Page 46 of Crosswind

"I have a budget presentation to finish."

"I know you have a budget presentation to finish." He sets down the cup. "Here is what we're going to do. You work until noon. Then you're mine."

I look at him.

"Noon," he says firmly. "Not twelve-thirty. Noon. I'll collect you from the kitchen table at twelve exactly and we're going for lunch somewhere you like and then we're walking around the city and then we're coming home and we're not doing anything for the rest of the afternoon."

"That's not nothing. That's a plan."

"It's a loose plan. The nothing is the main feature." He picks up his tea again. "Noon, Jan."

I look at him for a moment. At the complete certainty of him. At the Patrick warmth applied with gentle immovability, which I have come to understand is unstoppable and have largely stopped resisting.

"Noon," I say.

He smiles at his tea.

I work.

Patrick, good to his word, disappears into the sitting room and leaves me to it. I hear him occasionally — his podcast, the kettle, at one point what sounds like a twenty-minute phone call that I do not try to hear. The sounds of someone existing companionably in the adjacent room. I have worked alone in this apartment for years. The sounds of Patrick in the next room are, I find, not disruptive. They are, if anything, the opposite of disruptive.

I finish the section I needed to finish. I send two emails. I close the laptop at three minutes to twelve.

Patrick appears in the kitchen doorway at exactly twelve o'clock.

"Ready?" he says.

"You timed that."

"Of course I timed it." He holds out his hand. "Come on."

Lunch is at a place on the Prinsengracht that I have been meaning to try for three months and have not tried because I have been going alone and it seemed like the kind of place that required company. Patrick orders confidently from a menu he has never seen before, which is a Patrick thing — the ease with which he inhabits any situation. He asks the waiter one question and the waiter recommends something and Patrick takes the recommendation and it is the correct choice.

We talk about nothing important. His roster for next week. A book I've been reading. A thing that happened at his airline that he's been telling me about in pieces. The easy conversation of two people who have run out of difficult things to say and arrived at the pleasant side of that.

At some point he reaches across the table and takes my hand.

I let him.

He doesn't make anything of it. He just holds it and carries on talking, like this is simply what you do with someone's hand when it's available. Which, I find, it is.

Afterwards we walk.

Amsterdam in the Friday afternoon — unhurried, golden, the canals doing their reflective thing. Patrick keeps his hand in mine as we walk, shifting bags and jackets to accommodate without breaking contact, and I think about the market and the stroopwafels and the first time he did this and how it felt then, how it feels now, the difference between the two.

We walk the Jordaan. The Negen Straatjes. Along the Herengracht where the light on the water is doing something entirely unreasonable. Patrick takes photographs on his phone, the canal, the bridges, a cat on a windowsill, and I watch him do it with the quiet attention I have been giving him for months and which I have stopped pretending not to have.

"You're looking at me again," he says, without turning around.

"I'm looking at the canal," I say.

"You're looking at me."

"I retain the right to look at things I find worth looking at."

He turns. The expression — the warm, unhurried version. "That's the nicest thing you've said since this morning."

"Don't push it," I say.