15. You Kept Gettin’ in My Way
You Kept Gettin’ in My Way
Harris listened to Jay describe the projectionist abandoning the booth and tried to determine how to tell him the truth.
The lie had felt manageable before the four days apart—unpleasant, but contained. Harris could have corrected it later, once he knew what this was or whether it would happen again.
Now Jay sat beside him, one bare foot tucked beneath the opposite leg, talking with his hands while Harris’s body still carried the memory of his mouth.
Jay was a beautiful man. Harris had spent weeks translating that fact into safer language—striking, noticeable, hard to ignore. Tonight, with Jay’s hair still disordered and his mouth swollen from Harris, the simpler word kept winning.
Jay had trusted Harris with the truth of what he wanted, and Harris had repaid him with a lie.
The story Jay was telling eventually ran out. He reached for his beer, still smiling faintly at whatever memory he had just finished describing.
Harris rubbed one thumb against the label of his own bottle. “There’s somethin’ I need to tell you.”
Jay glanced over, his smile fading. “Okay.”
Harris looked down at the bottle. “At the lookout, I told you I’d done this before.”
A beat passed.
“Yeah.”
“Hadn’t.”
Silence followed.
Jay’s expression changed slowly, amusement giving way to concentration as he reconsidered what Harris had just told him. His gaze moved over Harris’s face as though looking for something he had missed the first time.
“You’d never been with a man?”
“No.”
Jay leaned back slightly. “The first time we kissed?”
“First time.”
“And everything after?”
Harris shook his head.
For a moment, Jay said nothing. He looked toward the floor, then back at Harris, replaying the lookout in some private sequence Harris could almost see happening behind his eyes.
“Jesus Christ.”
He stood and crossed a few steps before turning back. The movement put distance between them that had not been there a minute ago, and Harris felt it immediately.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. I know.”
Jay dragged a hand through his hair. He did not look furious so much as unsettled, which somehow felt worse. “That information would have mattered to me.”
“Didn’t want it to.”
Jay stared at him. “That wasn’t your decision.”
Harris’s jaw tightened. He knew that. Had known it almost as soon as the lie left his mouth. Knowing it now did nothing to make explaining himself easier.
“Didn’t want you treating me like I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“You didn’t know everything you wanted.”
“Knew enough.”
“Did you?”
The question landed exactly where Harris’s own uncertainty had been sitting for days.
He looked down at the beer in his hands.
He had not known what another man’s mouth would feel like.
Had not known what it would do to him to have Jay look at him without hesitation or disgust or even surprise once the shock wore off.
He had not known how much of himself he would want to hand over once he started.
But that was not the same as not knowing what had brought him across the space at the lookout.
Harris lifted his eyes. “I knew I wanted you.”
Jay stopped, and the room went quiet around the sentence. Harris had not intended to say it that plainly, but there was no useful way to take it back.
Jay’s anger did not disappear, though something warmer moved beside it.
“You should have trusted me enough to tell me you were uncertain.”
“I know.”
“You’re allowed not to know something.”
“Don’t particularly enjoy it.”
“I’ve noticed.” Jay returned to the couch but stayed turned toward him. “If you’d told me, I might have checked in more. I might have slowed down.”
“Didn’t need you to.”
“Maybe not. But I deserved the chance to know what was happening instead of assuming you’d done all of it before.”
“I got what I wanted.”
Jay nudged Harris’s boot with his bare foot. “Yes. That part was not subtle.”
Despite himself, Harris felt some of the tension ease.
“You being new to this wouldn’t have bothered me,” Jay said. “I’m less impressed by the lie.”
“Fair.”
The acknowledgment appeared to surprise him.
Harris set down the beer. “Nell knew.”
Jay went still.
“About men. She was the only one.”
The words felt different in the room than they had inside Harris’s head. More permanent. Jay could carry them away now, and Harris could not decide whether that felt like danger or relief.
“For how long?”
“Since I was sixteen. Maybe before.”
“How did she know?”
“Summer hand. I watched him too much.”
“And Nell noticed.”
“She noticed everything.”
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?”
Harris considered the mornings Jay had been gone. The films. Nell’s emails. The relief when the SUV returned.
“No.”
“Honest?”
Harris met his eyes. “Honest.”
Some of the tension left Jay’s shoulders.
There was another part of it, one Harris had understood before he ever kissed Jay and had not particularly wanted to examine.
“You leaving… helps.”
Jay blinked. “That is also impressively unromantic.”
Harris glanced at him, worrying now that he’d said too much.
“Knew it had an end before it started,” Harris said. “Shoot finishes. You go back to New York.”
Jay nodded slowly.
“Made it feel…” Harris searched for a word that did not sound ridiculous. “Safer.”
Something passed through Jay’s expression too quickly for Harris to identify. Then one corner of his mouth lifted.
“Nothing says carefree summer fling like a confidentiality agreement and an existential crisis.”
Harris’s mouth moved despite himself.
Jay nudged his boot with one bare foot. “I get it. I do.” Jay’s voice lost the joke without becoming heavy. “I’m leaving. You have a life here. I have one somewhere else. Neither of us exactly wandered into this thinking we were picking out curtains.”
“Right.”
“Wow. Try not to sound devastated.”
“Navarro.”
Jay smiled.
The ease of it loosened something in Harris’s chest. “Doesn’t mean I wanted this any less,” he said.
The words escaped before he could decide whether they needed saying.
Jay’s smile changed slightly. Softer, maybe, though he saved Harris from having to look at it for long by reaching for his shirt. “I know.” He pulled it over his head.
Harris watched him find his overshirt near the chair. “No one can know.”
Jay glanced back while pushing one arm through the sleeve. “I know.”
“Dinner doesn’t change that.”
Jay paused. “I didn’t think it did.”
“They know about you now.”
“They know I date men.” Jay pushed his other arm into the overshirt and looked at him. “That’s not the same as knowing about us.”
Harris knew that. His brain had spent most of dinner refusing to believe it.
“Still makes it easier for somebody to start wondering.”
Jay studied him for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll be careful.”
There was no hurt in the answer and no argument waiting behind it. Jay didn’t tell him he was being ridiculous, though Harris suspected he knew at least some of this was. He simply finished buttoning the overshirt and reached for his shoes.
That should have made the whole thing easier, and mostly it did.
“I’m still angry about the lie, by the way.”
“Figured.”
“You don’t get to distract me with your tragic cowboy emotional development.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
“You absolutely were.”
Harris gave him a flat look.
Jay laughed and stood. “See? Manipulative.”
“Get out.”
“Now that sounds more familiar.”
He stepped into his shoes and crossed toward the door. Harris followed without quite deciding to.
Jay stopped with one hand on the knob. For a second, neither of them said anything. Then Jay looked back.
“We’re okay.”
Harris studied him.
“Not you lied and I’m thrilled about it okay,” Jay added. “But okay.”
“Yeah.”
Jay’s gaze dropped briefly to Harris’s mouth. “Goodnight, Harris.”
“Night.”
Jay opened the door, slipped outside, and pulled it quietly shut behind him.
Harris stood there for another few seconds before turning back toward the room.
The glasses were still resting on Middlemarch. Jay’s empty beer sat beside his own. The couch cushion held the shallow impression of where he had been sitting.
Temporary, Harris reminded himself. That was the point; it was supposed to make this easier.