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The gym at noon. Rain still.

Home by two. Patrick makes tea, I make coffee, we occupy different corners of the apartment with our respective reading and it is… entirely, completely the correct Saturday afternoon.

At four he looks up from his book.

"What are you thinking about," he says.

"Czech Republic," I say.

He puts the book down.

"I've been putting it off," I say. "Not deliberately. Just finding reasons. And I've run out of reasons." I look at him. "I'd like to take you to meet my parents. First weekend in October. We'd fly Thursday evening after work, back late Sunday."

He is very still.

"My parents…” I stop. I have thought about how to say this and I am going to say it precisely. "They know I'm gay. I told them when I was twenty-six. They accepted it in the way my family accepts things — they didn't object, they didn't ask questions, and they haven't mentioned it since. Whether that is acceptance or managed silence I have genuinely never been able to determine." I pause. "My father will shake your hand and say very little. My mother will feed you and watch everything and say nothing directly. They are not your parents. It won't be the Haarlem lunch."

"I know," he says.

"It will be… it will require patience. And you can't fix them or charm them the way you charm most rooms. You just have to be there and let them, arrive at their own conclusions in their own time."

"I know," he says again.

"There's something else," I say. I look at the rain on the window. "That city… Brno. It's not just my parents. It's where I grew up. Where I understood what I was and what that was going to cost me. Where I learned to keep things small and contained and…” I stop. "I haven't been back with anyone. Ever. I haven't wanted to bring anyone there because bringing someone there means bringing them into that part of me and I don’t…”

I stop.

Patrick is watching me with everything he has.

"I don't show that part easily," I say. "But you've seen most of me now. And I think…” I look at him. "I think you should see that too."

Silence.

Then Patrick says, without hesitating, without qualifying, with the Patrick certainty that I have stopped arguing with:

"Yes."

I look at him.

"I want to meet them," he says. "I want to see where you grew up. All of it — the city, your parents, the part of you that learned to keep things small." He looks at me steadily. "I'm not going to fix anything. I'm just going to be there."

I look at the rain.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay," he says.

Saturday evening Patrick gets dressed with the care of someone attending something that matters and I watch him do it and feel the particular warmth of someone who has been attended to all week and is now watching the person they love attend to himself with equal care.

"You look good," I say.

He comes to stand behind me in the mirror, his hands on my shoulders.

"You planned the colleagues drinks too," he says.

"I was invited before. I never went." I adjust my collar. "I thought it was time."

"Jan." His expression in the mirror. "You're addressing everything I mentioned."