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"The café has good soup."

"Patrick."

"I'm noting it," he says. And smiles at the road.

When the path widens he reaches over and takes my hand. I let him hold it for three seconds, the precise amount of time before the path narrows, and then we let go and keep cycling.

Lunch is good. The soup is excellent. Patrick finds this important confirmation of my planning abilities, which I do not need confirmed but appreciate.

After: the gym.

Patrick looks at the weights section with the expression of someone who has come home. He has this expression every time we arrive here. I have noted it.

I have a system. I have always had a system — the machines, the order, the weights I use, the rest intervals. It is efficient and it works and it has required no negotiation for the years I have been doing it.

Patrick has a different system.

Patrick's system is: same exercises, same machines, same order, side by side. Which is fine. The problem is that Patrick lifts approximately twice what I lift, which means that every machine we share requires stripping the weights, doing my set, reloading the weights, doing his set, stripping again. Over and over. A continuous process of weight management that Patrick finds entirely unremarkable.

"We could just use different machines," I say, after the third round.

"We're doing it together," he says, re-racking eighty kilos with the ease of someone rearranging furniture.

"It would be more efficient…”

"Jan." He looks at me. "We're doing it together."

I look at the machine. I look at him.

I load the weights back to my number and do my set.

He is very large in a gym. This is simply a fact. The focused attention he brings to my form while spotting me on the bench press I find simultaneously useful and slightly distracting. I have made my peace with it.

Several people in the gym are looking at us. Patrick doesn't notice. His attention is entirely on the work. And on me.

I find I don't mind at all.

Forty minutes. Then home to change. Then Tomas.

Dinner is at the restaurant on the Keizersgracht where Tomas and I have been going since before Tomas had a girlfriend and when Tomas did get a girlfriend, Eline, a graphic designer from Delft, warm and sharp and entirely her own… we kept coming back.

Patrick and Eline find each other immediately in the way of warm extroverted people who recognise their own. Within ten minutes they are in a conversation about something I have lost the thread of, Amsterdam neighbourhoods, I think, Eline knows everyone in the creative scene, and Patrick has his elbows on the table and is leaning forward with the full Patrick attention and Eline is laughing at something he just said.

Tomas is watching me watch them.

"You look well," he says.

"I'm happy," I say. Plainly. Because I have decided to stop qualifying it.

Tomas looks at Patrick across the table, then back at me. "He adores you," he says. Quietly. "Every time he looks at you."

"I know," I say.

"And you adore him."

I look at Patrick, who is currently explaining something to Eline with the full Patrick enthusiasm, hands moving, face completely lit. He glances over at me mid-sentence and his face does the thing, the warm certain thing, and he goes back to Eline without missing a beat.

"Yes," I say.