“Me too, I—”
“—never got around to—”
“—didn’t want it to go to waste, so—”
In some cobwebby corner of my brain, I must have knownwe had the same vouchers with the same expiration dates, but I never imagined that somehow we would—we would—
“Please tell me,” I say, shutting my eyes, “we didn’t book the same fucking tour.”
The bus jerks into drive, and my knees buckle—half of me lands in the empty seat, the other half in Kit’s lap. My backpack swings around and smashes squarely into Kit’s face.
Into the hair behind my ear, voice thick and muffled and gently amused, Kit says, “So you’re still mad at me, then.”
I swear, clawing toward my own seat. Kit’s eyes are scrunched shut, his hand clamped over his nose.
“Orla’s got a lead foot. Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” Kit says, “but don’t panic when I show you.”
“Show me wh—” He removes his hand to reveal an absolutely spectacular nosebleed. “Jesus!”
“It’s okay!” Blood dribbles out of his left nostril, already pooling in the hollow of his Cupid’s bow. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It looks pretty fucking bad, Kit!”
“My nose just does this now.” He sneezes out few tiny red bubbles. “It’ll stop in a second.”
Now.Now, as in there was once athen,in which we were in love and I knew what his nose did and didn’t do.
When someone is your best friend for sixteen years, your boyfriend for two, and your first and only love, it’s not easy to edit them from your life, but I’ve done it. Everything that could be erased or deactivated or deleted has been: every number blocked, every Polaroid and souvenir T-shirt packed away in cardboard boxes in one of Sloane’s spare closets. I’ve curated my own life to know nothing about his, not his job or his haircut or whether he ever finished pastry school in Paris. I’m pretty sure hedoesstill live in Paris, but until this moment, he could have joined the Navy and had an arm bitten off by a shark for all I knew.
If Idothink about Kit, in the fantasy I don’t have, because I don’t think about him enough to have a specific fantasy scenario, we’re colliding at the door of a restaurant in Manhattan. He’s on a date, and I’m on invitation to sample the wine list, and whatever tragic artist he’s with gets bonked in the head by the door when he sees me in my bespoke suit and knows I’ve finally made it, that I have a fulfilling career and an endless parade of lovers, that I’ve gotten my shit so comprehensively together I’ll never need him or anyone else ever again. And I don’t even notice him.
In real life, people are staring.
“I’m okay, Birgitte!” Kit says with a little wave at the retirees across the aisle. He’s already befriended some elderly Swedes.
It’s never like this in my head, like I’m the same old catastrophe he couldn’t put up with anymore. He’s supposed to see that I’msomebodynow. A brave new Theo, in control of every situation. The damn Crocodile Hunter.
I untie the bandana from my neck.
“Come here,” I say, wetting the cloth with water from my pack.
“It’s really fine,” Kit insists. “It’s already stopping.”
“Then let me clean you up.”
Kit’s expression flickers, somewhere between cautious hope and the queasy, trapped look of a man being charged by a grizzly.
“Okay.”
I reach for him from the right, but he turns his face to the left. I go to reach from the left, but he corrects too fast and turns his face to the right. We miss each other two more times before I clamp a hand around his chin and tilt his jaw directly toward me.
Our eyes lock, both of us caught by surprise.
Bad move. Steve Irwin never went around grabbing crocodiles by their handsome little jaws. At least, none that he’d had sex with.
“Hold still,” I say, refusing to look away first. Kit blinks slowly, then nods.
