3. I’d Hate for This to Move Too Fast #2
They had spent nearly twelve hours together.
Harris had not become friendlier, at least not in any conventional sense.
He had answered questions, fixed a gate, kept them from getting lost, and allowed Jay to request the same explanation twice without abandoning him beside the creek.
He had also waited without complaint while Jay chased light across a burned mountain.
The standards were becoming alarmingly low.
Still, when the ranch appeared through the trees, Jay was sorry the drive was almost over.
Fatigue. Low blood sugar. A serious reaction to inadequate tripod access. Any explanation would do.
They returned tired, filthy, and starving. While they unloaded, Eli glanced at Harris. “You coming to dinner?”
“Not tonight.” Harris lifted a camera bag from the truck bed. “Heading into town.”
Jay looked over before he could stop himself.
Harris carried the bag inside and disappeared toward his cabin.
Dinner was not ready, so Jay took a corner of the long table near the windows and began the least glamorous part of documentary filmmaking: batteries onto chargers, memory cards labeled, footage transferred twice before anyone was permitted to erase anything.
Movement outside caught his eye.
Harris crossed the yard toward his truck with his hair still damp and pushed back from his forehead.
He had traded the faded work shirt for a black button-down fitted close across his shoulders, clean dark jeans, and boots that had probably never seen mud.
Without dust on his face or gloves in his pocket, he looked less like a man who had spent the day checking water and repairing gates and more like a man who had… well, more interesting sorts of plans.
The implications did not require Jay’s professional training.
“Dinner’s ready.” Elise came into the room behind them, smiling as Eli closed his laptop.
“Perfect timing. I was five minutes from eating a memory card.”
Elise laughed. Outside, Harris reached his truck, and she followed Jay’s gaze.
“Ah.” Elise glanced toward the road. “Guess he got tired of his own company.”
Jay looked at her. “That happen often?”
“Sometimes. He goes into town, comes home late, and nobody asks questions.”
She said it without any suggestive emphasis. She didn’t need one. Jay’s immediate, unreasonable dislike of an unnamed person somewhere beyond the ranch road supplied it for her.
“Good for him,” he said.
Harris climbed into the truck and pulled the door shut. As he looked over his shoulder to reverse, one arm stretched across the seat and the black shirt drew tight over his shoulders.
Unhelpful.
Jay had no business wondering what Harris looked like when he fucked someone. Naturally, this did not prevent the image from arriving fully lit and framed: those broad hands on somebody’s hips, that physical certainty redirected toward an entirely different task.
Production suspended. Entire sequence rejected.
The truck disappeared beyond the cottonwoods.
“Coming?” Elise asked.
If only.
Jay capped the marker. “Absolutely.”
Harris was straight. He had been married to a woman for twelve years and apparently went into town because celibacy did not appeal to him as a lifestyle. None of that was surprising, and none of it had anything to do with Jay.
Still, the empty chair at dinner irritated him more than it should have.
* * *
Harris drove home with the windows cracked, his black shirt open at the throat and a trace of perfume lingering in the cab.
The night had been good—easy, familiar, free of awkwardness or expectations beyond the ones they both understood.
Harris had wanted her, and she had known exactly what she wanted from him.
Nothing complicated about it. That had been the point.
He shifted gears, and the bench seat supplied the memory of Navarro’s weight beside him without being asked.
Jesus Christ.
The cab had been too small for three grown men.
Navarro was six feet tall and built like he expected his body to be useful, and Harris sure as hell was not small.
Their legs had pressed together because there had been nowhere else for either of them to go.
Crowded cab. Bad suspension. Simple explanation.
That his body had shown an unreasonable interest in the arrangement was not something Harris intended to examine.
Then there had been his damn laugh.
Navarro laughed plenty—quick sounds, usually at something he had said himself or considered cleverer than it was.
This had been different. Harris said one thing about Eli’s football nonsense, and Navarro had totally lost it: head down, hand braced against the dash, his whole body caught before he could arrange the reaction into anything more presentable.
When he looked up, his face had been open.
Harris had stared long enough for him to ask what was wrong.
“Nothin’,” Harris said aloud to the empty truck.
The same answer worked now.
He had been wound tight by the end of the day. Too many hours in a cramped cab, too much attention with nowhere useful to put it. So he had gone into town and dealt with it. Except the problem had apparently ridden home with him.
The night should have settled the matter. His body worked exactly as it always had with a woman he wanted, because Harris wanted women. There was nothing uncertain about that.
Every so often, his attention had gone elsewhere too.
A man in a bar. Somebody passing close. A thought that appeared and could be left alone.
He had spent enough years giving those moments nothing to feed on that they generally went away.
He had never needed to call it discipline because it had never felt difficult.
Navarro was harder to ignore because he had installed himself in the middle of Harris’s workday—in his truck, on his ranch, beside him at a creek asking questions and listening to the answers.
Looking at Harris as though every silence held something worth waiting for.
Laughing without warning and then meeting Harris’s eyes before either of them had time to hide what had happened.
That was the problem: proximity and repetition, like a loose gate wearing deeper every time it dragged. Remove the pressure and the damage stopped getting worse.
The filming would move on. Navarro would spend the next several days looking at footage instead of Harris. Whatever this was would lose momentum.
Harris turned onto the ranch road, headlights catching the first Shaw fence line and then the cottonwoods beyond it.
By tomorrow, the whole thing would feel stupid.
He was almost sure of it.