The Kit I knew was restless and hungry. This person is steady, self-sustained.

This new Kit thinks he’s doing me a favor. He thinks he can handle this, and I can’t.

Fucking Sheep Boy over here wants to be the bigger person.

“No, that’s stupid,” I say. “Don’t do that.”

He blinks. “Why not?”

“Because we both paid for our own ticket,” I point out. “And besides, I don’t know anyone else on this tour. Do you?”

Kit shakes his head.

“So, if anything happens, at least we’ll have . . .” What’s a noncommittal way to describe what we are to each other? “Someone who knows our blood type, or whatever.”

Kit considers that. The sheep licks his palm.

“Are you saying you want to be friends?”

“I’m saying I didn’t fly across the world to feel weird and bad for three weeks. I came to drink champagne and eat cannelloni until I throw up. So, we could try . . . peacefully coexisting.”

Kit tucks the inside of his cheek between his back teeth, hollowing it out prettily.

“I’d like that.”

“And maybe we don’t have to talk about everything that happened,” I say. “Maybe we just get through it. And then it’s done.”

After a long moment, Kit holds out the hand not covered in sheep saliva.

“Okay,” he says. “As long as that’s what you want.”

I take his hand in mine, and we shake on it.

“AB positive,” Kit says. My blood type.

“O negative,” I say back. His.

“Baa,” says the sheep.





I’ve learned a lot from taking the Court of Master Sommeliers certification exam three times. Most important: I have a naturally gifted nose.

When I’m sweating in front of stone-faced judges for a blind tasting, the faint distinction between fennel and anise calms me down. When Timo closes for the night, and the dishwashers are scraping forty-two-dollar hand-stuffed tortellini into the trash, and the chef sommelier sets down a glass of white and tells me to identify it, I can clock the spiciness of a grape grown in red slate soils or the airiness of a sandy coast.

Some of that is practice—sniffing produce, licking rocks on mountain hikes, a Rocky Balboa training montage through every botanical garden in Southern California—but you can’t teach instinct. I didn’t have to be taught to match the note of white pepper in the chef’s new special to a bottle of Aglianico, or to concoct a gimlet that tastes like a bride’s memory of her mother’s perfume. My nose just tells me. When I’m uncertain, or intimidated, or worried I’m about to fuck something up, I can count on that.

So, I prop open the window of my single room in Paris, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. Notes: dark roast coffee, fresh bread from the café down the street, garden aromas of foxglove and elderberry, sulfur from the igneous rock in the cobblestones, car exhaust and ivy and cigarette smoke.

My heart rate slows. My fists unclench. I open my eyes to see Montmartre’s rosy bricks and slate mansard roofs, the city splayed at the foot of the hill.

I can do this. It’ll be fun. It’s a morning pastry tour through Paris, not The fucking Hague. It doesn’t matter that Kit literally left me to study Parisian pastry. It doesn’t matter that I once whispered to the universe, I don’t ever want to know how Kit is doing, I’d rather imagine him sitting alone in an empty room forever, and instead the universe has answered with a live-action role-play of Kit’s daily life, starring Kit.

“I’m in Paris,” I say, pulling on light wash jeans and a boxy linen button-up. “I’m in Paris,” I say, checking the mirror, thankful for short, effortless shag haircuts. “I’m in Paris,” I say on my way out, like if I say it enough, it’ll stop feeling so weird and big.

I’m here. I’m unbothered. I’m peacefully coexisting. I look great, I smell nice, and I’m going to eat my weight in chou à la crème.

Kit appears as I’m waiting for the jangly old elevator.

I’m surprised to see a creature of comfort like Kit in our tiny Montmartre hostel when he has his own pied-à-terre a few miles away, but he has always loved committing to a bit. He’s probably all juiced up to play tourist. Tasting everything like it’s the first time, falling in love all over again, aesthetically jerking himself off.