Page 90 of The Fire Line

The memory came with the western fence, warm stolen beer, and Nell laughing while Harris threatened to throw her into the trough.

“She called it my secret bi thing,” Harris said. “I mostly didn’t call it anything.”

Jay absorbed that. “Nobody else knows?”

“Nope.”

“Your family?”

“No.”

“Claire?”

Harris looked at him sharply. “I loved her. Our marriage was real.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“Wanted her too. None of that was false.”

“I know.”

The answer came easily, with no visible effort to reconcile Harris wanting Claire with Harris wanting him, no assumption that one truth invalidated the other.

“Men were something I noticed,” Harris said. “Sometimes. Didn’t do anything about it.”

“Why not?”

“The ranch. Claire. Habit. Pick one.”

“Fear?”

Harris rubbed his thumb over the seam of his jeans. “Yeah, I guess. Some.”

Jay left several inches between them. “Didn’t you ever want to find out?”

“Wanting something and deciding to do it aren’t the same.”

“No,” Jay said quietly. “They’re not.”

For a moment, Harris believed that might end the questions, but Jay’s expression shifted. The irritation was still there, but something beneath it softened, as though Harris had finally given him the part of the answer he had been waiting for.

“Wasn’t looking for a man,” Harris said. “Wasn’t planning on any of it.”

Jay watched him for a moment. “So what changed?”

Harris looked away. Several answers existed. Because Jay looked at people as though understanding them mattered. Because Harris could pick his laugh out of the yard. Because his dark hair kept escaping its tie and falling around his face, and Harris noticed every damn time. Because Jay entered a room and somehow made the space feel different around him. Because he had followed Harris into the mountains and trusted him with every practical danger while asking Harris to trust him with the rest.

Harris chose the version he could actually say.

“You kept gettin’ in my way.”

Jay’s mouth twitched. “Romantic.”

“Wasn’t trying to be.”

“I know.”

The smile faded, but not entirely. “And you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and decide this was a mistake?”