10. Martin
MARTIN
The flock was managed. The accounts were current. Martin slept, worked, and ate at the farmhouse table as always, but the cottage had become too quiet. Nobody hummed while he worked; tools stayed where he set them down, the chair remained shifted beside the stove, and the corner stayed empty.
He had typed three messages he never sent: When are you coming back. The cottage is too quiet. I miss you. Each had felt like a claim he had not earned, so he deleted it and answered Galen with the practical truths instead: glad it went well, drive carefully, glad Ferras were pleased with him.
Jacks found him at the gate on the tenth evening, watching the lane with an attention no gatepost had ever required.
"You expecting someone?"
"No."
"Then stop looking offended every time it isn't him." She didn't wait for a response, and didn't look up from whatever she was doing to the latch. "Run ends tonight, doesn't it."
"So he said."
"That still wasn't what I asked."
Martin had no better answer for her. Jacks went back to the latch. Hazel passed a few minutes later with an armful of washing and said she'd set four places for supper.
He heard the engine before he saw Nina, climbing the lane clean and steady.
Galen had finished the work, been paid, and had every road in England available to him.
Nothing had forced him back to Ashcombe.
Martin walked to meet him rather than waiting by the cottage, because standing still had already cost them both enough.
Galen climbed out tired from the drive, guitar case visible behind the seat, and didn't reach for a practical excuse the way Martin half expected — no mention of Peter wanting to check her under load, no reason borrowed from anyone else's convenience.
"I came back."
"I can see that."
"That isn't what I'm asking you to see."
Martin looked at him properly and understood that whatever came next had to be said plainly. He considered asking about the M40 or the state of the yard, but neither refuge survived the thought.
Martin made himself say the true thing first, before he could organise it into something safer. "I thought making it easy for you to leave was the decent thing to do."
"I know."
"I made it so easy you couldn't tell whether I wanted you back."
Galen didn't argue the point. He looked, for a moment, like a man deciding whether to spend the whole question at once or in careful instalments, and then he asked it whole.
"Do you want me here?"
"Yes. I want you here after the next booking, and the one after that. I want to know when you're coming home."
"Are you asking me to visit between jobs?"
"No. I'm asking you to live here." Martin held his gaze, steady, refusing to let the sentence soften into something smaller. "Take the work. Go when the work takes you. I'm asking where you come back to."
"You don't have to work for Ashcombe to live with me," he added. "Jacks pays you for farm work. This stays separate."
Galen looked at him for a long moment, something in his face working loose that Martin hadn't seen it do since the pub, since before either of them had any reason to guard it.
"I know how to fit into almost anywhere," he said.
"Years of it. I've never known how to ask whether anyone wants me once I stop being useful. "
"The work got done," Martin said. "That was never the problem. It was never what I wanted from you."
"I've another three nights in October," Galen said, testing it aloud, the way a man tests a floorboard before trusting his weight to it.
"And after?"
"I come back."
The answer went through Martin with more force than seeing Nina at the top of the lane had managed.
Galen stood before him road-tired and uncertain, with every road still open behind him, and had chosen this one anyway.
He had chosen Martin. For one disorienting second, Martin's mind offered no list, no practical next step, nothing at all except the need to touch him.
"Say that when you leave, not just now. Every time."
"You say you want me to."
"All right. I want you to. I want to hear it every time."
Galen studied him for a moment. "You've been sitting on all of that for two weeks, haven't you."
"Don't make a habit of pointing it out."
He touched Galen's face, the same place he'd touched it the morning Galen left, and this time he didn't let go after a single second.
This time Martin closed the distance. Ten days of remembering had preserved the shape of him and none of the reality.
Martin pulled him in hard enough to draw a startled laugh against his mouth, and the warm, familiar sound nearly undid every careful sentence he had just managed.
The kiss carried none of the restraint of that last goodbye, only Galen's hand fisting in his coat and Martin's arm finally doing what it had wanted to do for two weeks, holding him properly.
It went on longer than either of them had any practical reason to allow, out in the yard where anyone might see, and neither of them cared.
Galen retrieved the guitar without being told where to put it. He carried it into the cottage, saw the chair still shifted and the space still clear, and set the case back where it had been. The pencil was still tucked into the outer pocket where he'd left it.
At the farmhouse, Hazel's four places were already laid, the fourth chair pulled out as though it had never once been in doubt. Jacks looked up from the stove long enough to say, "Breakfast is at seven," in precisely the tone she'd have used if he'd never left at all.
"I know," Galen said.
Hazel asked how the music had gone. Jacks asked whether Nina had behaved herself the whole way. Supper continued around the fourth place as though it had never once been in question.
Back at the cottage, Martin got the fire going while Galen set Nina's keys on the table beside the guitar. Martin moved the chair back beside him, the same few inches he'd shifted it the day the guitar first arrived, and reached across the narrow table for Galen's hand.
"Three weeks until the next booking," he said.
"And after?"
Galen looked at the space Martin had kept open for him.
"I come home."