Casey McQuiston

Theo and Kit have been childhood best friends, crushes, lovers and, after a brutal breakup four years ago, estranged exes.

It's not until Theo and Kit are trapped on board a tour bus that they discover they've each had the same idea: to take their dream European food and wine tour - alone. And now they're stuck with each other for three weeks of the most romantic sights and sensuous flavours of France, Spain, and Italy. But it'll be fine. They're absolutely over each other.

So, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is game. In fact, why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.

some things taste better together

The Pairing

Emma Hak-Kovacs

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

irem

"Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there's a... resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world.”

“You know how they say to do one thing every day that Scares you?" 

"Well, I'm working my way up. Right now I'm at one a week."

It's not just that I want him. It's that he taught me what wanting was. Anyone would have a weakness for that.

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.

"I don't necessarily see myself as any particular, static thing," Theo goes on, "but if I have to pick, non-binary is the closest. Definitely some shade of trans. I just know l'm a lot of stuff, but one thing I'm not is a woman. Does that make sense?" 

Truthfully, it wouldn't matter if it made sense. I would accept anything about Theo even if it didn't agree with any laws of this world or the next.

“You’re…expansive. You take up space. You make the world bigger to fit you. So, no, I'm not surprised you can't fit inside one idea of gender."

My favorite parts of me are the ones that Theo brings out, the ones that grew to match theirs.

 They showed me the galaxy, then made me feel it. That's one of Theo's natural gifts, the way beauty moves through them like stained glass.

“Sometimes it was always wrong, and the only thing to do is stop believing it was good to love them in spite of it. But sometimes they were good to you. Sometimes you go looking for kindling and find that green leaves won’t burn, that the garden was watered too well. Sometimes you have to rearrange the truth into something you won’t miss.

And sometimes, when enough time goes by, it gets hard to remember which one you did.”

The Pairing quotes

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