The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

What mattered was, you had to be at my parties, and my parties had to have me.

She tells it like a morbidly funny children’s story. Two teenage girls managing an estate, chasing geese out of the garden so they wouldn’t hunt her youngest brother, fending off overly helpful aunts and uncles.

“You mean Kit?” Maxine arches a brow. “The Sex God of École Desjardins?”

Now the dessert course is coming out, and I’m confronting the idea of Kit distributing life-changing orgasms to his entire pastry school class.

“Sorry, I was trying to reach my sister, but I must have dialed the Titanic.”

I, personally, am single by choice, not lack of opportunity. I get plenty of opportunities. At my last wedding gig, I pulled a bridesmaid and a groomsman, and we gave one another so many opportunities that I had to have Gatorade for breakfast.

I look good, strong, androgynous. Like someone who’s not afraid of this city and never has been.

“You need a Parisian mailing address to get into THE SEXODROME.” “Canceling THE SEXODROME for discriminatory business practices.”

It’s exactly the kind of place I love, the kind of place Kit knows I love. I’m a speakeasy person. I love a brilliant secret.

“I like the bar,” I say conversationally. “I thought you might.” “Almost as exciting as the Sexodrome.” “It’s actually pronounced THE SEXODROME.” “Oh, really? Is that the local tongue?” “No, the local tongue is what you get when you go in.”

My old silver Subaru hatchback, may she rest in peace.

Under his shirt. Where his body is, of course.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m clearly the deranged shark man. You’re the fancy research boy.”

They work with a cool efficiency I have to admire, as someone intimately familiar with handling a late-night full house. I hope that’s how I look when I do it.

The last person I was expecting to see in the hostel hallway this morning is Kit, but here he is, ambushing me at my door. Technically he’s just emerging from his own room looking underslept, but it feels like an ambush.

Why is he wearing his sincere face? How can he have his sincere face on at a time like this?

Maxine probably only sleeps with low-level royalty.

(You’d think he’d have known better about the apartment in Paris after that, and we could’ve avoided the breakup altogether. But here we are.)

Wine education, though. I was fucking mint at that.

and it turns out I’m great at learning things I actually want to know.

My first instinct, the thing I learned before I could find France on a map, is to love how Kit loves.

I’ve had to get used to not knowing the names of trees. It’s nice to know this one. Neither of us says anything else, but we don’t drift apart either.

We glimpse the interior—antique chaises and damask wallpaper and is that a nude oil painting of Gérard—and then we’re in a courtyard framed by the house’s long, narrow wings.

Baguette Husband gets a twinkle in his eye and says, “Not yet, maybe?” and nudges us to the last open table like we’re two fourth graders with a crush. The worst part is, we were, once. He’s eighteen years behind.

A speck of flour floats down from his palm and settles on my skin with the weight of one of Gérard’s antique sofas.

“How do all of theirs look like penises?” Kit puts his hands on his hips. “Sometimes baking is about what’s in your heart.”

That’s how Gérard talks about his grapes—like kids he’s trying to raise into strong-willed grown-ups with something to say at a party. Every morning, he plays Édith Piaf for them.

“I think they buried a bunch of French romance novels in the garden and he’s what sprang up.”

I bite my lip, trying not to look too pleased with myself, but I couldn’t be happier if Gérard invited me to move into the château as Florian’s full-time suspenders wrangler.

Kit and I have been assigned to a blanket so small, I have to wonder if Baguette Husband was involved.

“Maybe if I show a little leg he’ll give me the whole bottle.”

Oh. That’s someone I haven’t met before. The Sex God of École Desjardins.

Shit. We were doing such a good impression of old friends who’ve never seen each other naked, and now I’ve dumped our nudes on the cobblestones.

I search our surroundings for something to break the silence, an emergency fire axe.

The ginger told me he can never return to Belgium for legal reasons.”

“Those men are terminally straight.” “Nobody’s straight on a European vacation.”

They switch everyone to bisexual at passport control.” “Damn, that’s what the stamp’s for? Could’ve skipped the line.”

I’m like, the number one seed. Of fucking.”

“Proud of you for resisting a seed joke.” “Thank you, I’m very strong,” I say.

“Such a strapping young man.” “You should be banned from sex for that. You should have to become a monk.”

I address the bar manager’s crisis first, even though I specifically told everyone at work not to bother me while I was—and I used these exact words—up to my nips in Brie.

If I could get away with saying this to people, I would add this phrase to my venacular

If my French were better, this is the part where I would go, Are we about to make out?

Kit’s laughing, I’m laughing, the air between us is fresh and light. We feel like friends. My sex competition idea is fixing us. I am, I decide, a genius.

Which is how we leave Les Halles with two pounds of cherries, a hunk of fromage, and directions to meet a sexy fishmonger named Paloma at sunset.

life goals right there

“You could be ordering anything. Look at the tuna—leek, fir, marigold! Is it a dish? Is it a community garden? Is it a candle? Do words mean things? Can’t wait to find out.”

“Well,” I say. “Just as I thought. Rocks.”

This has always been the difference between us. I look at a mountain and think, What a nice view. Kit looks at a mountain and thinks, I wonder if I could climb that.

“Man, I hate when the girls get all Edwardian.” I pretend to sigh, and Kit laughs.

“Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there’s a … resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world. Like when Legolas and Gimli walk into Minas Tirith and immediately start criticizing the landscaping.”

SOOOO VALID OF A STATMENT KIT

“All the greatest action movies of the eighties, the most grab-ass, baby-oiled, hyper-masculine movies ever made, don’t work without this underlying sense of everyone’s dick being hard the whole time.