san sebastian

The short version is, I'm pissed at Kit.

The long version is, we're on a pintxos crawl through glorious, sun-soaked San Sebastián, and everything is sumptuous and salty and soaked in oil and piled atop the most delectable morsels of crusty bread, and Kit looks happy, and I'm pissed.

I've read the San Sebastián portion of World Travel five times, so I know exactly what Bourdain said about this place. He wrote that it might be the greatest culinary destination in Europe, and that he imagined himself living a perfect life here. I get it—I feel it in every corner of this city, every sand-dusted tile and fuzzy green stone, every brick in every Gothic arch, whiffs of saffron and clove and guindilla at every overstuffed pintxos bar.

We've arrived on the last day of Semana Grande, the city's end-of-summer festival, and the streets are fucking alive. Street performers balance on milk jugs with puppets on their hands, cooks under tents pound balls of dough into pans, giant-headed mascots chase screaming children through the squares. The chaos is incandescent and overwhelming and viscerally of its own place, like a cava waterboarding.

And still, I'm pissed at Kit.

I don't want to be pissed. I want to feel the way I did yesterday. I want to be here, on the small peninsula of San Sebastián's Old Town, in a dim bar with ham hocks hanging from the ceiling, slurping buttered clams and enjoying the company of my friend Kit.

"Oh my God, Theo," Kit's saying, passing me a skewer of pickled olives, peppers, and anchovies on a slice of baguette. "You have to try this one."

Fabrizio pops up beside us in an even more spectacularly good mood than usual. I'm surprised his shirt's still on.

"La Gilda! Excellent choice! This is the first Basque pintxo in history. Do you know the film Gilda?"

"With Rita Hayworth?" I ask.

"Yes! This is named for her, because it tastes like how she was in the film. Green, salty, and spicy."

We find ourselves sharing a little table with the old Swedish couple Kit befriended on the first day. Plate after plate of pintxos pour from the kitchen—slices of tortillas de patatas, mushroom croquetas, velvety goose liver and herb-flecked anchovies on bread topped with duck eggs—so many that Fabrizio sweeps in to help the waiters. Kit sits sideways in his chair and laughs at everything, his body loose with the unmistakable contentment of the recently fucked.

It's all so easy for him. Leaving me for a shiny new life, kissing sexy fishmongers and abandoning me to be cockblocked by my own unresolved feelings. Even when we were together, I could see the vines of potential spiraling out of him, reaching for taller trellises in bigger fields. He gets everything he ever dreamed of, and I'm where I've always been, one step behind.

It would be such a relief to create a problem for him, even a small one.

Fabrizio drops off a plate of croquetas and compliments Birgitte's blouse, and when he saunters off, Birgitte says, "Den d?r Fabrizio, he is like a painting we have in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm."

"Which one?" Kit asks.

"I think I know," says her bespectacled husband, Lars. With the jolly mischief of a man wearing a straw fedora indoors, Lars pulls up something on his phone and shows it to his wife.

"Ja! This is him!"

She shows us an extremely horny painting entitled The Youth of Bacchus, featuring a bunch of naked, nubile, wine-drunk revelers in a forest, either dancing or warming up for an orgy.

"Oh, yeah, I definitely see it," Kit says. He zooms in on the central figure, a muscular, bronze-skinned man with a tambourine-waving child on his shoulders and a leopard hide barely concealing his dick. "Especially his, uh—his—"

He points at the grooves of abdominal muscle near the figure's hips and takes a sip of wine, trusting me to choose the appropriate phrase. Iliac furrows? V-line? Adonis belt?

I say, "Cum gutters."

Kit chokes.

"Kümgütter?" Birgitte asks. "What is this word, kümgütter?"

I thump Kit between the shoulders, smiling beatifically. "Kit, care to explain?"

"I—" Kit shoots me a look that's half glare, half terrible delight. My smile widens. "It's, ah, American slang for the lower muscles on the stomach."

"Oh!" Lars exclaims. "We call this b?ckensp?ret! In America, I should say kümgütter?"

"No no no," Kit says, distressed, "it's vulgar slang."

"Is it?" Birgitte asks. She leans in with a twinkle in her eye. "What does it mean?"

Kit looks to me for help. I open the translation app on my phone and press the mic button until the digital bleat sounds.

"Cum gutter," I enunciate loudly enough for the next tables to hear. "Huh, no results."

"Please, you will not embarrass us," Lars says. "Go on!"

Kit takes a breath. "So, during sex, when a person with a penis finishes on their partner's stomach, and—"

"Ahhh, I see," Lars interrupts, alight with glee. He says something to his wife in Swedish, and she nods knowingly.

"Cum and gutter! Two words!"

Despite my best efforts, this seems to have permanently endeared us to Lars and Birgitte. They ask us so many questions that I'm half expecting a Christmas card from Sweden this holiday season.

"And you two," Lars says, gesturing between Kit and me, "you are—?"

"Friends," I say.

"Old friends," Kit elaborates.

"Very good! And how did you meet?"

Kit and I exchange a look, waiting each other out.

"We went to grade school together," I say.

Kit weighs this answer, pushing an olive across his plate. He's not letting me off this easy, not after the cum gutters.

"That was where we met," he says, "not how we met."

I remember the day Kit showed up. Second grade, a skinny little changeling trying to explain to a bunch of California kids named Josh and Taylor how to pronounce his name—his real, French name, not the one he goes by. He was different. He had big, daydreamy eyes and a gentle accent that none of us had heard, and he spent every recess reading books in trees.

I was different too, a tomboy in the extreme, always wearing cargo shorts and insisting on being let into the boys' games. One day I found Kit in a stairwell, cornered by two of the boys who wouldn't play with me and trying not to cry. Maybe if he had been crying already I would have just gotten a teacher, but he was biting his lip, holding the tears back. Those little assholes didn't deserve the satisfaction.

When I was called to the principal's office that afternoon for fighting, he was there, waiting for his mom. She called him a different name than the one on the classroom roster, a family nickname. Kit. I asked him if I could call him that too, and when he said yes, I told him to call me Theo.

The Swedes adore this story.

They reward us with their tale of meeting each other at a ski lodge in the Alps, where they were celebrating their respective divorces. After three nights of discussing art by the lodge's fireplace, they realized they'd met before on a hiking trail in Croatia in their early twenties. They married within months, and they've been inseparable for fifteen years now.

"I was a fool the first time we met," Lars says. "Proud, crude, always one woman after another."

"And I was married!" Birgitte adds. "It was the wrong time. But he was the right man."

Lars wraps his hand around hers. "Still, I wonder what life would be if I had asked her to run away with me that day at Jezero Kozjak." He looks at us intently. "Learn from an old man. Take care of good love when you find it."

Kit glances at me with something soft in his eyes, like we could still be those kids in California.

The Somm once told me how he came to love wine. Everyone has that one bottle, he said. His was a red that sat in his mother's kitchen window for twenty-seven years, until one day he looked up the vintage on the sun-bleached label and discovered it could have been worth forty thousand dollars if stored properly. Instead, it's a window decoration, a precious thing that spoiled because nobody thought to take care of it.

I do, despite everything, want to take care of this. There's never been another person who could fill Kit's place, and I know there never will be. I've been living around that gap, never looking at it, always feeling the draft it lets in. Yesterday was so warm, though.

I want to be his friend—not because it'll make the trip easier, but because I want to. But I can't do it like this. If I'm going to do it right, there are things I have to say.

The green peak of Monte Igueldo towers over San Sebastián, and a little amusement park sits on top. In the packed crowd of Semana Grande tourists, I feel my first moment of gratitude for our navigational beacon of butt-fucky Pinocchio puppet. At least when it's time to regroup in an hour, I'll only have to look up.

Before Kit can be swept away, I grab the strap of his sling bag. I point to a sign advertising a children's boat ride with once-in-a-lifetime views.

"Wanna be my co-captain?"

"Yeah," he says, smiling. "Yeah, let's go."

At the front of the line, a teenaged ride operator waves us into a miniature boat and pushes us off down the long, winding flume. Greenish water carries us forward, alone together, Kit in the front seat, me in the back.

At the first big curve, the trees fringing the flume give way to open air, and the view spreads into panoramic widescreen. It's as spectacular as promised: water glistening for miles into the horizon of the Atlantic, the distinctive seashell-shaped bay of La Concha, small white sailboat triangles, jutting green islets, lush mountains cupping the city and fading off into distant blue-gray shadows.

The boat rounds another corner and floats into a rocky cave, and then, as if to wake us up from a dream, our boat bangs into the one in front of us.

The river is stuffed bumper-to-bumper as far as I can see, each boat full of confused tourists and cranky children. Another boat collides with ours, and when I turn to check, it's Stig waving at me apologetically.

"Hey buddy," I say.

"Hall?," Stig replies. His boat is sitting dangerously low in the water.

"I think we're stuck," Kit says.

We wait, sitting in silence except for the rush of water and the conversation of the Portuguese tourists in the next boat. Stig hums to himself. I study the inside of the cave.

It appears to have been decorated to appeal to children sometime in the late '90s, but not in any way that makes sense. In the recesses of the cavern, someone has propped up plywood cutouts of a random assortment of Disney characters—Peter Pan, Quasimodo, Hercules flexing his biceps, all looking conspicuously un-trademarked. Between them are a few topless mermaids, a stuffed stork, and a plaster crocodile with glowing red eyes.

"Interesting decor," I comment, eyeing a mannequin dressed as a pirate and a hauntingly out-of-place skeleton.

"Sort of Disneyland meets Willy Wonka's nightmare tunnel," Kit replies.

"‘It's a Small World' on ayahuasca."

Kit laughs, and I think, fuck it. There's no good place for this conversation. Might as well have it in a cursed mermaid-nipple dimension.

I take a breath and say, "Kit."

He twists in his seat to face me like he's expecting another joke. I can see the moment he registers the serious look on my face, and the quarter second after, when he calculates how rarely I look serious about anything.

"Oh." He pushes a piece of hair behind his ear. "Are we . . . ?"

We are.

"I know I said I didn't want to talk about what happened," I say. "And I honestly don't see the point of getting into what we said on the plane, or the Paris thing, because I haven't changed my mind, and you obviously haven't either." I pause. He doesn't contradict me. "But I do have to talk about what came after, if we're going to be friends."

Kit absorbs that.

"Okay," he says, nodding thoughtfully. "After. What do you mean? Heathrow?"

My face flashes hot. I'm already irritated on reflex.

"Yeah, Kit," I say, making an effort to keep my voice polite, "weirdly enough, I would like to know why you left me at an international airport with my dick in my hand."

A pause.

"Theo, you flew back to America without me."

"It wouldn't have been without you if you had shown up."

"What are you talking—?" Kit pinches the bridge of his nose, like he's thinking very hard. "Hold on. What do you think happened that day?"

"What do I think? I know what happened."

"I thought I did too," he says slowly, "but now I'm not so sure."

I suck in another deep breath and recite the sequence of events, even though I'd prefer to do almost anything else.

"We fought," I say. "We said a lot of stuff there's no coming back from. By the time we got through passport control, I didn't even want to go on the tour anymore, and you said you didn't either. I said I wanted to go home, and you said you did too. And then you said you needed some space to think, and you walked away."

Kit says, "And then I came back."

My mouth opens automatically, but whatever I was going to say disappears into the damp cave air.

For four years, my life has been directed by the simple fact that he walked away. He turned around and never came back. That was the one-line answer when anyone asked, the simple truth.

"You came back?"

"I came back," he says again, "and you were gone."

"That was—" I shake my head. "That was because I had already gotten our tickets home, and I had to check our bag."

Now Kit's staring at me, the way I was just staring at him.

"Our tickets?" he says. "You got one for me?"

"Of course I did, Kit. I checked us both in, and I texted you your ticket, and then I waited at the gate until the very last call, but you never came."

Kit closes his eyes and says, "Theo, you sent me your ticket."

"What? No, I didn't." I distinctly remember how my fingers shook as I checked into our combined reservation, pulled up both of our boarding passes, and sent him a screenshot of his.

"Yes, you did."

"No, I didn't, I remember, distinctly."

Kit pulls out his phone and swipes through his messages to our conversation. Unlike me, he hasn't deleted it, so he can scroll directly up from the text I sent him in Paris to our last exchange. I catch a glimpse of one undelivered message from him to me, gone from the screen too fast to read, before he taps on the image above it. The boarding pass I sent him, taken straight from the British Airways app.

At the top, where it should say Kit's name, it says mine.

I stare at it. Read it three times before I believe it. Of all the idiotic, badly timed, baby-brained fucking accidents, this is the last one I ever thought I could make and maybe the most important one in the entire course of my adult life. I feel faintly nauseous.

"Okay, well, obviously that was a mistake," I insist, pushing his phone away. "You had to have known that."

"What I knew," Kit says, his voice tight, "was that it sounded like you didn't want to be with me anymore, so I went to have a cry in a very damp airport bathroom, and by the time I got back you were on the other side of security, and you'd sent me a message that clearly—to me—meant you were going home without me." He touches a hand to his temple, like the memory is stressing him out. "I thought that was your way of breaking up with me."

"I—I can't believe you would—" I shake my head. "Kit, does that sound like something I would do?"

"Honestly, yes."

I—

I think of all the lies I told to get out of meeting him in Oklahoma City. The look on his face when I told him I'd left Santa Barbara. The crash of his coffee mugs when I threw them in a box. How fast I left that bar in Paris.

"Well, I didn't," I say to the taxidermied stork over Kit's shoulder instead of having to look him in the eye. "Why didn't you just ask? We had agreed we were going home."

"I didn't think we had."

"I did. And I thought—" All this time, I'd been sure. "—I thought you had your ticket and just decided not to get on the plane. I thought you left me."

Kit says, "I thought you left me."

I count to three in my head, collect myself.

"Okay, well," I say, "what about the rest? Why did I have to find out you were moving to Paris from a shift manager at Timo?"

Kit blinks, surprised into a whole new line of confusion.

"That's how you heard?"

"I was at work when you called in to quit."

"No, it was a Tuesday lunch shift," he says. "I specifically called then, because you never worked Tuesday lunches."

"I picked up a double."

"Fuck." He sighs. "I didn't know. I mean, I figured you'd heard somehow—"

"Yeah, that was obvious."

"Theo, I wanted to tell you," he says, sounding like the softer side of miserable. "I did. When you left, I didn't know what to do. Every time I thought about having to see you and say goodbye, having to—to go into our apartment and disentangle our lives—I couldn't do it. I took the train to Paris, and I went to the flat. I must have written and thrown away a hundred letters until I got one right."

He looks into my eyes with a sincerity that's nearly frantic, like it'll kill him if I don't believe him.

"And then," he says, "the day I was going to send it, Cora called to say you'd packed my things. And when I tried to text you I realized you'd blocked my number, and I thought, that's it. Theo's done with me. I'd taken too long and lost my chance to change your mind. And after what you said on the plane, I thought I should respect what you wanted. I should let you go. I should live with it. So, that's what I did."

He leaves it there, letting me pick it up and do what I want with it, like I have the first idea where to put this piece I never knew was missing. This unexpected fucking complication. The idea that I survived losing him with an anger I hadn't even earned.

The whole thing, my story where Kit plays the traitor—it doesn't make sense with two broken hearts.

When I find my voice, I ask, "What about the rent?"

"What?"

"We were splitting rent. I had to cover your half when you left."

He scrubs a hand over his face. "Sloane said she was going to help."

A memory comes back to me: Sloane, taking me out for dinner after the breakup, gently suggesting over dessert that she could help with bills until my lease ran out. I should have known.

"You asked Sloane to bail me out?"

He holds up his hands before I can get going. Apparently, this is the one thing he won't allow me to get mad about.

"I sent one text to your sister," he says flatly, "who was also my friend, who loves you and is a literal multimillionaire, asking if she would be willing to help you."

"I can't believe—"

"Theo," he interrupts. "If I had sent money, would you have taken it?"

For the first time, I imagine how it would have felt to have Kit cut me a check after he broke my heart.

"No."

"Right," Kit says. "I thought Sloane had a better chance, but I'm guessing not."

I don't say anything. Slowly, boats begin drifting forward, one by one. Someone must have unclogged the river.

"Okay," I say at last. Kit's eyes are fixed on the plywood mermaid, his brows set in a rueful arch. He tips his chin up to listen. I squeeze my knees with both hands. "Okay, so, I left you, but only because I thought you left me. And you left me, but only because you thought I left you."

Ripples of light flash off the water and across Kit's face, catching on the soft curve of his smile.

"C'est à peu près ?a." I know this one; he always said it growing up. He's picked it back up since Paris. That's it, more or less.

All I can do is laugh. "What a dumb fucking series of events."

Kit laughs too, and finally, we begin to float on.

"So, are we friends?" Kit asks. He's not even mad. He's not mad at me for any of it.

Our boat drifts out of the cave and into the sun. I take a breath and try to make my answer come out resolute, but the truth is, things feel less resolved than ever now.

"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, I think so."

Later, we crash into Fabrizio on the beach.

He's a few drinks in, a crust of sea salt and sand up to his knees, his bare chest glazed with sweat like the outside of a spritz glass. When he kisses my face, his skin smells like chinotto oranges. We're both so happy to see him. Our human aperitivo.

"Do you know a good place to watch the fireworks tonight?" Kit asks him.

Fabrizio grins and pulls me into his right side, Kit into his left.

"Stay with me, amori miei. I will show you."

A thick, slow crowd carries us from the beach like flies in honey, across a plaza jangling with carnival games to a hole-in-the-wall corner bar. Kit and Fabrizio ravish the pintxo counter, and I order a wine I've never had, a straw-colored Basque Txakoli that the bartender pours from high above his head into the precise center of my glass without looking. At our table outside, I tell Kit and Fabrizio about the bartender's pour, how pouring from a height accentuates the tiny, delicate bubbles in the wine. Kit leans in so closely to listen that he nearly tips my glass into Fabrizio's lap.

We feast, and we laugh, and the sun goes down. Kit reclines in his chair to listen to Fabrizio, a hand buried in his hair to keep it off his face. My mouth waters from the acid of the wine and three helpings of sour La Gilda.

When we're done, Fabrizio takes us to one of the nicest hotels along the beach, one with spires and arches and Gothic embellishments up its front, where he knows a concierge who lets us onto the rooftop. I wait until the first firework explodes over the bay, until Kit's eyes are fixed on the sky, to let myself look at him the way I've wanted to since Monte Igueldo.

When I do, I see Kit. Not a memory that can be bent or shrunk or cut up into paper snowflakes, but a whole, living person. I see lights flickering over a face I woke up to every morning and shoulders I slept on when I was exhausted from growth spurts. Here, now, under a shower of sparks, he looks just like the person who would have missed me, the one who wouldn't have left.

The truth is, I never stopped loving that person. I only stopped believing he existed.

I raise my glass, cross myself, and call out, "Here's to swimmin' with bowlegged women!"

Fabrizio smiles bemusedly while Kit and I chug our ciders.

"American toasts, very strange."

"It's from Jaws," Kit says as he sets his empty glass down. Affronted bubbles stream into my cider—I have never understood how an elf prince like Kit can drink me under the table. "Theo's favorite movie."

"Ah! One of my favorite American movies too!" Fabrizio says. "Have you seen the Italian one?"

I drop my own glass and swallow a burp. "L'Ultimo Squalo, 1981. Fucking classic."

We detour into an impassioned review of the movie's greatest moments, from all the extended windsurfing sequences to the scene where the mayor tries to catch the shark by dangling a steak out of a helicopter. Kit is laughing so hard he's nearly weeping.

We're at a disco so close to the beach that I can almost hear the surf over the pounding bass, crowded around one of the tiny tables fringing the dance floor. Fabrizio brought us here to dance, but instead we're sitting under the flashing lights, learning how he picked up English while studying Italian history in Rome.

"I am nineteen years old then, staying with my zio Giorgio, yes?" he says. "And it is winter, and I get—what is it called—when clouds make me sad?"

"Seasonal depression," Kit prompts.

"Seasonal depression! So I am inside all the time, and the only thing Zio Giorgio has to watch is videotapes of an old American show. Hawaii Five-O. So, this is how I learn English, from Detective McGarrett. ‘Book 'em!'"

He procures another round of cloudy Basque apple cider and tells us about his pursuit of eternal summer, how he learned Portuguese and some Māori so he can lead tours in Brazil and New Zealand while it's winter in the northern hemisphere. He tells us how he was almost a professional footballer but was too bored by the training schedule, how he always dreamt of traveling for a living even while his brothers worked in the family restaurant.

"I can relate to that part," I tell him. "My family sort of has a business too, but I never wanted to be in it."

"Yes, I know," Fabrizio says.

"You know?"

"Your father is the director, no?" Fabrizio says. "I have seen many of his movies. He is very good."

"You've known this whole time?"

"Of course," Fabrizio says, one of his always-moving hands flapping dismissively. "It is not a common name, Flowerday."

An incredulous laugh slips out of me, and Kit smiles, teeth gleaming.

"But I must ask you," Fabrizio says, leaning in so he doesn't have to shout, cheekbones flashing. God, he is irresponsibly hot. "You two know each other, but you do not arrive together in London. Why is this?"

My drinks are catching up to me. Kit looks at me, and I say the first thing that floats to the surface.

"We used to date." It feels comically, unforgivably small to call it that, but I'm at least two ciders beyond a better explanation. I'm still looking at Kit, not Fabrizio. His gaze is fuzzed out around the edges. Maybe the drinks are getting to him too. "We actually haven't seen each other in years."

"And you did not plan this?"

Kit says, "Complete surprise."

"Che bello!" Fabrizio sings, relaxing back onto his barstool. "My tour has brought you back together! How is this for you? How do you feel?"

"It's had its ups and downs," I say, "but it's been nice to have my friend back."

Kit presses a knuckle to his lips and says nothing.

"In all my years of this tour," Fabrizio says, hand over heart, "I have seen many kinds of love. Family, friends, just married. New love, much too soon for so many days together—these hearts are always broken before Toscana. Couples together for fifty years. Even some who find the love of their life on my tour. But I have never seen two people who once were in love, making peace. It is a marvelous thing. I am so happy you are here."

I look at Kit, whose expression is still too complicated to read.

"I think we're happy to be here too."

"Yeah," Kit agrees. He smiles. "We are."

"Tell me, what surprises you most about each other now?" Fabrizio asks us. "What is most impressive?"

I quickly take a long gulp of cider so that Kit will have to answer first. I feel his gaze travel the line of my jaw, my wet bottom lip.

"I'd say . . ." Kit begins, speaking not to Fabrizio but to me. "Your confidence. The way you carry yourself. You seem . . . in command of yourself."

My heart does something horrible behind my ribs, but the words make my shoulders feel broader, my grip stronger. Kit holds my gaze. I hold his.

"Huh," I say, "I was going to say the same about you."

Someone's knee nudges mine. I'm not sure whose.

"Meraviglioso," Fabrizio says, slapping the table so loudly that we both jump. "More drinks, yes?"

He's gone before we can answer, disappearing into the wall of dancing bodies between our table and the bar.

"Jesus," I say, managing to catch my breath. "Hate to see him go but love to watch him walk away."

Kit laughs. "He really is something, isn't he?"

"Yeah," I agree. "Who do you think he likes more, you or me?"

"What, are you putting him back on the menu?"

"Oh, baby, he was never off it," I say. "I could show him a nice time."

Kit raises his eyebrows.

"What?" I ask. "Why do you look so skeptical?"

He shrugs. "I just don't know if you're compatible."

"I'm not talking about marrying him."

"Neither am I."

I set the dredges of my cider down with a slightly sticky thunk.

"You mean we're not sexually compatible? What are you, the Fuck Whisperer?"

"I know people like him, and I don't know if you're up to it," Kit says, the tip of his middle finger skating around the rim of his glass. "That's all."

"Up to what? Does he want to put my toes in his mouth or something?"

"He wants to make love. Light a hundred candles, sprawl out on a Moroccan rug, massage oil onto each other's bodies for hours before you even get into it. I don't think you have the patience."

"You'd be surprised how patient I've become," I say. Kit's fingertip slips from the edge of his glass and smudges down the side. "And what if you're wrong, huh? What if he wants to be, like, manhandled?"

"Then I would manhandle him."

"You're not a manhandler."

"That's not true."

"Who have you ever manhandled?"

Kit's eyes lock on mine. "You."

A server brushes past with a tray of shots. A woman at the next table laughs, sudden and loud. Something sour and hot rolls down the inside of me and begins to pool.

"Like, three times. Barely. At specific request."

"Maybe I've been practicing."

Where is Fabrizio with that drink?

"So, that's what you'll do if he wants you to rough him up?" I ask. "Spank him twice and bake him croissants in the morning so he knows you didn't mean it?"

"You liked those croissants," Kit says, the corner of his mouth tugging upward. "And if he wants you to be sensual? Will you give him the Flowerday Special? A mixtape and a hand down the pants by track three?"

"I'd wait until track twelve."

"Wow, you have gotten patient. Did you start meditating?"

"I have simply learned how rewarding it can be to take my time," I say. "It's called having range."

"Range," Kit repeats, leaning closer. "Sure."

"In fact, if you want any tips, let me know." I shift toward him. "I'm happy to help."

"If I ever need advice on using spit as lube, I know who to ask."

"And I'll hit you up next time I'm trying to, like, fuck a poet."

"Oh, poets are easy," Kit says, breath warm against my cheek, all apples and spice. "They just want to be thrown around."

"Sounds like you've been throwing some poets around, Kit."

"I told you, I've been practicing."

"Still finding that hard to believe."

"I have references."

"And I have doubts."

"Give me an hour and I can prove it."

"An hour's not nearly long enough."

The eye contact is overwhelming, so I look at his lips instead. They part to reveal pink tongue against white teeth, and for one smothering moment, the only thing in Spain is that mouth, the plush promise of it, the way it would feel to push inside.

It crushes me then, slams into me and pulls me down: I want him. I still want him.

I kick my stool backward and jump to my feet at the same moment Kit does.

"There has got to be someone in this club who wants to fuck me," I say.

Kit looks away, eyes wild. "I'm sure you're right."

We split up, not bothering to fight the crowd blocking Fabrizio. Instead, I find someone leaning against the back wall with a beer. I chat them up in clumsy Spanish, and at the first sign of interest, I ask if they want to get out of here. When they say yes, I turn to declare victory, half expecting Kit to be there.

He isn't far, but he's not waiting for me. He's on his way out of the club with a group of hot locals of various genders, his arm over a woman's shoulder, being swept away into the night. I left him alone for ten minutes, and he got himself invited to some kind of polyamorous Spanish sex party.

He meets my eye and smiles, fingers tangled in a stranger's hair.

"That still only counts as one!" I call, but he's already gone.