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"I said I'd think about it." He looks up. "I wouldn't do anything you weren't comfortable with."

I look at him for a long moment.

This is not the thing. I know this is not the thing, it is a reasonable offer, he has handled it reasonably, he is asking rather than deciding. This is not the thing.

But something about it — the they'd want to meet you, film us — something about the accumulation of it, all of it, the comment and Finn and the first collaboration request and now this, the weight of being Patrick Sutton's boyfriend landing in a new way, a way I can feel in my chest—

"I need a minute," I say.

He looks at me. "Jan?"

"I just…” I push back from the table. "Give me a minute."

I go to the bedroom. I close the door.

I hear him on the other side of it. Not doing anything, just there, the quality of Patrick when he knows something is wrong and is deciding whether to push. I hear him put his cup down. I hear him take a step toward the door and then stop.

He doesn't knock.

He waits.

I stand in the dark on my side of the door and he stands in the light on his and neither of us says anything and the thing I have been carrying all week sits in the room with me, too large to manage, too real to file.

This is the part I cannot resolve: I do not want to say it.

Not because I don't mean it. I mean it with more precision than I have meant most things in my life. I have been in love with Patrick for long enough that the falling is behind me and this is simply the fixed point around which everything else now organises itself.

But saying it would make something else real. Not the love, that has been real for weeks. The dependence. The fact that Patrick Sutton has become, without my planning it, the load-bearing structure of parts of my life I had previously supported alone. The fact that when he is in New York I cannot sleep. The fact that his voice through a closed door does something to my chest I cannot fully account for. The fact that the apartment is different when he is in it and more different when he is not.

I have lived alone for nine years and been sufficient. I have not needed anyone in the way I need this.

Saying it out loud makes it permanent. Makes me the person who needs Patrick Sutton — specifically, irreplaceably, in a way I cannot manage or contain or file under something useful. I am not afraid of loving him. I am afraid of needing him. These are not the same thing and I have spent most of my adult life making very sure they stayed separate.

They are not separate anymore.

That is the thing I have been not-saying. Not just to Patrick. To myself.

I hear him sit down on the floor outside the door.

Outside my apartment the canal does its ordinary Thursday morning thing — a boat, a cyclist, the city operating at its usual indifferent pace. In here just the dark and the door and Patrick, who has flown through the night to be here, sitting on the other side of the door, waiting for me to be ready.

I am not ready.

The world, I find, has continued moving regardless.

CHAPTER TEN

PATRICK

I sit on the floor outside the door and wait. This is harder than it sounds. I am not, by nature, a person who sits still when someone I love is in the next room in distress. I want to knock. I want to go in. I want to find the thing that's wrong and address it directly, which is how I address most things, because most things can be addressed if you approach them correctly.

I have learned, over the last three months, that Jan is not most things.

So I sit on the floor and I wait and I listen. Nothing from the other side of the door. Not crying, I would hear that. Not pacing. Just silence, someone standing very still with something large.

I go over the last hour. The phone call, the collab offer, Jan's face when I told him. The particular quality of that face, not upset about the collab specifically, I understood that immediately. Something underneath it. Something that had been there before I walked through the door.

I go over the last three days. New York, the texts, Jan's responses which were fine, which were exactly Jan's normal responses, which I am now reading differently. Okay. Miss you too. Okay. The economy of Jan under pressure, which looks exactly like Jan normally except slightly more so.