Two Man Station Read online

  They could both use a new beginning.

  Six Months Later

  The sun had set already, but the cockatoos in the rain tree at the bottom of the paddock were still calling out to one another in curious, questioning notes that ended with a chorus of raucous squawks. It was cold. The heat of the day had vanished the moment the light did, and Jason shivered as he crossed the yard. He climbed Gio’s back stairs, almost tripping on the cat that lounged there invisible in the dark.

  Gio’s back door was unlocked. The smell of fresh coffee wafted out onto the cold night air.

  Jason stepped inside. “Hey.”

  Gio leaned in the kitchen doorway. He was still in uniform. “Hey. Is Taylor in bed?”

  “I told him that if he didn’t get to sleep on time, the camping trip was off.”

  “Harsh,” Gio said with a grin. He stepped back into the kitchen.

  Jason followed him, and then crowded him up against the bench, corralling him in with his arms while Gio fiddled with the coffee machine. He leaned in and bit the side of his neck gently, and Gio jerked.

  “Are you trying to give me third-degree burns?” Gio asked, elbowing Jason in the ribs.

  “I’m trying to give you an erection,” Jason said, sliding his hands down Gio’s chest and tugging at his belt.

  Gio snorted. “I just spent eight hours drinking shitty coffee from the shitty machine in the station. I need a decent caffè macchiato before I even think about an erection, thanks.”

  “You are such a coffee snob,” Jason said, pressing a kiss to the curls at the nape of his neck before releasing him.

  Gio turned around, smiling. “It’s part of the package, Jase. You should thank me for teaching some refinement to your skippy arse.”

  Jason curled his hand around the back of Gio’s neck. He pulled him in for a kiss. “Drink your fancy bloody coffee, then.”

  Gio’s smile widened.

  Jason gazed out of Gio’s kitchen window over to his own house. There was a low flickering light in the living room. Holly liked to watch TV in the dark. Having Holly living with them was working well. There was someone there at night if Jason was called out, and Holly’s parents were happy she wasn’t living alone in town. Jason wasn’t sure what made him such a safe bet, whether it was because he was a police officer, or because it was an open secret in town that he and Gio were together. It was the sort of thing that nobody had really addressed—nobody sober, at least, and most of the drunks had quickly learned that their arrests went much more smoothly if they shut their mouths on that particular topic—but people knew. For every sideways look Jason got, he also got a few smiles and nods and, once, an entire tray of lamingtons made by one of the ladies from the Catholic Ladies’ Auxiliary at Saint Patrick’s.

  “For you and your young man, dear,” she’d said, patting him on the arm, and she hadn’t been talking about Taylor.

  Gio drank his coffee. It was a mystery to Jason how Gio could put away so much caffeine and still sleep at night. He seemed to manage it though, moulding himself easily to the curve of Jason’s body. Some nights it was Jason who didn’t sleep. Some nights he lay awake staring into the darkness and listening to Gio breathe. Some nights he wasn’t sure how they’d made it to this place where everything was quiet and soft and right, but Jason didn’t want to question his luck. They were at a place now where it worked, where they worked. They were at a place where they had room to build a future together.

  “How was work?” Jason rearranged the magnets on Gio’s fridge.

  “Nothing to report, boss.” Gio’s tone was only half-teasing.

  They still got the occasional unmarked package in the mail—probably just an attempt by Gio’s ex-colleagues to prove that they were untouchable—but Jason was satisfied that the investigation had put the wind up those arseholes and that the harassment was dying a slow death at last. Gio might still be hated down on the Coast, but in the police service’s Northern Region he was a fucking hero. Which was good. With the inquest into the shooting coming up soon, he could use that support.

  And then maybe—finally—they could put everything behind them and get on with their lives.

  “Glad to hear it,” Jason said.

  Gio set his cup down in the sink with a soft clink. “I need a shower. Are you staying over?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gio flashed him a smile. “Good.”

  He padded down the hallway, peeling off his shirt as he walked.

  “Don’t be too long!” Jason called after him, and Gio laughed.

  Jason headed for Gio’s bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the pipes squeal as Gio turned on the shower. He unbuttoned his shirt, fingers grazing over the scar tissue on his chest. Jason was still reluctant to touch it. He didn’t know if the tenderness in the scar was imagined or not. He’d healed, but he’d spent so long learning to move without exacerbating the injury that sometimes he still didn’t trust himself to take a deep breath, or to twist his torso when he moved. His first fight at the pub after going back on active duty? He’d suddenly imagined a fist in the chest, and for a second he’d been frozen to the spot. Then Gio had moved in front of him, and he’d been able to breathe again. To act. To do his bloody job.

  Afterwards, Gio had said, “Do you think that never happens to me, Jase?”

  They had each other’s backs. They were solid.

  Jason shrugged his shirt off and then stood to unfasten his jeans. He shoved them and his underwear down, and then climbed into Gio’s bed. There was a paperback lying on the bedside table. Something by that Turkish writer that Gio loved and Jason barely understood. Jason flicked through a few pages and then set the book aside. He heard the pipes shudder off, and a few minutes later Gio appeared in the doorway wearing a towel.

  He raised his eyebrows at Jason. “So, I believe you said something about an erection?”

  “Drop the towel and get your arse over here,” Jason said.

  “Yes, Sarge,” Gio said with a laugh, and did just that.

  The ute bounced over the rocky ground, sending up swirling plumes of dust behind them. Taylor, buckled into the middle seat, whooped and crowed, while Gio gripped the handle above the door.

  City boy.

  Okay, so Jason might have overplayed the idea of a campsite. Clearly Gio had been expecting somewhere with some actual amenities, or at least a road to take them there. They’d turned off the road about an hour back, the track had run out soon after, and Gio was looking increasingly dubious.

  “We’re sleeping in the middle of nowhere tonight, aren’t we?” he asked as they bounced over another hillock. Spinifex scraped the undercarriage of the ute. “You want me to die of a snake bite.”

  “It’s winter, Gio. There won’t be any snakes.”

  “I’ll bet that’s exactly what the snakes want you to believe.”

  They arrived at the campsite a short while later. Taylor immediately went scrounging for firewood, and Jason unloaded the back of the ute. Gio looked around dubiously.

  It wasn’t much to look at during the day. Just a small bluff overlooking the curve of a creek bed. The creek bed was bone-dry in winter. On the other side of the creek bed, the flat countryside reached out for the horizon. The hillocks and ridges of the earth were smoothed out by sheer distance. A few clumps of trees dotted the landscape, their white trunks stark against the red dirt.

  “Wow,” Gio said.

  “It used to be an inland sea,” Jason said. “A million or so years ago. Now come and help me get set up.”

  “Did you bring a tent?” Gio asked. “I’m not seeing a tent.”

  Jason hauled the swags out of the back of the ute. “We don’t need a tent. It’s not going to rain.”

  “Seriously?”

  Jason laughed. “Trust me, Gio. We’ll be fine.”

  Taylor came stomping back with an armful of firewood. He dropped it beside the ute. “Can I go looking for fossils, Dad?”

  “Stay in sight of the ute,
” Jason warned him.

  The uniformity of the landscape could be dangerous. Jason had headed up enough search parties to know that even the most experienced locals could get lost out here. He’d heard stories of people finding massive fossils uncovered by the wind and the weather, or sheltered formations with indigenous rock paintings on them, who after finding their way back to their vehicles were never able to locate the places again. There were stranger things too. Once, he’d been sent out to search for a bloke who’d been mustering and was overdue. The bloke’s quad bike had died, it turned out later, and it had taken him hours to make it to high enough ground to get a signal on his phone. When the bloke had managed to call in at last, Jason had driven to where he’d thought he was, and turned the lights on the police LandCruiser on.

  “Can you see the lights?” he’d asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I see them. Yeah, you’re coming right for me.”

  Jason had been stationary at the time.

  “Well, what the hell was I looking at?” the bloke had asked when Jason had eventually found him.

  Jason had figured there was no way either of them would ever know the answer to that.

  He watched for a moment as Taylor scrabbled down into the creek bed and then climbed out the other side, and then turned his attention to building up the fire. It was too early to light it yet, but he wanted to be ready by dusk. The temperature would drop the second the sun slipped below the horizon.

  “Alana and I used to come out here,” he said, clearing a place for the fire.

  Gio crouched down beside him, sweeping some brush away.

  “We used to roll our swags out here and watch the stars for hours.” He smiled at the memory. “We had to tether Taylor up with one of those toddler leashes so he didn’t wander off in the middle of the night.”

  “That sounds like something Taylor would do,” Gio said with a laugh.

  “Well, not much has changed, that’s for sure.” Jason checked to see that Taylor was still in sight, and then turned back to Gio. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” Gio asked softly.

  “For coming with me even though you obviously hate camping.”

  Gio ducked his head, flushing.

  Jason rose to his feet, and held a hand down for him. “It’s beautiful when the stars come out, I promise.”

  “Huh,” Gio said, looking at Jason with his head at an angle.

  “What?”

  “Turns out that you, Jason Quinn, are a romantic.”

  It was Jason’s turn to flush. “Shut up.”

  “And now it’s gone.” Gio’s smile was brilliant.

  “Shut up,” Jason said again, and reeled Gio in for a gentle kiss that left them both breathless.

  Behind them, the late-afternoon light turned the red dirt golden.

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for reading Lisa Henry’s Two Man Station!

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  Thanks, as always, to my wonderful beta readers and fellow authors: J.A. Rock, Sofia Grey, Jaqueline Grey, and M. Caspian.

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  Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.

  Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn't know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.

  She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.

  She shares her house with too many cats, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.

  You can email her at [email protected]

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