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Yeah, Allie’s out of her mind.
Of course she is - that much is obvious from just looking at her, and anywhere that isn’t a tattoo parlor would have told her off already about a dozen different bits of her outfit, and that’s not even starting on her attitude. She goes by ‘Dark Allie’ these days, and the face she made last time Andy had asked her if she’d had anyone mugged in her lately only goes to show that there really isn’t anything going on behind the pretty purple-tinted fringe of hers, but general office ladies are hard to come by even in Mrs Thatcher’s ravaged economy, especially ones that’ll work for what the whimsically named Ink Inc. manages to offer in the way of pay, and so… they’re stuck with Allie.
Who has just booked him a two-hour consult. A two-hour consult. Which, granted, if you were trying to do an award-winning all-over back piece on some minor celebrity with serious decision anxiety, but… this bloke, the one who just walked in the door and carefully closed it behind himself, this bloke’s a boring businessman with slicked-back hair and an expensive-looking blazer over his expensive-looking T-shirt.
Twenty minutes tops, for a consult, and likely far less than two hours for the actual piece. Probably something monochrome and Japanese, or a martini glass on his bicep. Andy doubts he’ll even have to get his sketchpad out. Still, it’s paid work, and so he puts down the girlie mag and puts on his best and scruffiest business smile.
“Mr Gadling?”
“Yeah,” the man says, and his answering smile is surprisingly genuine. “You can call me Rob. If you like.”
Andy nods somewhat gruffly. “I’m Andy,” he says, “in case Allie didn’t tell you than when you booked. Actually, given how she completely buggered up the appointment otherwise, I’m glad you’re actually Mr Gadling, at least.”
“Oh dear.” The man grins, making little sheaves of laugh lines explode at the corners of his eyes. “So you thought I wasn’t here for a tattoo?”
Andy snorts. “That’s the only thing people come here for, mate. But for some reason that’s probably lost somewhere in her airy little head, Allie thought you’d take two full hours to tell me what you’re looking for.”
“Well… if you want the long version of the story…” The man - Gadling, Rob, whatever - chuckles. “You’d be covering rather a lot of ground in either case.”
“Big piece, then?” Andy perks up.
Gadling gestures down the length of his right arm. “I have a few… older bits and bobs that I’d love to see brought together into a… cohesive whole.”
Andy’s eyebrows rise. “Aaah. She forgot to tell me that. A cover-up job, is it? Yeah, those take a bit more finesse.”
Gadling’s lips do an interesting thing that isn’t quite a pained expression, but Andy can tell something’s rubbing him the wrong way about what he said. “Not covering them up so much as making them into one thing. Something that represents me.”
“Hmmm,” Andy says, “let’s see them then. Take stock of what we’ve got. If any of them are intricate, I’m gonna have to get the camera out but for now…” he points his pencil at Gadling. “Fire away.”
“Well,” the man says, twisting his hand slightly so that the sleeve of his suit jacket slips up a little, “here’s number one.”
Andy’s eyes go a bit wide because frankly he hadn’t expected this businessman type to want, or to already have, a tattoo on his hand. Carefully, he peers at the small angular design on the side of Gadling’s hand, halfway between the root of his little finger and the outside of his wrist. He can’t quite make out what it is, and it’s faded to that bluish shade that older inks get, but the edges of it are so crisp as to give him pause.
“That’s the oldest one,” Gadling says simply. “And yeah, that one was not intentional. Typesetting accident, actually. Most of a lowercase a.”
“Ow.” Andy winces in sympathy. “One of them old Linotypes? Yeah, those monsters will fuck you up. My uncle used to work on one of those… looks like you got imprinted, huh?”
“Yeah,” Gadling agrees, “something like that.”
***
They don’t make ink like that any more, not like they did in the 1480s, a laborious process involving galls and soot and caustic iron salts. Hob knows, because he misses the smell of old books, to the extent that he has been known to seek out the less frequented corners of the university’s theology library just to bury his nose in treatises he has no intent of ever reading.
This mark, this came from his early days, before he learned to read, actually. He had been a hired hand, strong and street-smart and not in a position to make demands, and not afraid of fire or of the way it turned metal into shimmering treacherous water that could eat your flesh if you weren’t careful.
Hob was careful, which is how he managed to not catch his sleeve on fire that time around, but alas, the freshly cast letter, still searing hot under its veneer of leaden gray, latched on to his skin and traveled a few agonizing inches attached to his hand before falling to the floor, deformed and spoiled.
And the only thing within reach that was even remotely damp had been the ink tamper, which should have added its own burn to the fresh wound but managed to dissipate the pain enough for his hand to unclench and soak in the relative coolth while his breathing returned to normal.
Caxton, to his credit, did not dismiss him, or even chide him; instead, the old man quirked one corner of his mouth up in what Hob had learned was his attempt at a smile and said something about this being a fitting beginning to his new career.
That was how Hob had learned the shape of the letter “a”, a small, partial, blackletter version of which he had carried with him ever since.
To his relief, the Stranger, when he reappeared, did not appear to consider it a mark of the devil; did not comment on it at all, in fact, leaving Hob more puzzled than before their meeting, but also oddly buoyed by the man’s detached interest, the tiny quirk of his lips that was so like Caxton’s but so much more delicate and yet so much more cutting.
As it healed, Hob caught himself wondering what his Stranger would make of the mark if he knew of it - or what he would make of it in a hundred years’ time. Whether he would ask about it. Whether he would remember Hob gushing about printing.
In the hundreds of years since, Hob hasn’t managed to come up with a good, pithy explanation, so he usually leaves it at the definition he’s gotten used to: a partial lowercase a for humble beginnings.
***
“So, the coverup - sorry, the new piece,” Andy corrects himself. “You’re good with it going all the way down past your wrist, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Gadling says. “Bring it all together. A lot of stories.” He smiles, and it looks oddly sad.
“All right.” Andy makes a note on his sketchpad. “What else do we have?”
Gadling turns his hand, exposing the inside of his wrist, and Andy peers at it. This one is barely there, a flowing, swirly line that is so thin it’s broken up completely into a series of wispy grayish-brown marks.
“This one,” Gadling says, “was also accidental - well, in that he didn’t mean to break skin.”
“It looks like a signature,” Andy hazards.
“Something like that, yeah. A monogram. Old-timey quill pen… nowhere near as painful, I’ll tell you that.”
***
Well, nowhere near as painful physically as getting scalding lead stuck to your skin, that much was true. And, to be fair, Hob had been rather distracted at the time, his mind a bubbling cauldron of wine and anger and pride and lust, the prick of the playwright’s pen the perfect pinch of spice to make it overflow.
The year had been 1589, the wine had been plentiful and good, and his Stranger had just swanned off with someone so much less than him it had, apparently, made his brows thunderous enough to draw comment from Kit Marlowe, in blank verse no less.
One thing had led to another in half-shouted taunts across the tavern floor, and before long, Hob had added his venison pasties and his wine and his thirst for validation to the general mess of Marlowe’s table, and the smug bastard had continued the conversation all while scribbling on a scrap of paper that, when tucked into the bindings of his leg splint just within reach of Hob’s hand, read:
If you can carry me upstairs, good sir
I have a nook to tuck you well inside.
They must have been a comical sight, shambling up the steps groaning and laughing, and Hob’s prick as stiff as Marlowe’s splinted leg. And by all the saints but he still remembers the grin on Marlowe’s face at his realization that he’d just agreed to fucking a man who was in no position to bend over or even stand up. You’re a delight, Master Gadling, he’d said, shall I broaden your horizons, then?
That was the night that he had learned that Kit Marlowe not only kept good fortified wine in his room, but also good unscented oil, and a treasure trove of lewd imaginings in his storyteller head. Hob was fairly certain he had climaxed several times from just the words, all while the playwright’s nimble fingers had played him to distraction.
It must have been Marlowe’s well-shaped nails, and what they did to Hob’s skin, that led to him breaking out the actual quill and ink, and writing his sinful odes on the well-used parchment of Hob’s inner thighs, and then, when he ran out of space, continuing anywhere that wasn’t too hairy, ending with a manacle of florid letters around Hob’s wrist and signing it with his name with such intent that Hob only noticed the blood he’d drawn hours later, awaking with a pounding head and his clothes scattered about the room.
The ink mostly washed off, but the blush on his insufficiently bearded cheeks gave him away, and Eleanor drew the correct conclusions right away, dragging him to her chamber by the scruff of his neck and making him kneel and use his silver tongue on her, and making him forget about his Stranger for another blissful hour or so.
***
“I think the bit that survives is mostly an M,” Hob says, surprised at how wistful he sounds. “Not that it’s legible any more.”
“Easier to work with,” Andy agrees. “Yeah, this one would be more of a challenge to keep visible rather than cover up, but… I can definitely work with the general flow of things. Have a prominent line follow where this was, sort of thing. Only you will know it’s there.”
“Appreciated,” Hob says, and Andy just nods. Probably a touchy subject, he thinks. Ex-lover, likely. Interesting. He hadn’t pegged this one as gay.
“So,” he continues, brightly, “got any more accidents to show me, guv?”
Gadling pushes the sleeve of his blazer up to reveal something in the middle of his forearm that makes Andy wince. The scar looks wide and angry but also old, faded in places, like the tentacle mark of a tiny mythic beast.
Andy whistles through his teeth. “Accident-prone, are you? That one’s gonna be a bit more of a challenge to get the ink to stick to… burn scar? Gas stove? Playing with the fireplace tools as a kid?”
“Something like that,” Gadling agrees, shrugging.
***
It had been, technically, a fireplace tool, yes. A red-hot poker, in fact, hammered into shape by a crafty blacksmith over the hearth of some looted home that had had enough furniture left in it to serve as an improvised village tribunal, a bench for the ravening judges, and a chair to tie the accused to.
There had been nothing civil about the Civil War, and for all that they could not put him to death (not for want of trying), they did manage to brand him a filthy rotten Royalist.
The angle had been all wrong, though not wrong enough to allow the angry red burn mark to fade entirely over the centuries. Still, these days Hob suspects he’s the only one who can still decipher it as the remnants of the letter R rather than P.
The early 1700s had been more than a little uncomfortable as a result, because while the wounds of the Civil War had healed in the country as much as on his skin, Hob had had a few close escapes with being mistaken, by sufficiently misinformed people, for a pirate branded for his crimes.
Pirates, Hob knew, were branded on their faces, but he knew better than to try to convince a knife-wielding ruffian educated enough to read a single letter but not a history book or even a broadsheet ballad detailing the dashing buccaneers’ latest incredible exploits on what was quickly ceasing to be the Spanish Main.
That said, this was probably the scar that had aged best in terms of what people thought it signified - in recent years, it had been a source of amusement more than anything else, seeing as it apparently branded him a particularly daring and devoted member of the kink scene (“what’s her name then? Pamela? Peggy?”), or, even later, a particularly dedicated Jack Sparrow cosplayer.
He had had to look that term up, and rent the film in question, and then spent a good few minutes laughing to himself about how the reason that this ridiculous caricature of a silver screen pirate had his brand on the inside of his forearm was, quite probably, because whoever had designed that caricature character had, at some point, run into Hob in a disreputable bar.
Another one the Stranger had never seen, buried as it had been in the glut of horror and pain that had been most of the 17th century as it had spilled over his lips with the wine and the breadcrumbs.
Well, if he ever returned, Hob hoped he would find it buried in art.
***
“It was the letter R,” Gadling explains, “let’s leave it at that.” A sigh. “That’s a chapter in my history I’d rather forget… as would the rest of the country, I’m sure.”
And suddenly, Andy is imagining skinheads and the stench of beer, or maybe even mods and rockers, given how Gadling is likely just old enough to have been around for that. “Brixton?,” he asks, “or something like that anyway?”
“Something like that, yes.”
The next one requires Gadling to shrug off his suit jacket, and this one, at least, is an actual tattoo rather than a wound accidentally colored by ink or dirt. Andy runs his fingers slowly over the uneven lines. “Hand and needle, hm?,” he hazards. “Spent some time inside, did you?” He finds himself revising his opinion of his neatly-appointed client by the minute. “Prison, I mean. Not like I’m judging or anything,” he adds hastily.
“No,” Gadling replies evenly, evidently not at all offended. “Spent some time at sea.” He smiles. “Genuine Polynesian work, would you believe it. Well, it was supposed to have been anyway. Things got… interrupted.”
Andy inclines his head and squints a little, and yeah, okay, he can picture this guy on board one of the big freighters, shorter hair and a bit scruffier maybe, working his way up in the business.
***
It had been a good year, somewhere in the latter half of the 1700s, a year filled with wide-eyed discovery and new beginnings, a year in a long string of years in which his clear eyes and his level head and his strong arms, along with his ability to read, earned him the grudging respect of captains on all seven seas.
He’s not sure now, but he thinks it may have been his last voyage to that side of the world, at least in person. Back before English maps extended that far into the island-spattered blue of the Pacific Ocean, and back before anywhere had been resolutely named by his compatriots and all anyone had to fall back on were strings of emphatic native speech, studded with vowels that shimmered like the polished shells that represented their homes on maps made of sticks woven together into a network of currents that had made Hob’s eye go wide.
On that particular occasion, the density of emphatic vowel-throwing had reached rather uncomfortable proportions, centering, as far as he could tell, on whether his tryst with a very accommodating island beauty had in fact been appropriate.
It had been consensual, that much was evident from her own posturing and arguing with a gaggle of dubious and, crucially, armed local lads, but Hob gathered, over long hours of familial palaver, that the state of his skin was indeed deemed inappropriate for that kind of thing, possibly because they were concerned it would rub off on any potential offspring.
Of course, language barrier or not, Hob could not help noticing that the brother most passionately involved in defending his sister’s honor was also the one who had watched the whole thing as it was happening, and then crept up to Hob in the middle of the night and demanded seconds.
Things had gotten ugly for a moment there - while Hob had managed to fend off attempts at attacking his face with the traditional tools (because he would be damned if he bore the mark of an enjoyable night under the stars for the rest of his life), they had managed to wrestle him down and get the hammer and needle-comb into place for at least a few searing geometric lines in the style of their people.
Mercifully, they had gotten interrupted by some old guy in charge, his scowl scarred with blue-black swirls and his voice sonorous and harsh, evidently displeased by their treatment of the pale-faced stranger.
Hob never found out whether it had been the woman’s shouting or his own that had summoned the chief, but he had gotten off relatively lightly with more shouting and a swift dismissal via canoe, as well as some epic side-eye from the men tasked with rowing him directly back to his ship, no detours allowed.
He’d lost his shirt and shoes in the process, but it had made for a very good story, so he didn’t mind going shirtless for a while, displaying his trophy that looked like the capital letter E, small and saturated and lying on its back, oozing gently down his bicep and stinging with the salt spray.
By the time they’d reached Portsmouth, lore had it that the mark stood for Hob bedding three girls in one night, and he’d been happy enough to leave it at that.
For a while, it had been the sigil of his trading company, the three lines representing the three legs of his profitable trade route, until some enterprising correspondent had come up with the triangle as a more fitting descriptor, and the ignominious connection of the Gadling name with the transatlantic slave trade had begun to fade as slowly as this particular tattoo.
Another story his Stranger had never gotten to hear - this time, of course, because they’d gotten interrupted by someone who appeared to be even more invested in the mysterious pale man’s life than Hob himself had been.
Still, this one had been, in the grand scheme of things, a good one. Full of life.
***
“All right,” Andy says, “and one more - pull up the sleeve a bit. Need to see how far up it goes.”
Gadling nods and tugs the sleeve of his T-shirt out of the way, revealing an ornate medallion on his shoulder that has paled a bit with age but is very clearly there on purpose.
“Hm,” Andy muses. “I have to ask - do you want to keep this one visible or does it need to be covered up?”
Which is a fair question, seeing as it’s literally the letter D, very legible and ornate, and very Victorian in style.
***
Which is, of course, because it is. Victorian, that is. This one, Hob can pinpoint to the exact year and month: 1889, early July, a few weeks after his disastrous attempt at making friends with the man he’d come to think of as his Stranger. He’d been moping at home for a bit, until one night he’d caught sight of himself in the mirror and decided that that was enough, he had so much to live for, damn it, and had gone and thrown himself into London’s nightlife, gas-lit and gin-fueled and so, so pleased with itself for apparently surviving the horrors of the Ripper for long enough to start cracking jokes about it.
She’d been a vaudeville actress, red-headed and deep-voiced and keen on comforting him. She’d also had a fondness for his existing tattoos that bordered on the lewd, and she had easily talked him into getting inked for her, or rather with her, her one slender white hand cradled in his own while the artisan worked his magic on Hob’s shoulder, probably quite oblivious of where the girl’s other hand was working its magic beneath her skirts.
Hob let her believe that the slight tremble to his frame, the labored quality of his breathing, was because of the pain, or perhaps because he did notice her pleasuring herself surreptitiously, when all the while he was fighting off thoughts of his angrily departed friend, his Stranger once more, the one constant he had had in his uncannily long life.
That was, ultimately, why he’d insisted on the letter D, for darling perhaps, but more likely for daring, or dreaming. Or durable.
Not for her name, neither her real one nor her stage name. This was for him, and for a man whose name he still did not know, and now never might.
***
And all of a sudden, Andy gets it, and he’s a little disappointed Gadling doesn’t grin and clap him on the shoulder when he says it out loud.
“I like that, mate. It spells ‘armed’. All those letters. Your arm is armed!”
“Something like that,” Gadling admits, like that is the closest he’ll ever get to saying yes. “Armor was actually what I was thinking, independently of your little spark of genius there. Just… not all of it metal, maybe?”
And, yeah, it does end up being a two-hour consult, and a long sketching session way into the night, but they come up with something that Andy is proud of, a sleeve of armor that is as organic as it is ambitious, and Gadling looks at it for a long time without saying anything before declaring, to Andy’s amazement, that he will be back next year, and then once a year as his busy schedule allows, for the next scale or joint or missing link in his armor, and any touch-ups to the previous year’s work.
Crucially, he pays upfront, so Andy is more than happy to accept.
***
All right, he has to admit that he did the calculations a couple of times over the last three-and-a-bit decades, what with inflation and all, but no, he’s not put out at all. He’s actually come to like Gadling, showing up like clockwork on or about the first week of June every year. He takes good care of his ink too, and so Andy has seen his work grow, from the medallion on Gadling’s shoulder down the man’s arm, into the crook of his elbow with barely a wince, and down through fields of hairs that, weirdly, never went gray.
He’s never heard of anyone vain enough to dye his arm hair, and so he figures that Gadling’s just lucky, like Andy’s grandma had been, with barely five gray hairs to her name when the cancer claimed her in her seventies.
He’s getting there himself these days - not the cancer, thankfully, but the retirement, and he’s stopped working at the shop a couple of years ago and now lugs his tools and inks across town to Gadling’s house. Nice place too, as befits a businessman with a checkered past.
Gadling serves tea, loose-leaf and piping hot, and Andy makes small talk for a bit as he settles into his surroundings, looking for the best-lit place, while Gadling still has his sweater on. He thinks they must be getting close to done with the piece, actually.
Out loud, he says, “That’s a gorgeous piece of batik you’ve got there,” gesturing at the long skinny textile hanging from a bamboo rod on the wall. “Someone asked me to do a thigh piece like that once… bloody difficult, light colors over dark, or, well, making it look like it’s light colors over dark anyway. Fiddly work. Hm. Never noticed this one before.”
“I had it in the bedroom,” Gadling replies with a smile. “Thought it could do with a bit more exposure, for the few times I entertain.”
Andy raises his eyebrows. “Entertain? You could open a museum with just the stuff in your living room. Entertaining for sure.”
Gadling snorts at that. “I imagine I’ll have to move all this shite soon. Bought a new place. Above a pub, would you believe it?”
Andy grins, because there’s not much he wouldn’t believe when it comes to Gadling. Among other things, the fact that he has seen the inside of Gadling’s bedroom, intimately, and never noticed the tapestry before, probably on account of just how damn distracting the man can be when fully focused on your pleasure for one day a year.
“Good place to retire,” he agrees. “Get them to bring you food upstairs. Or drag you to bed when you’ve had too many. Nah, that’s a lovely thought, actually. And we’re almost done here anyway - I could extend that bit of chainmail from last year and make it look a bit frayed and incorporate the little A today, if you want.”
“No,” Gadling says, forcefully. “Not today. We’re not finished yet.”
And Andy is left wondering, after that, and through the next bit of the armor sleeve, what it is that Gadling is waiting for, but he figures that he’ll still be around next year, and so will Gadling, likely.
He makes sure that Gadling has his new mobile number, and tells him to call in May as usual, with his new address and a day that works for him.
“What day is June 7th next year anyway,” he asks, “do you know?”
“Who cares,” Gadling replies, shrugging like he has all the time in the world. “You’re retired, and I’m a teacher. Summer is summer, each one like the last.”
***
Later that day, Hob is proven wrong.
Not just in how this time, the fresh tattoo actually shows, peeking out under his sleeve, the faux skin that has replaced simple clingfilm in recent years pulling oddly at his wrist as he works. He wonders, as he works his way through the last batch of undergrad papers, how many more years he’s going to hold out like this until he gives up.
Wonders whether this, too, is a fool’s errand. Which, really, is the story of his life.
So much lived, so many loved, and yet still hungry, and still unfinished.
He takes a sip of his beer and tries to focus. Something is off. His skin is prickling, and not just on his wrist, where the fresh ink hasn’t even had a chance to start oozing yet, the chainmail links crisp and slightly raised, as if they were truly little loops of metal laid on his skin.
And then, someone shows up, and it’s him. And he smiles. And apologizes. And Hob’s face cracks open in a smile that feels like he’s breaking apart from the inside and oozing all over the place.
The Stranger’s fingers, unquestioning and cool and welcome, examine the fresh tattoo, and Hob promises, in a rush of words, to show him the rest later, all of it.
Later, it turns out, is sooner than he expected, the sun still just above the rooftops, and the touch of that cool hand incredibly addictive as it reads Hob like a book. He has to take his T-shirt off too in the end, even though yes, of course he could just have pushed his sleeve up, but somehow he wants to be bare, wants his Stranger to see every scar, every accident, every mole and hairy bit, and to take them all in and touch them all.
“Every year on the anniversary of what should have been our meeting,” Hob explains, voice choked, shaking his head. “Don’t know what I would’ve done if you’d stayed away any longer.”
“Stayed away,” the Stranger replies, voice dark and flat. “Not of my own free will, I assure you.”
Hob looks up in alarm.
“I was held captive by a second-rate sorcerer in search of gifts like yours. And I was careless.” The man’s lips, uncannily sensual at the best of times, compress into a thin line. “I will say I have had a lot of time to think.”
“Yeah?,” Hob asks, a little hoarse and a little afraid. “About what?”
“About your words. From the last time we met.”
Hob flushes and shakes his head, the urge to hug himself overwhelming. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I?,” he says, and something in him adds, loudly, an idiot in love.
“Fools see the truth where philosophers cannot, Hob Gadling.”
Hob snorts, relief warring with all sorts of other, messier emotions. “Well,” he says, finally, “does that mean it’s finally time for me to hear your name? Since you’re apparently agreeing to being my friend.”
“Fools,” the Stranger - his friend - repeats, “see the truth. You, Hob Gadling, are wearing my name on your arm.”
“Armor?” Hob frowns. “No, wait, armed was what that read, at least that was what the artist who did all this thought. Not that I, you know -”
He trails off suddenly as his Stranger stops him with a single touch. And then another. And another, his cool gentle finger finding each letter in turn, no matter how accidental or concealed, and spells out what, apparently, it said all along.
“Dream?” Hob whispers, and by God he has questions, so many, and he’s not going to let go until he has answers for all of them, not this time.
***
The next day, Andy finds himself invited back to Gadling’s place, and at first he’s worried that he’s fucked up somehow, that there’s blowout that needs fixing or something like that.
Gadling looks… no, he has a hard time coming up with a descriptor that doesn’t verge dangerously close to well-fucked, because he’s seen that look on the man’s face. Hell, he”s put it there a few times. He knows when Gadling’s relaxed, and today is the most relaxed he’s ever seen him.
And, apparently, he’s done with the tattoo. Today.
Gadling asks for a faceted ruby to be placed at the end of the armor and the chainmail, touching the little A scar. Andy actually has to get the sketchpad out - it’s an iPad these days, but old habits die hard, and so he sketches what he envisions on top of a photo of Gadling’s barely-healing wrist, moving the design slightly so that he doesn’t have to go over anything he inked the day before, and incorporating the little black letter into the shading inside the gem itself.
As the last line falls into place, Andy can’t help noticing that all of the resolutely non-gray hairs on Gadling’s arms stand on end all of a sudden, like there’s something in the room with them, something watching over this moment, and he looks up from his work - good work, complete work, and work that he will have to beg to take a studio-quality photo of once it’s fully healed - and attempts a smile, and it feels like the room smiles with him.
“Yeah,” Gadling says. “Thank you. A fitting summary of my life.”
“Aw, now,” Andy replies, “you’ve got a few good decades in you still, Rob.”
“I believe so.” Gadling chuckles. “And so much to live for.”