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"Come here," he says.

I go to the table. He pulls me in from my chair and I sit sideways across his lap in the arrangement that is simply what we do now, and he puts his arms around me and I let him and we sit like that while dinner waits on the counter.

"This is the best Thursday I've had in a long time," he says.

"It's a low bar," I say. "You spent Monday through Wednesday in a simulator."

He laughs. His arms tighten. I look at the kitchen and feel — I have a word for it now. Structurally, completely: happy.

After dinner I take his hand and pull him to the sofa.

He follows without question, which is Patrick — he follows me to the sofa the way he follows me most places, with the ease of someone who has decided that where I'm going is where he wants to be.

I sit down. I look at him.

"Come here," I say.

He sits beside me. I pull him in properly, both arms, his head on my chest, and I hold him. Not the way I usually hold him, the careful measured version. The other way. The way he holds me when he wants me to feel it.

He goes very still.

"Jan," he says. Quietly.

"You missed three days of cuddles," I say. "You were in a simulator. I was in Madrid. That's a deficit."

He makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite anything else.

"I'm addressing the deficit," I say.

He doesn't say anything. He just settles. The Patrick settling, the one I know well, the full weight of him giving in. His arm across my stomach. His face somewhere near my neck.

I run my hand through his hair.

He exhales completely.

We stay like that until he falls asleep on me, which takes approximately twenty minutes, and then I sit in the quiet apartment with Patrick asleep on my chest and look at the ceiling and feel something so clean and large and simple that I don't try to name it.

Eventually I shift us both and he surfaces just enough to cooperate, barely… and we find the bedroom and the bed and fall back into each other and I pull him in and we sleep.

— — —

Friday morning I wake at six.

Patrick is asleep. His arm is across my chest, his face in my neck, his breathing slow and deep. Standard arrangement. I lie still for a moment and listen to him breathe and think about the breakfast trays in the kitchen cupboard and the blueberries I bought yesterday and the protein smoothie ingredients in the fridge and feel the particular warm certainty of someone who has planned something and is about to execute it.

I ease out from under his arm.

He makes a sound. Not awake. I put the duvet back carefully and he settles without surfacing.

I go to the kitchen.

The trays are behind the blender. Breakfast trays — the kind with fold-out legs that sit across a duvet. Solid wood. I ordered them on Wednesday evening from Amazon, read the reviews, chose the ones with the highest stability rating. They arrived Thursday afternoon while Patrick was in the shower before the spa. He didn't see them. I put them behind the blender and said nothing. I set them up on the counter and start the pancakes.

Blueberry. Patrick mentioned once, in passing, that blueberry pancakes were his favourite — a Sunday morning in July, a conversation about something else entirely. He said it the way he says things that aren't important to him and are therefore true. I filed it. I have been waiting for the right occasion.

The smoothie is mango and vanilla protein, made with oat milk because he mentioned once that dairy makes him sluggish on training days. I did not tell him I remembered this. I simply switched to oat milk in the fridge several weeks ago and said nothing.

I arrange everything on the trays. I make his tea. I make my coffee.