saint-jean-de-luz

"Ah, finally!" Fabrizio sings when I board the bus late the next morning. "Our little conquistadore!"

Orla shoves the clipboard at me.

"Go on, we haven't got all day."

"Be kind to my Theodora," Fabrizio says. "It is not her fault. She is in love!"

"I'm not—"

"I am always so happy when my guests sample the local cuisine on their own," Fabrizio says, winking lavishly. "And when it becomes love! Orla, do you remember the German girl two summers ago, who tried to tell us to leave her in Barcelona with the sailor? Ah, they are married now!"

I push on down the aisle, accepting a round of applause from the Calums and envious but not unfriendly looks from Dakota and Montana. At my seat, Kit is against the window wearing a patterned terry button-down and very small matching shorts.

I heave my pack into the overhead, grab the nearest small item from the outermost pocket, and chuck it at him.

"Ow," Kit says as a jar of pomade hits him in the arm. He pulls out his headphones. "Good morning."

"Morning!"

I'm wearing my most shit-eating grin as I flop down next to him and Orla whisks us away from Bordeaux.

"So." Kit's tone is light and indecipherable. "How was Florian?"

"He was . . ." I hold a pause to build suspense. "Surprising."

"In what way?"

How to explain it? Kit and I may have set the terms of a sex competition yesterday, but we haven't yet laid out rules for talking about sex with each other. We're friends, though, and the last time we were friends, we told each other everything.

What happened with Florian was, we went back to his apartment to share another bottle from the chateau. Then he took me to his bedroom, showed me the contents of the top drawer of his dresser, and asked me if I would use it on him.

"Surprisingly well prepared," I say, thinking of the supple leather harness he buckled around my hips, the vial of oil he poured over my fingers. "I mean, I knew he had the knees for it, but I didn't think he had the range."

Kit's eyes widen incrementally. "You mean he let you—"

If anyone would know, it's Kit.

"That was all he wanted." A strange, small part of me almost wishes Kit could have seen how nicely my hand fit between the two dimples at the small of Florian's back. Kit is the only one who could truly appreciate how my technique has improved. "I guess you could say I hadn't pegged him for it."

Kit's expression of covetous wonder twists into a grimace.

"Not a pegging pun."

"He took it really well," I go on, all eyebrows. "Such a strapping young man."

"You should be banned from sex for that. You should have to become a monk."

"Score's two to one," I say, cheerfully ignoring his disdain. "Advantage me."

"I hope you're enjoying yourself," Kit says, taking out his book. "It won't last."

It's two hours to our next stop, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing commune on the southwestern coast of France near the Spanish border, so I decide to catch up on my most pressing notifications.

One, the family email chain. Two, a text from the bar manager at Timo. Three, an email from the Somm. Four, an email from Schnauzer Bride. Five, a text from Sloane. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and put the part of me that wants to ignore them all in a chokehold.

I address the bar manager's crisis first, even though I specifically told everyone at work not to bother me while I was—and I used these exact words—up to my nips in Brie. It shouldn't be that hard for the guy with my old job to read my notes, but I guess an assortment of random sticky notes in the back office isn't as intuitive for him as it was for me. I remind him that our small-batch-bitters supplier has to get free tiramisu once a month or he'll stop giving us a discount, and that those two barbacks can't be scheduled together because one fucked the other's girlfriend.

In the family email chain, Dad has sent a long-winded update from set in Tokyo, Mom is location scouting in the Texas Panhandle, Sloane is thinking about leaving a horse's head in her costar's bed, and Este is meeting an ambassador's son for dinner in the Maldives via chartered helicopter. I send back a short report about Paris and Bordeaux, leaving out Kit completely.

After is the Somm, asking if I've registered for a distributor portfolio tasting next month. Trade events are important for serious sommeliers, but I hate networking and being expected to look feminine, and I really hate listening to men in blazers and dark jeans jerk each other off about Burgundy. And I can't give up a weekend of bus bar sales to kiss ass in Scottsdale. I tell him I can't make it, already hearing his lecture, do I really want to make it in this business, et cetera and so on.

Schnauzer Bride is next, wanting to incorporate at least three but no more than five botanicals from her florist's samples into her menu. My endurance is fading, so I grind out a few cocktail pitches and lock my phone. Sloane can wait until my brain isn't so hot.

I press the cool glass of the screen to my cheek and breathe out slowly, soothed by the expanse of French countryside rolling past the window, the funny, skinny trees with puffs of leaves bursting from their tops like dandelions.

Sometimes it's embarrassing that this is peak performance for me, that I spent the past few years kicking my own ass to achieve twenty minutes of executive function and a fear my life will collapse if I breathe wrong. But most days, I'm proud of how far I've come. Everything up to age twenty-five was a series of small-to-medium fuckups, until I decided to get my shit together.

I got my shit together because I had to, because I didn't like myself or my life. But I also did it because every time I lost my keys or forgot a promise, I missed Kit.

Living with Kit was like living in a pixie nest. Every night, I'd find my phone charger relocated to my nightstand and my water bottle beside it, refilled at the precise temperature I liked. Dates circled themselves on the calendar. Fresh flowers appeared whenever the old ones wilted. And no matter how carelessly I unloaded the dishwasher, when I checked the back of the utensil drawer, the measuring spoons were always there.

I loved and resented how good he was at the parts of life I was worst at, and once he was gone, I let resentment win. I made my love into a power drill and built a life I could keep in order myself, because you can't miss something you don't need anymore.

But every so often, after an eight-hour shift and an all-night gig, I'll stumble home to a pile of dishes and think, Kit would take better care of me than this. And for a second, he'll be there. Putting the cereal bowls away, waiting up with a book, kissing the tension from my shoulders, picking up my slack.

"Theo?"

The real, present Kit is watching me, one headphone out, his book face down on his lap.

"You okay?"

I shake my head.

"Yeah! Yeah, just thinking," I say. "What, um, what are you listening to?"

"Oh"—Kit glances at his phone—"you'll laugh."

"Probably not."

He gets this tender look on his face, the way he used to when he'd look up at the very top of Mount San Jacinto from the valley floor.

"So, before the trip, I had this idea to make a list of composers who wrote music in each of the tour stops. Because I—" He pauses, searching for the words. This is new. He used to talk in long, breathless sentences until he chiseled down to his point, but now he sifts through his thoughts. "Everywhere we go, I want to experience it entirely. All the way out to its edges. I want to touch it, taste it, drink it, eat it, climb it, swim in it. You can hear a place by walking down the street or sitting next to the ocean or opening a window, but I think if you want to listen to it, it's in here. Like how bread can taste like the kitchen it's baked in. Or—"

"Or how wine can taste like the barrel."

He smiles.

"Yes. Yes, exactly. So, I'm listening to Ravel."

Without another word, he hands me a headphone. I put it to my ear, and he starts the track over.

I've never seen a movie set in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but I've seen sandcastles and dollhouses and ripe white peaches, so, close enough. The buildings cuddle together around narrow streets, some made of pink stone and others crisscrossed with bright red timber and matching shutters. Lazy morning sunlight drips from the pink-orange roofs to the promenade curving around a huge crescent-shaped beach, which Fabrizio says is simply called La Grande Plage. In the hazy blue distance, the Pyrenees rise toward endless sky.

We start our day at the village's central market. In winespeak, Les Halles has a robust, varied nose, with high intensity aromas of the sea—salt water, abalone shell, wet stones, seaweed, fatty fish. Notes of brined pork and smoked sausage, yeasty bread and burnt crust, fresh clover and geranium and bird of paradise, wild sage. Another elusive note slips in between, something juicy and sharp, like lemongrass or verbena.

That's the one I follow.

I weave around cheese cases and pans of steaming brioche, past an old woman ordering lamb from a mustached butcher, to a vibrant fruit stand. It reminds me of my go-to frutería back home, except there's a type of pear I've never even heard of, which is rare when you spend your spare time tasting wine with guys competing to name the obscurest berry. These fruits can teach me something. I pick up an apricot and press my nose to its skin.

"Bonjour!"

I startle up from the note I'm tapping into my phone (orangé de Provence: intense, sweet, tart) to see a shopgirl in an apron.

She's pretty the way Saint-Jean-de-Luz is pretty, breezy and sensuous, her brown face soft and relaxed. Her dark hair is in an informal knot at her nape, and the loose bits have the crispiness of sun-dried seawater. She's holding a speckled green-red pear and a paring knife, a slice balanced on the blade. She has an air of wife about her. Maybe not my wife, but certainly someone's.

"You want?" Fruit Wife says.

"Oui." I nod eagerly. "Wow, yes, please."

The petal-pink flesh of the pear melts on my tongue like butter with a kiss of cinnamon, and the woman watches me suck juice off my thumb. If my French were better, this is the part where I would go, Are we about to make out?

She points to a sign over the bin of pears.

DOYENNé DU COMICE.

Hiring a hot girl to feed fruit to customers is an excellent business model, because next thing I know, I'm being rung up for two pounds of cherries as Fruit Wife waves goodbye.

"Lining up number three already?" asks Kit, who has apparently witnessed the whole thing.

I shake my head. "I think I just got hustled."

"Understandable," Kit assesses with a nod. "She's lovely."

"What'd you buy?"

"Fromage de brebis," he says, holding up a chunk of wrapped sheep's milk cheese. "The guy at the stall was hot too, but I can't sleep with any more cheesemongers. Trying not to pigeonhole myself." I open my mouth, but Kit has a hand raised. "Theo."

"Don't use words that end in ‘hole,' then."

He huffs out his oh Theo laugh. I'd forgotten how nice it sounds.

"There's a sexy fishmonger," he says.

"Ooh, show me."

We loop the market, admiring glossy pastries and dishes of stuffed peppers, ribbing each other. Kit's laughing, I'm laughing, the air between us is fresh and light. We feel like friends. My sex competition idea is fixing us. I am, I decide, a genius.

At the back of the hall, the fish counter is as pungent and glistening as an oyster shell and as busy as the Grande Plage. Bins of ice brim with gleaming prawns, scallops in brick-red shells, deep ruby cuts of tuna, slender little silvery-pink fish and flat fish and fish with stripes. Customers line up three bodies deep and point at squids.

Behind the counter, a strong-nosed brunette in coveralls heaves fish onto the bar, wrapping and weighing and taking orders in a crisp, friendly voice. A man lobs a question at her; she punctuates her answer with the crunchy thump of her cleaver on the chopping block.

"That's her," Kit says unnecessarily.

When the crowd clears, the fishmonger cleans her hands and turns to us, addressing Kit in French. I understand just enough of Kit's response to know he's telling her I don't speak the language.

"Ah." The fishmonger switches effortlessly to English, confident but with a light, unplaceable accent. "Sorry, I didn't think you were American!"

"Thank you," I say, meaning it. "You're very good at your job."

"I've had this job since I was twelve. I very much hope I'm good at it by now." She grins, flashing a gap between her front teeth. "He says you're on a food and wine tour? What will you eat in Saint-Jean-de-Luz?"

"Lunch is at a restaurant in a hotel on the Grande Plage," I say. "Do you know it? It has a Michelin star."

"Ah, Le Brouillarta." She does a begrudging frown of approval, and I get the sense that nothing short of a fresh-caught fish roasted by a local grandmother would have satisfied her. "And where will you go after you leave here?"

We take her through the destinations ahead. Along the coast and over the Spanish border to San Sebastián, across Spain to Barcelona, back up to the southern coast of France and east until we hit Nice and Monaco. After that, it's Italy the rest of the way: Cinque Terre and Pisa on the northwest coast, inland to Florence, south through Tuscany to a villa in Chianti and on to Rome, further south to Naples, and a ferry to Palermo for the final stop. By the time we're done, she releases a French swear so colorful it surprises a laugh out of Kit.

"Lucky bastards!" she says, patting her stomach through her coveralls. "My mother was born in Barcelona. I'll tell you where to go." She goes on to describe in detail, with total confidence, the precise and mandatory experience we are to have in Barcelona. The only bar for vermouth, the only tapería for patatas bravas. "And then, if you like pastry—do you like pastry?"

"I do," Kit says.

"He's a pastry chef in Paris," I add.

Kit casts me a look, his eyes bright and curious. "And Theo is a sommelier."

Finally, we've impressed her. She leans over a bin of pearly anchovies, examining us with renewed interest, before concluding, "I like you."

I'm not easily thrown off my game, but something about her keen gray stare makes my face warm. Kit's elbow nudges mine.

"So few travelers respect food and drink the way they should!" she goes on. "Oh, you must see the port, where we buy our fish. I can show you after the market closes, if you want? My name is Paloma, by the way."

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

"I'm gonna be honest," I say. "I love a menu that's just a list of nouns."

Kit and I are sitting together in Le Brouillarta, soaking in the ocean breeze through the open window as I study the menu. Lobster cake. Bergamot, mint, cucumber, and citrus. Foie gras. Smoked eel, chanterelles.

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

The smile tugging at Kit's mouth makes something flare in me.

"You said the wine yesterday smelled like worn saddle, right?" he says.

"Honestly, it was more like assless chaps. I was being polite. Why?"

"Illuminating, is all." He doesn't begrudge me for it. We're the same way about food.

Kit and I have always shared a need to know what we're getting into. Kit takes leaps, once he's confident he can control how he'll land. I generally prefer the ground. But what's on the plate—what's in the glass, what melts into the palate, what plays nicely together in the pan—that's where we both like to be surprised.

It started with Del Taco.

We were ten, and I was sure an American fast food cultural education would help Kit fit in. That was the fall my sisters got their first gig together, so I was having all my dinners with Kit. One afternoon when his mom asked what we wanted, I said, "Miss Violette, can we get burritos?"

Frankly, Del Taco isn't even good. But I watched Kit across the back seat as he took that first bite and slipped into another dimension. One mediocre mouthful of refried beans and he was hooked on discovery. He had to know what other wild and astonishing shit was out there. We worked our way through every shape of french fry at every major fast-food chain, until Kit's mom told us we were frying our taste buds with American sodium and plonked a pot of coq au vin in front of us. Then it was my turn to be astonished.

While my sisters were making a divorce drama with Willem Dafoe, I was at Kit's house, discovering French cuisine. Kit's mom was a garden fairy, a kitchen witch, and everything she cooked was some great-great-grandmother's jealously guarded recipe. She introduced me to the five mother sauces, let me caramelize onions at her stove, and made what I still think of as the platonic ideal of b?uf bourguignon.

And so, Kit and I became curiosity gluttons together. Fifty percent of our friendship was sitting at tables going "ooh!" and shoving bites at each other. When we exhausted every cuisine in the Coachella Valley, we drove all over the state for roadside stands and chili festivals and beachside fish shacks. We'd take any risk, as long as it was something you ate or drank.

We were twenty-one when we first started daydreaming of a restaurant of our own, a small bistro with a simple, seasonal menu and new cocktails every week. We'd call it Fairflower. And from then on, everything we tasted had a bright, new tang of possibility.

I miss that flavor sometimes. I haven't been able to find it since.

"Do you remember the fancy-ass restaurant in LA?" I ask Kit. "The one we went to for your birthday?"

I know not to bring up our relationship now, but this was before, when I was still in what I thought was unrequited love. It was Kit's twenty-second birthday, and he wanted to try this restaurant he'd read about. God, we both wanted to like it so much more than we did.

I watch his face, waiting for the shadow I saw when I mentioned the breakup yesterday, but he brightens.

"Oh my God. The molecular gastronomy place."

"Now that was a nouns-only menu."

"It was less of a menu and more of a poem."

"All the portions were, like, microscopic."

"The octopus foam."

"Who thought of octopus foam?" I say, the same thing I said when it arrived at our table that night.

"Octopus should never be foam!" he says, the same reply he had then.

"The bill was three hundred dollars, and we were still so hungry after, we went to—"

"Original Tommy's, for chili cheese fries."

"Yes." I picture us in our nicest outfits, eating chili cheese fries out of the back hatch of my car. Hollywood, neon glow, Olivia Newton John on the parking-lot speakers, and a big, scary, brilliant secret in my heart.

I finish my tiny glass of room-temperature water, still smiling. Kit slides his over to me, and I finish that one too.

After lunch, we're set loose on the beach. Kit turns to me and asks, "What do you want to do?"

I'm mad at myself for leaving my swimsuit at the hostel, but I refuse to let that come between me and a place like this. I shade my eyes and scan the blue horizon, all the way to the rock formations rounding out the bay.

"I want to go see those rocks."

Kit nods. "Then let's go see those rocks."

He flags down a delivery guy for directions, and we leave the beach to climb uphill along a narrow, snaking road hidden among the trees. We go up and up and up, until we reach a little white chapel at the crest. From here, I can see everything from the green knees of the mountains to the horizon, and over a shambly wooden fence, the grass gives way to striations of gray rock cascading toward the water.

"Well," I say. "Just as I thought. Rocks."

Kit laughs and shakes his head. "Come on."

He ignores the locked gate and the sign barring visitors from the area and flits through a gap in the fence posts, heading downhill.

"What are you doing?" I yell.

He turns, grinning over his shoulder, light on his feet. "You wanted to see the rocks. I'm getting you to the rocks."

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

I sigh, duck through the fence, and follow.

I catch up to him at the shoreline, where the rocks flatten into a shelf pummeled by waves, mist shimmering over our faces. Kit pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and plants his hands on his hips, pleased with his work.

He's found us our own private cove.

A long, narrow, concrete breakwater juts out from the shore, its surface slick and dark from catching the tide. We walk it until we can see the Grande Plage around the edge of the rocks, and then we sit down on its edge. I lay my bag of cherries from the market between us, and Kit unwraps his cheese. With help from my pocketknife and Kit's traveling jar of honey, we share both. The cherries are fantastically tart with a plummy sweetness, better than any cherry I've tasted before. Shout-out to Fruit Wife.

We don't discuss any of this. It just happens, like any of the thousands of meals we've eaten together. We've lapsed into our shared first language.

"That book you've been reading," I ask Kit. "What's it about?"

Kit swallows a bit of cheese.

"It's about this English girl named Lucy who falls in love with a man she meets while traveling to Florence," he says, "but of course everyone is being very Edwardian about it, so now she's engaged to another man who's a better match but a total drip."

"Man, I hate when the girls get all Edwardian." I pretend to sigh, and Kit laughs. "Is it good?"

He leans back on his hands and contemplates the question.

"I like reading E. M. Forster because it's always gay, even though this one is about a man and a woman," he says. "Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there's a . . . resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world. Like when Legolas and Gimli walk into Minas Tirith and immediately start criticizing the landscaping."

I turn the idea over in my head. "Sort of like how I love older action movies because they're inherently homoerotic."

He exhales a short laugh through his nose. "I can't wait to find out what you mean by that."

"Kit. Come on. How many times have you watched Point Break with me? And how many times did we watch Speed? Those are two of the best action movies of the early nineties, and at their heart, both are about Keanu Reeves having this intense, soul-deep connection with the other lead, this crazy chemistry engine that works so well it's basically sex. The only difference is that one is Sandra Bullock and one is Patrick Swayze."

Kit touches his fingers to his lips, like he's thinking hard now. "I never thought of it that way."

"Or Road House! Or Top Gun!" I go on, propelled. "All the greatest action movies of the eighties, the most grab-ass, baby-oiled, hyper-masculine movies ever made, don't work without this underlying sense of everyone's dick being hard the whole time. That, that is fucking gay! They made the loop all the way around to gay! And that's the secret sauce. Nowadays everyone's so afraid of accidentally making a gay movie that nobody's dick is hard, which is why there hasn't been a truly iconic action hero in the last twenty years." I spit out a cherry pit and add, "Except John Wick."

The corners of his mouth tuck under into an appreciative upside-down smile.

"I like how you brought it full circle with Keanu."

"Right?"

"You really landed that plane."

"He doesn't get enough credit for what he's done for the community," I say. "The Matrix? Gender."

"Mm," he hums in amused agreement. "You're making great points."

Of all the things I missed about having Kit as my best friend, this might be the biggest. The forever yes, and of our conversations, every thought a continuation of the last, every random inconsequential detail of our lives dominoing into one another. Especially here, in our big, swirling, mutual soup of sex and gender.

We came out to each other four years apart—Kit first, to my absolute lack of surprise. Based on how he moved through the world, I'd always suspected he was either fruity or engaged in some kind of spiritual romance with the cosmic essence of the earth for which there were no human words. I should have known then that I was bisexual too; we understood each other too well to not be the same. But I was only fourteen, and I wasn't ready to know that about myself until eighteen.

He was so happy when I told him, pulled me so close that my Slurpee exploded all over us both. We had to jump the fence of the apartments behind the 7-Eleven to rinse off in the pool. It was like our world became twice as wide, like we could finally talk about colors no one else could see.

There's a second coming-out that I haven't done yet with Kit. Something I wasn't ready to know about myself until a few years ago. I watch him scrape the meat off a cherry pit with his teeth. Is this the right moment? Our first time alone together as friends again?

"Hey."

Kit turns, his eyes the color of top-shelf whiskey in the sun.

"The cherries," I say. "On the fly."

An old game of ours, invented when we first started fantasizing about Fairflower. I watch him recognize it, whiskey eyes glittering like I've dropped in a sugar cube.

"Oh," he breathes. "Okay, let me think."

I make a game-show-buzzer sound. "No thinking!"

"Okay, okay! I'm making an éclair. Cherry and mascarpone filling, quince and cherry jelly on top. And a mirror glaze, just to be sexy."

"Very nice." I pull my knees to my chest. "I'm taking the quince, and I'm making a ginger-quince syrup and putting it in an old-fashioned, with Angostura bitters and Four Roses and orange peel."

"Then I'll take the bitters and put them in a dark chocolate cake. Chocolate ganache with cayenne and cinnamon."

"I'm mixing the cayenne with salt and gochugaru and putting it on the rim of a persimmon margarita."

"Persimmon compote and blitzed hazelnuts for a cinnamon-roll filling, with persimmon–cream cheese frosting when it's fresh out of the oven."

"Fuuuck." I press my forehead to my knees. "I wanna eat that."

"So do I," he agrees. "Do I win?"

"I think so. I don't know how to top that."

"That's—" He interrupts himself with a cough.

"A first for me, yes," I say. "And you tried to shame me for my dirty jokes."

"It's not my fault," Kit sighs. He tips his head up, letting the sea breeze sweep his hair from his flushed face. "It's too nice out here. I can't work under these conditions."

"It really is." I gaze out over the water, imagining I could see a seaweed-wrapped starfish washing up from the ocean floor, the wiggling dots of the Calums on borrowed surfboards, a pod of dolphins, someone swimming home for dinner. "What must it be like to live here?"

Kit considers it. "I think I'd like life by the water. Especially out here on the C?te d'Argent, where you get the mountains and the ocean, and the flora too. It almost reminds me of Santa Barbara."

I haven't wanted to ask. I didn't want to hear him lie to save my feelings, but he's brought it up now.

"Do you ever miss California?"

"Oh, yeah," he says, eyes closed to the sun. "All the time."

I don't know what to say, so I don't say anything. We sit in companionable quiet for a while, just us and the cherries and the ocean.

"I wish I brought something to swim in," Kit says, as much to himself as to me.

I think of our talk about experiencing places—swimming in it, he said. I can hear the Ravel piece he played for me, the flute trills and strings rushing in and out like sea-foam. If he can give me that, I can give him something back. That's what friends do, isn't it?

I spring to my feet and face the rocks, my back to him.

"Stand up."

A surprised laugh bubbles out of him. "What?"

"Stand up and turn around. Face the horizon."

Over the whoosh of the waves, I hear the crinkle of paper, the rustle of leather, a zipper. Kit, tucking our things safely away before he does whatever ridiculous thing I have in mind. I'm glad only the rocks can see me smiling.

"Okay," he says. "Now what?"

"On three, we take off our clothes."

I can't see his face, but I know the exact velocity at which his brows just shot up.

"Sorry?"

"I won't look at you, you don't look at me. We take our clothes off and jump in as fast as we can."

A pause. The waves roll in again.

"Specifically how naked am I getting?"

"As naked as you want to get, I guess."

"How naked are you getting?"

"Underwear only."

Another pause.

"Underwear only," he repeats, his tone neutral. "Okay."

"Ready?"

"I hope so."

"One, two, three!"

I rip my shirt off over my head, drop my shorts, and leap.

The water is cool, but not the shocking cold I expect from a lifetime swimming in the Pacific. It swirls around me in smooth, strong whorls, and I stay down for as long as I can, letting it hold my body and push up on the bottoms of my feet. I kick to the surface just as Kit splashes in.

"You hesitated!" I yell when he comes up.

"No, I didn't!" He pushes wet hair away from his face. "I just didn't know if you meant it."

"Why, because I can't be spontaneous?" I say. "I'll have you know I've become very spontaneous. You know how they say to do one thing every day that scares you?"

"You do that?"

"Well, I'm working my way up. Right now I'm at one a week."

"I see," he says. "What scares you this week?"

This, something in me answers automatically. You.

"Bull testicles," I say. "I'm gonna eat some in Spain."

I dive under and swim a quick lap, five meters out and back, just to pop up behind Kit and startle him.

"Ah, okay!" He spins around, paddling backward. "You win, you're spontaneous. I'm sorry I doubted you."

I laugh, swallowing the words down with a blazing gulp of air.

"It's good to see you swimming," he says.

Kit was at the swim meet where I messed up my shoulder, and he was there for the years after, when I hated the thought of learning to swim again. He was there before too, so many chlorine-scented summers. He's missed the past few years of chin-ups every morning to shore up my muscles and exploratory dips at Corona del Mar, but he knows what it means for me to be back in the water.

"Yeah. It feels good."

We tread water for what feels like ages, our bare shoulders rising and falling with each swell, just talking. I feel sun-roasted and salt-brined, like a tomato in a jar. Life is silly and random and magnificent, and I'm experiencing it all the way. I'm in it up to my nips. I'm in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a delirious pink tide pool of happy accidents, and despite it all, I'm glad that it's Kit here with me. I can't think of anything happier or more accidental than that.

When an especially big wave rolls in, Kit twists around to catch it head-on, and I see the thin, straight line of black text on the top of his left shoulder, running horizontally between the base of his neck and the shoulder joint.

"Oh, hey," I say, "there's your third tattoo."

Kit tucks his chin back to look at it. "Oh, yeah, I forgot about it back there."

"What does it say?

"Just a line from a book."

"What book?"

"The Silmarillion."

"Ah, of course," I say. Kit's family introduced me to genre fiction and Renaissance festivals after a childhood of Serious Art. His parents used to say they stole Kit from Rivendell, on account of how he had the air of like an ethereal elf child. Tolkien was always his favorite. "Nerd. Can I read it?"

He turns, and I push myself closer, glad I'm a strong enough swimmer to keep our naked skin from accidentally touching.

The words read, surpasse tous les joyaux.

"It's in French," I say, a little disappointed.

He's quiet while the ocean laps against his chest.

"I read the book in French first," he says finally. "It means, ‘surpasses all jewels.'"

"Huh. Cool." It's been ages since I read The Silmarillion for Kit, but the phrase sounds familiar. I'm more fascinated by the linework, the delicate, featherlight script. Whoever did this must have barely dug into his skin at all, but the black is stark and clean. "I love the lettering."

Without thinking, I run my fingertip over the ink. Wet skin meets wet skin. Kit shivers.

The sense memory crashes in like a rogue wave. I see our skinny legs, grown too fast and not filled out yet, kicking together against the tide. I see a teenaged Kit levering himself out of my parents' pool. I remember a flat tire in the pouring rain on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, peeling his wet shirt off in the back seat. I feel my back pressed to his chest in a too-small bathtub, and I see his face, slick with me from nose to chin.

Oh, fuck.

Kit kicks away as if he can sense the deluge of uninvited horny thoughts. God. Why can't my fear of spontaneity manifest as impulse control? Why do I have to touch things?

"Sorry, that was—" I start, but then he turns. "Oh my God, Kit, your nose."

It's bleeding, this time from both sides. He wipes it with the back of his hand and examines the red swirling through the seawater. "Ah. Yeah. I thought so."

"It looks . . . pretty fucking gnarly. It'll stop, right?"

"It should," he says, attempting an apologetic smile, "but it might stop faster if I get out of the water?"

"Okay," I agree. He looks at me like he's waiting for something. "Oh, right. I'll close my eyes, just let me know when you're decent."

I listen for his strokes through the water, and the sounds of him climbing onto the breakwater. Something soggy splats against the concrete—the underwear he swam in.

"I'm decent!" Kit calls out.

When I open my eyes, his back is to me as he settles his shorts on his hips. I very deliberately do not have any emotions or observations about his silhouette against the distant watercolor foothills or the fact that he's no longer wearing anything under his terry shorts. Kit's build has always been graceful and lithe, but his ass is, as the poets say, bodacious. The poets, not me—I'm not choosing any adjectives. I swim in and get myself dressed, very decidedly not looking.

"Sorry to kill the mood," Kit says, his head tilted.

"No, it's okay, there was no mood." I pull on my shirt, feeling mildly delirious. "Except, you know, a friendly mood. The mood of friendship."

"Yes, my favorite Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Friendship."

"Tony Leung is so hot in that one."

"He always is." He turns just as I do, scrunching up his nose and sniffing. He hasn't put his shirt on yet. I look everywhere but him. "I think it stopped."

"Cool. What do we do now?"

Kit considers. "Do you want to go pick up some things for when we meet up with Paloma?"

"What kind of things?"

"I was thinking pastry," he says, "in case she wants to keep hanging out."

He puts his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, and I narrow my eyes, finally thinking clearly.

"You're trying to sleep with her."

"I simply think," he counters, "it seemed possible she might want to sleep with one of us, and the right pastry might tip things in my favor."

"Or the right bottle of wine."

"Sure," he says noncommittally, half smiling, "maybe."

"Let's go, then." I slide my feet back into my Birks, grinning back. "May the best slut win."

I stand outside the bakery, cradling a bottle of screw-top red and watching through the window as Kit charms every single person behind the counter. He emerges flushed, waving to the shopgirls as they blow kisses. He really is some kind of world wonder.

"What'd you get?"

He opens a white paper box to reveal two dozen thin, pale, informal cookies with crinkly cracks around their edges. When I take one, it's surprisingly light and tastes like almonds.

"Mouchous," he says. "Basque macarons. Chewier than the Parisian ones, right?"

"Mmm. And better, I think."

"The secret is potato flour." He closes the box. "And you?"

I hold up my bottle. "A cheeky Croatian Plavina. Should be cute and beachy, a little juicy."

Kit sighs.

"This isn't fair. You're just going to do your thing, and it'll be over."

"What thing?"

"Your sommelier thing, where you lower your voice and tell them the grapes taste like elderflower because the wind blew in a southeasterly direction in Provence last July, and then everyone wants to have sex with you."

I raise my eyebrows. "Everyone?"

"Theo!" a crisp voice calls out from above. "Kit!"

We look up to find Paloma leaning out of the open window of the apartment over the bakery.

"I was about to leave to meet you at the port," she says, "but then I look out my window, and there you are! And I see you went swimming, well done!"

The shutters of the window above Paloma's rattle open, and a bearded old man's head pops out. He looks at us, then calls down to Paloma in a language that sounds like both Spanish and French and also nothing like either.

"What's he saying?" I whisper to Kit.

"I think he's speaking Basque."

"Isn't your mom's family Basque?"

"Yeah, on her mom's side, but she didn't speak the language."

"This is my great-uncle Mikel," Paloma says to us. "He wants to know if either of you are fit for marriage."

"Uh—"

A much smaller but equally curious face appears in another window, a girl around twelve with a flute in one hand and a cookie in the other.

"What's Papa Mikel yelling about?" the girl yells to Paloma. "Who's here?"

"Just some friends!"

Paloma's cousin squints at us. "They don't look like any of your friends!"

"They're visiting! I met them at the market! Stop being nosy or I'll tell your mama!"

"Tell me what?" says a middle-aged woman in the window beside Great-Uncle Mikel.

"Léa isn't doing her flute practice!"

"Palomaaa!"

"Léa!"

"I'll come down," Paloma says to us, closing her shutters. The only one left in a window is Great-Uncle Mikel, lighting a cigarette.

"I love this fucking town," I say to Kit, who shakes his head, breathless with laughter.

Paloma bursts out of the street-level door beside the bakery wearing short-sleeved coveralls identical to the ones from this morning, sans fish guts.

"Sorry for my family," she says. "We have lived in this building for seventy-five years, so it's very interesting when someone new comes around."

"I guess you won't be impressed by these, then," Kit says as he shows her the bakery box.

"No, these are my favorites!" Paloma says, touching his arm. "And we must enjoy them while we still can."

"Is something happening to the shop?" I ask.

"Not yet, but the owner is a thousand years old, and she has no children to pass it on to. I think I'll die when she finally stops baking."

Paloma takes us away from the ill-fated patisserie and soon enough we're at the port, air brimming with salt and seagrass and the eye-watering smell of fish. We bob like buoys behind her as she shows us around red-and-green fishing boats, stopping to banter with a fisherman and help a deckhand heave a sack of ice off the pier. It's deeply dreamy.

I should be bringing her my A game, but Kit's presence—the scent of salt water on his skin, the faint stain of cherry juice on his lips—is disrupting my process.

Paloma has family throughout southern France and northern Spain, all married to the sea. Her parents met at this very port when her mother was working on her family fishing boat and her father was pulling fish for his family market stall. She says she was born smelling like anchovies.

"I speak five languages in all," she tells us. "French and Spanish were always my best. My Basque is okay. My Catalan is awful. English I learned in school, and then I lived in Sydney for a while."

"Sydney, Australia?" Kit asks.

"Yes, I went to culinary school," she says. "I thought I would be a chef at a famous restaurant, but I hated it. Every day I wanted to come home, until I did. I like it better here. Nobody ever tells me what to do."

Finally, as the sun begins to set, Paloma asks, "Do you have plans now? I'm meeting friends on Plage de Ciboure, if you want to come."

Kit and I exchange eye contact.

Tour dinner is optional tonight, I say with my eyes. Skip it?

Skip it.

"We'd love to," I say.

Paloma lights up. "Quelle chance!"

On a small, secluded beach away from the Grande Plage, one with big rock outcroppings and a view of an old fort on the water beyond, Paloma's friends make a loose circle in the sand. We're not the only ones to have brought an offering of food or drink—at the center of the circle, a blanket is spread with plates of oil and soft cheeses, brown paper parcels of jambon and saucisson, loaves of bread, round golden-brown cakes with burnt edges, jugs of lemonade, and a jumble of half-drunk bottles.

Paloma introduces her friends in rapid succession, each lifting a glass from atop fraying pillows or beach towels or sling-back chairs. There's a bartender, a surf instructor, a butcher, the cheesemonger from the market, a few beachside hotel staffers, a line cook, a bookseller, and a gardener.

"Ah," Paloma says, "and here is Juliette!"

A woman appears from the direction of the water, her dark hair falling damp and loose around her shoulders. Her sundress is darkened in patches, like she threw it on over her wet swimsuit. She's carrying a mesh bag of oranges over her shoulder.

Fruit Wife. Her name is Juliette.

I turn to tell Kit, but he and Paloma are already chatting in French with the cheesemonger. Maybe I should institute some kind of weighted system in our competition, like a half-hour head start if only one of us speaks a mark's native language. Kit should have to sit quietly and let me make the first run at anyone who speaks French, or at least take a disadvantage. Maybe an ugly hat.

But I'm standing before a buffet of the most sexually compelling characters of the Saint-Jean-de-Luz hospitality industry, and Paloma is not the only dish. I plant myself in front of the bartender and hold out my Plavina.

"Salut!" I say. "Your glass is empty. Wine?"

By a stroke of delightful luck, he's Croatian, so he speaks a few languages and is thrilled to see a wine from home. He calls over one of the hotel guys and the gardener, and I pour everyone a round of ruby red. In turn, the bartender offers me a glug of local white wine aged in underwater tanks beyond the seawall. Naturally, I have five hundred questions about this. Soon, I've been absorbed into a cluster of English-speaking oenophiles.

Camping lanterns illuminate the circle as I taste a bit of everything and ask question after question, tipsy and eager and rolling around flavors. The butcher tells me about the nineteen months of aging to create Jambon du Kintoa, which tastes faintly of chestnuts because the pigs roam free on the green Pyrenees slopes eating whatever they find. The line cook passes me a hunk of cheese that tastes almost like caramel. Even Kit drifts by on a slow lap around the sand to tell me the history of the gateau Basque, with its buttery crust and tart black cherry filling.

Kit comes by more than once, actually. We've gravitated to opposite sides of the language barrier, but he seems exclusively interested in the cheese and wines closest to me. At first I suspect competitive sabotage, until I realize he's checking on me. He's making sure I'm okay in an unfamiliar place. It holds the comfort of before, when we'd lock eyes across a party and know that whatever happened, we'd get each other home.

On his fifth visit, after someone's pulled out a speaker to play Kylie Minogue and we've all gotten up to dance in the sand, Kit and Fruit Wife find their way to me at the same time.

"Hi, Kit," I say. And then, with significantly more interest, "Hi, Juliette. It was nice to meet you at the market."

Juliette smiles, looking ever the wife with her hair down and her dress slipping off her shoulder. I'm not looking at Kit, but I can sense him finally putting together who she is. My hand finds his thigh, and I dig one blunt fingernail into his skin as a warning not to blow this for me. Juliette keeps smiling. My head goes a little wobbly, and I pull my hand away.

She produces an orange from the folds of her skirt and holds it out to me, saying something in French.

"Oh, merci," I say, taking the orange. "I—sorry, je ne parle pas fran?ais."

"Ah." A pucker appears between her pretty brows. "No English."

She says something else in French, and Kit shifts closer.

"She was saving this one for you," Kit translates, looking at me. "She's happy she got to see you again."

"Oh! Moi aussi!" I turn from her to Kit. "Can you tell her that I loved the cherries?"

Kit translates dutifully. "She says—ah—she says she thought you would like them because they're beautiful, and so are you."

"Oh yeah? Tell her I'd buy anything from her."

He does, and when she answers, he translates, "You should come back to the market tomorrow, then."

"I'm leaving tomorrow, but I have all night."

Kit translates, and Juliette answers, but he doesn't take his eyes off me for the entire exchange. It's almost like he's asking for himself when he translates, "What do you want to do that will take all night?"

I look directly into his eyes and say, "Something I'm very good at."

For a second, Kit's face goes completely immobile. Then he lets out a laugh that's all breath.

"You know what, I don't think I'm needed here anymore," he says, holding his hands up.

Juliette and I laugh, which doesn't need any translation. As everyone begins to collapse into the sand, I find myself sideways on a flower-patterned towel with my head in Juliette's lap. Kit falls on the other side of the circle with Paloma, talking quietly in the lantern light and sharing the last mouchous.

It feels so natural here, like we're among our people. Right now, I can imagine us here forever. Theo-and-Kit side-by-side in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. A perfect hyphenate daisy chain. We could have neighboring apartments down the street from Paloma's and lunches of cheese and fruit from the market. I would swim in the bay every morning, and Kit would go out to the mountains every weekend to sketch plants. We could become best friends again, spend the rest of our lives together.

I realize I've never felt this comfortable before, outside of the Valley. I didn't know it was possible.

My phone buzzes from my hip pack: another email from Schnauzer Bride. I ignore it and open my texts instead, replying to Sloane's message from this morning.

you know all those times you said i need to get out of the valley? I type. maybe you were onto something . . .

When I'm done, I look up in time to see Kit take Paloma's face in his hand.

It's a gentle, exploratory touch, his fingers lacing into the hair at her nape. His thumb brushes her jaw. She's still for a moment, and then her hand covers his.

His gaze shifts away from her face, to mine.

It's fleeting, but I catch it. The question in his eyes. The genuine need. It's a fair trade for earlier, with Juliette. He wants me to watch.

He leans forward and kisses her.

I go under.

In the moment of suspension after the plunge, we're everywhere. A hundred thousand memories of a hundred thousand touches circle like shoals of little iridescent fish. Kit's lips against the bridge of my nose. Kit holding the side of my face in the laundry detergent aisle. A slice of cake on a bad day and Kit's apron smeared with buttercream, a grateful kiss to each of his fingertips. Passed dishes, stolen covers, a thumbprint of strawberry juice on my chin. My hand pinning his shoulder to the wall, his mouth livid and wet and starving. The way he kissed me at the kitchen table the first morning we were honest.

Air runs out. I kick to the surface.

Up here, he's still kissing Paloma, and my head is still in Juliette's lap, and we're friends again. Just friends, just barely.

I sit up and pull Juliette's mouth to mine.

It's easy to kiss her. So smooth and sweet and uncomplicated. She puts her hand on the side of my neck and kisses back, and I slip my tongue into her mouth and taste nectar and buttery bread. There's nothing hidden here, just pure curiosity and desire, no sense memories to flood my body or ghosts to stick in my throat, and it's nice, isn't it? Is this what Kit felt? Is he watching the way I watched him?

I open my eyes to see for myself, but his spot in the sand is empty. When I scan the beach, I can't find him or Paloma anywhere.

I break the kiss and try to remember the French words for Where the fuck did they go?

"Où—" Shit, I only know present tense. "Où est—" Wait, that's singular. "Où sont Kit et Paloma?"

Juliette gives the group a perfunctory once-over and shrugs, her dress falling farther down her shoulder.

"Je ne sais pas," she says, kissing me again.

I kiss her for four seconds, five.

"Sorry, I just—do you think she took him home?"

Juliette chases after my mouth.

"Je ne sais pas."

I close my eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of her breath on my skin, but—

"Do you know if she likes him? Like, really likes him?"

She pulls away this time, sitting back with a sigh. She regards me from under her long lashes with an expression that's soft and almost sad, almost kind, with a bitter finish. The crease between her brows reappears.

She calls out to the bartender, who crawls over to kiss her cheek and listen as she tells him something in French. He looks at me with that same strange expression and says, "She wants you to know you don't have to do this if you love someone else."

The words land like a sprained ankle.

"What? I—" I glance between them, a laugh bubbling up from my chest. "Oh, that's—no, it's not what you think. Kit's my friend."

Juliette and the bartender exchange a look.

"She says you're lovely, but she doesn't settle for second place."

I try to argue, but it's useless. Whatever Juliette saw between Kit and me, whatever broke inside my brain when I saw him kissing Paloma, whatever was cut loose when my skin touched his in the water—Juliette has decided it's love. It doesn't matter how much I insist it's not.

She presses a kiss to the back of my hand and gives me a pitying smile, and the bartender passes me a bottle.