Page 59 of Crosswind

He doesn't look up. "That's not useful information."

I tighten my arms around him. He continues typing. I watch him do it, the focused efficiency of Jan approaching something he has decided to do properly, and feel something so large and warm that I rest my face in his neck and just stay there for a moment.

"Patrick," he says. A warning in it, mild.

"Mm." I don't move.

"I can't type if you're doing that."

"I'm not stopping you," I say, into his neck.

He shifts slightly. "You're breathing on my neck."

"I live here," I say. "This is my neck now. I've claimed it."

He makes a sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not a laugh.

"Seventeen temples," I say, into the neck. "Noted. We'll do three. You pick which ones."

"Already have," he says.

Of course he has.

———

The flight is fourteen hours.

I booked business class. This seemed, at the time, like the correct decision — a long-haul flight, the logic of comfort, the practical case for arriving in Bali rested rather than folded like a piece of paper. I am a pilot. I understand aircraft. I made what I believed to be an informed choice.

I was wrong.

The problem with business class, a problem I have somehow failed to fully register in all my years of flying, possibly because I have always been on the other side of the locked door, is the seats. They are excellent seats. They recline into flat beds. Jan is in seat D. I am in seat G. Between us: a centre console, an armrest, a storage unit, and approximately sixty centimetres of premium cabin engineering designed by someone who has clearly never been in love.

"This is someone's fault," I say, forty minutes into the flight.

Jan looks up from his book. "What is."

"This." I gesture at the partition between us. "The design. Whoever designed this has never been in love."

Jan looks at the partition. Then at me. "It's a lie-flat seat, Patrick. It converts into a bed."

"A single bed," I say. Like this is the problem's actual name.

"You knew that when you booked it." Jan turns a page.

"I didn't think about it properly." I look at the partition with the expression I normally reserve for things that have personally wronged me.

He looks up from his book. The mild Jan assessment. "You fly for a living."

"I fly the plane. I don't sit in the cabin having feelings about the seat configuration." A pause. "Also I've never flown with someone I loved this much. New variables." I look at the partition. "In economy we'd be sitting right next to each other. I could sleep on you the entire flight."

"You're a hundred and ninety centimetres," Jan says. "In economy you'd have your knees somewhere near your chin."

"Worth it," I say. Without hesitation.

Jan looks at me with the expression he uses when I have said something he finds both unreasonable and entirely characteristic. "Patrick."

"I would be squeezed against you for fourteen hours," I say. "Significantly preferable to this." I gesture again at the sixty centimetres of premium engineering between us. "This was designed by someone who has never wanted to be on top of another person on an aeroplane."