Page 12 of Last Track

He hadn't planned to play the fingerpicked arrangement. It arrived the way the difficult passage itself had first arrived to him, uninvited and then undeniable, his hands finding the shape of it before he'd consciously decided. This was the piece he'd fought for a week in the back of a cold van, the one that had finally come right on a night he'd believed nobody was listening.

He felt Martin go still across the room before he saw it.

The difficult passage came, the one that used to catch him no matter how many times he tried it, and this time it didn't. Galen let himself glance up as it resolved clean under his hands, and found Martin already watching him with the specific, unguarded recognition of a man hearing something he'd been given once already, in private, through a wall he'd claimed was thick enough to keep it out.

Nobody else in the room knew what had just passed between them. A few people clapped, warm and unremarkable, the ordinary reward for an ordinary song well played.

Packing up took longer than it should have. Heath kept finding one more cable to coil properly, apparently unable to leave a job half finished even when the job wasn't his, and Seamus kept finding one more thing to praise before he'd hand over the fee, as though goodwill were part of the payment and needed to be delivered in full. By the time Galen and Martin stepped out into the cold, the village had gone quiet around them, most of the windows already dark, and the walk back to Ashcombe unspooled slow and easy, footsteps matching without either of them arranging it.

"You knew that passage," Galen said.

"I told you the walls weren't thick."

"You never said you'd remember it."

"I didn't say I wouldn't."

They reached the fork in the lane, one path toward the farmhouse and the spare room, the other toward the low dark shape of the cottage. Galen had nowhere he needed to be tonight except somewhere warm, and the farmhouse would have been warm too. Nothing tonight required him to choose the harder path.

Martin stopped at the fork and looked at him, the question entirely unspoken and entirely clear.

Galen followed him home.

The cottage was warmer than the night, low-ceilinged and close, smelling faintly of woodsmoke and the particular dry mineral scent of a house that had been heated by the same fire for decades. Martin shut the door behind them and did not immediately reach for him, which Galen read, by now, as its own kind of question, the same patient asking that had been under everything since the hurdle.

He answered it by closing the distance himself.

The kiss this time carried none of the field's urgency or the hurdle's caution. It was slower, deliberate, Martin's hand settling at his jaw as though he intended to memorise the shape of it before allowing himself anything further, and Galen let himself be held still for exactly as long as he wanted, which turned out to be considerably longer than his body had planned on.

"I've got a room," Galen said against his mouth, half a warning, half an accounting. "At the farmhouse. Nobody needs me anywhere tonight."

"I know."

"I'm not here because I've nowhere else to be."

Martin's thumb moved along his jaw, unhurried. "I know that too."

The certainty in it undid something Galen hadn't realised was still braced, some old readiness to be temporary that had been holding its breath since the sheep field. He took Martin's coat by the lapels and pulled him the rest of the way in, and after that neither of them said anything requiring an answer for some time.

They undressed each other awkwardly rather than gracefully, the narrow bed forcing a rearrangement neither of them had planned, an elbow catching the wall, Galen's shirt catching on his own watch until Martin laughed against his collarbone and freed the buckle himself. Martin's hands were rougher than Galen expected even having watched them all week, a decade of fence wire and cold mornings written into the calluses along his palm, and when Martin's thumb found the old scar on Galen's forearm, Galen told him, badly, how he'd got it: a van door at motorway services outside Preston. Martin said nothing, only pressed his mouth to it as though the story mattered more than the joke he'd made of it.

The bed was too narrow for two men their size, and they solved it the way they'd solved the hurdle, by trial and correction: Galen's hair trapped for a moment under Martin's shoulder until he swore and they both laughed, low and startled, a sound that deepened rather than broke whatever was happening between them. Martin turned out to be unexpectedly vocal once he stopped deciding what he would and wouldn't allow himself, rough and unguarded against Galen's ear, nothing careful left in it at all, and Galen filed the sound away the way he filed away a difficult passage once his hands had finally learned it, something to find again.

When it was Galen's turn, he learned Martin the same way: what made his breath catch, what made his hands go still against a blanket that still smelled faintly of woodsmoke, what made him laugh, once, helplessly, into the dark when Galen's knee caught the headboard and the whole bed complained beneath them. Galen wanted to remember it exactly as it had happened: this room, this bed too small for both of them, this particular man learning to be loud instead of careful, rather than some tidier version of itself.

Afterward, they lay tangled together in the narrow bed with the fire gone down to embers, Martin's arm heavy and warm across his waist, and Galen listened to a silence that had nothing anxious left inside it, no arithmetic running quietly underneath, no fee to recover or agency to appease. For the length of that silence, at least, there was nothing he needed to be doing except exactly this.

He woke once in the grey edge of morning, warm and disoriented, and reached automatically for the shape of a van wall that wasn't there. Instead there was old stone, a low ceiling, and Martin's arm still around him, solid and unmoving, as though it had not occurred to him to let go in his sleep.

Somewhere across the yard, his clean clothes and his whole careful, temporary arrangement were waiting exactly where he'd left them, unclaimed and undisturbed, available to him the moment he chose to want them.

Galen closed his eyes again and stayed anyway.

6

MARTIN

Martin woke first, which was ordinary, and woke to another man's weight against his side, which was not.