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"No," he says. "I'm not upset." A pause. “I’m…" He stops. He is, I realise, doing the Jan thing — choosing words with the care of someone for whom language matters. "I'm aware that you didn't have to tell me. That you could have come home and said nothing and I would never have known. The fact that you told me…” He stops again.

"Jan," I say.

"It matters," he says. Simply. "That you told me. It matters a lot."

I look at him. At Jan receiving something that cost him to say. He has been left before. He has been the person someone chose to leave for an easier path. He has built walls specifically because of that pattern. And I have come home and told him a thing I didn't have to tell him and his face is doing the thing it does when something has reached him despite his best efforts.

I get up from the chair. I cross to the sofa. I sit beside him and he turns toward me and I put my arms around him and he lets me — goes into it, his face against my neck, both arms around me, holding on.

We sit like that for a while.

"Some spaces come with different assumptions," he says eventually, into my neck. "People may assume things. But that doesn't mean they get to ignore what you've told them."

"I know," I say. "I'm figuring it out."

"You figured it out correctly tonight."

A pause. Then he pulls back slightly, not away, just enough to look at me.

"Can I tell you something?" he says.

"Yes."

He is quiet for a moment. Choosing, the way he always chooses. "I spent a long time on the outside of that world," he says. "The gay world. The bars, the apps, the social grammar of it. There are people in it who want what you and I want — fidelity, something that builds. And there are people who don't. Both are fine. But when you're new to it, it can be hard to read which conversation you're in." He pauses. "Finn was testing the water at first. But after you answered him clearly, he should have listened."

He looks at me.

"I went to those places once or twice, when I first moved to Amsterdam. I was twenty-two, I was finally in a city where I could be myself, and I thought that was what being yourself meant. And I stood in those rooms and felt completely lost, because the version of being myself I wanted wasn't what I found there." A pause. "So I left. I went home and read my books and went to my gym and told myself that if I ever met someone it would be because I met them. Naturally." A pause. "And then I sat down at your breakfast table in Cancun."

I look at him. At everything in his face that he is letting me see.

"What happened to you tonight wasn't inevitable," he says. "It was Finn making an assumption. You corrected it. Twice, before he actually listened." He holds my gaze. "That's the whole thing," he says.

I look at him. "It's wrong for me too," I say. "What Finn did. That's not what I want either. I want what we have."

"Yes," he says. "I know. That's why I'm not upset." He pauses. "And that's why it matters that you came home and told me." He pauses. "It's one of the things I…” He stops.

I look at him. "One of the things you what?"

A pause. Long enough that I think he won't answer. Then: "One of the things I…” He stops again. Then, carefully: "One of the things I value about you."

He pulls back slightly and looks at me. His face is very close. The lamplight, the canal outside, the Wednesday evening quiet of the apartment.

"Okay?" he says.

"Yeah," I say. "Okay."

He nods once. Then he picks up his book again. I lean into the sofa beside him and he puts his legs across mine without looking up from the page, the natural arrangement, the one that is simply what we do, and his hand finds mine on his shin and holds it.

I look at the canal.

I think about what he almost said.

I think about the word he stopped before.

I think: I know what it was.

I think: I'm going to wait until he's ready to say it.