6. Martin
MARTIN
Martin woke first, which was ordinary, and woke to another man's weight against his side, which was not.
Galen had not moved in the night beyond turning once toward the wall and then back again, close enough that his hair had ended up trapped beneath Martin's arm.
The bed was narrower with someone else in it.
Martin's shoulder had gone stiff from staying still for it anyway, and he had not, at any point in the night, minded enough to shift.
He lay for a while doing the practical accounting he did with everything else: the fire had gone out sometime before dawn, the room had cooled, his own breathing had slowed to match a rhythm that wasn't his, and he had slept better than he had in longer than he wanted to examine.
Galen belonged nowhere in Martin's established mornings.
He had somehow not disrupted a single part of them, and that unsettled Martin more than any amount of disruption would have done.
A proper bed waited across the yard. Galen had stayed because he wanted to, and the freedom that made the choice matter was the same freedom that would eventually let him leave.
Galen woke a few minutes later, blinked at the unfamiliar ceiling, and said, without lifting his head, "Are we going to make this strange?"
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good. You can still tell me when I'm holding a post crooked."
"You usually are."
Galen huffed something like a laugh into the pillow. Martin let himself feel, for one unguarded moment, how easily that had come out of him, how little effort either of them had spent deciding what this morning owed the night before.
Downstairs, Galen's guitar case stood where he'd left it against the wall, and Martin disliked, mildly, how correct it looked there — settled, unremarkable, already at home. Galen reached for his coat, glanced at the case, and said he'd take it back to the farmhouse before work.
"Leave it," Martin said. "No sense carrying it there and back for one day."
Galen looked at him a beat longer than the sentence required, then let it go without comment, and Martin was grateful, briefly, that he hadn't been made to explain himself further before he'd had any coffee.
Breakfast, when they reached the farmhouse, was mercifully brief. Jacks checked the clock without looking up from her paper. "Seven means seven."
"I'm three minutes early."
"Martin's influence. Disturbing."
Hazel didn't hide her smile this time, and didn't look away when Galen caught her at it.
She set an extra rasher on his plate without being asked, refilled his coffee before he could reach for the pot himself, and said nothing else about where he'd slept, which struck Martin as its own kind of blessing.
Nobody needed to say anything. The extra rasher said it well enough.
Peter arrived before nine with the fuller verdict.
The valve was worse than he'd hoped, and the part wasn't sitting on a shelf anywhere closer than a specialist supplier.
If Peter's contact was in a good mood, they might have it fitted inside a fortnight.
Realistically, though, Galen should expect another week to ten days, assuming nothing else revealed itself once Peter was properly inside her.
"And if something else reveals itself," Galen said.
"Then you'll be very sorry you asked that question."
"I'm already sorry I asked most of my questions this week."
"Good instinct. Keep having it."
Galen took the number Peter gave him for the part and did the sum in his head without changing his expression, which Martin had learned, by now, to recognise as the least reassuring thing a man could do.
Peter left with the vague promise of news whenever news existed, and Galen stood a moment longer than necessary looking at the space where the trailer had been, before visibly setting the figure aside to be dealt with later.
Martin should have felt nothing but sympathy.
Instead, relief arrived first, immediate and unwelcome: another week with Galen.
He did not want Nina broken or wish more expense on a man already doing sums he disliked.
He wanted Galen still there once she was fixed.
The distinction was clear; it did nothing to make the relief less embarrassing.
Nor did the ledger solve the actual problem, which was that Martin had begun counting the hours until evening like a man afraid of losing something rather than a man simply enjoying it.
Galen went to Jacks that afternoon and came back with another week's worth of tasks written into her ledger. Martin was not asked and did not offer an opinion, which felt, increasingly, like the only honest thing left entirely within his control.
They spent the day on the north boundary, clearing old wire that had rusted into the hedge line and resetting a post that had leaned for longer than either of them could remember anyone noticing.
It went much as the hurdle had: Galen anticipating the next tool before Martin asked for it, Martin correcting one grip and nothing else, both of them content to let long stretches pass without needing to fill them with anything.
Somewhere around midday Galen started humming without appearing to notice he was doing it, stopped when a knot in the wire needed both hands, and picked the same tune back up the moment it didn't.
"You do that a lot," Martin said.
"Do what?"
"Hum. Without knowing you're doing it."
Galen considered this with more seriousness than the observation deserved. "Occupational hazard. If my hands are working, something in my head assumes it should be too."
"Does it bother you? Being quiet otherwise?"
"No. I like quiet. I've just never trusted it not to end." He coiled the last of the old wire and looked up. "Why?"
"No reason." Martin handed him the post level rather than answer properly, and Galen let it go, which was its own kind of mercy.
The work no longer felt like either man demonstrating competence. Martin handed over tools without explaining what they were for; Galen accepted correction without needing it softened. The ease between them felt borrowed from people who had known each other for years.
"Ferras and Co still haven't rung," Galen said later, over water. "I'll need to start putting feelers out once Nina's roadworthy. Can't let the whole season go quiet on me."
Martin agreed and did not ask how far those feelers might reach. After one night and almost a week, he told himself, the question would be unreasonable.
Galen came back to the cottage that evening for the guitar, as he'd said he would.
"I'll take it over before supper."
"You can leave it."
Galen looked at him properly this time, as he had that morning, searching for whatever sat underneath the practical offer. "It's no trouble."
"The farmhouse is warm but it's not quiet.
You'd only be carrying it back again tomorrow.
" Martin was already moving the chair by the stove a few inches, clearing the corner beside it of the boots and paperwork that usually lived there.
"Heat and damp aren't good for it either way. Better it stays somewhere dry."
That was all true. None of it explained why Martin had already decided exactly where the case should sit.
Galen watched him finish moving the chair and set the case in the space Martin had made. He looked at it for a moment, testing the weight of the invitation before trusting it to hold.
Then he went to find his coat, said something about clean clothes and Jacks's supper, and left for the farmhouse without it.
By evening, Galen's guitar had a place in Martin's cottage.
Martin was considerably less certain what to do about the man.