nice

On the highest plateaus of Provence, in the mountainous countryside above Nice, lavender grows like a motherfucker.

It's purple for miles, purple for years. Purple up to my nips. Every breath smells like lavender, and so every breath smells like Kit.

Sault is a scenic detour on the way to Nice, where we'll spend two nights before beginning the Italy leg. Everyone's hangover seems cured by the cool mountain air, except for Ginger Calum, who is throwing up behind a goat pen. Even Orla has climbed down from the bus to explore the lavender fields.

I bend to touch my toes, stretching my back and hamstrings. My knees ache from being tucked to my chest for the last four hours so I wouldn't accidentally touch Kit. If he knows I heard him last night, or if he heard me, he's unmoved. He napped all the way through Spain and back into France, lazily picturesque in his soft jeans and a sand-colored T-shirt, lashes fanned serenely against his cheeks.

Meanwhile, I can barely look at him. The fog of horny war has lifted, but I'm still in the trenches. I'm down here, dying. I've got trench foot of the heart.

Kit is walking with Orla now, somehow wearing her safari hat on his head. He spreads his arms wide, palms up to the sun, and Orla laughs.

Would that be such a bad thing?

The thing about loving Kit is, it's objectively the best thing that could happen to anyone. There's a reason it's happened to so many people by accident. Loving Kit is like being the strawberry in a flute of champagne. Just floating forever on sparkling bubbles, making dizzy circles, soaking up complexity and being sexy by association.

Being with Kit was different. I can admit it now: The only thing better than loving Kit was being loved by him.

Life with Kit was a good dream. It was just—it was inevitable. It made sense. I'd met him so young and loved him so long that everything I'd ever learned about love had grown into him, until I couldn't tell where he ended and love began. We used to look at each other with constant astonishment, like no matter how many times we kissed, we couldn't believe it was happening. And he made me happy, or at least as happy as I could be back then. It was good. We were good.

I've had a million temporary lovers since, but the truth isn't that I haven't needed something real. It's that I haven't wanted it. The thought of starting from scratch, the ordeal of rebuilding something I already spent my whole life building with someone else—it's exhausting. It's a fucking Olympic triathlon of mortifying vulnerability, and at the end, I might not even like them as much as I liked Kit. It'd be a relief if I never had to do it.

It'd also be a relief to get back the parts of me that live inside of him. To have somewhere to put all of him contained in me. There are so many things we couldn't fit into boxes, pieces of ourselves that we can't access anymore because we could never return them. I'd like to be whole with him.

And that whole me—the Theo of Theo-and-Kit—I like them. They have the best jokes, the most nerve, the biggest ideas. I'd have spent weeks coming up with the recipes I've pitched Kit on the fly. It's possible I wouldn't even be here if not for Kit. I never would've booked this trip on my own, and if I'd been able to get my money back, I don't know that I would have tried again. I might never have felt the world open wide to me.

Would that be such a bad thing?

Logistically, it would be stupid to fall back in love with Kit. For one, we live 5,600 miles apart. He loves his job and would never leave it, and I've never seriously imagined myself doing anything more than what I've been doing back home. And even if we lived on the same street, it wouldn't matter, unless Kit still has feelings for me. And I have every reason to believe he doesn't.

He said it in San Sebastián: I thought I should let you go, so that's what I did.

Maybe something more than friendship still shimmers between us—a friction, the tension of two people who know they're the best at fucking each other—but I know the difference between sex and love. I don't know which he feels when his body is close to mine, or what he sees when he looks at me. It's been so long, and I'm not the girl he wanted to marry anymore.

"Theo!"

I spin. Kit's only a few feet away now. He's ridiculous out here in a sea of lavender, a sprig between his thumb and forefinger. I shift my weight to steady myself on both feet.

"Did you have anything in mind for the afternoon?" he asks me.

"I—um, the Calums invited me to climb Castle Hill with them." I glance toward the goat pen. Ginger Calum is now lying flat on his back, halfway under a shrub. Blond Calum prods him with a stick. "But I have a feeling they're not gonna make it."

"A friend of mine from pastry school opened a boulangerie in Nice a few months ago," Kit says. "I thought I might pop in. Do you want to come?"

"Sure," I say, because there's no reason to say no. "Yeah, that sounds fun."

He looks me up and down, like he's taking his first opportunity to get the whole view of me this morning. My tan work pants cinched at the waist, the dust on my boots, the open collar of my shirt. He reaches up and tucks the lavender sprig behind my ear, his thumb brushing the topmost hoop in my earlobe.

"You're very handsome today."

My heart kicks in my chest.

I could ask him. If there's a lesson to take from the aftermath of us, it's that. Not here, not now, but maybe during one of our nights alone in a dimly lit bar, I could put my hand on his and ask if he could ever love me again. And if he said no, at least it would be an answer.

But if he said yes—

If he said he could fall again, I'd tell him I already have.

At the corner of two streets in Nice, a young woman slumps on a doorstep under a sign that says BOULANGERIE in gold letters. She's staring at a cup of tea like she might start crying into it. A huge splatter of pink-red covers her apron and shirt and mats the ends of her blond hair. She looks like hell.

"Apolline?" Kit says.

She looks up and sees Kit, her exhausted eyes going wide in surprise.

"Kit? Qu'est-ce que tu fais là?"

He answers, and gestures to me and says in English, "This is Theo, we were coming to see the shop, but—are you okay? What happened?"

She looks down at the grisly stain on her chest and sighs.

"Raspberry."

Apolline—whose accent suggests she's spent a few years in England—has had a clusterfuck of a day. Her entire staff is out with food poisoning from a party the night before, so she's been running the register and the kitchen by herself since early morning. She barely got half of the day's bread baked before opening, and she's sold out of almost everything. She also knocked a five-liter tub of raspberry filling off the top shelf of the walk-in and caught it with her face.

"We open for the afternoon in thirty minutes, and we need the business." She glances at her watch. "Je ne sais pas quoi faire."

Kit looks at me. I nod.

"Let us help you," Kit says to Apolline.

Inside, I clean up the debris of the morning shift while Kit and Apolline strategize in rapid French. When they're done repeating the words feuilleté and pate à choux over and over, Kit sends her home to change clothes, and I meet him in the kitchen.

"Okay." Kit pushes aside a pile of mixing bowls that appear to have been dumped in a panic. "We're going to be making eight things at once. Apolline's on the register, so I need you."

His eyes shine with the eager determination of Kit on a mission. I forgot how thrilling it is to be on the receiving end of that look. I grin at him, and he grins back, wolfish and ready.

"What's first?"

He hauls over a tub of dough, its domed surface jiggling.

"I've got to roll this out," he says, turning the dough out onto the workstation, "and cut and assemble—croissants, pains au chocolat, pains aux raisins, all those boys. While those are rising, I'll make the pate à choux. Can you handle glazes?"

I shrug. "I can handle most liquids if you give me a recipe."

"Perfect. I'll pipe chouquettes and éclairs, and you make the glazes. We'll do breads in between, and fillings are already prepped." He's working the dough now, pressing it out into a large rectangle. "There should be some sheets of butter in the walk-in, can you—?"

I'm already pulling the door open before he can finish. "What shelf?"

"Left side, second from top."

"Heard." I bring the butter over, and he unwraps a big, flat piece from its parchment paper. He folds the dough around it, picks up a rolling pin and whacks it so hard that dishes across the room rattle.

"Sorry!" he says to my surprised yelp, pounding away with his rolling pin with a fervor that I find upsettingly hot. "Makes it easier to roll! There's a recipe binder in the cabinet over that prep station, can you go to the éclair section and make the chocolate and white chocolate glazes? Pistachios are already prepped in—"

"Dry storage, I see them," I say, thankful for the distraction. "On it."

I take the binder down and fly through the instructions, bubbling with adrenaline. Once I've translated the phrases I don't know, I lay out the ingredients the way I do when I make drinks, so I can see everything at once.

"Nice mise en place," Kit says, glancing over. He tips his head back to shake hair from his eyes.

"Thanks, you good?"

"Yeah, I just—I don't have anything to tie my hair back."

I unwind a rubber band from some sleeves for to-go cups and bring it to him. He looks down at his butter-slicked hands and back to me.

"Could you?"

Could I—could I slide my hands into Kit's thick, soft hair while he's busy maneuvering dough with the calm agility of a professional?

"Sure," I say evenly.

I sweep my fingers up from his temples and gather the front pieces of his hair into an untidy knot, tying it off. I could swear he shivers at the touch, almost leans into it. When I give the knot a tug to make sure it's secure, his hands falter on the rolling pin. Oh.

"You still like that, huh?" I comment, my tone light, uninvested.

"Don't tease." He's aiming for firm, but his voice cracks on the second syllable. My hand is still in his hair, and I have the overwhelming urge to plant a kiss on his crown.

Instead, I lean close to his ear and whisper, "This is just like Ratatouille."

"Good fucking God, Theo."

He elbows me away, half laughing and half groaning as I yell, "What! We're in France!" on the way back to my station. But I tuck the moment into my apron, the breath he held before he knew I was joking.

Kit cranks the butter-filled dough through the rolling press four times, folding and turning, letting me peek at the paper-thin layers of lamination before he cuts it to shape. He rolls triangles of dough into croissants and tucks bits of chocolate and raisins into pockets with nimble hands. Eight sheet pans of pastries settle into the proofing rack, and he switches seamlessly to the stove beside me to make choux dough. I babysit saucepans like my life depends on it.

Apolline returns as I'm pulling the éclair fillings out of cold storage and Kit is piping the last dollops of choux. She thanks us with a kiss on each cheek, then heads out front to reopen with the few pastries left in her cases. I notice the whisk tattooed on her ankle, a match to the one on Kit's wrist and presumably somewhere on Maxine. I remind myself what happened the last time I got jealous of one of Kit's classmates before I lose focus.

"That's good," Kit says, watching me roll out baguette dough. "Much better than last time."

I feel useful and lit up inside. I dart from station to station, from cold storage to dry storage, to the front of the shop with chouquettes and cream puffs, to the back to tell Kit what's needed. I've been spending so much time by myself in the wine cellar and the bus bar, I forgot how much I thrive in good, competent, back-of-house madness.

The shop fills with locals picking up afternoon snacks and tourists filling boxes to carry away to their beachfront hotels, and we make it work.

It helps that Kit is extremely good at this. He's so deeply in his element, it's like Swayze in Road House when he finally gets to bust out his tai chi. The pastry school training keeps his lines neat and his measurements accurate, but the rest is all him. The flick of his wrist, the clear, decisive tone of his voice as he thinks out loud, the way I know from a shift in his hips or shoulders exactly how to follow in harmony. I put out my hand, and Kit pushes a piping bag into it; Kit tilts his chin, and I pass the oven mitts. If I could see us from above, I'd see two bodies, two aprons with the same stardust patterns of flour and cinnamon, one set of choreographed steps.

Our friends used to say they could tell we'd grown up together because we have the same gestures and tics, like two branches of the same nervous system. Outside of sex, I don't think I've ever felt that more than I do in this kitchen.

It makes me think of our old dream. Fairflower. The restaurant Kit believed we could open and that I thought of as an unattainable daydream. If I had let Kit convince me, would it feel like this? Would it be possible still, if I asked and he said yes? Maybe we could still open our own little shop somewhere, anywhere. Make up new menus every weekend, bike home from the market with baskets of fruit, stay up all night experimenting. Stay up all night doing all kinds of things.

Kit looks up at me over a steaming pan of croissants, a stray bit of hair falling across his brow. When he smiles, it's the pleased smile of a job well done, and I'm struck by a memory of him smiling like that between my thighs.

"One more hour!" Apolline calls.

The final rush goes in a flurry of pastry flakes and sugar nibs, éclairs boxed as soon as they're finished with pistachio dust. By seven o'clock, when Apolline turns over the sign in the front window, we're all sweating through our shirts, but we've done it.

"Mes sauveurs!" Apolline cries, sweeping Kit up to kiss him ferociously on each cheek. She does the same to me, and I find that I like her, her fiery eyes and the vivid color in her round cheeks and the way she still smells like raspberries. I also find that I don't really have any desire to try to sleep with her.

We gather around the central workstation and feast on leftover pastries, which is the first time I've actually gotten to taste Apolline's recipes. They're incredible, perfectly buttery and surprising and complex. I can't believe Kit and I made these.

"Do you have anything to drink?" I ask Apolline.

"In the case by counter, anything you want."

I leave the kitchen to fetch a Perrier for myself, then grab another for Apolline and a sparkling lemonade for Kit. Hands full, I have to shoulder the kitchen door, so I don't see them at first. It's not until I step inside that I realize what's happening.

The small of Kit's back is against the edge of his workstation. Apolline is pressed close to him from chest to hip. Her hand is in his hair, and they're kissing.

I drop one of my bottles, catching it with my boot before it smashes on the floor. It bangs into a proofing rack.

Kit and Apolline spring apart.

"Sorry!" I say, my voice unnaturally high. I cough and overcompensate, unnaturally low. "Sorry, I—I didn't mean to interrupt.'

"Theo—" Kit starts.

"You guys clearly have some catching up to do," I say. Fuck, is that why we came here? Does Kit have history with her? It was like a rite of passage in our year. . . . "I'm gonna— I'll see myself out."

"Theo, you don't—"

"No, no, it's totally cool! Really great to meet you, Apolline."

I leave the bottles and shove out of the kitchen, out of the boulangerie, and away from Apolline's street.

Castle Hill is only open for another half hour by the time I reach it, so I climb the steps two at a time. For some reason, it feels right to get as much topographical distance as I can from this afternoon.

I didn't even consider that Apolline might be one of Kit's pastry school lovers, or that this is why he wanted so badly to help her. I was in her kitchen fantasizing about a life with him while he was baking croissants for her. He was thinking of their pastry school hookups while I was contemplating pulling him into the back of a bar and asking if he could find it in himself to love me. That is . . . deeply fucking embarrassing.

I stare out over the sparkling rush of the Riviera and feel like the biggest jackass in the south of France. So, I do what I usually do when I feel like a jackass: I call Sloane.

She answers from set, tucked into a director's chair with pages of sides folded in her lap, her hair in rollers. I squint at the screen—that doesn't look like a wig.

"Hello, world traveler," she says, biting into a carrot stick. "Reunite with any old flames lately?"

"Did they make you dye your hair?"

"Oh, this?" She gestures to the dark brown hair, which was the same orange-blond as mine last time I saw her. "I did this out of self-defense. Less time in hair and makeup with Lincoln."

"It looks good."

"No, it doesn't, I'm shaving my head when this is over. Why do you look like someone pissed in your pinot gris?"

I sigh. "So, that text I sent you yesterday about Kit—"

A banner at the top of my screen interrupts me. It's an email from Schnauzer Bride.

Panic stabs between my ribs. I never responded to her that night in Barcelona, did I? And the next day I was too fucked up over Kit to think about it, and today I got caught up at the boulangerie, and—

The subject line reads "TERMINATION OF CONTRACT <3," with a bunch of sparkle emojis.

"Fuck!" I swear, opening the email. "Fuck, goddammit, I just got a really bad fucking email."

"What? From who?"

I skim Schnauzer Bride's record of every time I ever missed a call or took too long to answer an email, ending with my two days of silence following her shipping-barge crisis. My heart rate accelerates at every bullet point, all the way down to the last line, where she wishes me luck in the future and demands her deposit back.

"I just lost my biggest client of the season, and I—I already maxed out my credit card ordering all the shit for that gig, and there's no fucking way I'm breaking even now. God, I'm such a fucking—" Idiot, jackass, piece of shit, dumb fucking disaster, pathetic failure. I scrunch up my fist and grind it against my forehead. "Fuck!"

"Oh," Sloane says. "Bummer."

I drop my fist and stare at her face on the screen.

"It's kind of significantly more than a bummer."

"No, it is," Sloane says, looking more sincere now. More like she feels sorry for me. "Should we discuss the nuclear option?"

"I'm not borrowing money from you."

"Why not? You can't spell Sloane without ‘loan.'"

"That's not funny."

"It is," Sloane disagrees, biting into another carrot, "but as I have told you a million times, it wouldn't be a loan. I could be your investor. I'd be buying in. I could have our guy draw something up and wire you fifty grand tomorrow."

Jesus. "Fifty grand?"

"Okay, a hundred? Two hundred? What do you need?"

"I don't want any money, Sloane," I insist. "The whole point of the bus was—is—I mean, it's because I love doing it. It's a creative outlet, and people think it's hot, but it's also—"

"To prove you can do something by yourself," Sloane finishes. "I know. You're not ripping the curtain back on any secrets here, Theo."

"Then you know why I can't take the money."

"I get why you won't take money from Mom and Dad, but I don't get why you won't take it from me."

"It's the same thing."

This is absolutely the wrong thing to say to Sloane in any context, but I'm not currently my best self.

"It's actually fucking not, Theo," Sloane says acidly. "It's my money. Did you seriously just—do you think I have what I have because of Mom and Dad?"

I shrug. "I mean, it doesn't hurt."

"Let me remind you that I am a good fucking actor." Her expression is dead serious, the way it gets when we really fight, when I've actually managed to wound her. A pang of guilt and self-loathing shoots through me. "I studied. I did Shakespeare. I fucking did workshops, and I am very expensive, and directors want to work with me—"

"I know, I know, that's not what I meant—"

"—and you know what I don't have to do? I don't have to show my tits unless I want to. I never had to play Crying Girl Number Two just to get my name on a desk. I don't have to put up with any bullshit. And that's because I am very fucking talented, and I know how to use what we have, so you could be a little more grateful for it."

"I am grateful," I say, sounding awful even in my own ears. "I know I'm lucky. But I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be fucking Chet Hanks. I don't want to be another jerk-off with a trust fund and a famous family who gets them embarrassing gigs at fucking influencer festivals in Ibiza."

"Well, it's better than being broke on purpose so you can feel morally superior."

I feel her words like a punch.

"Jesus, Sloane, that's a bit fucking harsh."

Sloane sighs. The rollers in her hair wobble. "Look, Theo, I love you. But you get in your own way. You have this—this nepotism chip on your shoulder, and you make your life harder on purpose just to prove to yourself that you're not what you are. But you're a Flowerday. You have options other people would fucking kill for. You're just too proud to use them."

I hate this. I hate that I don't have anything to say in response.

"The offer stands," Sloane says. "Let me know if you change your mind."

She hangs up, leaving me alone on Castle Hill, feeling worse than I did before I called. And I was feeling pretty fucking shitty.

You get in your own way.

Kit said the exact same words to me in the fight that ended our relationship. I can hear the jet engines rumbling, the crinkle of a biscuit wrapper. I can see the look on his face when he said it, the gentle fucking pity.

I worry that sometimes you get in your own way.

This is why I had to keep myself away: As soon as I look into Kit's big sparkly brown eyes, I forget that I had every right to be angry.

The aftermath of our breakup may not have been Kit's fault, but it doesn't change the fact that the breakup was. He did what he did, and he said what he said on that plane, because he thought he could decide how my life ought to be.

That's what everyone thinks, isn't it? Everyone thought I should be in the family business until I was in front of a camera. Everyone thinks I need to be saved from myself, like I don't know I'm a fuckup. I know. I know. Every day I wake up in the town I grew up in, and I put on my boots and roll up my sleeves and work so hard to be pretty good at a few things, because I know I'd fuck up anything bigger. I would be so much braver if I was someone I could trust.

But what's the point of trying not to be a fuckup, if everyone thinks I'm one anyway? If I'm ruining my life, there are more pleasurable ways to do it.

I climb down Castle Hill and wander into bars, one after another until I find a guy who looks enough like Kit. After a few rounds, I pull him into the bathroom and put my hands in his hair. I laugh until I mean it.

I won't ask anyone for help. And I sure as shit won't ask Kit for love.