Page 26 of Crosswind

Patrick starts filming at nine.

He kisses me in the kitchen first, properly, both hands on my face, unhurried in the way he is when something matters, and then he pauses outside the bedroom door.

"I think I need to use your name," he says. "Not your work, not anything else. Just Jan. Is that okay?"

I look at him. He is standing in the doorway with the expression of someone who has thought about something carefully and is still not entirely sure — the kind of uncertainty I almost never see in him.

"Yes," I say.

"You're sure?"

I hold his gaze. "Patrick." A pause. "Use my name."

He nods once, kisses me again briefly, and closes the door.

I stand in the kitchen for a moment.

He is filming it here. I am in the sitting room with my laptop and the canal outside and the feeling of someone trying to be quiet in their own apartment.

I can hear him. Not the words, just the voice, the cadence of Patrick talking to a camera, the version of him that is warm and direct and slightly more considered than in conversation. I know this voice from three years of videos watched alone in this apartment on quiet evenings. I know it differently now.

I don't try to hear the words. This is his to say and I don't need to curate it. I trust him.

I go to the kitchen. I make coffee. I open my laptop and look at the quarterly report that has been waiting since Cape Town and read the same sentence four times without retaining it.

I close the laptop.

I know he will name me. What I don't know is how. Whether I will become a subject or simply a fact. Whether two hundred thousand people will finish today knowing who I am and caring, or knowing who I am and moving on.

I am a person who prefers certainty. I trust him, I said so and I meant it and it hasn't changed. That will have to be enough.

I have thought about this. I have examined it from several angles and arrived at the same place each time: I don't mind. I find, turning it over, that I genuinely don't mind. I have always lived my life without announcement — I am Jan Novak, I am gay, I am with Patrick, these are facts, here is my hand in his — and if today the facts become more widely known then they become more widely known. That's all.

What I mind, slightly, is not being there.

I look at the canal.

Tomas stops by at eleven with pastries he didn't need to bring and the expression of someone who has been exercising restraint for two days and has run out of it.

"I saw the Instagram," he says, before he is fully through the door.

"I know," I say. "Come in."

He comes in. He puts the pastries on the kitchen table and sits down and looks at me with the focused attention he uses when he is deciding how worried to be.

"Are you okay?" he says. He is looking at me with steady concern, without judgment, ready to stay as long as required.

"Yes."

"Jan." He tilts his head slightly. The Tomas version of I don't entirely believe you.

"I'm fine, Tomas." I look at him. "Really."

He looks at me for a long moment. I pour him a coffee. He wraps his hands around it and I sit across from him and we look at each other in the way of sixteen years of friendship.

"He's filming something today," I say. "Right now, actually. In the bedroom."

Tomas glances toward the closed door. Then back at me. "And you're out here."