10. Navarro Only #2
Harris dismounted beside a weathered trough supplied by a narrow line disappearing beneath the hillside.
Jay followed. The moment his boots touched the ground, his legs informed him that the previous four hours had involved muscles whose existence he had considered theoretical.
He stood beside Red, waiting for his knees to remember their contractual obligations.
Harris looked over.
“Don’t.”
“Didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“You’re gonna hurt tomorrow.”
“I already hurt today. I’m ahead of schedule.”
Harris’s mouth moved.
Jay straightened with what he hoped read as dignity rather than significant lower-body dysfunction. “Also, for the record, I’m doing extremely well.”
“Yup.”
“That sounded supportive.”
“Wasn’t.”
“Good. I’d hate for the mountains to change you.”
They worked at the spring for nearly two hours. Harris showed Jay the old spring box, the exposed line, and the places where groundwater had once seeped into September but now disappeared by August during dry years.
There was no cinematic catastrophe. No dead cattle or dramatic cracked earth waiting for a drone shot. Only a system producing less water than it once had and a family quietly rearranging an entire operation around the reduction.
Jay liked that. Damage rarely announced the point when it became permanent. People bought hay, moved cattle sooner, and called the accumulating losses adaptation because the alternative sounded too much like defeat.
Harris crouched beside the spring box and cleared dry grass from an old valve with his bare hands. Jay framed the dirt beneath his nails, the pale wire scar crossing one wrist, and thick fingers moving carefully around the corroded connection.
Harris glanced toward the camera. Two weeks earlier, he would have asked why the hell Jay needed a close-up of his hands. Instead, he shifted six inches.
“Here. You need the valve too.”
Jay adjusted the frame. “Oh yeah. Perfect.”
He got the shot.
There were marriages with less growth.
He kept that observation to himself.
They ate lunch against a slab of granite warmed by the sun. Della had packed roast-beef sandwiches with horseradish strong enough to qualify as chemical warfare, two apples, cookies, and enough napkins to dress a moderate wound.
Jay took a bite and coughed when the horseradish reached his sinuses. “My mother would be offended by this sandwich.”
“Too small?”
“Insufficient infrastructure. Outdoor meals in my family require six containers, three arguments, and one woman insisting nobody has eaten while directly witnessing the opposite.”
“Greek?”
“My mother. My father’s Spanish.”
Harris nodded as though this confirmed something.
Jay pointed the sandwich at him. “You thought Navarro was Mexican, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“My father’s family is from northern Spain. My mother’s parents came from Greece before she was born.”
“You grow up in New York?”
“Astoria. My mother treats every closed Greek bakery like evidence of cultural collapse. Relatives who moved to New Jersey are discussed as though they crossed an ocean.”
Harris folded the edge of his sandwich wrapper beneath his thumb. “You see ’em much?”
“As much as I can.”
Not entirely as much as they wanted.
“My mother stopped asking whether I’m coming home for things a few years ago,” Jay said. “Now she asks whether she should save me a seat.”
Harris looked at him. “You’re gone that much?”
“Sometimes.”
Harris’s expression communicated disbelief with impressive efficiency.
“Fine. Often.”
“How often?”
Jay smiled faintly. “You’re very curious today.”
Harris looked toward the valley, and that should have ended it. Instead, after a few seconds, he asked, “Miles ever travel with you?”
There it was.
“Not much. He couldn’t leave work.”
“You lived with him?”
“Four years.”
Harris kept his attention on the valley. “You still talk?”
“Usually.”
“What’s that mean?”
Jay watched him for a moment. Harris had managed to turn a casual question about an ex-boyfriend into something resembling a deposition while studying the landscape with suspicious intensity.
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.”
Harris’s hand stopped, something in his face shuttering before Jay could identify it. His eyes remained on Jay a second longer than the statement required, then returned to the valley.
“Anyway,” Jay continued. “My turn.”
“That how this works?”
“Oh, absolutely. You interrogated my failed relationship, I get one personal question.” Jay brushed the crumbs from his palms and stretched his legs out in front of him, buying himself a second to choose one that Harris might actually answer.
“Did you always know you’d stay here?”
The defensive set of Harris’s mouth eased. He looked across the slope as though the answer sat somewhere on it.
“No.”
Jay gave him a few seconds before prompting. “What did you think you’d do?”
“Didn’t think that far.”
“You strike me as a man born with a five-year land-management plan.”
“I was seventeen at the time.”
“So?”
“So I was stupid.”
Jay smiled. “College?”
Harris picked at the folded edge of the wrapper, though there was almost nothing left to fold. “Two years. Ag business.”
“That is… disappointingly on brand.”
“Dad got hurt.” Harris flattened the wrapper beneath his thumb and tucked it into the bag. “Came back home to help. Ended up staying.”
Jay could have asked whether Harris had intended to return, or whether staying had simply happened because enough people needed him, but he decided not to. Harris had already offered more than he’d expected.