The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

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.

Even when we were together, I could see the vines of potential spiraling out of him, reaching for taller trellises in bigger fields. He gets everything he ever dreamed of, and I’m where I’ve always been, one step behind.

You have this—this nepotism chip on your shoulder, and you make your life harder on purpose just to prove to yourself that you’re not what you are. But you’re a Flowerday. You have options other people would fucking kill for. You’re just too proud to use them.”

Having spent my childhood traipsing naked through the French countryside and my adulthood either studying artistic nudes or living in Paris, nudity doesn’t faze me. I have, however, become an Edwardian gentleman for Theo and Theo only.

Maybe they didn’t really believe what I said then either. Maybe I just put a crust on top of everything, and this has broken it.

what happened after monaco?? if you’ve gotten your heart broken again i’ll kill all three of us.

Already, we’ve toured three separate astonishing churches and been whisked down Via dei Tribunali, where Fabrizio taught us the exacting legal requirements of Neapolitan pizza: that the dough must only be stretched by hand, the mandated temperature for fermentation, the clockwise spreading of crushed tomatoes, approved local sources for cheese. We’ve taken forks and knives to bloody red marinara and basil-flecked margherita with soupy middles, and we’ve stood at windows for pizza folded up with butcher paper, a portafoglio.

“It was not for me to protect her from my heart. It was only for me to let her see it and decide if she will keep it.”

I love ingredients because they have memories. Stories, histories, personalities. A peach has a memory of every finger that’s touched it. A vanilla bean cures for months.

I wonder if he’s spent his life the same way I have, finding small ways to look after the person who saved us when we were young. I hope he gets as much joy from it as I do.

That’s one of Theo’s natural gifts, the way beauty moves through them like stained glass. It illuminates them, and they transform it in kind.

I’d had the gift of being loved to the center of my soul twice in my life, and even if both of those people were gone, the love had been there. It was still there, in the shape it had made me into.

“Contextual sandwich?” “Yes,” I say. “Sometimes, a perfect sandwich is not just about the sandwich itself, but about the setting. The experience of eating the sandwich. Context can elevate a great sandwich to a spiritual experience.”

You’re always looking for reasons to love things, and when you do, it’s never halfway. I’ve always loved that about you.”

I miss them so badly already. But I’ve learned to love that ache.