Page 65 of Crosswind

He is quiet for a moment. Then he squeezes my hand.

"Yes," he says. "I am."

I look at the pool and the terraces beyond it and feel something that is warm and slightly embarrassing and entirely worth it.

There is a cooking class on the fourth day.

This is Jan's addition to the itinerary — he found it, booked it, mentioned it to me with the particular Jan tone of someone who has already decided and is informing rather than asking. I said yes immediately, both because I wanted to and because I have learned that agreeing with Jan's itinerary additions tends to result in better outcomes than either of us expects.

The class is in a family compound in the rice fields. The teacher is a woman named Made who has been cooking this food for forty years and who takes one look at Jan when we arrive and says something in Balinese that makes her assistant laugh.

"What did she say?" I ask the assistant.

"She said your friend is very serious for a tourist," the assistant says.

Jan, who has already begun inspecting the ingredients laid out on the table, does not look up.

I look at Made. I look at Jan.

"He's not my friend," I say. "He's my boyfriend."

Made smiles, the full version, warm and entirely unbothered, and says something else.

"She says that explains the seriousness," the assistant translates. "She says people in love are always serious about the things they do for each other."

I look at Jan.

He has looked up from the ingredients. He is looking at me with the expression — the quiet one, the full-attention one, the one that is not quite a smile but contains everything.

"She's not wrong," I say.

He looks back at the ingredients.

But the corner of his mouth goes.

The nights in Bali are warm and soft and entirely ours.

The villa, the pool, the darkness here that is different from Amsterdam — fuller, richer, the sound of the night different, frogs and something distant and the air that is warm even at midnight.

We swim in the pool on the fourth night. Jan, who swims with the same focused efficiency he brings to everything, and me, who is perfectly content to float on my back and look at the sky and be present in this moment, which I have become quite good at since Jan, who is not a person who tolerates mental absence with any patience.

"You're doing the ceiling thing," he says.

"It's the sky," I say. "I'm doing the sky thing."

"You have the same expression."

"I'm happy," I say. "That's the expression."

He swims over. Stands beside me in the water, the pool warm and lit from below, the Bali night around us.

He looks at me.

"Me too," he says.

I take his face in both hands. He lets me. I kiss him in the warm pool in the Bali night and he puts his hands on my arms and kisses me back and the frogs continue and the night continues and the rice terraces are somewhere beyond the pool wall and none of it is anything except exactly right.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN