Page 164 of The Fire Line

The lesson should have been that vigilance failed. Harris could understand it intellectually without coming anywhere close to accepting it.

Jay shifted, and Harris’s arms tightened before he had time to stop them.

“You okay?” Jay murmured.

The question was absurd enough that under other circumstances Harris might have laughed. “Not really.”

Jay made a small sound that Harris took for agreement and settled again.

After a while he whispered, “Can I sleep?”

“Not yet.”

No complaint came. Harris touched his cheek until Jay looked at him.

“Little longer.”

Jay’s eyes closed again.

Harris roused him every few minutes, asking nothing harder than his name or making him look up long enough to prove that he still could. He still didn’t know whether the waking itself mattered. What mattered to Harris was that Jay came back every time he touched him.

Between checks, he listened to Jay’s breathing and tried not to hear hospital machines in every pause. Eventually Jay’s focus improved enough that his eyes opened without Harris needing to touch him, and only then did Harris let his own head rest against the granite.

He had no idea what loving Jay changed. New York still existed. The ranch still existed. Jay’s work would take him away, and Harris’s life remained fixed to land that could burn beneath him in a single night. Love solved none of those problems.

It simply made one thing impossible to pretend anymore.

Whatever happened after this, Harris needed Jay alive for it.

27

Still Here

When Harris was nine, Nell made him sleep outside behind the barn because there was supposed to be a meteor shower.

He had complained about mosquitoes, the cold rising through the blanket, and the fact that nothing had happened for what felt like hours. Nell, ten years old and therefore convinced one additional year had given her a superior understanding of the universe, informed him that he was incapable of appreciating anything requiring patience.

Then a streak of white crossed the sky, followed by another and then three almost at once.

Harris remembered the meteors less clearly now than he remembered Nell beside him in the grass, whispering there each time she saw one first. He remembered dry earth, horses shifting in the dark barn behind them, and the certainty available only to children that the person lying next to you would still be there in the morning.

He had not thought about that night in years.

Now, sometime after midnight on a burned ridge, Harris looked up and saw stars through the smoke.

The fire had moved on without really leaving. Pockets of timber still burned below them, throwing dull orange light against the dark, and every so often something gave way in the forest with a distant crack that made Harris’s body tighten before his mind had time to identify the sound. The granite at his back remained cool enough to touch and the air no longer felt hot enough to burn his lungs, but none of that stopped him from listening for the fire to come back.

Jay slept against his chest, though not deeply because Harris would not let him. Every few minutes he roused him enough to get his eyes open. The roughness in Jay’s chest persisted, but the confusion had eased and he no longer drifted away in the middle of an answer.

His hand remained spread across Jay’s ribs, following each shallow rise and fall until the rhythm became more useful than time.

Harris’s own body had started making itself harder to ignore. His right hand throbbed beneath the bandage, swollen enough that bending his fingers pulled sharply through the burned skin, while the left side of his chest hurt every time he breathed too deeply. Coughing made the pain flare hard enough to turn his vision briefly white. He had probably bruised the ribs badly, maybe cracked one, but the distinction could wait until there was somebody around with equipment and better judgment.

Jay shifted against him, and Harris’s hand tightened before he could stop it.

Jay stirred, his eyes opening slowly. “Still checking?”

His voice was hoarse enough that the words barely carried.