paris

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.

"Morning," he says with a small smile.

"Morning," I say.

I note his drapey linen shirt and pale blue trousers. Then I look down at myself and try not to swear out loud.

"We're wearing—" he begins.

"—the same outfit," I conclude. "You know what? I'm gonna take the stairs."

"Mark your name off, love, so I know I've not left anyone behind," Orla says as she thrusts a clipboard at me.

I draw a check next to Flowerday, Theodora, take my seat in the last row, and pull out my phone. Sloane's texted, We just got new pages and Lincoln has twice as many lines now. He's definitely fucking the director. How's Kit?

Last night, she called between shoots and demanded to hear everything. The Kit subject is tricky with my sisters: They've known him as long as they can remember, and he's, well, Kit. Even after everything, I know they only stopped speaking to him and his siblings out of loyalty to me, and we were the only exception to Sloane's opinion that love is a waste of time. She might actually be enjoying this.

oh, you know, I reply, he's kit. Then, have you considered also fucking the director?

Not every problem can be solved by sleeping with it, Sloane replies.

not with that attitude.

I see Kit coming and move to the window seat before he has the chance to magnanimously offer it to me.

"I was going to tell you to take the window," Kit says as he sits down, "since it's your first time in Paris."

I force myself to smile.

"How do you know I haven't been to Paris since the last time we saw each other?"

"I don't," Kit concedes. "Have you?"

I fold my arms. "No. But I could have."

Orla takes us to our local guide by way of a scenic tour. We careen around the wide, lawless circle of the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-élysées to the gardens that fringe the Louvre, then over the silver-green Seine and around the island that holds Notre-Dame. It's a nearly cloudless August morning, and the sun glitters on the golden dome of Les Invalides. Fabrizio tells us how Napoleon divided Paris into arrondissements, this pretty grid of uniform limestone and slate. Everything is peach and lilac and cream, except for the gardens, which are riotously green.

When we arrive at the park across from Le Bon Marché, a woman is waiting at the carousel in the chic, all-black ensemble of someone who'd prefer to be anywhere but next to a children's amusement ride. Her lavender hair is cut in a severe chin-length bob, and she's petite, but her boots add a few inches. She eyes Fabrizio's puppet on a stick with long-suffering distaste and gamely accepts an air-kiss from him, even when one of Pinocchio's dangling feet kicks her smooth, stern forehead.

"Group, this is Maxine!" Fabrizio says. "She is a pastry chef here in Paris! She leads our Parisian pastry tour since last year. Knows the best patisseries, orders the best for us. Maxine, will you introduce yourself?"

"I'm Maxine," Maxine says with finality, and Kit stifles a laugh.

"Okay!" Fabrizio claps his hands. "Andiamo!"

Maxine leads us out of the park and to a small corner shop with a simple black sign declaring HUGO & VICTOR.

"This," Maxine says, in brusque English, "is where we begin. My favorite patisserie in Paris."

The patisserie is so small that we can only squeeze inside in shifts, but it smells heavenly. One section is all house-made chocolates in boxes made to look like Victor Hugo hardcovers. Another is dedicated to artisanal marshmallows. Glass cases hold pavlova clouds topped with split figs, bubbles of sunshine-yellow yuzu cheesecake, and precise triangles of tarts—grapefruit, lime, apple and caramel, tonka bean, passionfruit. Maxine orders a mountain of pastries, and at the sidewalk tables outside, she floats around telling us about everything.

"These are called financiers," she says of a small loaf-shaped almond cake, explaining that some say their name comes from their ability to hold shape for hours in the pockets of Parisian stockbrokers. "And this—could you—" She gestures.

And Kit, who's closest, takes the financier and swaps her a tube-shaped pastry with a golden crust and a kiss of icing sugar at its peak. It kind of looks like a dick.

"Merci," she says. "This is my favorite brioche in Paris. Will you?"

At her polite cue, Kit carefully cuts the brioche open to reveal bouncy, round air bubbles and a pocket of raspberry compote.

"Parfait, mon cher," she says to him. He smiles, pleased to have pleased her. Teacher's pet. "The typical brioche you buy from the store is a loaf, yes? This is brioche mousseline. It is traditionally baked in a cylinder mold or even a tin can, and it has twice as much butter as most brioche. A rich man's brioche. You will taste—"

Someone at another table interrupts, calling out a question for Maxine. Kit murmurs something to her in French, and when she nods, Kit trots off.

"I can answer that for you!"

Maxine's pretty lips quirk into a smile as she describes the process of brioche dough, and I squint from her to Kit, suspicious.

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. He just happened to be born with the face of a fancy little god-prince and a way of approaching every interaction with total, sincere interest. 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.

We carry on through the 6th and 7th Arrondissements, visiting patisseries and boulangeries and chocolateries. My thumbs almost can't keep up with the notes on my phone. At a narrow chocolate shop lined with antique cigarette machines, Maxine hands out paper cones of creamy one-hundred-percent dark chocolate. At a sleek patisserie owned by a famed French chef, we try glass-smooth cakes shaped like mangoes and hazelnuts and, my favorite, a complex olive oil cake in the shape of a green olive.

I try to focus on flavors, but it's hard to ignore how Kit travels the streets of Paris like he was born in them. 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. He buys groceries here. He picks up loaves of bread and makes plans for lunch. While the rest of us are gawking at the Eiffel Tower, he's ducking back into a patisserie to chat with the head chef like an old friend. If he ever stands on these cobbles and thinks of his life with me, he probably considers it quaint. Small, cute, a bit embarrassing.

Our penultimate stop is a macaron shop, and we sit in the square around Fontaine Saint-Sulpice passing them around, tasting flavors so much bigger than their delicate packages: banana and acai, lychee with raspberry and rose, yuzu with wasabi and candied grapefruit.

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—when someone says, "You look really familiar."

It's one of the two twentysomething girls I noticed when I first boarded the bus, the shorter one with shiny black hair. I'm gathering that she and her friend are some kind of travel influencers.

"I don't think we've met before," I tell her, praying I'm not already two for two on getting clocked as a Flowerday.

"No, I think we have," she says. "You were making drinks at the Coachella after-party at the Saguaro, right? The bar that was, like, in a big van?"

I blink a few times, amazed. I was hired for that party. One thing about a freelance mobile bar in a Volkswagen Microbus is, influencers love it. I'd hoped one of them would book me for another job, but no one seemed to remember me.

"You were there?"

"Oh my God, yes!" She turns to her friend, a beachy blonde in a micro-cropped sweater-vest and cargo pants. "Ko! I was right!"

The blonde pauses her scroll through her phone to regard me for one blank second over her skinny sunglasses.

"You made the best Bloody Mary I've ever had in my life," she says in complete monotone. "I would literally kill for you."

"That's Dakota," the first girl says. "I'm Montana."

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

"I'm Theo."

"Theo! You're so cool!" Montana says. "Who's your brand partner? Do they rent that van out?"

"Oh, just me," I say. "The bus is mine. I got it secondhand and converted it."

"Wow, slay," she says. "Listen, I go to a lot of parties with a lot of open bars, and you are literally so talented. That blood orange margarita, with the peppers? You should be doing, like, Bella Hadid's birthday or something. Why aren't you in LA?"

"Thank you, wow," I say, meaning it. "But it's honestly just a side hustle. Weddings, parties, catering on weekends. I have a regular job at a restaurant in Palm Springs."

"I was telling Dakota—"

Over Montana's shoulder, I notice Kit talking to Fabrizio. His voice separates from the chatter and drifts to my ears.

"—that's what I think, at least," he says.

"You know so much about the French pastry," Fabrizio says. "How is this?"

"I'm a patissier at a hotel in the First Arrondissement," Kit says. "I actually graduated from école Desjardins with Maxine."

"Oh! You know our Maxine!"

"I know her very well. I told her she should apply to be a local guide when the spot opened up. She might not show it, but she loves doing this."

"Finally, I can thank someone for sending Maxine to us!" Fabrizio says. "She is a goddess."

"Isn't she?" I can hear the smile in his voice. The way he used to sound when he talked about me.

The morning shifts into focus. I never needed to worry about Maxine falling in love with Kit. Maxine and Kit are already in love. 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—

"—so anyway, now he's on house arrest," Montana is saying.

I snap back to our conversation.

"Sorry, who?"

"The guy who did Bella Hadid's last birthday," Montana says. "So there's an opening, if you want me to ask my friend who knows her friend?"

"That's—really generous!" I hedge, unsure how to tell Montana that I prefer to avoid the celebrity circuit without telling her why. "But—what do you do? Travel content, right?"

As we walk to our last stop, Montana tells me about getting paid in sponsorships to eat crab legs in Bali and make out with scuba instructors on international waters. 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.

Afternoon light spreads like caramel down Boulevard Saint-Germain, burnishing the flowers that drip from silk café canopies. At the head of the group, Kit and Maxine glide in step under a brown sugar sun. He plucks down a blossom and tucks it into the side pocket of her bag, a secret to find later. This is part of peacefully coexisting with your ex, I guess: watching them move on with someone else. Watching them find love in the city that was too much for you.

I may not be in love in Paris, but I'm not backstory either. I can tell the difference between an Austrian Riesling and an Australian Riesling by smell alone. I bought a bus that didn't run and turned it into a bar. I make the best Bloody Mary in California, excluding one guy with an ankle monitor.

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

Dinner is a traditional seven-course affair in a basement brasserie near the Eiffel Tower, secreted away from tourists. The whole thing is leather and velvet and aged wood, dusty chandelier light glinting off oil paintings and yellowed photographs in baroque frames, heavy air simmering with butter and marjoram. The kind of place where Tony Bourdain would camp out with a bottle of Burgundy and a pack of Reds. I wasn't sure I'd ever eat again after all that pastry, but suddenly I'm starving.

In the back, tables have been pushed into two long fifteen-tops for us. Maxine has joined us at Fabrizio's insistence, and by some cruel whim of the pastry gods, she's squeezed in next to me. Kit takes a chair several seats down and across and is immediately enveloped into conversation with Ginger Calum.

When your parents are director-producers and your godfather is Russell Crowe, it's rare to meet someone who intimidates you. Maxine, though—Maxine, with her orchid-and-moss perfume and permanently unimpressed expression—is intimidating. We're sitting hip to hip, but she doesn't seem aware of me at all. She's scrutinizing her hair in the back of her soup spoon.

Thankfully, I grew up with Sloane Flowerday. My little sister was twelve the first time she sent script notes so harsh the screenwriter left LA altogether. I can handle an ice queen with an expensive manicure.

"Hi," I say to Maxine. "I'm Theo."

"Yes, I know," she says, turning to me at last. Her tone gives nothing away.

"Right. I heard you and Kit went to pastry school together."

"We did."

"That's so cool," I say. "How did you meet?"

"Introduction to Dacquoise."

She's giving me nothing. I prop my elbow on the table and lean my chin against my fist.

"Dacquoise . . . the one with the layers of hazelnut and almond meringue, right?"

Maxine lifts her chin. Packed in like this, her face is inches from mine. 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.

"You were paying attention."

"You're a great teacher."

She takes a long look at me, like I've earned a proper assessment. Then she nods once, as if satisfied, and says, "Now I understand."

Before I can ask what, the waiters arrive with our first course, and the tables explode with oohs of delighted surprise. A silver tray appears between us: burgundy snails the size of plums, overflowing with garlicky green parsley butter. Two more waiters bring the wine pairing, and I clock the label—champagne, Ulysse Collin, Les Maillons. A low whistle escapes my lips.

"Hm?" Maxine inquires as she picks up a snail with a tiny set of tongs.

"That's a three-hundred-fifty-dollar starter wine."

Course after course spills from the kitchen, followed always by new wines. After we've loosened the snails from their shells and sopped up the buttery persillade, out come platters of roasted sea bream with beurre blanc sauce and charred lemons. A straw-colored Muscadet splashes into my glass, followed by a Chateauneuf-du-Pape to go with the coq au vin.

At the end of the table, Kit is the prince of dinner. He laughs as Ginger Calum does his best impression of the bream's googly eyes and makes sure the Swedes try the brandy-glazed carrots. He switches effortlessly to French for the waitress and leans in smiling when she whispers her answer in his ear. He loosens the buttons of his shirt. Fabrizio starts affectionately addressing him as "Professore" and begs him to explain the physics of a domed mousse we tasted earlier. He pulls out a pocket sketch pad to draw a diagram.

I drain my glass and turn to Maxine.

"Your accent—is it Canadian?"

"Montreal, originally," she says. "I grew up speaking English and French."

"Oh, like Kit. The bilingual part, not the Canadian part."

"Yes." She moves her glass in a little circle to swirl her wine. "Although I don't miss the continent as much as Kit does."

That I doubt. It doesn't seem like Kit cares if the continent lives or dies.

"What do you think of the wine?"

"I have been known to enjoy a Chateauneuf-du-Pape moment," she says primly.

"Oh, me too, especially with a gigot d'agneau."

"Mmm. There's something in it that brings out the herbs in a stew, but I can't remember what the French call it."

"The garrigue," I say. "The flavor you get when you grow grapes in the southern part of the Rh?ne Valley, because of all the sage and lavender and rosemary down there."

"That's the one." She considers me, politely ignoring the champignon that bounces off my plate and under the table. "Where did you learn these things?"

I could flex, if I wanted. Tell her I spent the last ten years working all the way up from busser to assistant sommelier at Timo, the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Palm Springs. But there's a new ember of curiosity in her eyes, and she's the kind of woman who'll only take your hand after you've laid it open before her.

So I say, "Kit probably mentioned my family to you, right?"

Her lashes twitch. "I know of them."

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

"And did you know when I was seventeen, I almost killed my dad's Best Picture campaign because the cops raided one of my house parties and TMZ reported it?"

"I was in Canada at the time," Maxine says neutrally. "But I'm sure it's a good story."

I smile.

I tell her how Este and Sloane both started getting steady work around the time I started high school, which meant my parents were usually either on their own sets or my sisters'. Kit was in New York, and I was alone in a house with a pool and eight bedrooms and a wine cellar. So, I threw myself a fifteenth birthday party.

Nobody cared much about Theo Flowerday, but everyone likes the kid from the famous family with the unchaperoned party mansion. I'd wanted to feel special. Like I had something to offer of my own. So, I made myself the house-party king of Palm Valley Prep, a magician with my parents' credit card and a fake ID. My big trick? I could make any drink on demand.

It didn't matter that I spent hours studying cocktail books instead of SAT prep, or that when I missed my family, I'd go to the cellar and look up every varietal and appellation from wherever they were shooting. What mattered was, you had to be at my parties, and my parties had to have me.

"So, yeah," I finish. "Plus, I work at a restaurant and handle the wine there."

Maxine delicately places her empty glass on the tablecloth, concealing my gravy stain.

"I was alone a lot too, at that age."

Over the next course of salad and a dewy Sancerre, Maxine casually explains that her parents died when she was fifteen and left her and her older sister to raise three younger brothers in a secluded mansion on the edge of Montreal.

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. She talks about learning to bake the family recipes—both the Japanese and the French Canadian ones—for the boys, who in turn forced her to go to pastry school. I don't tell her I'm sorry. I do ask follow-up questions about the geese, which seems to make her like me more.

I wave over more wine, and we keep talking. About Maxine's favorite things to bake (fussy breads), about my thoughts as a first-time visitor to Paris (great wine, big fan of the eating-croissants-outdoors industrial complex), about Fabrizio (yes, he's always like that). The cheese course arrives with a nice-ass Pomerol, and it's this wine that finally pushes me over the edge into drunk. I stumble through an explanation of Bordeaux's vintage report until Maxine says, "It's important to me that you know you sound like an ass," and I laugh so hard that wine almost comes out my nose.

As I'm wiping my chin, I find Kit watching us like he's not sure what we're up to and even less sure he wants to find out.

Maxine raises her glass to him. "Theo and I are friends now!"

Kit replies, "That's what I'm worried about!"

But the look on his face isn't displeasure. It's something a lot more pinkish and complicated.

I give him a real smile, the first he's gotten from me since before we boarded that plane four years ago. He touches his palm to his heart, then slips away again.

This is my opening to ask Maxine about Kit. What his new friends are like, what he likes to do around the city, if he's still in search of the perfect cinnamon roll. Instead, I concentrate on my cheese plate.

I'm finishing the Pont l'évêque when Maxine says, "Oh God, he's flirting with the waiter."

Across the table, Kit is talking to the waiter refilling his water. The smile on his lips is soft, intrigued, like he's just noticed the waiter is hot and is curious how he missed it. He murmurs something, and the waiter misses Kit's glass entirely and has to run off for a towel.

"I don't know," I say. "That's just how Kit is."

"Please." Maxine rolls her eyes. She doesn't seem jealous, more like fondly exasperated. "Do you know how deliberately you have to flirt to get your water refilled in Paris?"

Except, Kit never knew what he was doing. He was deliberate in a lot of things, but never, what? Seduction?

"He does that a lot?"

"You mean Kit?" Maxine arches a brow. "The Sex God of école Desjardins?"

I nearly spit out my wine again. "The—what?"

"Oh, only the most annoying thing about him," she says. "He had everyone he wanted. It was like a rite of passage in our year to have one glorious night with Kit and then be in love with him for a week. I know three different men who thought they were straight until him."

"That's," I reply, "something."

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.

Of the thoughts I don't have about Kit, the memory of what he's like in bed is one I keep inside a steel-reinforced vault. I was born a dumb, hot, horny creature who will abandon all reason if I think too long about the kind of sex we used to have, so I don't. Not an inch of skin, not a flash of pink tongue, not one hot, slutty breath on the side of my neck.

I'm not about to start now. If Kit has become some kind of minor sex celebrity, that's none of my business.

The waiter returns to mop up the spill, but Kit takes the towel and insists on doing it himself, which only flusters the waiter more. He backs into a waitress and gets a citron tart smashed into his shirt before beating another retreat.

"Get off your knees, man," Maxine says in a low voice. "Have some dignity."

I make sure to laugh at the right time.

After Fabrizio has pressed kisses to the cheeks of every waiter, we gather on the street. Maxine steps away to pull a silver cigarette case from her purse and light up.

"Theo."

Kit is waiting for me, half lit by the orange streetlight glow.

Longer hair suits him. It curls at his collar and kisses the highest points of his cheeks with a languid grace all his own. I wonder hopefully if it irritates him when he's baking, if he has to tie it back to get it out of his face.

He holds out a small paper shopping bag he's been carrying since the afternoon.

"It seemed like this one was your favorite," he says. "I thought you should have one to yourself, in case you're not in Paris again for a while."

Inside is a shiny olive oil cake, packed tidily in a ribbon-tied box.

"Did I get the right one?" he asks, and I realize I've been staring into the bag in stunned silence for five full seconds.

"Yeah, you did," I say. "How did you know?"

He glances away, up at a flower box in a window across the street.

"Lucky guess."

As if waiting for her cue, Maxine appears and links her arm through his, and now I understand. She probably takes note of what guests like on her tours, and she slipped him a hint. This is a couple gift. A conciliatory treat. An olive-cake olive branch.

"Thank you," I say to them, resolving not to feel pitied. "I heard the Calums and some of the others are going out for another drink, are you guys coming?"

Maxine takes a drag and exhales a cloud of smoke that smells like tobacco and lotus and high-end weed. She smokes hand-rolled herbal spliffs. Jesus, she's so fucking chic. I can't even remember to charge my vape.

"Darling, I just worked a full day," she says. "I'm putting myself to bed."

"Are you walking back to the flat?" Kit asks her. The flat, not your flat.

"It's a nice night for it, don't you think?"

"I'll walk you," he announces, like I'm stupid. Obviously he's going home with her to their apartment, so they can put each other to bed. We can be adults about it. "Maybe tomorrow night, Theo?"

"Sure," I agree. I put on my most suggestive grin. "Have a nice walk!"

Kit gives me a weird look, but they turn and leave together.

"Theo!" shouts Blond Calum as I watch them disappear arm in arm around the corner. "You with us?"

"Nah," I decide in the moment. "I'm gonna go see the Tower."

I set off on my own, across the street and through the wide green lawn at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, past amorous couples and teenagers with cheap champagne and guys selling light-up rubber balls that bounce thirty feet in the air. It's five minutes to eleven, which means five minutes until the lights on the Tower sparkle.

It's funny. I've seen this tower on so many screens, I assumed it'd be underwhelming in real life. None of those establishing wide shots capture how complicated it is up close, all the flourishes and arches and curlicues and starbursts of intersecting ironwork. It's not so bad being romanced by something familiar.

Sloane answers my video call on the second ring.

"Oh, hello," she drawls in a Katharine Hepburn voice. "I do hope you received my latest telegram."

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

"The director thinks I should try more of a Transatlantic accent. I've been practicing."

"By God, I think you've got it."

"Yes, I believe I do," she agrees. "How's Paris?"

"Well, Kit and his hot girlfriend gave me a cake. Also I drank a lot of wine and now I might have to pee in a bush under the Eiffel Tower."

Sloane drops the accent and sighs, "Oh, Theo."

"I know," I say. I flip the camera to show her my view. "But look, it's sparkling."

I briefly consider staying in my room the next morning.

I have a few concerns, based on my track record. I'm concerned I might get pickpocketed because I'm not paying attention on the metro and wind up hopelessly lost with no way to find my way back. Maybe all the beautiful, feminine Parisian women might glare at me on the street, and not in a sexy way. I could discover I was right four years ago when I believed I couldn't handle a city like this, that I belong in my familiar valley and the closest I should ever get to the wide, curious world is the label on a bottle.

And then I think of how many things I'll never taste or smell, and I put on my boots.

I hike up to Sacré-C?ur to see its glistening white scallops and sit on the steps where John Wick died, then climb back down to gawk at the Palais Garnier. I ramble the old stone paths along the banks of the Seine, poking around secret corners and watching day drinkers on floating wine bars. Everything is different here, in small details I never thought of as changeable before, but I find the city easier to navigate than expected, and I don't even embarrass myself when I order coffee and a croissant.

I'm beginning to suspect that a flirtatious smile and a genuine love of food and drink might get me anywhere.

The tour meets back up for lunch on a gourmet sightseeing cruise on the Seine, and I talk to Fabrizio for an hour about spaghetti Westerns while licking caviar off a spoon. We're served an Irouleguy Blanc so carefully sculpted, I write down built like Swayze in 1989 in my notes. I'm in such a good mood, I don't care when my eyes meet Kit's across the dining room. I don't even think about his pity cake or new relationship. In fact, I decide I'd be more concerned if Kit wasn't dating anyone. He's so good at it, it would be a waste for him to stay single forever, like Meryl Streep quitting movies.

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.

For the evening, we have tickets for the Moulin Rouge dinner cabaret, so I change into the nicest outfit I packed, a sleeveless black linen jumpsuit that plunges down my chest in a deep V. I turn in the mirror, pleased with the clean, subtle lines of my chest. I look good, strong, androgynous. Like someone who's not afraid of this city and never has been.

My luck runs out under a glittering chandelier. Inside the theater, the space arches in lush, carpeted tiers with crisp white linens and lamps with opulent silk shades on endless tables. We've been divided into tables of six and eight, and as Fabrizio hands us off to our ma?tre d', I realize who I'm seated with.

"Hello again," Kit says.

I bite the inside of my cheek. "Hi."

He does clean up nicely. Or, he's always clean, always neatly groomed and preternaturally fresh-smelling, but he knows how to make himself look like art. A cream linen shirt with a Cuban collar and delicate accents of embroidered flowers, tapered trousers cinched at his narrow waist, some of his hair twisted back into—did he braid it? Did he sit in his little room and lovingly braid his hair like he used to braid his sister's?

To add insult to injury, dinner comes with one bottle of champagne for every two people, and we have to share.

Across the table, Blond Calum eyes his champagne. "What, no absinthe? We don't get to meet the green fairy?"

"I reckon Kylie Minogue was booked tonight," Ginger Calum says.

Kit and I let out identical, simultaneous laughs. Both Calums look at us with eyebrows raised.

"Got that one, did ya?" Ginger Calum says. "Most Americans I've met don't even know who Kylie Minogue is."

"Heathens," Blond Calum adds.

"We're—" Kit says. "I'm a massive Moulin Rouge fan. It was my favorite movie growing up."

I've been trying not to think about it, Kit at thirteen, obsessed with a high-camp, high-saturation tragedy about forbidden love and dying of consumption. He's always been so completely himself.

"Once," I say, "in the eighth grade, he made me watch it four times in one night."

"I didn't make you," Kit teases, and then he flinches, like he doesn't know if this is allowed. His voice softens as he adds, "You were the one who wanted to learn every word of ‘Elephant Love Medley.'"

"And you were a full-grown adult when you convinced me to do it with you at someone else's karaoke birthday."

"Crikey," Ginger Calum says. "That'll kill the party."

"Oh, tanked it," I say.

"Very poorly reviewed," Kit agrees, beginning to smile.

"We pulled it out, though, with—"

"‘Can't Stop Loving You,'" we finish at the same time.

Our eyes meet, and I feel my mouth slipping into a smile. God, we got some mileage out of that song. So many nights in smoky bars or house parties, the two of us laughing into squawky microphones over an instrumental track. I haven't been able to think of it in years, but strangely, it doesn't hurt the same right now.

"Phil Collins," Blond Calum says with a sage nod. "Good lad."

"Good lad," I agree.

When the lights go down and the curtain rises on the luminous heart-shaped stage, I remind myself not to get sappy. I don't watch Kit's reactions from the corner of my eye. I choose the loveliest dancer on stage, and I focus only on her. It helps.

But it doesn't prepare me for the way Kit catches my elbow as we stand for the final bow. I find him gazing at me, golden in the chandelier glow.

"Do you still want to make up for last night?" he says under the cheers of the audience.

"What?"

"When I couldn't go out with you," he says. "Do you want to have that drink now? My favorite bar is around the corner, if you want to see it."

It's the fault of nostalgia, of my surprisingly successful morning, of blurry memories of Ewan McGregor's earnest belting and Kit spinning me under a disco ball, that I hear myself say, "Yeah, why not?"

We head off from the Moulin Rouge's red windmill, down the wide Boulevard de Clichy, past sex shop after topless bar after sex shop. Girls grasp their heaving bosoms in portraits over shop fronts full of mannequins in lacy red chemises. Flashing displays advertise vibrators in every imaginable shape and size, and some I've never even thought to imagine.

"I hope that's where we're going," I say, pointing at a three-story emporium, ominously emblazoned with the name SEXODROME in neon red letters. I'm nervous and searching for jokes. "I've always wanted to go to"—I drop my voice to the guttural register of monster truck announcer—"THE SEXODROME."

Unable to resist a bit, Kit replies, "You need a Parisian mailing address to get into THE SEXODROME."

"Canceling THE SEXODROME for discriminatory business practices."

He laughs and takes a left at a violet-painted club called Pussy's, down a sloping side street with ivy-covered apartments and fenced private gardens. At a bright red door beside a window promising pints for four euros, he stops.

"This is it."

Kit's favorite bar is the width of my room at the hostel.

"Are we gonna fit in there?"

Kit just smiles and pushes inside.

My love of cramped dives is extensive and well-documented, but I don't see anything unique about this one. Standard-issue scuffed bar top and sagging liquor shelves, the usual worn barstools. Maybe Kit has cultivated a sentimental attachment to absinthe drippers. It's too loud to hear each other, so he has to lean in and speak right into my ear.

"I'll get you a drink." His breath hits my neck, tangling in my hair. "Still the same?"

I do want my usual whiskey ginger, but I don't want him to think he can use the same old map to navigate me.

"I'll have a boulevardier, actually," I say. Kit pulls away, blinking. "Are there tables in the back?"

"Ah, yes, should be," he says. "Go through the doors at the end of the hall."

I squeeze past the bar and down a crowded little hallway, where an antique wardrobe stands against the back wall, its doors carved with scrolls of leaves. These can't be the doors Kit meant, but they're the only ones here. At the risk of looking like I'm raiding coat check, I grab both handles and pull.

Oh.

The back of the wardrobe has been cut out, revealing a hidden room decorated like a hotel suite Oscar Wilde would have done opium in. Violets and palms fan out on the peeling wallpaper behind red-shaded sconces. Two men drink cognac on armchairs draped with dustcloths. Beside them, a group of women gossip atop nightstands piled with cushions, coupe glasses glinting on a battered travel trunk. A couple toasts champagne in a sawed-open claw-foot tub. And at the center of it all is a huge antique bed.

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.

The only open seat is a corner of the bed, and when I sit, my ass plummets into the downy mattress. Kit finds me wriggling out of the abyss, elbowing cushions to pull myself upright.

"Oh, you got the bed," he says, setting the drinks down on a nearby stool. "I've never gotten to sit here before."

"I should warn you, it's not very supportive—"

Too late. Kit sits, and the mattress collapses under his weight, dumping him backward and sideways until we're piled on top of each other.

Except for the collision on the bus and our cease-fire handshake, Kit and I haven't touched. Now, he's everywhere. All of his body covers all of mine at once, his body heat and the scent of lavender surrounding me. His knees crash against my knees, his hips pushing mine deeper into the bed, and the only way out is for him to twist around and plant his hand on my other side, bracketing me in his arms. He's so close, I can almost make out the threads of the flowers on his shirt.

"Ah," he grunts, eyes dark and unfocused. "Hi. Sorry."

He exhales a short puff of air that ripples the hair around his face. An evil part of my brain tells me to tuck it behind his ear.

"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 laugh comes out as a hoarse bark, and Kit finally pushes up and away from me. For good measure, I grab a pillow and shove it between us. We both reach for our drinks.

"Corpse Reviver?" I ask, watching the liquid disappear between his lips.

He swallows. "Necromancer."

"So, the same thing, but with more absinthe," I conclude, pleased that his drink order hasn't changed much. My boulevardier swishes across my tongue, perfectly bitter.

Kit watches me over his glass, lashes lowered, almost smiling and almost not. It's a look he'd get when he was building a recipe around one ingredient, like he was rotating it in his mind and imagining it as part of a whole. He's seeing me in a scene from his life in Paris and deciding whether I complement the flavors.

Immediately, intensely, I don't want to let him reach a conclusion. Instead I say the first disruptive thing that comes to mind.

"So, how did you break your nose?"

He blinks. "Sorry?"

"Your nose. You said you broke it a couple years ago. How did it happen?"

"Oh." He lowers his glass. "On a water taxi in Venice."

I have feelings about two parts of his response: the part that means he's already had his first time in Italy without me, and the part where he was on a water taxi, which is objectively funny. It's easy to choose which to focus on.

"Let me guess," I say. "The boat passed under a window and you were struck by a falling wheel of Parmesan."

Kit laughs. "I wish."

"Turf dispute with a gondolier."

"No."

"What, then?"

"I hooked up with a water taxi driver while I was staging at a restaurant in Venice for a few weeks. He was distracted while driving and overestimated the height of a bridge."

"Oh my God. Please tell me the distraction was the hooking up."

Kit's eyes sparkle. "It was my birthday."

"Incredible. Wow. So glad I asked."

"What about you? Any broken bones?"

"No, but check this out."

I hold out my right hand, palm up, showing off the thin ridge of a scar from thumb to wrist. "Longboarding accident. Heard an ice cream truck and hit a curb. Stitches and everything."

"Longboarding? I thought you stopped skating when we were sixteen."

"That was until I got rid of the Soobie," I say. My old silver Subaru hatchback, may she rest in peace.

"No!" Kit gasps, genuinely aggrieved. "The Soobie? When?"

"A few years ago. Traded it for a Volkswagen bus."

"Now that I can see," Kit says. I flip my hand over, and his eyes land on the tattoo on my forearm. "That's new too."

"Oh, yeah." Neither of us had tattoos when we broke up, but I'm so used to mine now, I forget I haven't always had them. The one on my right arm is a kitchen knife, spanning from elbow to wrist. "I got it year before last. It's—"

"The knife from Halloween, right?" Kit guesses, with the deadpan delivery of someone forced to sit through the movie with me every October. He's the first one to ever get it right on the first try.

"Everybody assumes it's a chef's knife because I work at a restaurant. Like, what if I just love cinema?" I point to his left wrist, where a tiny whisk is inked in fine black lines. "Is that your first?"

"Third, actually," he says. "A bunch of us from my pastry school year got them together when we finished."

"Cute. I have three too." I pull up my left sleeve to show him the saguaro on my bicep. "This one was my first, for my twenty-fourth birthday."

We both know that my twenty-fourth was a month after we broke up, so he can probably guess how this one happened. Late night, empty apartment, twenty-four-hour tattoo shop with a flash sheet of cactuses in the window.

Kit looks at me with something like sympathy, then pulls up his own sleeve on the opposite arm.

"I got my first in the same spot, kind of."

The tattoo on the outside of his upper arm is a woman's hand holding three violets. He doesn't explain, and I don't need him to. Kit is the middle child of three. His mom was named Violette.

"Oh, Kit," I say. I have to stop myself from reaching out to touch it. "I love it."

"I think she'd like it," he says with quiet satisfaction. He tugs his sleeve down. "Where's your third one?

"Oh, uh." Abrupt pivot. "I'd have to take off my pants to show you."

"Oh."

"Yeah," I say. A thought solidifies behind his eyes. "It's not an ass tattoo."

"I didn't think it was an ass tattoo."

"Really?"

"Okay, I thought it might be an ass tattoo."

I roll my eyes. "Come on, it's on my thigh. Where's your other one?"

"Under my shirt."

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

"Hmm." I take another sip. I don't think about his body. "This is like the scene in Jaws where they compare scars."

"Does that make me Quint or Hooper?"

"Don't be ridiculous, I'm clearly the deranged shark man. You're the fancy research boy."

"Well," Kit says, raising his glass, "I'll drink to your leg."

"I'll drink to your leg," I quote back.

Is this—Kit and me, sitting on a bed, clinking glasses—how peacefully coexisting exes should feel?

It took so long to stop wanting him in my life. That feels like such an important, hard-won thing, and I don't know how to protect it from this moment. But I also don't know anyone else in the world who could have had those last ten minutes of conversation with me.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey," Kit says back.

"Bonsoir, kiddies," says a third voice, and we look up to see Maxine, dressed in black silk and holding a chambord martini.

"Maxine!" Kit says, standing so fast to greet her that I almost tip over again. He kisses her on each cheek, then turns to me, smiling wide. "I told Maxine where we were going and she wanted to come say hi."

"That's awesome," I say, trying to mean it. "Hi, Maxine."

Maxine kisses my cheek and sits down between us. Kit mutters something to her in French, and I catch a few of the words I know from growing up around his family—thank you and the best. She does an inscrutable hand gesture and hooks her ankle around his.

I like Maxine. I do. But now I'm wondering if the point of this whole outing was to remind me that Kit is with someone else now.

"The bartender is hot," Maxine declares matter-of-factly. "Did you see how hot the bartender is?"

"Kit got our drinks," I say.

"They're hot," Kit confirms. "Very hot."

Something twinges in my gut, a memory gone sour.

When Kit and I were together, our favorite bi-for-bi pastime was pointing out hot people to each other. It was silly and fun, but it meant something to me. It made me feel close to him, like all my incomprehensible, hidden feelings and wants were totally clear from his specific point of view.

Maybe the problem is that he can have the same thing with Maxine, someone who's a woman in all the ways I'm not. Kit likes boys, and he always liked my most boyish qualities, but every now and then, a worry crept in. When he kissed his flat-chested best friend with bitten-down nails, did he think of someone with plush curves and shiny hair, someone who touches with only the tips of her manicured fingers and leaves a lipstick print in the exact same spot on her glass with every sip? Someone who could be his girl? Someone like Maxine?

I look down at my own glass, covered in smudgy, oily fingerprints.

"I need to see this hot bartender for myself," I announce, suddenly in need of a break.

Back in the front room, the bartender is as hot as promised. Sharp jaw, broody eyebrows, androgynous. They're wearing a half-buttoned shirt and pleated gray trousers, and their hair gives the impression of a classic men's cut growing wild. 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.

"Whiskey ginger," I half yell when they lean in, thankful they serve enough tourists to know the English.

I let my eyes drift, scanning for a distraction. Then the door opens, and in she floats: the dancer from Moulin Rouge.

Her hair is down, and she's swapped her costume for a simple cotton dress, but it's her. Her face is a dewy, freshly scrubbed pink, red stain lingering on her lips. I turn my body sideways to open space at the bar, and she goes right to it.

"Hi," I say, before remembering what country I'm in. "Parlez-vous anglais?"

She looks me up and down, then smiles and says, "Enough." Which answers more than one question.

"I'm Theo."

She takes my hand, brushes a kiss against my cheek. "Estelle."

I buy Estelle a drink—she wants a white wine, and she touches my arm when I suggest the one I know to be the best in the bar—and we talk. I tell her that I was at her show earlier and how great she was, and she explains that she lives across the city but likes to come here after work. When I tell her that's lucky for me, she sneaks a finger through my belt loop.

Once I've finished my drink and the hot bartender has poured Estelle a second glass, I consider bringing her through the wardrobe and introducing her to Kit and Maxine. It could be a double date. She and Kit could talk art. I could slip my hand around her waist while Kit presses a kiss to Maxine's throat, and then I could watch Kit and Maxine go home together again.

Instead, I push Estelle's hair behind her ear and ask if she wants to leave.

She laughs as we climb up the hill to the hostel. I hold her hand above her head for a pirouette, watching her dress whip around her thighs, then reel her in and kiss her. She tastes like cigarettes and Muscadet, smells like hairspray and setting powder.

I take my phone out to let Kit know I'm not coming back, then remember I still have his number blocked.

My thumb hovers over the blue letters of Unblock this Caller.

Not much point to it anymore, is there?

left with someone i met at the bar. good night! I hit send.

In my room, my shirt lands on the floor, Estelle's balconette bra on the nightstand. I tell her she's beautiful, because she is, and then I tell her to lie back for me. I like the way she settles herself on the pillows, how everything she does is graceful. I like how her hair falls in her eyes.

I walk her out to her cab after, kiss her good night.

Usually sex helps me sleep, but tonight I'm awake for another hour. I can hear my own heart, and there's a cadence to its beating, a steadily repeating one-two-three-four.

It sounds unsettlingly like Theo-and-Kit.

"Have a good night?"

I gasp, nearly fumbling my croissant. 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.

"What are you doing here?"

"This is my room?" he says. "We've been over this, Theo, we're on the same tour."

I roll my eyes. Someone's in a mood. "No, I mean why aren't you at home with Maxine?"

"Why would I be with Maxine?"

"Because she's your girlfriend."

"What?" he says so loudly that a passing housekeeper shushes him. He lowers his voice. "You think— Theo. Maxine is not my girlfriend."

They—

No. What about last night? What about the flower in her bag? Why is he wearing his sincere face? How can he have his sincere face on at a time like this?

"But . . . you live together."

"No, she's plant-sitting for me while I'm on this trip."

"You went home with her after dinner."

"I walked her home because it was late," he insists. "I don't think of her like that, Theo, she's my best friend."

"Yeah, so was I."

The words are out of my mouth before I realize what I'm saying, and we both wince. Kit looks like he'd have preferred a punch in the face.

Before I can recover, a rumpled person in an unbuttoned shirt and gray trousers appears in Kit's doorway. I watch, dumbstruck, as they bid Kit a cheerful farewell in French. Then they slap his ass and stroll off toward the elevator.

I stare at Kit. Kit stares at the ceiling.

"Was that—?"

"The bartender, yes. Like I said. Nothing between Maxine and me." He turns for the stairs. "I need a coffee."

He leaves me there, alone with my croissant and the realization that I've made an absolute rollicking ass of myself.

If Maxine isn't his girlfriend, then—then he gave me a cake out of genuine kindness, and he invited me out because he wanted to show me his favorite bar, and Maxine really did want to see me again, and I acted like a rude little freak for no reason when I ditched them. I was supposed to be showing Kit how much I've grown without him, and instead I got jealous of the first person he smiled at and decided she must be sleeping with him. Maxine probably only sleeps with low-level royalty.

I wasn't like this before we were together. 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.

Maybe I can't do peacefully coexisting exes. Maybe it only works when we're friends.

I can try, I think. We're adults. I can set my anger aside and try to be his friend.