7. Galen
GALEN
By the following week, Galen realised his belongings had ended up sorted between two addresses without his ever consciously deciding it.
Clean shirts and his razor lived at the farmhouse, in the room he still, technically, paid nothing for.
His guitar lived at the cottage, in the corner Martin had cleared without ever calling it anything.
He had somehow acquired a toothbrush in both places, which struck him, when he noticed it, as the single most damning piece of evidence in the whole arrangement.
Galen woke most mornings uncertain which bed he'd fallen asleep in until he opened his eyes, and had stopped finding that alarming somewhere around the fourth day, which alarmed him rather more than the sleeping arrangements themselves.
He was crossing the yard for a jumper when his phone rang with a number he hadn't seen in eleven days.
"Ferras and Co."
"Galen." The voice on the other end was brisk, professional, entirely unbothered by history.
"Bit of a gap opened up. Dev Okafor's pulled out of the Cotswolds run with three weeks' notice and a bad shoulder.
Six venues over ten days: four from his book, plus Stroud and the closing night under your own name.
Cirencester would have been yours too, but Priya's taken it.
I couldn't hold the date once you went quiet on me for a week. "
"Define insulting."
She named a figure that wasn't. "Half up front, rest on completion, same terms as always. You'd be doing us a favour and yourself one at the same time. I mean that about Friday, mind. I haven't got room to eat a second gap this month."
Galen did the sum before he'd finished saying yes. It was good money, steady work, the kind of run that repaired a reputation as efficiently as it repaired a bank balance, and it began precisely when Peter had promised Nina would be fit to drive again.
"I'll need to confirm the van's roadworthy," he said. "Should know by Friday."
"Friday works. Don't make me chase you twice in one month."
He said he wouldn't, and meant it, and stood in the yard for a moment after the call ended feeling the specific vertigo of good news arriving exactly on schedule.
Peter confirmed it that same afternoon, wiping his hands on a rag that had given up being clean sometime around the second Ashcombe visit.
The part had come in Tuesday, nothing worse had revealed itself once he was inside her, and barring some final act of spite from a forty-year-old engine, Nina would be roadworthy by Friday or Saturday.
The bill, when he named it, was painful in the specific way expected pain always was, survivable rather than surprising.
It would eat most of what the Cotswolds run's advance paid him, before he'd played a single note of it.
"She'll outlive both of us," Peter said. "Reluctantly."
Jacks mentioned, without looking up from her ledger, that the top field would want clearing again once Galen was back from wherever he was going. Hazel asked over lunch whether he preferred roast on Sunday or something lighter, then carried on slicing bread before he answered.
Nobody asked if he was coming back. They left the chair pulled out anyway, and Galen found there was nothing in the gesture to push against.
That afternoon he found Martin at the cottage table with the farm accounts spread in front of him, and settled into the chair by the stove with the guitar already in his lap before either of them had said a word about it.
He worked through a passage he'd been meaning to finish for a fortnight while Martin turned pages and made the low, dissatisfied sound he made whenever a column refused to balance.
Galen had learned that sound the way he'd learned Nina's temperature gauge, a small warning that meant nothing was actually wrong yet.
Martin, in turn, had apparently learned the exact bar where Galen's hands still hesitated, because he glanced up at it every time without fail, then back down at his figures as though he hadn't.
Neither of them said much. At one point Martin got up without being asked and put the kettle on, and came back with two mugs of something considerably milder than Jacks would have made, and Galen took his without comment because commenting on it would have meant admitting how much the gesture had settled him.
Later, Martin passed him a pencil to mark a fingering he kept forgetting, apparently never registering that lending a farmer's pencil to a working musician was, in its own small way, an act of faith in the whole enterprise.
It was, Galen thought, an alarmingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon that owed nothing to either of their professions.
He told Martin about the booking once the light had started going gold through the window, laying it out plainly: the dates, the fee, the six venues, including Stroud and the closing night under his own name, and the fact that it began the weekend Peter expected Nina to be roadworthy.
Martin asked when it began, how many dates, whether the fee was fair, whether Nina would be ready in time. Practical questions, all of them answered easily, all of them circling the one thing neither man had said yet.
"You should take it," Martin said, when the questions ran out.
It was generous. It was sensible. It was what a reasonable person said to someone who'd spent a week digging out of a professional hole through no fault of his own, and it landed in Galen's chest like a small, precise disappointment he had no right to feel.
He had given other men far less reason to object and met considerably more resistance. Martin gave him nothing to resist.
"It's ten days," Galen said, testing the shape of it.
"That's good work."
"Seamus wants me back for another Friday. Jacks has already put next week on the ledger."
"We'll manage."
Two answers, both true, neither one anything close to don't go. Galen had spent a decade among agencies, venues, landlords, and one-night rooms that made leaving easy. He had not known until Martin offered the same careful permission how badly he wanted one person to mind.
He didn't ask outright. It was too early to ask, and asking would have made a demand of a man who'd given him nothing but room so far, and Galen had never once in his life been the person who demanded room from anyone.
They slept together again that night, and it was a different thing entirely from the pub and the narrow bed and the first astonished attention of it.
Martin already knew where he liked to be touched and didn't have to learn it twice, a hand finding the same place at his hip as though it had always lived there.
Galen knew where Martin kept the water glass without needing to ask, and reached for it in the dark with the unthinking certainty of habit rather than guesswork.
Clothes were set aside rather than dropped.
Nothing about it needed discovering anymore, and there was a fluency to it, a kind of shorthand two bodies build only through repetition, that should have felt like relief and instead felt like the ground shifting somewhere just out of sight, the quiet unease of realising something had stopped being new before either of them had agreed to it.
Afterward, Martin's arm settled over him with none of the careful deliberation of the first night, simply where it belonged now, and Galen lay listening to his breathing even out and thought, with something close to panic, that he could imagine this becoming ordinary.
Not exciting. Not remarkable. Just Tuesday, and Wednesday, and every night after that, which was a far more dangerous thing to want than anything the pub or the field had offered him.
Later, in the dark, Galen said, "Ferras needs an answer tonight."
"Then you should give them one."
He did, standing out in the cold yard in Martin's borrowed jumper because it had been closer than his own, thumbs moving over the screen while his breath fogged in front of him.
Confirmed. I'm in for the Cotswolds run, Nina permitting.
He told Martin before he sent it, watched for anything underneath the level nod he got in return, and found only the same steady, generous face Martin had been wearing since the accounts.
"Good," Martin said.
Galen could not tell, standing there in a stranger's borrowed jumper in a yard that had somehow become familiar to him, whether that single word had cost Martin anything at all, or whether generosity simply came that easily to a man who'd spent his whole life giving other people room to be exactly who they were.
Ferras sent the itinerary before Galen made it back to the farmhouse.
Six venues, ten days, the final night in Bristol, close enough to his own rented room that the agency had marked it a convenient place to end, as though his whole life could be filed neatly along one straight line from here to there.
His guitar remained in Martin's cottage.
Galen left it there.