The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

I realized I’d fallen in love with my best friend when I wasn’t looking.

“What if we tried it?” he asks softly. “Just once, to see what it would be like?”

I wish this happened to me.... Instead it was just pain and hurt and he chose someone else.

He’ll laugh about it tomorrow, and every person I take to bed from now on will be fighting his ghost for my attention.

“I lied. I never got over it.” Kit lets out a long breath. He turns off the water. And then he says the most incredible thing he could possibly say. He says, “Neither did I.”

IDK WHAT HAPPENED, THE CONTEXT BUT I AM INVESTED RIGHT NOW.

“No, but I’ve seen a lot of movies.”

Could be me.

Kit looks up, furrows his elegant brow, and says, “Theo?”

Oh, the drama, and I was listening Taylor's song: "the moment I knew" while reading this.... Godd

daughter

She is a woman!! Oh, shit.

I’ll be forced to share three weeks of the most sensuous, romantic sights and flavors of Europe with a stranger whose perineum I could describe from memory.

Good summary.

Now. Now, as in there was once a then, in which we were in love and I knew what his nose did and didn’t do.

Okay, but the poetry of it all.... But what if kit has a terminal disease and that's why he decided to break up with theo? Just theories of my own.

If I do think about Kit, in the fantasy I don’t have, because I don’t think about him enough to have a specific fantasy scenario, we’re colliding at the door of a restaurant in Manhattan. He’s on a date, and I’m on invitation to sample the wine list, and whatever tragic artist he’s with gets bonked in the head by the door when he sees me in my bespoke suit and knows I’ve finally made it, that I have a fulfilling career and an endless parade of lovers, that I’ve gotten my shit so comprehensively together I’ll never need him or anyone else ever again. And I don’t even notice him.

What in the la la land?

“AB positive,” Kit says. My blood type. “O negative,” I say back. His. “Baa,” says the sheep.

The sheep, stole the part

but he has always loved committing to a bit.

That's a fucking little good quality you little it.

Tasting everything like it’s the first time, falling in love all over again,

have you considered also fucking the director?

Mmm, that's what you say to your sibling?!

Kit has this thing—we used to call it his “condition”—where he accidentally makes people fall in love with him. He never knew he was doing it.

Condition? Isn't that a gift? Or something different like a curse but condition sounds like he's sick or lacking some parts in his human body.

but it’s hard to ignore how Kit travels the streets of Paris like he was born in them.

It is so easy to ignore it by meeting someone new...

It’s one thing to share someone’s life and then find yourself spectating on it, and another to watch him live the dream he left you for.

Paris can’t make me feel small, and neither can Kit. Not again.

You're paying too much attention to him and not your sanity.

I made myself the house-party king of Palm Valley Prep,

So... Tomboy or trans?

“When I couldn’t go out with you,”

What is he trying to do

“No, the local tongue is what you get when you go in.”

Usually sex helps me sleep,

What?

There were so many years of wanting him and thinking I could never have him, of watching him date other people and hearing about every fuck, feeling every complicated feeling you can have for a person, and I still managed to be his friend.

The problem is, we’ve only ever been everything or nothing to each other. I don’t know how to start being something to him.

Every morning, he plays Édith Piaf for them.

“Oh, you’d be into it. It’s an adaptation of The Age of Innocence, but like, weird. Very A24.

OH? YOU BETTER BE JOKING...

“Nobody’s straight on a European vacation.”

“I am always so happy when my guests sample the local cuisine on their own,”

Is this book gonna be cringey 24/7?

Maybe not my wife, but certainly someone’s.

Right........

“Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there’s a … resonant homosexual flavor?

The author knows....

Without thinking, I run my fingertip over the ink. Wet skin meets wet skin. Kit shivers.

Kiss it already.

abandoning me to be cockblocked by my own unresolved feelings.

I mean, you need to sort yourself out. If not, you're just gonna be confused and depressed the whole time.

He gets everything he ever dreamed of, and I’m where I’ve always been, one step behind.

Im right where you left me... Help, I'm still at the restaurant...

Kit glances at me with something soft in his eyes, like we could still be those kids in California.

You still kinda are, especially theo.

I want to be his friend—not because it’ll make the trip easier, but because I want to.

I hate the personal phrases that are totally what I am and what I want.

and you walked away.” Kit says, “And then I came back.”

So theo is the villain, good... I'm not appealed by theo.

“Kit, does that sound like something I would do?” “Honestly, yes.”

And I OOOP.... HE READ EM

I should live with it. So, that’s what I did.”

Oh... Theo, you're turning into a bad main character that I'm about to hate no matter what, but a little bit less than the meet cute diary one...

The whole thing, my story where Kit plays the traitor—it doesn’t make sense with two broken hearts.

You never know the other side of the story.

“C’est à peu près ça.” I know this one; he always said it growing up. He’s picked it back up since Paris. That’s it, more or less.

Okay, I'll love the book only because it has a lot of french for me to practice.

he looks just like the person who would have missed me, the one who wouldn’t have left.

He never left you....

The truth is, I never stopped loving that person. I only stopped believing he existed.

Kit presses a knuckle to his lips and says nothing.

I need Kit's thoughts now.... How is it possible that I can hate theo so much.

“And I’ll hit you up next time I’m trying to, like, fuck a poet.”

I want to fuck a poet, where are em?

“I was honestly more surprised they have air conditioning at all.”

Is that a read

“Yeah, fuck it.”

More like fuck me.

“Your haunch? Are you a pony?”

It was in between, when he told me how much he loved me. That’s exactly what I was afraid it would be.

Logistically, it would be stupid to fall back in love with Kit.

we're not even halfway through the book and i'm already tired of having to read all of Theo's Moaning and bitching about Kit, STOP OBSESSING, I'M STARTING TO FEEL LIKE THIS BOOK IS POINTLESS.

two people who know they’re the best at fucking each other—

AND THEO STOP BEING TOO HORNY, HONESTLY, TIRED OF THEO, THINKING OF DROPPING THIS BOOK.