Page 49 of Crosswind

I look at the ceiling and I run my hand slowly through his hair, the way he does for me, the same unhurried rhythm, and I feel him exhale completely against my ribs.

"Better?" I say.

"Much," he says. Into my chest. "This is exactly what I needed."

"You're very high maintenance," I say.

"I'm a little high maintenance," he says. The same as always. "There's a difference."

I look at the canal from this angle, upside down, from the sofa, and feel something I have been feeling all day in various forms and which I have decided to stop filing under anything other than what it is.

Happy. Structurally, without reservation.

His arms tighten slightly. His weight settles more fully against me.

"Jan," he says.

"Yes."

"This is perfect."

I look at the ceiling. His weight on my chest, his breathing slow, the Friday evening quiet around us.

"Stay," I say.

He is still for a moment.

Then his arm tightens across my stomach.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PATRICK

My parents live in Haarlem. Twenty minutes by train, a fact I have always appreciated — close enough for Sunday lunches, far enough that the distance requires intention. My mother called it practical when they moved there, twelve years ago, which is her word for things she has decided and doesn't need to justify further. My father agreed without discussion, which is his version of enthusiasm.

I have been taking this route since I was old enough to go alone and I know it the way I know most familiar things, not from attention but from the body. The flat Dutch landscape, the fields, Haarlem appearing through the train window: narrower canals, older brick, the particular unhurried ease of a city that has always known what it is.

Jan is beside me on the train with flowers on his lap and a bottle of wine in the bag at his feet.

The flowers are peonies, classic without being funereal, seasonal without being obvious. He researched it. I know this because he told me while standing in the flower market with the focused intensity of someone making a significant decision.

The wine took fourteen minutes. He asked what my father drinks, I said red wine, he looked at me with the expression he uses when I've failed to retain useful information, and then spent fourteen minutes, I counted, establishing that a Burgundy Pinot Noir, not too young, not too expensive in a way that would seem performative, was the correct choice. He rarely drinks, but he knows wine. Of course he had looked into it.

I stood behind him with my hand on his back, watching him examine the bottles with the focused attention he brings to things that matter to him, and I felt something so warm and certain in my chest that I had to say something.

"You're overthinking this," I said.

He didn't turn around. "I'm being thorough. There's a difference."

"I know," I said. "That's why I love you."

A beat. He examined the label once more. "This one."

I smiled at the back of his head.

He is dressed with the precision of someone who has thought about this — not formally, not performatively, just correctly.