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"I want them."

I look at him. He looks at me. A child walks into the back of my knees and apologises in Dutch and I accept the apology without looking away from Patrick.

"Fine," I say.

He puts the stroopwafels in the bag I'm carrying, which he has apparently decided is communal. I say nothing about this.

We walk back along the canal. The light is doing something pale and clean over the water. Patrick is carrying both bags — he took them from me outside the market without asking, the way he does things he has simply decided, and I did not argue — and he is telling me something about a flight he did over Iceland, the aurora from altitude, whether it looks the same through the cockpit window as through a camera. I am listening with the part of my attention that is never quite elsewhere when Patrick is talking, and watching the canal with the rest of it.

He stops mid-sentence. I look over. He is watching me with the expression he gets when he has noticed something and is deciding whether to mention it — the slight tilt of his head, the almost-smile held back.

"Jan," he says.

"I'm listening." I look back at the canal.

"You're doing your thinking face."

I turn to face him. "I don't have a thinking face."

"You have about four faces," he says. "This is the one where you're listening and also somewhere else at the same time."

I look at him. He looks back without apology.

"I was listening," I say. "You were describing the aurora. The green is more diffuse than photographs suggest and the movement is slower."

He stares at me. "You were somewhere else and you retained everything I said."

"I retain most things."

He laughs, the real one, the full version, and then he shifts both bags to one hand and takes my hand with the other. Just like that. No question, no announcement, as if taking my hand is simply the next logical step after carrying the bags and telling me about the aurora.

I look at our hands.

I look at the canal.

We walk the rest of the way home like that.

The afternoon is quiet in the way Saturday afternoons can be when there is nowhere to be and no reason to manufacture one.

Patrick reads on the sofa, his book, retrieved from my shelf where it has apparently been living quite comfortably, and I work at the kitchen table for two hours on the quarterly report that is due Thursday. This is, objectively, not how one might choose to spend a Saturday afternoon after Friday evening. It is also exactly how I am. Patrick, when I told him I had work to do, said: go, I'll be here. Said it without checking whether I wanted him to stay, which I did, and without asking for an alternative, which I didn't have one to offer.

I'll be here.

I work. Occasionally I hear him on the sofa, the sound of a page turning, someone absorbed in something. Occasionally he gets up and I hear the kettle in the kitchen and then he comes to the doorway and holds out a fresh cup without interrupting. I take it without looking up. He goes back.

At some point I look up and he has fallen asleep.

He is on his side, the book open face-down on his chest, one arm trailing off the edge of the sofa. His face, in sleep, has the openness of someone who sleeps without expecting interruption, the absence of the careful small arrangements the rest of us make without noticing. He looks like himself, more completely than he does awake.

I sit for a moment and look at him and don't attempt to be objective about it.

Then I go back to the quarterly report.

I make dinner. He wakes up, disoriented for approximately four seconds and then not, and comes to stand beside me at the stove and ask if he can do anything. I give him the bread to slice because it keeps him occupied. He slices it with more precision than strictly necessary, which is a thing I notice and decide not to comment on.

We eat. We talk, about his layover schedule, my week ahead, a thing that happened at his airline that he has been telling me about in pieces and which I have been following with more attention than the thing probably warrants, simply because he is the one telling it. He is a good storyteller. He makes things interesting by caring about them.

Afterwards he clears up and I make tea and we go back to the sofa and this time neither of us pretends to be doing anything else. He pulls me in. I go without negotiation. His hand moves up and down my arm in the slow absent way he has and outside the canal is dark and the city is doing its Saturday evening thing and I am aware of the ease of it. I have not been easy with a person before. I have liked people, wanted people, managed people carefully at a precise and deliberate distance. This is not that. This is Patrick on my sofa with his chin on my head and neither of us tracking the time.