Page 53 of The Fire Line

He wanted the fucking filmmaker.

Not only the body he had stared at in the equipment room, though that remained a problem all its own. He wanted Navarro’s mouth when he tried not to smile, the movement of his hands whenever an explanation interested him enough to involve his whole body, his laugh in the truck with his head dropping because Harris had caught him unprepared, the way he danced with Della and briefly forgot anybody might be watching.

He wanted the irritation, the questions, the jokes Harris pretended not to enjoy and remembered anyway.

Most of all, he wanted that unnerving attention Navarro gave him when he stopped performing for everybody else and looked directly at Harris as though the silences were not empty.

That was the distinction, and it held Harris motionless while another semi turned through the lot.

Wanting a man had never been the real problem. Harris could have managed wanting; he had been managing it most of his life.

Wanting Navarro was different because Navarro was not abstract and he was not somewhere else. He lived several hundred yards from Harris’s cabin. He crossed Harris’s yard every day. He laughed where Harris could hear him and asked questions Harris sometimes found himself answering before remembering that he had meant not to.

People left. Harris stayed.

That had always made attraction manageable eventually. Nothing fed it forever.

Navarro would leave too. Harris knew that, and the thought did not help nearly as much as it should have.

He crushed the cigarette into the sand-filled cup beside the truck and checked the ember twice.

Going to town had not fixed anything.

It had only removed the last useful excuse.

10

Navarro Only

Jay found the itinerary on top of his laptop the next afternoon.

No envelope. No message asking whether the dates worked. No explanation for why it had appeared while he was away from the conference room. Only a folded route map with Harris’s handwriting across the front.

Tuesday — 5 A.M.

Jay opened it.

The route ran into the high country he had been trying to access since they arrived: the old spring system, the abandoned homestead, the north lookout, the line cabin. Until then, the places had existed as names in production notes, family stories, and pieces of landscape Harris pointed toward from somewhere else.

Before he reached the bottom, Jay was already assembling footage: shrinking water at the old spring, development near the original homestead, the lookout above the valley, the line cabin in the upper range.

Two nights were marked in Harris’s handwriting, with a third listed in case weather slowed them. At the bottom:

No pack horse past North Ridge. Carry what you bring. Pack light.

And beneath that:

Navarro only.

Jay read the last two words again.

Priya came around behind him carrying coffee. “What’s that?”

“Apparently I’ve been summoned.”

She leaned over his shoulder. “Navarro only?”

“Very exclusive.”