The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

There’s a dildo on the luggage carousel. It’s not my dildo. Not that I didn’t bring one, but Kit would never pack ours so carelessly that it could just flop out of my suitcase and go tumbling through baggage claim. There are rules for these things.

“Go home. Work on yourself. Your personality is bad, and not in a fun way.”

I’ve lived in the Coachella Valley almost my entire twenty-eight years, because it has mountains and desert and huge skies and ravens the size of dogs, and because I already know all the ways I can fail there.

I study fauna at their watering hole like it’s National Geographic. I’m the Steve Irwin of having a pint with the lads.

And here I am, in a pub five minutes from Trafalgar Square, muscling a new keg into position, being incredibly brave and independent and sexy of my own volition.

I can do this. I’m the Crocodile Hunter.

The light changes, and we keep walking in the same direction. This isn’t a meet-cute. Is this a meet-cute? I’m not into beards. I hope it’s not a meet-cute.

I may be tall, but I’m not genetically coded to push warships off beaches into the Nordic surf.

I have several questions, but no time.

He looks made-up, like the guy who gives Kate Winslet her first orgasm in a movie about a divorcée in Sicily.

Maybe that cab did hit me.

Maybe I was flattened in a zigzag crosswalk, and afternoon commuters are gathered around saying what a shame such a hot young piece of ass should have to go out as roadkill outside a Boots.

Maybe everything since has been a dying fever dream, and I’ve arrived in hell, where 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.

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.

He’s already befriended some elderly Swedes.

A brave new Theo, in control of every situation. The damn Crocodile Hunter.

Steve Irwin never went around grabbing crocodiles by their handsome little jaws. At least, none that he’d had sex with.

This is supposed to be my Saturn return voyage of self-realization. And now I’ll have Kit in every frame, doing nauseating Kit things. Charming old Swedes, waxing poetic about sfogliatella, fondling the foliage, summiting Tuscan hills in the glow of dusk, smelling like—is that lavender? Still?

with an enigmatic smirk that makes me wish my pack had hit him harder.

And in that moment, Kit does something unfathomable: he pulls a paperback out of his backpack, opens to a marked page, and starts reading.

I just got kicked through the doors of my own personal haunted nightmare mansion, and Kit is reading A Room with a View.

I’m less interesting to him than a book he forgot he had.

It would be such a gorgeous view if Kit wasn’t in it.

“It’s Florence for me,” I tell them when they ask what destination I’m most looking forward to. “They’ll have the best wine. And the best collection of butts carved out of marble.”

marched into the walk-in and screamed at a bin of potatoes, then clocked out early to put Kit’s shit in boxes.

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

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.

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.

So valid

And now I have to stand here and receive his annoying fucking empathy.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

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.

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 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.

Priorities

One section is all house-made chocolates in boxes made to look like Victor Hugo hardcovers.

I want to go here NOW

Attempting a casual flirt with him is like trying to discuss the weather with the sun.

If my first experience in Paris is Maxine falling for Kit right in front of my dick brioche, I might jump in the Seine.

I’m looking at the fountain, inventing names for the saints inside the niches—St. Edna the Indignant, patron saint of stabbing your ex with a chocolate spoon because you’ve been cast as quaint backstory

I instantly love this. Did they come as a combo pack?

The way he used to sound when he talked about me.

Their eyes probably met over a tart, and Maxine knew her life was about to turn to gold dust and candied petals, and now purple hairs cling to Kit’s shower curtain, and—

She’s deeply cool, and she thinks I’m cool.

I hold my chin a little higher, like I did yesterday when I heard there was a keg I could change.

I make the best Bloody Mary in California, excluding one guy with an ankle monitor.

She really is pretty in a Shirley Jackson sort of way, like she lives in a haunted mirror. If she didn’t belong to Kit, I’d be making a move to smear her perfect mauve lipstick, but it’ll be enough to get her to like me.

It doesn’t seem like Kit cares if the continent lives or dies.

Of course she does. I’m the unfamous Hemsworth.