The Pairing

(Kit’s Version)

Just northeast of Lyon, overlooking the Ain, there sat a medieval village called Pérouges surrounded by walls of honey-gold stone. And within those walls, there was a house.

The house was smallish and modest, with flower boxes that spilled green vines down its cobbly front like tipped watercolor pigment. The garden too was painted a lush, impossible green, and the hills outside the village’s walls were green and amber and the bruised bluish black of wet soil. Somehow the flowers never wilted or browned when I pressed my fingers to their petals, even though we’d been told not to touch them when they were in bloom. When I opened the shutters each morning, the air tasted of irises and sage.

(One day, the love of my life would say this explained everything about me. You can take the boy out of the fairy-tale hamlet, but you can never take the fairy-tale hamlet out of him.)