Page 73 of Crosswind

I think about this.

"The business class seats," I say.

He stares at me. "That's… I wanted to be next to you."

"It was your decision."

"It was a romantic impulse that I still maintain…”

"Patrick."

"Get on the motorbike, Jan."

I get on the motorbike. He hands me a helmet without being asked. He puts his own on. We go.

The road goes through small villages and past rice fields and up into the hills and past a warung where Patrick stops for cold drinks without being asked and hands one to me at the roadside with the ease of someone who has been doing this for years. Which he has not. Which is simply Patrick — the fluency of him in any situation, the way he arrives somewhere and immediately belongs there.

I hold onto him from behind.

This is practical. The road is narrow and occasionally uneven and holding on is the correct response to the situation. I am not holding on for any other reason.

"You're holding on quite tightly," Patrick says, over the engine.

"The road is narrow," I say.

"Mm."

We ride through the village and the rice fields and the particular Bali morning that is already warm and full of light and birds and the smell of something flowering somewhere close. I have my chin on Patrick's shoulder. His hands on the handlebars. The road unspooling ahead of us.

I think: I have not done this before. Not this, not a motorbike through a rice field in Bali, but the broader thing. The belonging somewhere that is not a place but a person. Moving through the world and having it feel like this.

I hold on a little tighter.

Patrick doesn't comment.

The waterfall is worth the journey.

It drops from a height I cannot estimate precisely into a pool that is genuinely cold, which I discover because Patrick goes in immediately and I go in because — because he asked me to and because the day is hot and because Jan Novak goes into waterfalls in Bali apparently, which is a sentence I would not have predicted writing in June.

The pool is cold and the water is loud and Patrick surfaces and shakes the water from his hair and looks at me with the expression he has when something is exactly right.

"Good?" he says.

I look at the waterfall. The water coming off the rock, the light through the trees, the sound of it filling everything.

"Good," I say.

He grins. He pulls me under the waterfall.

I let him.

We stay until we are completely cold and then we climb back up to the road and get on the motorbike and Patrick drives us back through the rice fields with my arms around him and my face against his back and the Bali sun drying us as we go.

"Last day," he says, at some point. Over the engine.

"Yes," I say.

When we stop at a junction, Patrick covers my hand briefly with his, then returns his hand to the handlebar.