Page 16 of The Fire Line

Unhelpful.

Jay had no business wondering what Harris looked like when he fucked someone. Naturally, this did not prevent the image from arriving fully lit and framed: those broad hands on somebody’s hips, that physical certainty redirected toward an entirely different task.

Production suspended. Entire sequence rejected.

The truck disappeared beyond the cottonwoods.

“Coming?” Elise asked.

If only.

Jay capped the marker. “Absolutely.”

Harris was straight. He had been married to a woman for twelve years and apparently went into town because celibacy did not appeal to him as a lifestyle. None of that was surprising, and none of it had anything to do with Jay.

Still, the empty chair at dinner irritated him more than it should have.

* * *

Harris drove home with the windows cracked, his black shirt open at the throat and a trace of perfume lingering in the cab. The night had been good—easy, familiar, free of awkwardness or expectations beyond the ones they both understood. Harris had wanted her, and she had known exactly what she wanted from him. Nothing complicated about it. That had been the point.

He shifted gears, and the bench seat supplied the memory of Navarro’s weight beside him without being asked.

Jesus Christ.

The cab had been too small for three grown men. Navarro was six feet tall and built like he expected his body to be useful, and Harris sure as hell was not small. Their legs had pressed together because there had been nowhere else for either of them to go. Crowded cab. Bad suspension. Simple explanation. That his body had shown an unreasonable interest in the arrangement was not something Harris intended to examine.

Then there had been his damn laugh.

Navarro laughed plenty—quick sounds, usually at something he had said himself or considered cleverer than it was. This had been different. Harris said one thing about Eli’s football nonsense, and Navarro had totally lost it: head down, hand braced against the dash, his whole body caught before he could arrange the reaction into anything more presentable. When he looked up, his face had been open.

Harris had stared long enough for him to ask what was wrong.

“Nothin’,” Harris said aloud to the empty truck.

The same answer worked now.

He had been wound tight by the end of the day. Too many hours in a cramped cab, too much attention with nowhere useful to put it. So he had gone into town and dealt with it. Except the problem had apparently ridden home with him.

The night should have settled the matter. His body worked exactly as it always had with a woman he wanted, because Harris wanted women. There was nothing uncertain about that.

Every so often, his attention had gone elsewhere too. A man in a bar. Somebody passing close. A thought that appeared and could be left alone. He had spent enough years giving those moments nothing to feed on that they generally went away. He had never needed to call it discipline because it had never felt difficult.

Navarro was harder to ignore because he had installed himself in the middle of Harris’s workday—in his truck, on his ranch, beside him at a creek asking questions and listening to the answers. Looking at Harris as though every silence held something worth waiting for. Laughing without warning and then meeting Harris’s eyes before either of them had time to hide what had happened.

That was the problem: proximity and repetition, like a loose gate wearing deeper every time it dragged. Remove the pressure and the damage stopped getting worse.

The filming would move on. Navarro would spend the next several days looking at footage instead of Harris. Whatever this was would lose momentum.

Harris turned onto the ranch road, headlights catching the first Shaw fence line and then the cottonwoods beyond it.

By tomorrow, the whole thing would feel stupid.

He was almost sure of it.

4

You’ll Fit In Fine