Page 19 of Last Track

"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."