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I sit with that for a moment.

I have followed Patrick Sutton's voice across the internet for years before I ever met him. Watched his videos in my apartment on quiet evenings and thought, in the careful way of someone who has decided not to want things that aren't available, that he seemed like someone worth knowing. That I liked the way he talked about things he loved.

I met him on a treadmill in Cancun and told myself it was nothing.

I am in 1A on his aircraft going to Cape Town.

I am, I find, completely undone.

The engines change note. We start to move.

CHAPTER FOUR

PATRICK

The crew bus leaves at twenty-two-ten. I know this because I have done this route eleven times and the sequence is automatic — shutdown checklist, handover, crew lounge, bus, hotel, repeat in reverse four days later. I have never once waited at the gate.

Tonight I wait at the gate.

"Bus is here," Anders says, behind me. His voice has the careful neutrality of someone who has noticed something and is deciding how to approach it.

"I know."

A pause. "You're not on it."

"Also correct." I don't look away from the arrivals board.

He comes to stand beside me. We look at the arrivals board together. Jan's flight, my flight, though for him it was just the passenger cabin and for me it was eleven hours behind the flight deck door, touched down fifty-three minutes ago.

"Someone coming?" Anders says.

"My boyfriend," I say. Because it is true.

Anders looks at me. I look at the arrivals board. There is a beat, the kind that happens when you say something for the first time out loud to someone who didn't know it, the air rearranging itself slightly.

"Since when?" Anders turns to look at me properly, arms crossed.

"Few weeks." I keep my eyes on the board.

"You didn't mention it."

"I'm mentioning it now. Close your mouth, Anders."

A pause. "Wait. Weren't you…didn’t you have a fiancée? That was a woman."

"Yes."

"So you’re..”

"Bi," I say. The word feels new in my mouth, slightly exposed in the open air of Cape Town International. "Yes."

He stares at me. I look at the arrivals board. There is a silence long enough that I glance at him — he is standing with his hands in his pockets, jaw slightly loose, the expression of a man genuinely recalculating.

"Huh," he says.

"That's all you've got?"

"I'm processing." He shifts his weight. Another pause. "Does she know?"