bordeaux

I dropped out of college two months into my first semester.

It was supposed to be fun, going to college with Kit—and the Kit part was fun. UC Santa Barbara had a good art history program for him, and their swim team had scouted me, and I missed him. I'd tried so hard to get over him, but I missed him like tea misses honey, boring without him.

It had been easier than I expected to have him back. I'd anticipated the gut punch of our first reunion, how New York had made him taller and surer and even more sparkly, but then he had just been Kit. As much a part of me as the rest of me.

Lectures were boring, and I kept forgetting exams, but I could stick it out as long as I got to keep swimming. The pool was the one place I was really, truly great, so great that my coaches threw around words like college record and Olympic trials. Then I wrecked my shoulder at invitationals and the doctors benched me for good, so I didn't see the point anymore. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving; I just cleared out my dorm and silently moved back into my parents' house in the Valley. That was the closest Kit and I ever came to a real, adult fight, when he found out I'd made the decision without him.

(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.)

All to say: Higher education didn't work for me. Wine education, though. I was fucking mint at that.

It began with aggressively befriending the chef sommelier at Timo, a mystifying sixtysomething man with a collection of leather dusters and a psychosexual obsession with Chablis. I was bar manager then, but I pestered him into putting me in charge of the cellar map and inviting me to spit in buckets at his after-hours blind tastings. Then there were flash cards and wine-encyclopedia audiobooks and almost setting myself on fire practicing decanting, and it turns out I'm great at learning things I actually want to know.

Now, I know what it means to stand here on the Pomerol plateau, on the right bank of the Gironde estuary. I know about its pockets of rare blue clay, and that when my boots crunch through the crumbly marl, a million little merlot babies drink from the dense earth beneath, ripening navy and opulently sweet so fast they'll never lose their newborn zing. We follow Fabrizio down a tree-canopied road through the most fuck-off magnificent morsel of southwestern France, grounds sprawling in green and green-gold and copper, orderly rows of vines in one direction and fringes of ancient trees in another. The whole sky wants to climb in when I open my mouth. Tasting notes: clay, plums, the sea.

I catch Kit craning his neck, admiring the sun through the leaves overhead. He's wearing washed-out linen. His mouth is soft and happy, parted with wonder.

A frisson of yes-no-yes courses through me.

Kit has always encountered the world with a pure, wholehearted eagerness to be amazed. A cool rock, a dog in a park, a song in a shopping mall, the rolling grounds of an eighteenth-century chateau. My first instinct, the thing I learned before I could find France on a map, is to love how Kit loves.

Then there's the miserable ordeal of everything else.

But after that comes the second yes: I'm going to try to be his friend.

I fall into step beside him and ask, "What's that tree?"

His jaw drops when he sees me, which is honestly funny. Like a dumb baby in a Renaissance painting.

"I—I think it's a Norway maple."

"Really?"

"Best guess. I thought it was a field maple at first, but the leaves have points."

It's a skill he picked up from a childhood running around the French countryside and his mom's greenhouse. Anytime I saw an interesting flower or a funny-shaped cactus, I could text Kit a photo and have it identified in ten minutes or less. 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.

The path ends at a massive chateau with a limestone facade and dark mansard roofs, elegant but unpretentious. Somewhere in LA, a location scout is crying because they shot a wistful French period romance without knowing about it. Ten-foot stone walls separate it from the gardens, and in their opening stands a white-haired man in a chambray shirt and olive trousers. His straw sun hat manages to look jaunty despite also looking like he's sat on it a bunch of times.

"Amici," Fabrizio says, "this is Gérard! His family owns this estate for generations. Today, we learn how wine is made in Bordeaux!"

Gérard, who has an accent like a cognac-drunk fiddle suite, leads us through the arching entrance of the chateau. 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. Here, a dozen or so wooden worktables are arranged on the packed dirt, bowls of flour and dough set out on each one.

Another man awaits us there. From the way Gérard saunters up to him (and from what I saw of that painting, though it's hard to tell with his pants on), this must be his partner.

"Before our tour, we have une petite surprise for you," says Gérard. "Baguettes! My husband will teach you how to make baguettes, and then we will tour the grapes and taste the wines. Et à la fin, we will have lunch in the garden, and you will eat your baguettes." He leans in and stage-whispers, "And if you cannot make the baguette, you must leave France. It is the law."

He winks outrageously and leaves us with his husband, who's draped in a menagerie of floaty earth tones.

"Bonjour!" Baguette Husband says.

"Bonjour!" everyone calls back.

Baguette Husband demonstrates how to form the provided dough into three small baguettes, explaining that they'll be rested and baked for us during our tour. Everyone divides up, two people to each numbered table. Maybe if I had sat with Fabrizio that first day I'd be sharing his table instead of Stig, but as it is, Kit and I are the only two left.

"Ah, together?" Baguette Husband coos at us.

"No," Kit says with a readiness that's almost insulting.

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.

We flour our table in silence, and I riffle uselessly through my brain for something to say. Everyone else is laughing and chatting with their table partner, flicking flour at each other or trying to recall the instructions, while Kit and I are pointedly not having a cute time.

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.

I also don't know how the hell this lump of gluten is supposed to move through three-dimensional space to become a baguette. The dough and I are in a fight. I fold one edge toward the center, then seal it down with the heel of my hand, then turn the dough around and do it again, and then—fold it? How? Save me, Baguette Husband.

I peek over to cheat off Kit's work and discover, with no small amount of horror, that he's already finessing his last baguette. His hands move like a magic trick, precise and swift and certain.

He was always a gifted baker, but he's gotten staggeringly good at this. It's like the dough wants to be touched by him. It gives under the heel of his hand, swells affectionately back into his palm, relaxes again at the gentlest pressure. The muscles in his forearms flex with the plain, steady purpose of doing the exact thing they were developed to do, which is when I realize how much they've developed, how they taper down to the same elegant wrists, the dusting of flour there, the little whisk inked just under the knob of bone—

"Theo," Kit says, "you're overworking it."

I look at my dough. Half of it is flattened under my fist.

"Oops."

"It's okay," he says, "you can still fix it, you just have to—"

His hands move toward mine and stop, hovering an inch above. A speck of flour floats down from his palm and settles on my skin with the weight of one of Gérard's antique sofas.

"Like, um, like this."

His left hand does a funny sort of circular motion, and I catch the hint and mirror it with my right. My misshapen lump of dough starts to resolve into a loose ball.

"That's good, just like that," he says. When I glance up, he meets my eyes and gives me a small, encouraging smile. "Don't stop."

"I bet you say that to all the boys," I say, which is an overcompensation, but Kit gives a bright, permissive laugh.

"Keep going."

I stare down at the dough, at our hands. He expertly guides me through each step without ever touching me, his fingers so close I can feel their warmth. It helps. He moves, I move. He gives simple and patient directions, I follow them. His thumb almost brushes mine, I classify the twinge in my chest as acid reflux.

Together, we roll out three lopsided baguettes.

"Not perfect," I observe, "but not bad."

"Better than the Calums," Kit says in a low voice. At the next table, Ginger Calum's nose is smeared with flour, and Blond Calum has made the courageous choice to eat a hunk of raw dough.

"How do all of theirs look like penises?"

Kit puts his hands on his hips. "Sometimes baking is about what's in your heart."

Gérard returns, accompanied by a scruffy gray terrier, and at last we amble into the vines. When I realized we'd be touring the vineyard in the first week of August, this was the part I couldn't wait for: Bordeaux in veraison, when the vines are as colorful and alive as they'll ever be.

We visit the merlot first, the main grape of Pomerol's eponymous wine, which we're allowed to taste off the vine even though it'll be weeks until they develop their biggest flavors of cherry jam and strawberry and, because it's been a hot year, lush black fruits. Next, Cabernet Franc in a riot of lavender and fuchsia and the juicy green of a cut-open lime. We hear about warm, dry summers and mild harvest seasons, the life-giving clay and the salty kiss of the Atlantic, how it all comes together to yield grapes with a lot of personality. 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.

Beside me, Kit is smiling. If there's one other person in the world who'd get lost in this vineyard teaching plants to love French torch songs, it's Kit. The yes-no-yes happens again, like that unripe grape bursting sour across my tongue.

"Ah, here is one of our farmhands!" Gérard says. "Florian!"

A pair of work boots tromps down a row of vines, and a young man bursts onto the path.

My God, what a young man he is. Square-jawed and faintly stubbled, with sweet brown eyes and dark curls falling across his sweaty golden forehead. He's carrying a crate of grapes on one muscular shoulder, straining the fabric of his dusty white shirt. Suspenders hang around his hips, apparently shrugged off to allow full range of motion for cinematic deadlifting.

"Salut!" Florian says, wiping his face with a gloved hand. Soil streaks his cheek. "Welcome!"

On pure reflex, my head snaps toward Kit. His does the same, and our eyes meet in the raised-eyebrow look of unspoken agreement we used to share in moments like this: He's hot! We turn away just as fast.

Gérard invites Florian to join us, and Florian tells us how his parents met working on this vineyard and let him race around the vines when he was small. He lives in an apartment in Bordeaux proper now, but he happily makes the drive five days a week to tenderly coax vines up their trellises.

Kit leans into my ear and says, "I don't think we're the only ones who noticed the Florian situation."

Dakota and Montana are exchanging conspiratorial whispers, and at least three different brides are visibly contemplating leaving their new husbands. One of the Calums asks if he knows any good bars in Bordeaux. Even the old Swedish lady starts cleaning his cheek with her scarf.

"Do you think he's always part of the tour?" I ask Kit. "Like, when they know guests are coming, they have him come in to provide an immersive hot farmhand experience?"

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

In the wings of the chateau, Gérard takes us through the vat room and the aging cellars to a narrow, stone-walled tasting room. Then, one by one, Gérard pours us each a glass of their signature Pomerol.

I give mine a baby sniff, swirl it around the glass and whiff it again, slower this time. Damn, it's intense. Black cherry, crushed pepper, oak, and something else. Something lower, farther back on the nose. What is that? Is it—

"Worn saddle," I think out loud, and Gérard pauses, his bottle suspended over Kit's glass. Behind him, Florian perks up.

"Yes, I smell it too with this vintage," Gérard chuffs. "Good nose!"

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 chateau as Florian's full-time suspenders wrangler. When I lift the wine to examine its color, I see Kit through the glass, funhouse-y and frowning into his wine.

"You got all of that?"

He looks vaguely hurt, as if his nose has betrayed him by not providing the richest possible sensory experience. Instead of answering, I take a sip, and he watches me pull the wine over my palate, turn it over in my mouth, settle its weight on my tongue. His eyes follow my throat as I swallow.

"Hm. Yeah, definitely black cherry on the front." I lick the back of my teeth. "Dried, though. And some plum jam."

Kit says gently, under his breath, "C'est quoi, ce bordel?"

The other wine is a younger Pomerol, a round, fruity summer wine that Gérard promises will go perfectly with lunch. This time, Florian pours.

"Hello," Florian says as he fills my glass, his voice close and warm and earthy.

"Thanks so much," I say, smiling at him.

It happens so quickly, it's hard to say if it happens at all. Florian finishes my pour, and then he flutters his eyelashes in what could be interpreted as a flirtatious wink. He moves on to Kit, who says something in French that makes him laugh, and he winks at Kit too. Before I even have time to summon indignance, we're whisked out to lunch.

Blankets and quilts spill across the sun-soaked lawn, each with a numbered serving board and our lopsided baguettes. Two more farmhands emerge with platters of meat and cheese and fruit. Kit and I have been assigned to a blanket so small, I have to wonder if Baguette Husband was involved.

We sit one careful inch apart and pile our board with little pots of seedy fig jam, orange crescents of melon, slices of Jambon de Bayonne, and hunks of soft, stinky cheese. Baguette Husband returns to laugh at the dog as she runs happy laps and sniffs everyone's ham.

Kit procures a tiny jar of cloudy honey from his bag, and I can't resist the urge to roll my eyes.

"Did you really bring your own special honey from home?"

"The restaurant where I bake sources our honey from a lavender farm," Kit says. "It's ruined me for all other honey."

"Oh, sure, we can't have you eating just any old honey."

As lunch goes on, Florian stays busy refilling everyone's wine. When he kneels beside us, I catch a hint of his scent on the midday breeze. Soil and sweat and a bit of thyme.

"Do you like the wine?" he asks me.

"Oh, it's gorgeous," I answer honestly. Then I think about him winking at Kit. I look into his eyes and sink to the bottom of my voice to add, "Structured. Muscular, even. I can tell you work hard."

Florian stops pouring a second too late. When he leaves, Kit is staring.

I tear a piece of bread off and smear it with cheese. "What?"

"You know what. You were flirting with Florian."

"So?" I shrug. Kit's face is unreadable. "Are you jealous?"

"No," Kit says instantly. "I mean—yes, because he was flirting with me at the tasting. I thought he and I had something special."

"Sorry, he's mine now. Look at this pour." I gesture extravagantly at my half-full glass. "Maybe if I show a little leg he'll give me the whole bottle."

Kit looks down at one of my legs sticking out of my shorts, blinks slowly, then drains his glass.

"Pardon, Florian!"

He says something that must be French for Can you top me off? Florian's eyebrows say Kit has found a way to make it sound just as suggestive as it does in English.

This time, when Florian holds the bottle over Kit's glass, Kit loosens one of his shoulders and tilts his head to the side. He slips Florian a languid smile, letting the sunlight gild the ridges of his jaw and throat.

Oh. That's someone I haven't met before. The Sex God of école Desjardins.

When Florian leaves, Kit's glass holds more than mine. He turns that smile toward me, eyes bright with laughter and something else I can't name.

"Well." I take a swig that's somewhat bigger than necessary. "We'll see who wins the next round."

"In the meantime," Kit says, passing me a honey-soaked piece of baguette, "taste this."

I take it in the name of friendship, doubtful his boutique honey can possibly be as good as he says. Kit is the kind of person always pursuing the most of everything—the highest thread count, the ripest peach—but sometimes he gets lost in aesthetics. I'm not expecting much when it hits my tongue, especially not with my mouth still coated in sugars from the wine.

But then the flavor blooms.

"Damn."

"Right?" Kit says, positively beaming.

"It's actually fucked up how good that is," I say. "The lavender with the floral notes from the wine, the violet and peony."

Kit sags onto his elbows, gratified, and regards me from under heavy eyelids. "When did you become so good at wine tasting?"

Unlike with Maxine, I have no problem flexing for Kit.

"I'm the assistant sommelier at Timo now."

His eyes widen. "You are? Since when?"

"Unofficially, like, three years? But I didn't fully switch over from bar manager until last year." I pause, then decide to just say it. "After I took the certification exam."

"You—" He sits up. "Theo, you passed the sommelier exam?"

"Yeah," I say. It's technically a lie, but just barely. My exam is scheduled for the day after I get home, and I know I've learned enough to pass now. There's no way I'll fail a fourth time. And I'm not going to walk it back, not with Kit marveling at me like this.

"That exam is insanely hard, isn't it?" Kit says. "The somm at my restaurant said he threw up his first time."

"It's not that bad," I say, as if I didn't serve the table counterclockwise instead of clockwise the first time I failed, or forget the thirteenth German wine region the second time. (See you in hell, Saale-Unstrut.) I drain my glass. "I have some other stuff going on, but sommelier is my day job now. Or, night job, I guess."

I wave over another refill and ask Florian how many crates of grapes he can carry at once. Kit wonders out loud how far Florian could carry him. When we compare glasses, they're exactly the same level of two-thirds full.

It goes on like that for the rest of lunch, Kit and Florian and me. We mop up the fig jam and honey and melon drippings with our bread, ask for refills until we've lost count, make Florian laugh and blush, turn our mouths purple. I smile at Kit. Kit smiles at me.

And every time we hold our glasses together, every time the lip of his glass almost touches the lip of mine, I try not to think, This is the closest we'll ever come to kissing again.

We spend the afternoon at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in the city of Bordeaux, where I float from room to room, not bothering with most of the plaques.

It's not that I don't care about art. I love art. But prestige art is my parents' shop talk, and eventually, you get bored of it. While my dad was directing contemplative period pieces and my mom was adapting Lady Chatterley's Lover, I was watching every Friday the 13th sequel. My favorite is the one where Jason is cryogenically frozen for 445 years and goes to space. The day I said that to my dad was probably one of his top ten parental heartbreaks.

The art I like best is unpretentious, highly saturated, and fully committed to what it's doing even when it's bad. Especially when it's bad. I like B movies and slashers and eighties action flicks, anything with a synth music cue and a cocaine-fueled screenplay. I don't want to analyze the creator's intentions. Subtlety is for wine; I want to feel what the art wants me to feel and feel it big. Kit got so upset that I refused to read The Lord of the Rings when we were kids, but the movies had all the feelings in them.

For me, it's enough to look at a painting and think, I like it. Or, This makes me feel sad. Or, This reminds me of myself. Or, That's a fucked-up looking dog.

When I enter the next room, the first thing I notice is the huge painting of a woman kneeling on crumbling stones. She's wearing a dark blue coat with a gold sash over a billowing white dress, and her arms are uplifted, her palms out-turned. The look on her face is sad but vengeful. Her tits are mostly out.

The second thing I notice is Kit, transfixed before her, a fountain pen and a little sketchbook in his hands.

I used to always catch Kit like this when I'd visit him at work, back when we lived together after he finished his degree. His front desk job at the Palm Springs Art Museum wasn't stimulating enough for him, so he'd take extra-long breaks to sketch the exhibits.

Why did I find that so charming? He was just posing, wasn't he? Too cultured and deep to sit at his desk on his phone like a simple receptionist.

I imagine asking him about this painting. The tragic look he'd give me for not knowing the painter, for not having my eyes turned to the greatest heights of artistic expression. I imagine him explaining it like I'm a toddler, making references that only someone with an art history degree would get. That's what the version of Kit in my head would do, the Kit who's an ex I don't talk to anymore. Pretentious, erudite Kit, always too highbrow for me.

A piece of hair falls in his eyes, and he pushes it back with the eraser of his pencil.

That motion, the way the rubber skids across his brow. I'd forgotten, but I remember it now. Kit-the-ex never does that in my head. But Kit-in-real-life did when I knew him, and this Kit does too.

As far as I know, there are two ways to get over someone: Surrender to the anger that's already there, or invent something to get angry about. Sometimes it was always wrong, and the only thing to do is stop believing it was good to love them in spite of it. But sometimes they were good to you. Sometimes you go looking for kindling and find that green leaves won't burn, that the garden was watered too well. Sometimes you have to rearrange the truth into something you won't miss.

And sometimes, when enough time goes by, it gets hard to remember which one you did.

After, on the museum steps, Fabrizio unspools a list of local recommendations: La Cité Du Vin, the ancient crypt under Basilique Saint-Seurin, the bronze horses of the Monument aux Girondins. A few of us decide that the medieval Saint-Pierre district sounds most interesting.

"Mind if I come too?" Kit asks me.

I'm post-tipsy, relaxed enough that it feels silly for him to ask permission. I roll my eyes and wave him to my side. This feels good, like the picnic shook something loose. Florian gave us a gift: mutual assurance that we're only interested in fucking other people.

We head past Cathédrale Saint-André and onto a wide, tram-lined street, where Kit asks, "How's Sloane?"

It's strange to hear her name from his mouth, but of course he would ask. Sloane's the most important person in my life, and he's known her since she was five, which is two whole years longer than the rest of the world has known her.

"She's good. Busy, but that's how she likes it. I'm sure you've, you know. Seen her around."

"Yeah, I have," Kit says, and I wonder, not for the first time, how many times he's seen my sisters' faces on a screen and thought of me. "She was incredible in that thing with Colin Farrell last year. How long did it take her to get her Irish accent that good?"

"Like a week. I swear she's not human. She just started working on this new one, like a turn-of-the-century, high-society New York accent."

"What's that one for?"

"Oh, you'd be into it. It's an adaptation of The Age of Innocence, but like, weird. Very A24. The script is nuts. Her agent says it'll be her first Oscar nomination."

"That's incredible!" Kit says sincerely. "Is she playing May or the countess?"

"Winona Ryder." I haven't read the book, but I've seen the Scorsese film from 1993. "She really wanted to be Michelle Pfeiffer, but the director said she comes off too friendly."

"Sloane? Sloane who wanted her audition monologue to be Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? When she was ten? That Sloane?"

"Curse of the former child star," I sigh. "What about Cora? How's she?"

Kit laughs under his breath, and I smile. Cora's still Cora, then.

"Last year she stole Dad's credit card and charged seventeen hundred dollars at Dave & Buster's," he says. "This year she unionized the staff of her Dutch Bros."

"Hey, that's really cool!"

"She doesn't work there."

We talk about my youngest sister, Este, who just wrapped a five-episode run on a big-budget HBO show, and his older brother, Ollie, who's now in marketing at a publishing house in New York.

Near an intersection, the road branches diagonally, like whatever lies this way is too old to abide a grid system. It starts as a secret alley, then opens wide, dark cobblestones giving way to the big, smooth, pinkish tiles of the Place du Palais.

Tourists filter through arched antique doors with paper shopping bags and ribbon-tied candy boxes. Cafés overflow onto smoke-tinged terraces. A delivery man zips between Kit and me on a butter-yellow bicycle, fresh loaves of bread bouncing in its basket. It's like its own tucked-away village, forgotten by time and walled off by rows of lavender and peach buildings that sparkle in the evening sun. At the edge of the square stands a massive, medieval gate topped with a truly fantastical number of pointy turrets. We go under it and down another storybook street, toward one of the historic churches Fabrizio mentioned, église Saint-Pierre.

We're almost there when I glance down a side street and notice the letters over a bright blue restaurant entrance: A CANTINA COMPTOIR CORSE. Corse like Corsica, like the island.

"Kit," I say, stopping. He stops too, even though the rest of the group is leaving us behind. "I have to go try something. For work."

Kit simply nods and follows. It's not until after we've pushed deep into the noisy pub, grabbed the last two leather stools at the bar, translated the menu, and put in an order that he finally raises a question.

"You said this was about work," Kit says, "but you didn't order any wine."

I cross my ankles under the bar. My boot grazes the cuff of his pants.

"You know how I told you I traded the Soobie for a Volkswagen bus?"

I tell him about my bus, gutted and built out by hand into a bar I can drive around the Valley, how I design custom cocktails for weddings and bachelorette parties and influencers that come in for Coachella. Then I tell him about next month's monster wedding gig: 350 guests, eight bespoke recipes, and a bride who emails me five times a day expecting prompt responses to questions like Did I mention one of the drinks must be served in these custom tiki mugs that look like my pet schnauzer? and Can you make a drink that tastes like the vacation to Corsica where we fell in love?

I leave out one major detail: I'm barely bringing in enough money to make back what I spend, and before I got hired by Schnauzer Bride, I was close to packing it in.

"Anyway," I finish, "I need to find out what Corsican flavors are like so I can design a cocktail that reflects ‘the complexity of our love,' which, you know. He's a hedge fund manager named Glenn, but sure."

"Theo, this is . . . wow." Kit stares at my phone, which I've opened to the Instagram page for my bus, a grid of cocktail money shots and my hands holding drinks out of the service window I installed. His eyes are wide and sparkling when he looks up, and a wave of warmth sweeps through me. The only thing bigger than Kit's capacity for wonder is how it feels to be at the center of it. "You built that yourself?"

Obviously, it was harder than I'm making it sound. Almost a year of sweating and swearing, watching hours of tutorials online. I got on a first-name basis with my local Home Depot sales associates. I ripped out and replaced the floors, put in a new engine, scraped the rust off and repainted, rigged tanks and pipes and sinks, pasted wallpaper and sanded the countertops and salvaged coolers from work.

Some people dye their hair when they go through a breakup. I got a bus.

Kit doesn't need to know it was a breakup bus, that I was nail gunning my heartbreak out while he was licking crème anglaise off some pastry classmate's abs. Or that I might never have been fired up enough to take the risk if he hadn't said what he did on that plane.

"I mean, it did help that I was briefly hooking up with a carpenter." I see the food coming and pull my elbows off the bar. "But what about you? What's the pastry game like?"

Over cuttlefish in a garlicky red-wine tomato sauce and cheesecake with orange zest (fiadone, I add to my notes), Kit describes working at a gourmet restaurant inside a five-star Parisian hotel. Early mornings, precise milligrams of ingredients, arranging ribbons of white chocolate with long tweezers like a brain surgeon.

"Honestly, the worst part is the tweezers," Kit says. "I'm so much better with my hands. When I can get my fingers in, there's pressure, you know? You can tell from touch if something will give, or if it's too soft, or— Oh, here." He passes me a napkin, for the bit of drink that has dribbled from the corner of my mouth.

When I'm finished taking notes—acid, tomato, citrus, island mist, maybe a spritz?—we skip the church and head straight to Place du Parlement in the heart of the district. We stand at the fountain under wrought iron balconets, where Kit points out the sculpted stone faces keeping vigil on the corners of each building.

"They're called mascarons," he says, "not to be confused with macarons," which fills me with another swell of affection.

I can't believe how much better I feel than I did last night. Can it really be only twenty-four hours since I was at the Moulin Rouge, trying to crush the bloom of nostalgia? Does time move differently in France?

France. I'm in France. Four years later and we're in Bourdeaux together after all.

"Man," I say. "We're really here. Look at us."

"Look at you," Kit says. "A sommelier and a bar owner."

"And you're a gourmet pastry chef," I counter, feeling my grin spread. "Crazy the difference four years can make."

"Yeah. A lot changed." He returns my smile. A couple of children dart past, racing around the fountain. "Not some things, but . . . still, a lot."

"I guess it's kind of good that we broke up, so we could become these cool fucking people."

Kit's smile stays fixed, but something changes in his eyes.

"Yeah."

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.

At a table outside a bar on the edge of the square sits a man with a head of dark curls. He's wearing a T-shirt and tan trousers instead of farmhand regalia, but he really looks like—

"Is that Florian?"

Kit follows my line of sight, and his mouth pops open in surprise. "I—I think it is."

"Is he with—?"

One of the two other men at the table lets out a cackle that unmistakably belongs to Blond Calum.

"Of all the people to get Florian out for a drink," Kit says, "my money was not on the Calums."

"Oh, mine was. Those two are trouble. The ginger told me he can never return to Belgium for legal reasons."

Just then, Dakota and Montana appear on the terrace with matching flutes of pink champagne. Florian waves, and the Calums start pushing tables together so everyone can sit.

"Oh," Kit says, "this is interesting."

"It's like The Bachelor," I say, fully invested. "Which of those girls do you think wants the fantasy suite most?"

"How do you know it won't be one of the Calums?"

"Those men are terminally straight."

"Nobody's straight on a European vacation."

"Sounds like you're speaking from experience," I observe, picturing Kit picking up tourists at bars in Montmartre.

"Historic precedent. They switch everyone to bisexual at passport control."

"Damn, that's what the stamp's for? Could've skipped the line."

Kit laughs, rubbing a hand across his forehead in a kind of oh Theo gesture that makes the nerves in my fingertips buzz. "The real question is, which one is most likely to succeed?"

"The one with the dark hair—Montana—she's perkier, which gives her an edge, but Dakota's a wild card."

"The blonde?" Kit asks. "She looks bored."

"Some guys are into that. Should we start a pool?"

"I think—" Before Kit can reveal what he thinks, Fabrizio manifests on the terrace with a bottle of wine and a basket of frites. "Hold on. Game changer."

We watch as Fabrizio sits next to Florian and throws an arm over the back of his chair. He joins the conversation with a salacious grin, tosses a frite into his mouth, and then dips another in sauce and feeds it to Florian.

Kit outright gasps. "Oh my God."

"That's the game, folks."

"Fabrizio by a mile."

We both fall apart in laughter, mine shot through with relief. The tension is gone, and that easy current from lunch gushes in like water in the fountain. As long as we can keep finding our way back here, we'll be fine. We just need an endless supply of Florians.

Which gives me an idea.

"You know who else might have a chance?" I ask Kit.

"Who?"

"One of us." Kit's still half laughing, like he doesn't think I mean it. "I'm serious! He was flirting with both of us. We have a head start."

Kit shakes his head. "I don't know."

"Come on, I'll prove it."

"Theo, don't—"

He grabs a handful of my sleeve to stop me. I raise my eyebrows, and he lets it go, pauses, then smooths it back into place.

"Why not?"

"I—I just mean—" His olive face has taken on a faint tinge of mauve. "If it's going to be one of us, why not me?"

Oh. I recognize this approach. Back when we were friends, we used to occasionally compete for the same people. Occupational (bisexual) hazard.

"Is that a challenge, Fairfield?"

"Maybe," Kit says. "But then, if Fabrizio could pull Florian, maybe the true challenge would be Fabrizio. By the transitive property."

"Fabrizio's more available, though. We're always with him," I say. "With Florian, there's a finite window of opportunity. A Florian Fuck Window."

"Sure, but let's say one of us succeeds within the Florian Fuck Window," Kit counters. "The other could just do the same with someone else in the next city. It wouldn't be a meaningful victory."

"What are you suggesting? A tournament bracket?"

"I'm not suggesting anything," he says, though he doesn't look disinterested, "but if I was, I think it would be a matter of seducing a local in the greatest number of individual cities."

Huh. Now that's an idea.

I touch my chin with two fingers, thinking. It started as a bit, but now I'm seeing the potential benefits of a friendly-but-horny rivalry. I like us like this. If having sex with other people will keep things with Kit stable enough to enjoy my trip, and we both get an outlet for any leftover sexual friction, then why not?

"A body-count competition," I muse.

"You don't have to phrase it like we're murdering them, but yes, essentially."

"We do both already have one, from Paris . . ." The more I think about it, the better it sounds. In fact, the longer I look at Kit, the more I want to have sex with someone.

"Wait," Kit says. "You're being serious? You actually want to compete?"

"It sounds fun. I'm down. Are you?"

When I look into Kit's eyes, I can practically see the pleasure receptors in his brain crackling. He can't say no, not a hedonist like him.

"Define hookup. Does that include making out, or over the clothes, or—?"

"At least one person has to come," I say.

"Oh." Kit blinks. "That's easy, then."

"Is it?"

"What, is it not easy for you?"

"No, it's easy for me."

"I personally do it all the time."

"So do I," I say. "That's what makes it a competition. I'm like, the number one seed. Of fucking."

Kit touches his chin. "Proud of you for resisting a seed joke."

"Thank you, I'm very strong," I say. "So, what do you think? A little sex wager between friends?"

For a long moment, Kit doesn't say anything at all. He just looks at me, searching my face so intently that I feel his gaze like a touch.

Then, like he did on that cliff in Dover, he puts out his hand.

"Okay," he says. "Let's do it."

I grin. "Let's do it."

When I take his hand, it's smudged with ink from his sketchbook. His skin burns hot against my palm.

"One more thing, though," Kit says. His thumb presses into the back of my hand. "Is that star of Fatal Attraction Glenn Close?"

I turn to look, and Kit takes off toward the bar.