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“It’s nice to learn you.” Poet knocks his head against my shoulder. “Will you tell me if you need something and I don’t notice?”
“I will try,” I promise. “But I am used to being alone. It might take me some time to grow.”
“We have time, Oscar.”
“I hope so.” I set the gin bottle down. “I really do love you.”
Poet’s smile is as warm as the sunset on golden fields. “I love you too. Will you say it in Lithuanian for me?”
Of course. I say it as he studies my mouth and I think we are out of surprises for one day.
But I am wrong.
“Are you working tomorrow?”
Am I? No. Even before the fire, I had the day off.
I shake my head. “Why?”
Poet steps into my arms and fits us together as if we are made to be this way. Because we are. “I need to see Folk. Then I want to go to Norfolk to see Aras, and my parents. Can we go in the morning?”
I say yes without words. We don’t need them. We are in this life together now, because we choose to be.
And it’s time to start living.
EPILOGUE - POET
WINTER
The top field is green again. Deep green, with winter grass that has learned to survive.
Rain softens the earth beneath my boots. I crouch to check the depth of flooded tractor tracks and the dark water reflects the pale December sky.
“Almost like it never happened.” I see Saint say this, because he crouched first. And I think he means the wildfire that touched this field without taking it, leaving a torched and skeletal hedgerow in its wake. But his forest gaze is dry as a bone, even in the rain. “Fire and grass can’t hide it, though.”
He knows.
About Dav’s digging expedition. Oscar warned me it was a fool’s game to keep something from Saint Malone.
That man sees the most when you don’t know he’s watching.
“It’s healing, not hiding,” I counter. “And now it’s living again.”
Saint just smiles and I leave him to it. Because that’s what he likes. He’s still yet to ask me anything about money. Never questions how I run the farm. Like most things in Porth Luck and beyond, I couldn’t ask for better than the life and people who found me here.
I trudge back towards the house, stopping off in the rebuilt barn. Dav’s gone for the day, but Mal is still here, fitting the doors I gave up on yesterday. “You don’t have to do that.”
Mal’s working the impact driver, one boot braced to the timber as he lines up the hinges. “Keeps me out of trouble.”
“Come inside when you’re done. Food should be ready soon.”
Like Saint in the fields, I leave it at that. Folk told me Mal likes to keep busy and if that means he’s busy here, I’m not complaining. I just wish he’d let me pay him. It’s not like I can make it up to him the same way I do Oscar’s free labour on the farm—with blowjobs and…other things.
Things that draw me to the house as much as the smell of whatever Oscar and Sol are cooking for the Christmas Eve dinner we’re having tonight. Dinner we can’t touch a morsel of until the first star lights the sky.
Lithuanian tradition.
Like the wreath on my front door that falls off as I open it. Aras made it. But it comes loose and hits the deck every day because Oscar doesn’t live here yet. That’s my theory anyway. Our reality is we haven’t spent a night apart in months. Even when our work overlaps, we find each other in the dark.
