Page 74 of The Elements

The cabin is starting to fill now, and a young woman in her early twenties approaches the empty window seat, the one Emmet had ambitions toward.

She has the most extraordinary good looks—I’d be willing to bet that she’s a model—and appears to be dressed for a fashion shoot rather than a long-haul flight.

My first thought is that while we’re living it up in business, she looks aggrieved that she hasn’t been upgraded to the private suites of first. A middle-aged man a few seats away jumps up to help her store her hand luggage in the overhead compartment and she thanks him, her oversized sunglasses remaining firmly on her face throughout their interaction.

He tries to make small talk, but she dismisses him politely before sitting down and kicking her shoes off.

The body-hugging outfit she’s wearing is ridiculously short, barely reaching beneath her thighs, and her legs are bare and tanned.

I notice Emmet watching her, and it’s not because she’s taken the seat he wanted.

His tongue is pressed against his upper lip, his eyes are open wide, and I realize in this moment that my son is straight.

To date, he’s never expressed an interest in either sex to me, but I’ve always instinctively felt that he might be gay.

I was, perhaps, relying on age-old clich é s that are probably as insulting as they are redundant, but despite his water-based athleticism, he was always an incredibly sensitive child, eschewing team sports or any games that involved roughness of any sort.

Part of a small, tight-knit group of equally delicate boys, he’s always seemed happier either in their safe company or on his own, reading books and watching esoteric, foreign-language films. His taste in music too has always tended toward sensitive female singer-songwriters or gender-defying young men.

It’s strange how a simple, unexpected moment can inform a parent about such an important aspect of their child’s life, but the fact that he can’t keep his eyes off the woman tells me that I’ve been incorrect in my assumptions.

Is it wrong of me to feel a certain relief?

Of course his sexuality wouldn’t matter to me in the slightest but the world, life itself, I think, is difficult enough without adding an unnecessary layer of complexity.

I try to imagine him flirting with a girl and find the idea close to preposterous.

There were girls in his friendship group when he was younger, but over the last eighteen months, they seem to have peeled away a little, the business of puberty forcing a temporary division of the sexes.

I daresay that many of those I knew as children, the ones who ran in and out of our home barefoot and screaming, will reappear in my life in the fullness of time as girlfriends in a year or so.

It will be interesting to see how they’ve changed, and whether one of them will break my son’s heart or have her heart broken by him.

I think he’s incredibly handsome, but then I’m his father, so it’s natural that I consider him to be the most beautiful boy in the world.

But what if those girls, or others, feel differently?

What if his romantic life proves unhappy?

The idea of him suffering any sort of pain sends an almost insupportable ache through my body.

I want to keep him safe from all of that.

In an ideal world, I would keep him young forever, protecting him from all hurt.

In that same world, someone would have done that for me.

But my training also teaches me that to wrap him in cotton wool will serve only to stifle him and prevent him from growing into the man that he should become.

It’s a conundrum for me, one that I am struggling to solve.

The model—assuming she is one—perhaps aware that she’s being observed, turns around, removes her sunglasses, and fixes her eyes on my son, who turns away quickly, pulling a book from his bag and burying his face within it.

He blushes again, a slow surge of scarlet rising from the base of his neck into his cheeks and ears, and he doesn’t look left or right in the minutes that follow, ignoring the cabin crew as they collect our empty glasses, not paying attention to the safety demonstration, and keeping his eyes firmly on the page as the plane taxis down the runway to take off.

We have thirteen hours in front of us, after all. And then, after we make our connection, a further seven hours in the air. Then finally, one further journey by train and boat until we reach our destination, where we might be welcomed or rebuffed. There will be plenty of time to talk.

But should I have thought this through more deeply before booking our tickets? Perhaps, but there was so little time to make a decision I could only do what I thought was right. At some point, I’ll have to confess to Emmet that the only people who know we are undertaking this journey are he and I.

That we haven’t, in fact, been invited.