7. Moth to the Fucking Flame #2
Harris recognized it before she reached Della.
Nell at twenty-three, sitting backward on a kitchen chair with her braid over one shoulder, grinning because whoever held the camera had almost certainly told her to behave and Nell had almost certainly done the opposite.
Willa climbed onto the bench beside Della and held up the frame. “Auntie Nelly.”
Della’s hand stopped on the chair arm.
The change was small enough that somebody who did not know her might have missed it. Harris did not. Her mouth tightened first. Then her eyes filled.
The camera remained pointed toward them.
Harris put down the wrench and started toward the porch.
Before he reached the doorway, Navarro lifted one hand. Eli immediately lowered the camera.
No discussion. No glance toward Harris for permission. No question about whether another few seconds might still be usable.
Della pulled Willa against her side. Navarro removed his headphones and set them beside his chair.
He didn’t apologize or soften his voice into the careful tone people used when they wanted you to know they understood grief.
He simply stopped filming and turned slightly away—not enough to leave Della alone with the moment, only enough to give it back to her.
Harris stopped in the doorway.
He had been prepared to end something. There was nothing left to end.
For weeks, he had treated the camera as the threat and Navarro as the man carrying it. Cameras took. Filmmakers wanted more than people intended to give. Harris understood those rules and knew what his job was when somebody crossed the line.
Except Navarro kept recognizing the line before Harris had to show it to him.
Rain bleeding in the barn. Della now. Even the cattle that morning, when he had left thousands of dollars of equipment sitting open beside the road because helping mattered more than getting the footage.
Competence Harris understood. It could be measured. Either somebody followed an instruction or they didn’t. Either they could handle themselves when things went wrong or they became another thing Harris had to manage.
Decency was harder to keep at a useful distance.
Navarro had not stopped filming Della because Harris was standing nearby. Harris had been too far away to stop him in time. He had done it because he had known, on his own, that the moment did not belong to him.
Harris went back to the latch because standing in a doorway watching Navarro be decent to his mother seemed like an exceptionally poor use of his time.
The wrench turned once beneath his hand before he realized the bolt was already tight.
He lowered it.
That was the real trouble with the second piece of evidence. Beneath all the talking and wandering and general Navarro-ness was somebody Harris could trust to do exactly what was needed when it mattered. Worse, there appeared to be a decent man mixed in there too.
Harris liked him.
Not all of him, obviously. That would have been excessive.
Navarro remained irritating. He still asked questions Harris had no intention of answering, treated rules as the opening position in a negotiation, and possessed an almost supernatural ability to appear whenever Harris wanted five uninterrupted minutes.
His driving remained questionable. His understanding of appropriate footwear had not improved nearly enough.
But Harris found that he kind of liked talking to the man.
He liked that Navarro could make Della laugh without trying too hard. He liked the way he paid attention when somebody gave him an answer he had not expected. He liked that Navarro could complain about ranch coffee for half an hour and then drop everything the second somebody actually needed him.
Attractive had been manageable when Harris could pair it with irrelevant.
Attractive, competent, and decent was a significantly worse combination.
Trust was still too large a word for a man Harris had known less than three weeks.
Harris did not hand it out because somebody managed not to be an asshole in front of a camera.
But the judgment he had made on Navarro’s first day no longer fit the available evidence, and refusing to update because he preferred the old answer was how small problems became expensive ones.
Fine. Navarro was not careless or cruel. He could follow instructions, knew when to put the camera down, and even possessed enough restraint not to congratulate himself every time he behaved like a decent human being.
Harris would account for that.
What he would not do was let any of it change how he behaved around the man.
Navarro liking men did not require Harris to watch him differently.
It did not require him to reconsider every look he had caught across the barn or wonder whether Navarro’s teasing contained something Harris had not been listening for before.
He would speak to him exactly the same way he always had, give him exactly the same amount of space, and stop examining harmless interactions for evidence of something that probably wasn’t there.
There was no reason for Navarro to notice anything.
That resolution lasted until the following Wednesday.
The third piece of evidence was waiting in the equipment room without a shirt on.
Harris had gone in for the fence radio.
That was all.
He had spent most of the afternoon replacing a section of wire along the west pasture and needed to check something with Evan before heading back out.
The radios lived on the shelf inside the equipment room.
Harris had walked through that door hundreds of times without the act requiring any particular thought.
He made it one step inside.
Navarro stood beside the worktable, pulling a T-shirt over his head.
Harris stopped.
Navarro’s overshirt lay across the table beside his equipment bag. The T-shirt cleared his head, and Harris got one unobstructed look at him.
More muscle than he’d expected. Olive skin stretched over a hard chest and stomach. His gaze caught on the dark line of hair disappearing beneath the waistband of Navarro’s jeans.
Then Navarro’s arms started coming down.
Harris got his eyes onto the radio shelf.
“Looking for something?” Navarro asked.
“Fence radio.”
His voice sounded normal. Good.
“Right.”
Harris crossed toward the shelf and kept his attention where it belonged while Navarro pulled on the clean shirt.
Radios.
There were six of them. Five in their charging docks. One missing.
“Is three still okay?”
Harris reached for a radio. “Said it was.”
“For the training session.”
He clipped the radio to his belt. “I know.”
“You’ve been a little difficult to read lately.”
That brought Harris’s eyes back to him.
Navarro had finished dressing. His hair was mussed from pulling the shirt over his head, longer pieces falling around his face. He looked amused, but there was a question under it.
For nearly a week Harris had been so determined not to change anything that he had somehow changed everything.
He had shortened conversations that did not need shortening, found work elsewhere when Navarro drifted too close, and kept every exchange squarely on ranch business because anything else suddenly felt like something he might mishandle.
So much for behaving exactly the same.
Navarro smiled. “I’ll see you there. I think I’ve memorized the terms.”
Harris walked past him without answering.
He made it halfway back to the barn before realizing he was carrying the wrong radio.
Fence channel three. He had needed channel one.
“Fuck.”
Harris did not go back.
He had nearly been caught. That was the part he kept coming back to. Harris had walked into the equipment room while Navarro’s shirt was halfway over his head and looked before he had time to decide not to.
More muscle than he’d expected. Olive skin stretched over a hard chest and stomach. His gaze had caught on the dark line of hair disappearing beneath the waistband of Navarro’s jeans.
Moth to the fucking flame.
Then Navarro’s arms had started coming down. Harris had gotten his eyes onto the radio shelf maybe half a second before Navarro could see where they had been.
Too damn close.
Harris had managed harder things than not staring at a man. Time to remember that.
The radio stayed clipped to his belt for the rest of the afternoon, useless and accusatory.
The attraction itself was no longer worth arguing with. Harris had looked, and worse, he wanted to look again.
He had known Navarro was good-looking almost from the beginning. That had been harmless when Harris could treat the fact the same way he treated a good-looking man on television or somebody passing through town: noticed, irrelevant, done.
There was nothing abstract about what had happened in the equipment room.
Wanting was one thing. Doing anything about it was another.
Harris had managed that distinction for years. He could manage it now.
Knowing the gate was unlocked did not require him to open it.
He spent the rest of the afternoon on the west fence, where the work at least had the decency to stay straightforward. Wire needed tensioning. Two staples had worked loose farther down the line. The west gate still dragged in dry weather.
Problems with solutions.
Those Harris could handle.
Three pieces of evidence.
Navarro was useful when it mattered.
Navarro was decent when nobody required him to be.
And Harris wanted him.
The first two were facts about Navarro. The third was Harris’s problem and required no action whatsoever.
He pulled the wire tight and set another staple.
That was the answer. Harris would keep his hands where they belonged, his attention on the work in front of him, and whatever had shifted inside him could stay there until it figured out how to settle back down.
Navarro did not need to know.
Nobody did.