14. Freshly Debauched
Freshly Debauched
Dinner was pot roast, potatoes, green beans, and a salad nobody except Elise appeared especially committed to. Willa and June had been comparing the relative size of their potatoes while the adults spent the better part of ten minutes discussing Priya’s recent dating mishaps.
Harris really should have anticipated where this conversation was going.
“What about you?” Della asked as she passed the potatoes toward Jay. “Do you have anybody waiting for you back in the Big Apple?”
Harris looked up before he could stop himself.
Jay, sitting across the table between Priya and Eli, finished chewing. “Not currently.”
Elise gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Currently?”
Jay sighed. “I walked directly into that, didn’t I?”
“Completely.”
“There was someone. We broke up a while ago.”
“Was it serious?” Della asked.
“Pretty serious. We were together five years.”
“What was her name?”
Harris’s stomach tightened, but Jay didn’t even hesitate. “His name’s Miles.”
Della paused with the serving spoon halfway back to the bowl, surprise crossing her face before she recovered. “Oh. I didn’t realize.”
“Yeah.” Jay took another bite of potato, as if there were nothing remarkable about the exchange. “He was an urban planner in New York.”
“Still is,” Priya said. “Unless something dramatic has happened since Christmas.”
Jay glanced at her. “You talked to him at Christmas?”
“He texted me.”
“Why?”
“Because he likes me.”
Eli looked up from his plate. “He likes me too.”
“This feels unnecessarily hostile.”
Elise laughed, and Della’s momentary surprise had already settled into ordinary curiosity. “Do you still see each other?”
“Sometimes. We have friends in common.” Jay gestured between Priya and Eli with his fork. “Apparently some of them have also chosen him in the breakup.”
“Miles made better coffee,” Eli said.
“Get out.”
The table laughed, and Harris became abruptly aware that he should probably say something. Everyone else had taken the new information, fitted it into what they already knew about Navarro, and kept going while Harris sat there with his whole body wound tight around two completely ordinary words.
His name.
Harris already knew that. He knew considerably more than anybody else at this table knew, which was part of the goddamn problem.
Say something normal. Don’t make this weird.
“Five years is a long time to put up with you,” Harris said.
Jay’s eyes came straight to him, and Harris had half a second to wonder whether he had managed to make it weird anyway before Jay smiled. “Thank you. I was wondering when you’d offer some emotional support.”
“That was it.”
“I’ll treasure it.”
Evan laughed, Della asked Priya to pass the green beans, and the conversation began moving somewhere else almost immediately. Harris wished his brain would do the same.
Jay had corrected Della without embarrassment or explanation, without even the smallest pause to decide whether he should tell the truth or not.
His name’s Miles. That was all. He hadn’t watched the table afterward to see who might react or softened the fact into something easier for anybody to hear.
Harris knew better than to think that ease had cost Jay nothing to acquire. But sitting here now, Jay seemed entirely comfortable letting the truth belong to him, and Harris admired the hell out of that.
Only Walt seemed to have withdrawn from the conversation.
It was subtle enough that Harris doubted anyone who didn’t know his father would have noticed.
Walt kept eating and answered when Evan spoke to him, but he had stopped contributing much of his own, and when Jay made Priya laugh a minute later, Walt’s attention remained fixed deliberately on his own plate.
Harris knew him too well to miss it.
Irritation stirred, followed quickly by the urge to do something about it.
Della had asked Jay about his relationship and Jay had answered.
That was all. If Miles had been a woman, Walt wouldn’t have gone quiet over it, and Harris wanted badly enough to point that out that he had already started assembling the words.
Saying them aloud was another matter. If he came to Jay’s defense too quickly, somebody might wonder why Harris had been paying such close attention to Walt’s reaction in the first place, why this mattered enough for him to intervene, or why, for that matter, Harris had taken Navarro into the high country alone and spent half the summer finding reasons to be around him.
The frustration turned inward.
Across the table, Jay was still talking to Elise, completely unbothered. He hadn’t apologized for making anyone uncomfortable or made himself smaller by a single inch, and Harris liked that about him so much it hurt.
Walt stayed through the rest of dinner but declined dessert. When Della offered him pie, he shook his head and pushed his chair back. “Think I’m gonna head out.”
Evan glanced at him. “Everything okay?”
“Yup. Early morning.”
It was plausible enough. Walt was often up before daylight, and he didn’t invent some urgent piece of ranch work that everyone at the table knew could wait. Still, Harris knew the difference between his father being tired and his father deciding he’d had enough of a room.
Walt carried his plate to the counter, told everyone good night, and disappeared through the mudroom.
Jay barely seemed to register the departure. By the time the door closed behind Walt, he was already listening to Priya again.
Harris wasn’t.
Everybody knew now.
Jay being attracted to men changed exactly nothing about the past month.
It had been true when Harris took him into the mountains, true every time Jay came by his cabin alone, true every time they disappeared somewhere in Harris’s truck.
The difference was that yesterday none of Harris’s family had known it.
Now they did, and Harris became abruptly aware of how the two of them might look from somewhere outside his own head.
Once the thought started, it was impossible to put back: the high-country trip, Jay at his cabin, the amount of time Harris spent taking him places without the rest of the crew, the way his attention found Navarro across a dinner table no matter how firmly Harris told it not to.
It was ridiculous. Knowing Jay dated men did not mean anybody would suddenly assume he was sleeping with every man he spent time with, but Harris’s brain had apparently decided ridiculous was a perfectly serviceable working theory.
When he glanced across the table again, Jay was already watching him.
Harris nearly dropped his gaze on instinct, then caught himself. Avoiding Navarro so aggressively that everybody noticed would hardly improve matters, so he held Jay’s eyes instead.
Something questioning moved through Jay’s expression.
Harris gave the smallest shake of his head. Nothing’s wrong.
The question eased out of Jay’s face, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
Harris felt the answering pull at his own before he could stop it.
Well. That answered one question, unfortunately raising several others in its place.
Questions like when and where.
Harris looked away before his face could contribute anything further and became acutely aware of Della serving pie three feet away while Evan helped June retrieve something she had dropped beneath the table and Priya continued talking to Eli as if Harris’s entire private life had not just become considerably harder to manage.
Jesus Christ.
Wanting Navarro had been considerably easier when nobody else knew to look.
* * *
Harris showered, changed his shirt, and spent forty minutes in his cabin pretending he had not returned there specifically because Jay was making him insane.
Watching Jay’s films had not helped. They had given Harris new versions of him to carry around: Jay standing in wind beside a harbor, Jay reflected in a factory window, Jay allowing another person’s silence to remain theirs.
The films made Nell’s trust in him feel personal in a way Harris had not expected, and they made the man at the dinner table harder to ignore.
Harris considered several legitimate reasons Jay might need to come over. The high-country map was settled. Harris still did not know what a sound log contained and had no intention of finding out. Nell’s opinion of Jay’s work was absolutely fucking unusable.
He sat on the edge of the bed, stood again, went to the window, and returned to the kitchen. Maybe Jay would come find him.
That might actually be smarter now. Dinner had changed the calculation whether Harris liked it or not.
His family knew Jay dated men, and Harris had spent half the meal becoming painfully aware of how much time the two of them already spent alone.
Jay crossing the yard to his cabin after dark suddenly felt less invisible than it had yesterday.
Harris disliked the thought almost as soon as he had it.
There had to be some distance between being careful and acting as though Jay’s presence itself was incriminating.
Harris had no idea where that distance ended yet, but avoiding the man altogether because his family knew one more thing about him felt too much like making Jay carry Harris’s problem.
Still, they couldn’t be stupid.
Harris went outside, smoked half a cigarette, came back in, brushed his teeth, and checked the clock. Nine twelve.
This was pathetic. There was no legitimate reason for Jay to come to his cabin, and waiting around for him to appear was Harris’s latest attempt to avoid admitting the obvious.
He wanted Jay there.
Apparently that would have to be enough.
Harris went outside again.
He found Jay behind the equipment room, sitting on the low step with his phone in one hand. Jay looked up, and the small, private smile Harris had seen across the dinner table returned.
“Hey.”
Harris stopped several feet away. This was where the reason was supposed to arrive.
“Hey.”
Jay waited. “You okay?”
“Yup.”
“Good talk.”
Harris glanced toward the yard. Nobody was nearby.
Jay stood. “You come looking for me?”