Epilogue #2
His apartment looked reassuringly familiar when he entered: jacket over the chair, work notes spread across the table, and several coffee cups that had reached the stage where washing them felt like an accusation.
His new copy of Middlemarch lay facedown on the couch.
The bookstore display with the dark-rimmed glasses had sent him inside a few days earlier, before he could decide whether that counted as a lapse in judgment.
The handwritten recommendation beneath the book described it as surprisingly funny, which Harris would almost certainly consider an inadequate assessment.
Jay had bought two copies.
He had made it considerably farther than the fifty pages he once identified as meaningful progress, partly from stubbornness and partly because reading the book had become a way to be near Harris without actually speaking to him.
The second copy was already somewhere between Brooklyn and Montana.
It wouldn’t replace the one taken by the fire. Jay understood that more clearly after watching Harris search through the cabin ruins. Still, it had felt wrong for Harris not to have a copy.
Jay had spent four days staring at the blank card before finally writing:
For the new shelves. I’m on page 214. Your confidence in me was insulting.
He had signed it with a J, slipped it beneath the cover, and mailed the package two days ago.
It was not contact—not exactly.
It was close enough that Jay had spent the past forty-eight hours alternating between wishing he could take it back and wishing it would reach Harris sooner.
He’d just picked up his own copy from the couch and was considering whether he had enough attention left for another chapter when his phone buzzed against the table.
Jay reached for it without thinking and stopped short when he saw the name on the screen.
Harris.
For one disorienting second, he thought of the book.
Too soon. There was no possible way it had reached Montana yet.
Whatever this was, Harris had done it on his own.
The shape of his name went through Jay with the same force as Harris emerging through smoke on the ridge, immediate enough that his body responded before thought could catch up.
When he opened the message, a photograph filled the screen.
Rain stood beside the lower fence with Jay’s navy cap hanging from her teeth. The crown had collapsed, and one side of the brim was darkened with horse saliva. Behind her, thin green grass showed through the burned ground, startlingly bright against the blackened slope.
Harris: Found this by the lower fence. She denies involvement.
A laugh escaped Jay, sudden and helpless in the quiet apartment.
He enlarged the photograph. Rain stared into the camera with the serene confidence of an animal who had destroyed the evidence and expected to be praised for returning it.
He typed: Tell her she can keep it. Blue suits her.
The answer came quickly enough that Harris must have still been holding the phone.
Harris: Looked better on you.
Jay stared at the message. He could hear the dry delivery behind it and picture the slight movement at the corner of Harris’s mouth.
The familiar ease of the exchange settled over him so completely that for a moment he was back beside the fence, irritating Harris simply to watch the restraint in his face fail.
Jay: Careful, cowboy. That almost sounded like you missed me.
His thumb hovered over send.
For five weeks, Jay had believed a clean break would keep the feeling from growing into something more difficult.
New York would absorb him, Harris would stay at the ranch, and whatever had existed between them would settle into memory before either man asked it to survive circumstances for which it had never been designed.
Instead, silence had removed every place the feeling could go.
Jay still thought of Harris when he woke and when he crossed the city late at night.
He wanted to know whether Rain’s mane would grow back evenly, whether the new fence held, whether Harris’s hand had healed enough to turn pages without pain.
He wanted Harris’s voice, his attention, and the particular, infuriating safety of being watched by someone who had learned when Jay’s humor meant he was afraid.
Five weeks had done nothing to make him want any of it less. If anything, the possibility that Harris had moved on had only made the wanting harder to dismiss.
Jay pressed send.
The message showed as delivered. For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then his phone began to ring.
Jay stared at Harris’s name for one stunned second before answering.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
The gravelly sound of Harris’s voice went through him with the intimacy of touch.
Neither spoke immediately. Wind moved faintly against the phone, as if Harris was outside somewhere. Jay could picture him beside a fence, looking toward the pasture because emotional honesty apparently still required several acres of open ground.
“So,” Harris said finally. He paused and cleared his throat. “I do miss you.”
Jay’s fingers tightened around the phone.
“A lot more than I figured I would,” Harris added.
The directness caught Jay unprepared.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been feeling that too.”
Harris was quiet for a moment. “Been trying to figure out what good sayin’ it does.”
Jay rested his free hand on the copy of Middlemarch. “Come up with anything?”
“Nope.” Harris exhaled slowly. “I know seein’ you wouldn’t fix anything. We’d still live two thousand miles apart. You’d still have your work, and I’d still have the ranch. There’re a hundred reasons this is a bad idea, and most of ’em are good ones.”
Jay went motionless, listening into the silence on the line as though Harris’s next words might decide everything.
“I know it’s not fair to ask you to keep this going when I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to look like,” Harris continued.
The wind moved again. Jay heard the faint metallic complaint of a gate somewhere beyond him.
When Harris spoke next, his voice had gone rougher.
“But I can’t get you out of my head, Jay.”
Jay closed his eyes.
Relief moved through him slowly, easing something that had remained tight since Montana. Whatever else Harris could not offer him yet, Jay had not been alone in this.
“Don’t want to, either,” Harris said.
The admission settled beneath Jay’s ribs and stayed there.
Harris drew a breath. “I just need to see you.” A pause. “Can I come see you?”
Jay opened his eyes. Beneath his palm waited a book meant for shelves Harris had not built yet—a place in a future neither of them knew how to name.
Harris had spent five weeks finding reasons this could not work and called anyway.
A smile broke across Jay’s face.
“Yeah, Harris,” he said. “You can come see me.”