18. You Look Like You’re Doing Math
You Look Like You’re Doing Math
In the days after the fence line, Harris and Jay failed to establish rules and developed a pattern instead.
It began with practical texts that occasionally stopped being practical.
Harris read the message beside the feed-room door with one glove between his teeth and a coffee mug in his free hand.
Harris: Yup.
Three minutes later:
Jay: Compelling.
Nothing about that required an answer. Jay knew the time. The exchange had completed its useful purpose.
Harris put the phone in his pocket and made it almost to the barn before taking it out again.
Harris: Go to bed Navarro.
A black heart appeared almost immediately, stopping Harris in his tracks.
He had no idea whether the symbol required acknowledgment and, if so, what that acknowledgment would even look like. Sending one back seemed excessive. Ignoring it seemed safer, unless Jay had sent the thing specifically to see whether Harris would become confused by it.
Before he could make up his mind, another message arrived.
Jay: Sorry, wrong cowboy.
A laugh escaped before Harris could stop it.
Noah looked over from the yearling pen. “What?”
“Nothin’.”
Harris put the phone away and continued toward the barn, mostly because he could not think of an answer that would not reveal how long he had spent trying.
After that, the pattern arranged itself with very little help from either of them.
Around other people, nothing changed. Jay worked with Priya and Eli, Harris moved through the ranch as he always had, and they managed ordinary greetings without giving anyone much reason to look twice.
Harris called him Navarro across barns and pastures because he always had.
The name carried naturally through the yard.
Alone, Jay came more easily.
So did the improbable tendency to find each other whenever nobody else was nearby: behind the equipment shed, on the shadowed side of the lodge, once beside the old calving barn where Jay claimed he had come to photograph the boards and Harris claimed he had come to check a latch that did not exist.
They were careful. Mostly.
A kiss could fit into thirty seconds if neither man wasted time pretending it had happened accidentally. Harris learned which doors could be seen from the lodge windows and which buildings carried sound. Jay learned to move away the moment Harris’s attention shifted past him.
At night, privacy was easier to find, but they were not stupid enough to make Jay’s walk to the cabin a nightly occurrence.
Priya and Eli slept down the hall from him, and people on a ranch noticed movement without trying: a door opening after dark, footsteps across the yard, a light coming on through the cottonwoods.
Two or three nights in a row would have become too conspicuous.
Jay had mentioned Priya asking why he’d started taking so many walks after dinner. He’d told her sitting in the edit room all day was destroying his spine. According to Jay, she’d accepted the answer with an expression suggesting acceptance and belief were separate concepts.
So they avoided having a routine.
Sometimes Jay knocked after nine, once the lodge had settled and the yard had gone quiet. More often, he didn’t. He never stayed until morning. Other nights they made do with thirty stolen seconds behind a building or nothing at all.
Harris told himself the irregularity was practical.
It did not explain why, on the nights Jay didn’t come, he had begun noticing the silence outside the cabin door.
Two nights after the fence line, Jay appeared carrying two beers and a paper sack from the lodge kitchen.
“I brought provisions.”
Harris stepped aside to let him in. “From Della?”
“Obviously.”
“What’d I do?”
“Apparently eating dinner at five thirty and then moving fence for three hours qualifies as neglecting yourself.”
“Course it does.”
“Della was looking for someone to bring this out. I told her I was going for a walk anyway.”
Harris looked at him.
Jay lifted the bag. “Technically true.”
“Sure.”
Inside was one enormous slice of blackberry pie, Della’s idea of a reasonable serving for a single adult man.
Harris looked at it. “Jesus.”
“She was very clear it’s for you.”
“Then why’re you still here?”
Jay put a hand to his chest. “I deliver food to your remote outpost and this is the gratitude I receive?”
Harris got two forks, and they split the pie at the kitchen table while Jay gave him a brief but deeply felt account of his battle with the county archive database.
“Maybe you’re using it wrong,” Harris said.
Jay lowered his fork. “That’s a cruel suggestion.”
“Could ask somebody for help.”
“Worse.”
By the time the pie was gone, Jay had also finished explaining why the archive’s search function constituted an attack on both scholarship and human dignity.
Harris carried the plate to the sink. “You done?”
“With the pie or my formal complaint?”
“Both.”
“Never.”
When Harris turned around, Jay had taken his beer to the couch.
“What’re you doing?”
“Sitting.”
“Can see that.”
“I thought we might occasionally behave like people who know each other with their clothes on.”
“We ate pie.”
“An important step in any relationship.”
The word landed between them with a little more weight than the sentence required.
Jay seemed to hear it too. He took a drink and looked toward the window.
Harris let it go.
He settled at the other end of the couch, and for a while the conversation stayed safely unimportant: the next morning’s filming, a guest who had asked Eli whether the cattle were free range, Walt’s conviction that the weather app on his phone was somehow less accurate than Harris’s identical weather app.
It should have felt ordinary.
Instead, Harris remained acutely aware of Jay stretched out beside him, one arm resting along the back of the couch, the easy occupation of space that had become familiar faster than Harris wanted to think about.
Jay was telling him about trying to upload county records from his apartment in New York when Harris interrupted.
“You live alone?”
“Yeah.”
A beat passed.
“Now,” Jay added.
Harris knew what that meant.
“With Miles before?”
Jay glanced over, perhaps surprised Harris had asked. “For most of it.”
“How long were you together?”
“Almost six years.”
Six years.
Long enough that Harris immediately began supplying details Jay had not given him: shared furniture, grocery lists, arguments conducted in familiar rooms, knowing which coffee the other man bought without needing to ask.
Harris had spent twelve years married to Claire.
He knew how thoroughly another person could become built into the ordinary architecture of a life.
He took a drink.
“You always live in New York?”
“With Miles? Mostly. We moved apartments twice, which is basically how New Yorkers mark the passage of time.”
“Thought that was rent increases.”
“That too.”
Harris smiled faintly.
He could have left it there.
Probably should have.
Instead, his mind returned to the tack room.
The question had been turning up at inconvenient moments ever since, usually when Harris was alone and therefore unable to blame Jay for putting it there.
“With Miles,” he said.
Jay looked at him.
Harris immediately disliked the amount of attention two words had earned.
“What about him?”
Harris took another drink. “Sex.”
Jay’s eyebrows rose.
“Very specific.”
“Forget it.”
“No chance.”
“Navarro.”
Jay’s mouth twitched. “What do you want to know?”
There was no graceful version of the question. Harris tried to find one anyway and accomplished nothing except a longer silence.
Jay watched him figure it out.
Then understanding crossed his face.
“Oh.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Were about to.”
“I was going to save us both time.” Jay took a drink. “You want to know who topped.”
Heat worked its way up Harris’s neck.
“Could’ve gotten there.”
“Eventually.”
Harris gave him a look. “Well?”
“Me.”
The answer came easily.
Harris kept his expression neutral.
“You?”
“I topped.”
“Always?”
“With Miles?”
“Yeah.”
Jay shrugged one shoulder. “Always.”
There it was.
Harris took another drink as though the answer had satisfied nothing more consequential than idle curiosity.
Inside, something rearranged itself.
Jay had been with a man for five years, and for those five years, Jay had occupied one side of that particular equation every time. Harris had exactly no experience of his own with which to complicate the obvious conclusion.
The tack room came back with uncomfortable clarity: Jay’s hand slipping lower, Harris going still, the strange combination of uncertainty and want that had made slow the only answer he could manage.
Apparently, if this kept going, Harris had some figuring out to do.
He did not intend to do any of it with Jay watching.
Jay studied him for a moment. “You look like you’re doing math.”
“Trying to figure out how Miles got a word in for five years.”
Jay blinked. “Excuse me?”
Harris took another drink.
“You talk a lot.”
“I answer one deeply personal question and this is what I get?”
“Yup.”
That worked. Jay’s attention shifted toward defending his conversational habits instead of examining Harris too closely.
Good.
Harris settled farther into the couch and made himself look unaffected.
“So why’d you split up?”
Jay gave him a long look. “That is an impressively abrupt change of subject.”
“Thought we were talking about Miles.”
“We were talking about one very specific aspect of Miles.”
“Still Miles.”
Jay shook his head, but he answered.
“We wanted different lives by the end. I wanted to keep traveling for work. Miles wanted something more settled. Then we spent about a year pretending that was a scheduling problem instead of a fundamental incompatibility.”
For the second time in less than a minute, Harris had to make sure his face did nothing.
Different lives.
One person built for leaving. One built somewhere permanent.
The resemblance was close enough that Harris wished he hadn’t asked.
Jay would finish the film and go back to New York.
Harris would stay here. They had known that before anything started, and Harris had told himself the ending was part of what made starting possible.
No promises meant nothing to break. No attempt to turn temporary into permanent meant nobody wasting a year trying to solve with plane tickets what was really a problem of two lives built in different places.
By the sound of it, Jay had already learned that lesson once.
Harris had no intention of asking him to learn it again.
He nodded as though the answer had landed nowhere particularly important. “Makes sense.”
Jay looked down at his bottle. “Eventually.”
“You still talk?”
“Yeah. We’re still good friends.”
That surprised Harris enough that he looked over.
Jay caught it. “What?”
“Nothin’.”
“You have a very expressive nothing.”
Harris ignored that. “Wasn’t ugly, then.”
“The breakup?” Jay shook his head. “Sad for a while. Not ugly. We still liked each other. We just didn’t work anymore.”
Harris understood that better than Jay could know.
Claire had taught him that loving someone and being able to build the right life together were not necessarily the same thing.
“Good,” he said.
Jay’s mouth tilted. “You sound relieved.”
“Ain’t.”
“Sure.”
Harris let the conversation move on and made certain it stayed there.
Within a few minutes Jay was telling him about a shoot in Arizona where a rental car had lost most of its suspension thirty miles from the nearest town. Harris listened, asked the appropriate questions, and gave no indication that his attention kept trying to double back.
Jay topped.
Always, with Miles.
And five years with someone he still cared enough about to keep in his life had ended because caring had not been enough to make two incompatible futures fit.
Two pieces of information Harris had asked for himself.
Both would have been easier not to know.
By the time Jay’s knee settled against his along the couch, Harris had packed both thoughts away somewhere private enough that Jay seemed to notice nothing.
That was where Harris intended to keep them.