Page 108 of The Fire Line

“Maybe you’re using it wrong,” Harris said.

Jay lowered his fork. “That’s a cruel suggestion.”

“Could ask somebody for help.”

“Worse.”

By the time the pie was gone, Jay had also finished explaining why the archive’s search function constituted an attack on both scholarship and human dignity.

Harris carried the plate to the sink. “You done?”

“With the pie or my formal complaint?”

“Both.”

“Never.”

When Harris turned around, Jay had taken his beer to the couch.

“What’re you doing?”

“Sitting.”

“Can see that.”

“I thought we might occasionally behave like people who know each other with their clothes on.”

“We ate pie.”

“An important step in any relationship.”

The word landed between them with a little more weight than the sentence required.

Jay seemed to hear it too. He took a drink and looked toward the window.

Harris let it go.

He settled at the other end of the couch, and for a while the conversation stayed safely unimportant: the next morning’s filming, a guest who had asked Eli whether the cattle were free range, Walt’s conviction that the weather app on his phone was somehow less accurate than Harris’s identical weather app.

It should have felt ordinary.

Instead, Harris remained acutely aware of Jay stretched out beside him, one arm resting along the back of the couch, the easy occupation of space that had become familiar faster than Harris wanted to think about.

Jay was telling him about trying to upload county records from his apartment in New York when Harris interrupted.

“You live alone?”

“Yeah.”

A beat passed.

“Now,” Jay added.

Harris knew what that meant.

“With Miles before?”

Jay glanced over, perhaps surprised Harris had asked. “For most of it.”