The Pairing (The Proposition, #3)

The narrative moves forward two years. At the Heathrow airport in London, Kit walks away from Theo. They were going to take a tour together, but Theo books a flight home alone.

“Four Years Later”

Theo and Kit dreamed of opening a restaurant together, and they were going to take a culinary tour of Europe to inspire them. They fought during the flight to London, leading Theo to head home alone. Kit went to pastry school in Paris after the breakup. The two haven’t spoken to one another since.

Four years after the breakup, Theo and Kit’s nonrefundable travel vouchers are about to expire. 28-year-old Theo decides to take the tour as a way of proving to herself that she is “finally, completely over Kit” (11). She flies to London and nearly misses the bus to Paris. Theo meets Fabrizio, the handsome Italian tour guide, and Orla, the Irish bus driver.

When Theo boards the bus, she is astonished to see that Kit is sitting beside the only open seat. She accidentally hits him in the face with her backpack and then cleans his bloody nose with a bandana. They have a polite but brief conversation about their current lives and health. Kit spends most of the bus drive to Dover reading A Room with a View while Theo fumes inwardly over the unexpected appearance of her ex-boyfriend.

The tourists stroll beside the famous white cliffs. Theo’s parents are acclaimed film directors, and her younger sisters, Sloane and Este, are movie stars. When two tourists talk about the physiques of Theo’s sisters, Kit intervenes and takes her out of earshot. He apologizes for everything and says that he didn’t think Theo wanted to talk to him because she blocked his number. He offers to bow out of the trip in Paris rather than make them suffer three weeks of awkwardness. She suggests that they put aside their history for the time being and “try…peacefully coexisting” (27).

On their first morning in Paris, a pastry chef named Maxine guides the tourists through the city’s pâtisseries. Theo grows irritated because Maxine appears to be smitten with Kit. Two young women on the tour are travel influencers named Dakota and Montana. They recognize Theo from a freelance project, a mobile bar called Saguaro. Theo is distracted from this conversation when she overhears Kit telling Fabrizio that he and Maxine graduated from École Desjardins together. This leads her to believe that Kit and Maxine are a couple, but she resolves not to feel inferior because of Kit any longer.

Theo and Maxine are seated beside one another during the tour group’s traditional seven-course dinner at a Parisian brasserie. Drawing from her experience as an aspiring sommelier at a Michelin-starred restaurant named Timo, Theo impresses Maxine with her knowledge of wine. Theo was often alone during her late teens because Kit was in New York and her family members were away making films. This led her to develop an interest in mixology and hosting events because “everyone likes the kid from the famous family with the unchaperoned party mansion” (41). Maxine relates to Theo’s affluent yet lonely youth because she was orphaned at 15 and grew up in a mansion in Canada. Kit flirts with a waiter, and Maxine informs a shocked Theo that he was known as the “Sex God of École Desjardins” (44). After dinner, Kit gives Theo an olive oil cake, which was her favorite out of all the pastries from the tour that morning. Theo thinks that the cake is a conciliatory gift from him and Maxine. When Kit turns down an invitation to join his fellow tourists for a drink and offers to walk Maxine home, Theo assumes that they live together and are going to have sex. She goes to the Eiffel Tower and calls her sister, Sloane.

The next day, Theo’s confidence grows as she does some sightseeing in Paris by herself. The tour group dines at the Moulin Rouge, and Theo and Kit are grouped together at a table. They remember how much Kit loved the film Moulin Rouge and how they used to sing together at parties. Back when they were a couple, their song was “Can’t Stop Loving You” by Phil Collins. Kit takes Theo to his favorite bar in Paris, which is a speakeasy hidden behind an antique wardrobe. Over drinks, they tell each other about the scars and tattoos they acquired in the four years they were apart, such as the saguaro on Theo’s bicep. After Maxine joins them, Theo excuses herself. At the bar, she admires a handsome, androgynous mixologist and meets a dancer from the Moulin Rouge. She unblocks Kit’s number to let him know that she’s leaving the bar with the dancer and has sex with her in her hostel room.

The next morning, Theo is surprised to discover that Kit spent the night with the androgynous bartender. He explains that Maxine is his best friend, not his girlfriend, and that she’s staying at his flat to take care of his plants while he’s on the tour. Theo realizes that jealousy has clouded her perception, and she resolves to try to be Kit’s friend.

Theo reflects on her past with Kit. She enrolled at UC Santa Barbara because she was scouted by their swim team, and Kit studied art history there. She dropped out two months into her first semester after a shoulder injury ended her swimming career. She didn’t tell Kit before she left college, and this led to one of their worst fights. Years later, Kit found an apartment in Paris without talking to Theo first.

In the present, the tour group visits a vineyard in Bordeaux, where they learn how to shape baguettes and sample some vintages. Kit shares his expertise with Theo during the baking lesson and is impressed by her palate during the wine tasting. Theo implies that she is a sommelier even though she has failed the Court of Master Sommeliers certification exam three times. At a picnic lunch, they enjoy the baguettes they shaped along with “little pots of seedy fig jam, orange crescents of melon, slices of Jambon de Bayonne, and hunks of soft, stinky cheese” (71). Theo and Kit have a friendly competition in which they flirt with a handsome farmhand named Florian to see whose wine glasses he will refill more.

During a visit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Theo considers the possibility that she has invented a pretentious, irritating version of Kit in her mind so that she can feel anger instead of sorrow over losing him. As Theo and Kit explore Bordeaux, she tells him about the mobile bar she built by herself, but she doesn’t tell him that she used this project to cope with their breakup. Kit tells her about his work as a pastry chef in a five-star hotel in Paris. After seeing Fabrizio and the tour group flirt with Florian, Theo suggests that she and Kit should both try to sleep with Florian and see who succeeds. Kit proposes a more expansive competition between him and Theo. The winner will claim victory by “seducing a local in the greatest number of individual cities” (82). Theo accepts, hoping that a friendly rivalry will distract them both from the lingering tension between them.