Page 165 of The Fire Line

“How’s your head?”

Jay considered. “Better.”

“Dizzy?”

“Some.”

“Nauseous?”

“A little.”

Harris pressed the back of his fingers to Jay’s forehead, which told him almost nothing. He did it anyway.

Jay watched him with tired amusement, too drained to sharpen it into a proper joke. “You should sleep.”

“Later.”

Jay let his eyes close again, but his hand moved weakly until it found Harris’s wrist.

For a while neither of them spoke. Smoke moved across the stars in thin bands, revealing and hiding them, and Harris found himself thinking of Nell again—not the hospital this time, but the barn, the blanket, the impatience of being nine years old and unable to imagine a future in which she would not be there to point out the next streak of light.

The memory hurt differently from the one that had opened inside him when Jay went slack against his back. That had been terror. This was grief returned to its ordinary shape, and Harris knew how to live with ordinary grief. He had years of practice.

Jay’s fingers shifted over his wrist.

“You said something before.”

Harris went still. “When?”

“Before I passed out, maybe.”

The fire below them cracked through a stand of damaged timber. Harris kept his eyes on the ridge. “What do you remember?”

“Not much.”

Relief came first, followed by something more complicated that Harris chose not to examine.

Jay frowned faintly, searching through whatever pieces remained. “You sounded scared.”

Harris could have denied it. The lie would have been easy and useless.

“Was.”

Jay went quiet.

The word sat between them without demanding anything else, and Harris was grateful for that. Jay did not ask what Harris had meant or force him back toward the things he had said while he believed Jay might be dying.

Don’t leave me.

Please.

And the thing Harris had not said aloud because it had arrived too completely to require language.

I love you.

He knew it now, and the strange part was how little the knowledge resembled revelation after the fact. It had not transformed him or clarified New York or solved the problem that Jay’s life moved while Harris’s did not. It had simply rearranged the importance of those problems. Yesterday, distance had been evidence that wanting too much was foolish. Tonight Harris would have accepted any distance the world offered if it meant Jay got to wake up somewhere on the other side of it.

He looked down and found Jay asleep again, one hand still resting over his wrist.