“The point is—ow—you can’t just act like I’m the same and you’re the same and everything’s fine, because—”
“Baa!”
“—because it’s not.”
Kit’s face is serious, even as the sheep clamps her teeth around the hem of my overalls.
“I’m not the same,” he concedes. “And I’m sure you’re not. And I would have liked to talk to you, but, Theo, what part of blocking my number was supposed to make me think that was welcome?”
I look down at the sheep in time to see her cough up a clump of grass on my boots. Nearly missed my bus, almost hit by a car, committed assault and battery, heard a man call my little sister “a top sort,” regurgitated on by a sheep, and now trapped with my ex, who is making an inconveniently good point.
“I am sorry,” Kit says. “For all of it.”
Kit was born with a sincere face. He means everything he says, and he looks like it.
When I look at him, I believe he really is sorry. Not that it’s enough, but it is at least true.
“And I’m sorry if I overstepped,” he says. “Old habits.”
I think of Kit, age eleven, plucking a bee stinger out of my foot. Kit, age twenty-three, waking me up when I overslept for work.
He opens his little bag, and the sheep finally turns her attention from me, eyeing Kit curiously as he shakes a few orange bits from a foil pouch into his palm.
“Hi, beautiful,” he says in his softest voice. “Would you like to leave poor Theo alone and have a snack?”
She plods over and starts eating out of his hand, as happy and gentle as a lamb.
“Dried apricots,” he tells me.
Against my own wishes, my jaw unclenches. Maybe, if I’m being honest, I needed Kit away from me because it’s so hard to stay mad in his presence. Anger doesn’t like to hang around him.
“Look,” I say. “You being here—this isn’t the trip I had in mind.”
“Me neither,” he says, still feeding the sheep.
“But this is important to me, okay?” I say. “So I’m going to do it.”
“Yeah, of course it is. You should.” He’s nodding, still horribly sincere. “I was thinking, if you’re uncomfortable, I could . . . hop off in Paris? Stay home?”
So heisstill in Paris.
Even worse, he means this too. It shows not only on his face but in the set of his shoulders, the plaintive tilt of his chin.
He really isn’t the same. Something has firmed up, like the center of a crème brûlée that was sloshy custard the last time I saw it. He seems . . . completed, somehow. The Kit I knew was restless and hungry. This person is steady, self-sustained.
This new Kit thinks he’s doing me a favor. He thinks he can handle this, and I can’t.
Fucking Sheep Boy over here wants to be the bigger person.
“No, that’s stupid,” I say. “Don’t do that.”
He blinks. “Why not?”
“Because we both paid for our own ticket,” I point out. “And besides, I don’t know anyone else on this tour. Do you?”
Kit shakes his head.
“So, if anything happens, at least we’ll have . . .” What’s a noncommittal way to describe what we are to each other? “Someone who knows our blood type, or whatever.”
