ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Jens' Apartment: The Devotion
The door opens before I knock.
Jens is already there — all 188 centimeters of him, filling the frame like a load-bearing wall that learned to smile. He's wearing a plain grey t-shirt and sweatpants and he looks like a Norse god on his day off, which is somehow more intimidating than if he'd been dressed for it. He looks down at me — and I mean down, in the literal physical sense — and does that thing where his face arranges itself into something warm and unhurried.
"You okay?" he says. "You look tired."
"I'm fine," I say, because that's what you say.
He steps aside and lets me in.
The apartment is immaculate.
Not clean in the way that means someone cleaned it recently — clean in the way that means dirt has simply accepted it doesn't live here. The floors are dark wood, unmarked. The kitchen surfaces are bare and gleaming. The couch cushions are arranged with a geometric precision that feels like a personality trait. Everything smells like sandalwood — warm and deep and just slightly too present, the way a smell gets when it's been the smell of a place for long enough that it's stopped being a smell and started being an atmosphere.
I set my bag down and immediately feel like I've introduced disorder into a system that was perfectly balanced.
Jens hands me a beer without asking if I want one. It's the right beer. I don't know how he knows that.
"Jesper's not back yet," he says, dropping onto the couch with the effortless mass-management of someone who has never once been awkward in their own body. "Soon."
"Cool," I say.
I sit. I drink my beer. Jens drinks his beer. The TV is on — something good, something I've been meaning to watch — and the conversation is easy, the way it always is with Jens when it's just the two of us, because Jens doesn't perform. He just exists, taking up his considerable amount of space, saying exactly what he means and nothing extra. It should be relaxing.
It mostly is.
I'm looking at the photos when Jesper comes home.
There are a lot of them. That's not unusual — people have photos of their partners, that's a normal human thing — but these are everywhere. The obvious places: the shelves, the side table, the wall by the door. Fine. Then the less obvious places: above the light switch. On the inside of a cabinet I open looking for a glass. I notice one on the fridge and think okay, and then I open the fridge for the beer Jens offers me and there's one in there too, tucked between the shelf and the wall, small and slightly laminated.
I close the fridge.
I don't mention it.
When Jesper walks in, the apartment changes.
I don't mean that metaphorically. The air changes — some barometric shift, some adjustment of pressure — and Jens, who had been sitting perfectly still and perfectly relaxed, becomes a different kind of still. Focused. The way a compass needle moves when north enters the room.
Jesper is — there's no neutral way to put this — beautiful. Not in a way that takes effort to notice. In a way that's just immediately true, the way some facts are, whether you wanted to know them or not. Soft features, blonde, slight in the specific way that makes him look like he was designed to stand next to Jens as a compositional choice. He drops his keys on the hook by the door with the practiced ease of someone who has always lived here and will always live here and has never once considered otherwise.
He looks at me and his eyes are sharp and immediately assessing.
"Oh," he says. "You're here."
"Hey, Jesper."
He holds eye contact for one more second, calibrating something, and then he walks past me entirely and directly to Jens, dropping into the space beside him on the couch with the gravitational certainty of something returning to its orbit. Jens's arm goes around him before Jesper is even fully seated, automatic as a reflex, and Jesper tips his head back against Jens's chest and says something too quiet for me to catch, and Jens says something back even quieter.
It lasts maybe four seconds.
It feels like walking in on something private that has no doors.
Then Jesper looks back at me, bright and perfectly pleasant.
"You want food? Jens made food." He says it like Jens is not right there. Like reporting on a feature of the apartment.
"I — yeah, sure. Thanks."
Jesper smiles. It's a gorgeous smile and it contains exactly as much warmth as he's decided to give me, which is enough to be polite and precise enough to remind me where I am on the list.
Jens is already getting up to get the food.
The evening is genuinely good. That's the thing. I want to be clear about that.
The games are good. The show is the right show, the conversation moves the way it should — someone says something, someone builds on it, someone says something stupid and we go sideways for a while and then come back — and Jesper, once he settles in, is wickedly funny in the way that people are when they're smart and have no particular investment in making you feel comfortable. He makes me work for it. I don't mind. The beer is cold and the food is warm and the apartment does its sandalwood thing around all of us and I think: this is fine. This is a nice night.
But they never stop touching.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that demands acknowledgment. It's constant and quiet and completely unconscious — Jens's hand in Jesper's hair while they both watch the screen, Jesper's fingers around Jens's wrist while he makes a point, the way Jens adjusts the blanket over both of them without looking down, the way Jesper's feet find Jens's lap without either of them initiating it. It's like watching two bodies that have forgotten they were ever separate.
I am aware, in a way I can't quite metabolize, that I am the only person in this room who is only one person.
Jesper falls asleep somewhere in the second episode.
It happens fast — between one moment and the next he's just under, head tucked against Jens's shoulder, hair slightly messed, lips parted, face utterly soft. The sharpness he keeps dialed up when he's awake just — leaves. He looks about seventeen. He looks like the thing Jens has built this entire apartment around, all the photos, all the sandalwood, all the obsessive cleanliness.
I look at the window.
Outside is the specific dark of late, late night. Not evening-dark. The kind of dark where the city has stopped doing most of its things and the silence has a texture to it. I've been here longer than I meant to be.
I watch Jens look at Jesper.
I don't mean to. But it's there, happening right next to me, and it has a gravity that makes it hard not to watch. Jens is looking at Jesper the way — I'm trying to find a comparison and nothing is landing right — the way people look at things they can't believe they get to have. Not possessively. Not hungrily. Just with this enormous, bottomless attention, like the looking is the thing, like looking is what he does with the part of himself that doesn't have anywhere else to go.
His hand moves to Jesper's hair. Cards through it once. Then again. Slow, absent, completely automatic.
Then he leans down and presses a kiss to Jesper's cheek.
Jesper doesn't stir.
Jens straightens up, slides out from under him with a carefulness that should be impossible for someone his size, and picks Jesper up like it's nothing. Like this is just a thing his body knows how to do. Jesper makes a soft shapeless sound and his head drops against Jens's chest and Jens carries him down the hall in the dark without turning a light on.
I sit in the living room by myself and I feel something I can't immediately name.
Not jealousy. Not nostalgia, exactly. Something more like vertigo. Like I've just looked down from a height I didn't know I was at.
This man loves his partner too much.
The thought arrives fully formed and I don't know what to do with it. Not too much as a judgment. As an observation. As a fact the room is organized around. This apartment is a monument. The photos in the cutlery drawer. The single axis everything orbits.
It's the most loving thing I've ever seen and it is, sitting alone in the careful silence of their living room, completely terrifying.
Jens comes back.
He sits back down on the couch in the exact spot he left, easy as anything, and picks up his beer like it's been four seconds. I watch him settle and I think about the way he carried Jesper down the hall and I feel the vertigo again, that sense of looking at something too concentrated to look at directly.
"I might head out," I say. "It's late. Later than I thought."
Jens's face does something. It's fast — a second, maybe less — but it happens. Something drops through his expression like a stone through water, there and gone. Then the stillness comes back and his face reassembles itself into that mild, unhurried look.
"No," he says. "Stay. Please."
It's not threatening. His voice is the same as it always is. Quiet. Nonchalant. He's not blocking the door. He's just — asking. Looking at me with those steady grey eyes and asking, and the please lands somewhere unexpected, like he means it in a way that has more weight than the word usually carries.
"It's getting pretty late —"
"The couch is comfortable." He says it like it's settled. Not unkindly. Just: settled. "Stay."
I look at the door.
I look at Jens.
I stay.
The couch is comfortable. He wasn't wrong.
I don't sleep for a while. The apartment is quiet — the particular quiet of a space designed around two people where a third one doesn't quite displace correctly — and I lie on the couch and look at the ceiling and think about nothing useful until I stop being able to.
Then the sounds start.
From down the hall. Through the wall.
At first I think I've imagined it — just the building settling, just whatever sounds old apartments make when everyone's asleep. But it persists. Soft. Rhythmic. Unmistakable in the specific way that sounds become unmistakable once you've recognized them once. My jaw tightens. I stare harder at the ceiling.
I reach for my phone to — I don't know, read something, exist somewhere else for a while.
My phone is dead.
I look for a clock. There's no clock in the living room. Not on the wall, not on the microwave, not anywhere I can see from the couch. The curtains are thick enough that I can't gauge the light from outside, can't tell if it's midnight or four in the morning or something else entirely.
I pull the blanket up. I close my eyes. The sounds from down the hall continue for a while, and then they don't.
At some point I sleep.
Morning, or something shaped like morning.
The light coming through the edge of the curtains is pale and noncommittal. I'm up before I consciously decide to be, sitting upright on the couch with the immediate certainty that I need to leave. Not urgently. Not in a panic. Just cleanly: it is time to go. I fold the blanket. I find my shoes. My bag is by the door where I left it.
Jens is already in the kitchen.
Of course he is.
He's making coffee — real coffee, with the small stovetop moka pot, and the smell of it is extraordinary and I hate that — and he's wearing the same grey t-shirt and sweatpants and he looks like he's been awake for a while, or like he sleeps in a way that leaves no evidence either direction.
"Morning," he says. Not a question.
"Morning." I pick up my bag. "I'm going to head out — thank you for last night, seriously, it was good."
He looks at me.
"Stay another night," he says. "We like having you here."
Something small and cold sits down in my sternum.
We.
I think back through the last twelve hours trying to find a moment where he used I. Didn't find one last night. I'm not finding one now. Not I want you to stay or I like having you here. Always we. Always the both of them, the closed circuit, the single body with two sets of hands.
"I have stuff," I say. "Things I need to do."
"Tonight," he says easily. Like we've agreed on it. "Come back tonight."
He holds out a mug of coffee.
The coffee smells perfect.
I take it without meaning to.
I drink the coffee standing up. We don't talk much. Jens doesn't fill silence out of obligation — he never has — and so the kitchen is quiet and the coffee is extraordinary and I hold the mug and look at the photos on the wall, the ones I can see from here, and then at the ones on the fridge, and then I remember the one inside the fridge and I think: he never says I.
We like having you here.
I set the mug in the sink.
"I have to go," I say.
Jens nods. He's smiling, small and mild. He walks me to the door — not in front of me, just alongside, easy, like we're moving in the same direction — and opens it, and the morning air comes in.
"Tonight," he says again. Not a question. Not quite an invitation. Just — stated.
I step out.
"Yeah," I hear myself say. "Maybe."
The door closes.
I stand in the hallway and look at the door and the closed door gives me absolutely nothing back. Behind it: the sandalwood and the coffee and the photos in all the places photos shouldn't be and Jesper still asleep down the hall and Jens standing exactly where I left him, probably, still, patient, in no particular hurry.
We like having you here.
I take the stairs. I push out into the actual morning — real light now, real cold, a street with people moving through it living their individual lives — and I walk.
Two blocks.
I take out my phone to check the time. Still dead.
I find a cafe. I charge my phone. I order something I don't taste. I think about tonight and whether maybe is actually maybe or whether it's already something else, already decided, already written into whatever closed system I walked into last night along with my bag and my shoes and the beer that was the right beer before I said what kind I wanted.
I think about Jens carrying Jesper down the hall in the dark.
I think about the look on his face.
I think about the word we.
My phone comes back on. I have a text. I don't check who it's from because I already know, and I sit there with the cafe noise around me and the coffee going cold and I think about how easy last night was, how good the food was, how right the show was, how comfortable the blanket was, how clearly the couch was made up before I arrived —
I think about the photos inside the fridge.
And I understand, finally, sitting in a cafe two blocks from Jens's apartment with my dead phone in my hand and the sandalwood smell still faintly on my jacket —
I was never just visiting.
I open the text.
Tonight. We'll make dinner. — J
I put my phone face-down on the table.
Outside, the morning does its normal, unaffiliated thing.
I sit there for a long time.
It was never I. It was always we. The question is when you became part of it.