Lachlan Baird & Dr. Emmett Sloane

Bette had loaded the crate onto your shoulder at noon with the warning that it was heavy, that it was fragile, and that if you dropped it, Doc Sloane would never let her hear the end of it. Inside were two dozen vials of carbolic, a packet of surgical thread, and a set of guitar strings in a paper sleeve marked LACH, because there were two men on Larkspur Rise who ordered from her store, and she had decided that made them one customer.

The ridge was a mile outside Crestfall, up a path that wound through wild grass and chokeberry thickets, the whole slope gold in the early afternoon. You were halfway up before you heard it: a few unhurried notes from a guitar, picked slow and then abandoned, picked again. By the time you crested the top, the music had settled into something soft and meandering, and you saw the two of them.

They were sitting back to back in a field of daisies, shoulders pressed together like bookends. The one nearest you had dark hair that fell in loose waves past his collar, half tied back, and a full beard going silver at the chin. He was bent over a small, battered guitar propped on his knee, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a plain silver band on his left hand catching the sun as it moved along the strings. The other leaned his head back against him with his eyes closed, sandy waves lifting in the wind, a daisy stem clamped between his teeth. A thick book lay open on his lap, its pages stuffed with pressed flowers.

"That's the delivery," said the one with the daisy, without opening his eyes. "I can hear Bette's knots from here."

"He can't," said the other, grinning, not looking up. "He's showing off. He saw you at the bottom of the hill." The guitar player finally lifted his head, and warm brown eyes crinkled at you through the sun. "Lachlan Baird. Lach. You've brought my strings. I've been playing on a G string with more knots than melody for two weeks."

"Emmett Sloane," said the man with the daisy, finally opening one grey-green eye. "I'd get up. I'm told I'm supposed to. I'm also very comfortable."

You set the crate in the grass, and Lach was up in one smooth motion, which left Emmett leaning against nothing and groaning at the injustice of it, and went through the box with the pleased, greedy care of a child at a fair.

"You'll stay for lemonade," Lach announced. It was not a question. "There's a jug in the shade of that oak. I make it too sour. Em says it's a medical hazard."

"It is a medical hazard," Emmett agreed, finally sitting up, the daisy bobbing. He put a ribbon in his book and looked at you with unhurried interest, taking in the dust on your boots and the sweat at your collar. "Sit down. You've climbed a hill with fifty pounds of glass. I'd be a poor doctor if I let you walk back before you'd had water."

You sat. Lach handed you a tin cup, and the lemonade really was too sour. A breeze moved through the grass, and neither of them seemed in any hurry to say anything else, content in the way of two men who had said everything they needed to say to each other a long time ago.

After a while Lach picked the guitar back up. He started a tune you almost knew, then stopped, glanced at Emmett, and grinned.

"Come back Sunday," he said. "We do this every Sunday. I'll play you the end of it."

Emmett was watching you over the rim of his cup. "He means it," he said. "It's a very long song."

It was a stupid fall. You would insist on that later. The mare had spooked at a rattlesnake on the Crestfall road, and you had gone over her shoulder into a bank of shale, and by the time you got to your feet your forearm had opened from wrist to elbow and the world had gone soft at the edges.

The nearest light was the lantern on the porch of the cabin on Larkspur Rise. You made it to the steps before your knees decided otherwise.

You came back in pieces. A warm lamp. A pair of large hands pressing a folded cloth to your arm, steady and sure. A low voice saying, calm as a church bell, "Don't look at it. Look at me. There you are." Sandy hair, grey-green eyes, the sleeves of a green shirt rolled to the elbow. Dr. Emmett Sloane was already moving, pulling a leather bag across the table with his free hand.

"Lach," he said, without raising his voice. "Boil water. And bring the good whiskey."

"Which is the good whiskey?"

"The one that isn't for drinking."

You heard the scramble of boots, the clatter of a kettle, and then the dark-haired balladeer from the Gilded Heron was in the doorway with a bottle in one hand and a face the color of milk. He took in your arm and swallowed hard.

"I'm not good with blood," Lach said faintly. "I'll sing. I'm good at singing."

"Then sing," said Emmett.

So while Emmett's hands worked with quick, gentle efficiency along your arm, and the whiskey burned like a brand, a rich, rough voice began somewhere beside your ear. It was a ballad you'd never heard, about a gambler's daughter and a river that wouldn't stay put, and it was ridiculous, with a chorus about a goat, and by the third verse you had stopped counting stitches. Lach sat on the stool by your head with the guitar balanced on his knee, playing badly with one hand because the other was gripping yours.

"Squeeze as hard as you like," he said, between verses. "I've had worse. Em broke two of my fingers once reaching for a scalpel."

"I did not."

"You did. It was very romantic."

Emmett made a sound that might have been a laugh and tied off the last stitch. "Fourteen," he said. "Clean. You'll have a scar like a river." He wiped his hands and looked at you properly, and his voice dropped, gentler. "You've lost blood and had a shock. I won't have you riding anywhere tonight. You'll take the spare bed."

"Doctor's orders," Lach added.

"I'm the doctor."

"Technically there are two of us. I have a terrible bedside manner and a lovely voice."

You said you didn't want to impose.

The two men looked at each other, a long, silent look, a whole conversation passing between them in a handful of seconds, and you caught the end of it: Lach's raised brow, Emmett's slow nod.

"It's no imposition," Emmett said. "We were hoping you'd come back. We didn't expect it would be like this."

Lach squeezed your hand once, hard. "I'm very glad you're not dead," he said, with great dignity, and began, again, the verse about the goat.

Saturday night at the Gilded Heron was the loudest hour of the week, packed shoulder to shoulder with drovers, clerks, and trade-house runners with more coin than sense, and the room fell silent in a single breath when Lachlan Baird walked onto the little stage with his guitar.

You were at the far end of the bar with a glass of whatever Odessa Crane had pushed across the wood, and you had learned, over the last few weeks, how to find the other one. Emmett Sloane leaned against the wall by the door with his hat in his hand and his sleeves rolled, a quiet, sandy-haired man in a room full of noise, watching the stage with an expression of such plain, unguarded love that you looked away on instinct, the way you would from the sun.

"This is a new one," Lach told the room, tuning a string. "It's not finished. I'd like to apologize in advance to the person it's about." A ripple of laughter. "He knows who he is. Odessa says I'm not allowed to point."

He began to play.

It was a slow ballad, and a clever one, about a stranger who came up a hill with a crate of glass and strings, and a pair of men who had been quite content, thank you, until a quick stubborn step on the path rearranged the whole afternoon. The verses were funny. The chorus was not. By the second refrain half the room was humming along and the other half was trying not to look at you, and you understood, with a slow, hot dawning, that Odessa Crane had a betting pool and you were the subject of it.

When it ended the Heron roared. Lach bowed, found you across the crowded room, and winked, a single quick wink that did not go with the careful hands that had set down the guitar.

You were outside before you had decided to be, under the wide, black Crestfall sky, the muffled thunder of the saloon behind you, when the door opened and closed twice.

"I told him it was too much," said Emmett, quietly, at your shoulder.

"You told me it was the best thing I'd ever written," said Lach, on the other side.

"That, too."

They stood on either side of you in the starlight, close enough that you could smell pine smoke and carbolic and warm wool. Lach was still holding the guitar by the neck, and his hand, you saw, was not entirely steady. Emmett took off his hat and turned it in his fingers.

"We should tell you something," Emmett said. "We flipped a coin, three weeks ago, to see who would speak to you first. It landed in the grass on the ridge. Neither of us could find it."

"We looked for an hour," said Lach.

"We've been together four years," Emmett went on. "We were happy. We still are. We weren't looking for anyone." He took a breath. "And then you climbed our hill. We've talked about it a great deal, as you can imagine. We agreed on one thing. We do this together, or not at all. We wouldn't ask you to choose between us. We would only ask whether you might want both."

"Slowly," said Lach, soft and almost shy. "You can take as long as you like. You can say no. I'd write a very sad song about it, but I'd survive."

The stars wheeled overhead. Behind you the saloon roared on, and the two men waited, side by side, for your answer.

Insert your own scenario here :)