Page 59 of The Fire Line

He laughed softly. “You sure you want to talk about this? Last time I mentioned my homosexuality, you ran off to fix a water trough that, as far as I could tell, was doing just fine.”

Harris went still. Not dramatically—Harris did almost nothing dramatically—but the wrapper stopped moving beneath his thumb.

“You bein’ gay ain’t a problem.”

The humor left Jay before he could decide whether to let it. “Okay.”

“Ain’t worried about that.” Harris finally looked at him, his expression controlled but his attention unusually direct. “I mean it.”

Jay held his gaze. Whatever Harris had been doing for the past week—the abrupt exits, the conversations cut short just when they became interesting, the sudden abundance of extremely necessary ranch work—Jay had never been able to make the pieces fit. Harris could conceal an entire interior life behind that face when he wanted to. Jay was becoming increasingly certain of that.

But this did not feel like the hidden part.

“I believe you.”

Something flickered across Harris’s face, gone too quickly for Jay to name. Surprise, maybe.

Jay let one corner of his mouth lift. “The emergency trough remains difficult to defend, though.”

“Let it go.”

“Never.”

Harris’s shoulders eased by a degree so small Jay might have missed it a week ago. He had begun developing an unfortunate expertise in Harrison Shaw.

Relief moved through Jay with it.

Harris was not uncomfortable because Jay was gay. That eliminated one explanation, and Jay was more relieved by its absence than he particularly wanted to examine. It did nothing, however, to explain the rest of Harris’s behavior.

If anything, it made the mystery considerably more interesting.

Harris folded the wrapper smaller. “So. Miles.”

“Remarkable recovery.”

“Navarro.”

“Right. Miles. We know too much about each other to become strangers and too much about ourselves to try again. He’s seeing someone now.”

The fact appeared to land somewhere, though Jay could not tell where.

“Why’d you break up?” Harris asked. There was no accusation in it. Only actual curiosity.

Jay could have supplied the easy answer: work, timing, different lives. All accurate and none sufficient. Instead he said, “I was gone too much. Miles knew what I did, so I treated that as permanent consent to whatever schedule I wanted. Every time I came home, I assumed being home enthusiastically made up for the rest.”

“He ask you to stop?”

“Not exactly. He asked me to make room.”

“And you didn’t.”

There was no judgment in Harris’s face, which somehow made answering more difficult.

“I tried to, but no. Not enough.” Jay cleared his throat. “I loved him. I kept assuming there would be more time later. After this shoot, after this festival, after whatever thing I absolutely had to finish because apparently the entire documentary industry would collapse without my personal intervention.”

Harris’s mouth moved faintly. “Sounds important.”

“Extremely.” Jay pushed the wrapper into the food bag. “He eventually got tired of being with somebody who was always coming home next month.”