Page 162 of The Fire Line

Harris started climbing faster.

Ash slipped beneath his boots. Every step pulled at his ribs and sent pain through his hand whenever Jay’s weight shifted, but pain had become information with nowhere important to go.

“Jay.”

Nothing.

Harris hauled him higher, and somewhere in those next few yards New York stopped being a threat.

It was no longer the place Jay would disappear to when this ended or evidence of all the ways Harris could never fit into his life. It became an apartment Harris had never seen, work Harris barely understood, people who knew Jay’s coffee order and expected him back.

Harris wanted all of it.

He wanted Jay to go home. He wanted him on the plane and back in the city, complaining about traffic and bad coffee and whatever else New York gave him to complain about. He wanted Romy calling him, Miles texting him, his family getting irritated because Jay forgot to answer.

Jay could go back and never return to Montana, and Harris would take it.

He would take friendship, production emails every few months, Jay’s name lighting up his phone twice a year. He would take hearing through somebody else that Jay was happy with another man, that he had moved apartments, that he was filming somewhere Harris would never see. Harris would take every version of the future in which Jay was alive enough to leave him behind.

Anything except this.

Anything except the terrible looseness of Jay’s body against his back.

The truth arrived with such force that Harris almost mistook it for another injury.

He loved him.

There was no softer word available and no useful argument against it. Harris loved Jay, and that was what this agony was—not the fear of losing something he owned, not panic at being left alone, but the absolute need for Jay to keep existing even if Harris got nothing from it. Even if Jay’s life continued somewhere else and Harris was reduced to knowing about it from a distance.

“Jay.”

Still nothing.

Harris climbed faster.

Ahead, the old burn opened into bare granite and short grass where the previous fire had left little fuel for this one to consume. Jay’s arm slipped from around his neck, and Harris dragged it back across his chest.

“Hold on.”

Nothing.

“Jay, come on.”

The words broke on what little breath Harris had left.

Rain flashed through his mind, refusing to leave until Harris struck her and watched her run somewhere he could not follow. Letting her go had been protection because survival had required distance.

This was not that.

They reached the old burn where the ridge opened into stone, low grass, and scattered dead trunks. Smoke crossed in thinner sheets, the wind moving steadily enough that the air felt almost clean after the recess below.

Harris lowered Jay beside a slab of granite and pressed two fingers beneath his jaw.

His pulse was fast. His breathing shallow.

There.

He was there.