Page 62 of Crosswind

His arms tighten once more.

We stay like that for a long time.

The first three days have a quality I find difficult to name. Not the novelty of being somewhere new. Not the absence of ordinary life.

It is Jan on holiday.

Jan on holiday is a version of Jan I have not seen before and which I am paying close attention to.

He wakes up early, this is consistent, this is simply Jan, but here he takes his coffee out to the terrace and sits with it and looks at the rice terraces as they change in the early light and does not open his laptop. I watch him do this from the doorway and feel something I have stopped trying to name because the names are all insufficient.

He lets me hold his hand everywhere.

This is the other thing. In Amsterdam Jan is — not private, exactly, but measured. The hand-holding, the public affection — present, real, but considered. Here, for whatever reason, the distance from ordinary life, the anonymity of being somewhere neither of us is known, Jan simply lets me. In the markets, on the temple steps, walking the rice terrace path at dawn. My hand and his hand and the Bali morning around us.

"You're different here," I say, one morning.

He looks at me from across the coffee cups on the terrace. "Different how."

"Softer," I say. Then, quickly: "That's not… I don't mean…”

"I know what you mean," he says. He looks at the terraces. "It's easier here. To be…” He pauses. "Nobody knows us here. Nobody has opinions about us here."

"Does that happen in Amsterdam?"

He looks at me. "Not often. But the possibility exists." He drinks his coffee. "Here it doesn't."

I look at him.

"I like it," he says. "The not-existing-to-anyone."

"We exist to each other," I say.

He looks at me. The full Jan attention, unhurried, taking me in.

"Yes," he says. "That's precisely what I mean."

Across the next two days, we visit three temples, following the itinerary Jan prepared in Amsterdam three weeks ago. Pura Tirta Empul on day two — the holy springs near Ubud, which I have been to twice before and which means something different standing here with Jan, who takes everything in with the focused attention he brings to things he finds worth his attention. Pura Luhur Batukaru the same afternoon, on the forested slopes of Mount Batukaru, one of Bali's major directional temples, cooler and quieter than the coastal ones, the one that requires the most walking, which Jan does without complaint in the quiet that means he is paying full attention to something. And Pura Besakih on day three — the mother temple, on the slopes of Mount Agung in the east, which I have also been to before and which still stops me, the scale of it, the way it sits against the volcano like something that has simply always been there.

Jan stands at the base and looks up.

"Extraordinary," he says.

"Yes," I say.

I am looking at him.

He turns. Catches me. The expression — not quite flustered, the warm version of it.

"The temple," he says.

"I was agreeing," I say.

He shakes his head. But he doesn't move away from me. He turns back to the temple and I stand beside him and put my hand on the small of his back because I put it there and it belongs there and I have stopped finding reasons not to.

The following morning Jan comes out of the villa in his swimming shorts.

I am on the terrace with my tea. I look at him.